The level of mendacity reached in the current political discourse had me shocked until this morning.

People, goaded by the the previous president, fought to undermine the democratic process under the pretense of fighting for democracy. Brainwashed Trump cultist see brainwashed cultists in the rest of us. Trump accuses everybody else of lying while getting ever more brazen in his lies as time goes by. Up is down and wrong is right. Which is shocking and it feels unprecedented, until you remember that Europeans used Christianism to justify the exploitation and colonization of other people. Jesus Christ's message was to love one another, including our enemies, which feels revolutionary even after 2,000 years. I guess you have to give it to the Europeans for their creativity in twisting the message of love by a brown Semite into the banner for the subjugation and genocide of people based on their not looking like Europeans.

This morning I learned about the great Stevie Wonder's efforts to make Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday a national holiday. That made me think about the message of love that MLK spread and his fearless fight for equality. The ideology that supported MLK, despite the constant death threats he received and the immense pressure and oppression from the government he operated under, was Christianism. The weaponization of Christianism by the right in this country and the complicity, at worst, or passivity, at best, of the American Christians had made me have a very low regard for Christianity in the last four years, even though I come from a Christian family.

So my realization this morning was this: Black people will emancipate white folks and the rest of us from the mental slavery that we suffer from today thanks to the message of Jesus Christ. I don't know how this works, but Jesus knew it 2,000 years ago. In his Sermon on the Mount, in my interpretation, Jesus praises the meek, the poor and the persecuted, those at the bottom of the social strata. As it turns out, two millennia later, those who seem to have understood Jesus' message of Love and understanding in America are those who have suffered the most injustice. After slavery, destitution, exploitation, aggravation, cruelty and abuse, the response of the Black people in this country was not violence (at least not in a scale comparable in any way to the scale of the Civil Rights Movement led by MLK), but pacific civil disobedience. The response from white folks to this display of pacifism was indeed violent—physically and morally. It was Black folks, at the bottom of the social strata, it was those who were not permitted to ride the bus in the front seats or eat at the same counters, who took upon themselves the task of educating the ignorant rest of us in the art of pacifist resistance, in the art of listening Jesus' words of turning the other cheek. It was Black leaders who taught us the art of seeing each other as brothers and sisters.

The task is not complete, by any means, but it is up to the rest of us to learn as much as we can from Martin Luther King and other leaders like him, and to pick up the slack in the fight for a better world.