The Importance of Staying Awake

MLK speaks to DJT

I’m certainly not the first person to be struck with the wild irony of the second inauguration of Donald Trump happening on the day we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr.. It’s one of those weird quirks of the calendar where a national holiday runs into a constitutionally mandated beginning of a presidential term.¹

One of my favorite MLK speeches was the one he gave at the National Cathedral just days before he was killed. He titled it “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution”.² King had given versions of the speech before as commencement addresses at Morehouse and Oberlin.

The speech’s title draws from Washington Irving’s story about Rip Van Winkle. When Rip went to sleep in the lodge he was visiting, a picture of King George was on the wall. When he awoke after twenty years, George Washington was on the wall. As King says, Rip literally slept through a revolution.

This image comes back to me as the second Trump term begins. Things feel just as disorienting today as they did for Rip Van Winkle in the story. It is tempting to disengage as this administration begins. To use the Rip metaphor, it’s tempting to roll over and go back to sleep. But King was imploring us to stay awake and understand what was happening.

So this afternoon, I reread Remaining Awake and also read the second inaugural of Donald J. Trump. As much as Trump’s remarks are intended to make us feel drowsy and simply hope that everything will be rosy, King reminds us to remain awake to the realities that affect people’s lives. In what follows, I’m going to put their speeches in dialogue to remind us of the stakes before us.

After some introductory remarks, President Trump says the following:

I return to the presidency confident and optimistic that we are at the start of a thrilling new era of national success. A tide of change is sweeping the country, sunlight is pouring over the entire world, and America has the chance to seize this opportunity like never before. But first, we must be honest about the challenges we face. While they are plentiful, they will be annihilated by this great momentum that the world is now witnessing in the United States of America.

As we gather today our government confronts a crisis of trust. For many years, a radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens, while the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair. We now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home, while at the same time stumbling into a continuing catalog of catastrophic events abroad. It fails to protect our magnificent law-abiding American citizens, but provides sanctuary and protection for dangerous criminals, many from prisons and ​​mental institutions that have illegally entered our country from all over the world.

Trump has a tendency to be very general about “the challenges we face” and very specific about which problems he wants to focus on. He argues that it is ineptitude or malevolence that has caused the crisis of trust.³ But he is confident that with his people at the helm of government, these issues will be easily resolved.

His version of whom is harmed by government is fairly circumscribed. It is those on the right, the rich, the “forgotten Americans”. King also had claims against the government, but they sound very different.

In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the Emancipation Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any land to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person in prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person is not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. And you just go up to him and say, "Now you are free," but you don’t give him any bus fare to get to town. You don’t give him any money to get some clothes to put on his back or to get on his feet again in life.

Every court of jurisprudence would rise up against this, and yet this is the very thing that our nation did to the black man. It simply said, "You’re free," and it left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to do. And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do anything for the black man, though an act of Congress was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor.

But not only did it give the land, it built land-grant colleges to teach them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further their expertise in farming; not only that, as the years unfolded it provided low interest rates so that they could mechanize their farms. And to this day thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies every years not to farm. And these are so often the very people who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps. It’s all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but it is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself by his own bootstraps.

In his address, Trump recognizes people of color but only to thank them for their votes. Here is how he addresses the real-life issues of race.

This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based. As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female.

This week, I will reinstate any service members who were unjustly expelled from our military for objecting to the Covid vaccine mandate, with full back pay. And I will sign an order to stop our warriors from being subjected to radical political theories and social experiments while on duty. It’s going to end immediately. Our armed forces will be free to focus on their sole mission: defeating America’s enemies.

Here is how King followed up on the bootstrap quote above:

We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our country, and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of all the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.

Because politicians like the president love to ignore the real substance of the Dream speech⁴, they think King was calling for color-blindness. He was instead confronting one of the major structural injustices of American culture.

Another sharp contrast emerges on the nature of economic inequality. It is no small thing that Trump’s inaugural was celebrated with some of the country’s richest men in attendance. They appear to support Trump as an avenue to improve their financial standing in the world.

King is eloquent in retelling the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus from Luke 16.

Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell because he didn’t see the poor. His name was Dives. He was a rich man. And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only was he poor, he was sick. Sores were all over his body, and he was so weak that he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of Dives every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And Dives did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, "Dives went to hell, and there were a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives."

There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because he was rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is true that one day a rich young ruler came to him, and he advised him to sell all, but in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery and not setting forth a universal diagnosis. And if you will look at that parable with all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took place between heaven and hell, and on the other end of that long-distance call between heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell.

Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament, you see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in hell talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity. It was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day and he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum and minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.⁵

Trump recognized the confluence of the Inauguration with MLK day. I don’t know what he is saying in the first sentence — might be a mistake. But he promises to work to make King’s dream a reality without addressing his core concerns.

Today is Martin Luther King Day and his honor, this will be a great honor. But in his honor we will strive together to make his dream a reality. We will make his dream come true.

Here is what King says toward the end of his speech, right before he gets to his classic closing.⁶

Let me close by saying that we have difficult days ahead in the struggle for justice and peace, but I will not yield to a politic of despair. I’m going to maintain hope as we come to Washington in this campaign. The cards are stacked against us. This time we will really confront a Goliath. God grant that we will be that David of truth set out against the Goliath of injustice, the Goliath of neglect, the Goliath of refusing to deal with the problems, and go on with the determination to make America the truly great America that it is called to be.

I say to you that our goal is freedom, and I believe we are going to get there because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be as a people, our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America.

It goes without saying that I think King is right. Trump may have his preferred policy initiatives and believes that his meager victory gives him the right to engage in his revolution without criticism. But the issues of race and economic inequality are very real (and related to the loss of trust in the government), to say nothing of climate change.

We must remain awake while this supposed revolution is going on. We cannot afford to drift off during the next four years. As King says in that last quote, we may feel like David going up against Goliath, but that fight is something we must engage while wide awake.

1. Not unlike when Trans Day of Remembrance fell on Easter.

2. I usually get this from the Stanford King Institute but their link is down. I don’t know this particular site but they took the text from a copy read into the Congressional Record by Congressman George Brown, Jr. on April 9, 1968 (page 1395)

3. I’ll continue writing on this important topic.

4. Thanks to Scot McKnight for quoting the whole thing on his SubStack today.

5. That last line is one of my all-time favorites.

6. The Arc of Justice, Carlyle, William Cullen Bryant, and James Russell Lowell.