The media is chock full of stories claiming the Trump opposition is too “exhausted” to resist him this time.
“The protests have been sparser, the liberal pundits are quieter, the resistance, all told, seems weaker,” wrote Osita Nwanevu in The Guardian. “Ten years into the Trump era and due for at least another four, we’ve been humbled into near-impotence, a victory for the only ideology Trump has ever been committed to, which is humiliation.”
Former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun gets it that “people are just tired — tired of fighting and feeling like they are not getting anywhere.” But she warned, “You can’t get tired in doing good. You have to keep up the struggle, and that’s the message that comes down to us from biblical times.”
Mosely Braun, 77, was the featured speaker on Monday at Paducah’s 35th annual Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day observance at Tilghman High School. The first Black woman elected to the Senate, she lost her bid for a second term in 1998. Afterwards, President Bill Clinton named her ambassador to New Zealand and to Samoa.
She’s still a diplomat. Last year, President Joe Biden named her chair of the United States African Development Foundation.
“It’s true that sometimes it seems futile in fighting evil, but you have to fight with your whole being and never give up and never get too tired,” she told Forward Kentucky in an interview after her remarks. “People feel like they’ve lost, but they are going to have to reach down deep and find that courage and that energy again.”
In Paducah, she was walking with a cane, the result of a recent fall while she was getting off an airplane in Mauritania. Moseley Braun spoke while seated in a chair. But the injury didn’t dampen her enthusiasm and good humor. She joked about her six-year-old granddaughter referring to King as “Dr. King, Martin Luther Jr.”
In her Forward Kentucky interview, she recalled “Si, si se puede!” – part of a famous slogan of the United Farm Workers union. In English it means “Yes, yes, it can be done.”
“I don’t speak Spanish, but you just don’t give up — you just keep fighting because if you give up, then you are giving them the victory. If you continue to push and fight and continue to hold the line, you’ll be fine.”
Meanwhile, Democrats are opting “for a more toned-down approach” to Trump “that aims to home in on the effects of his policies on working-class people,” Igor Bobic wrote in HuffPost.
“The Democratic party is trying to find its place,” Moseley Braun said.
In her speech, Mosely Braun, who marched with King in Chicago in 1966 — she was with him when a bottle thrown from an angry white crowd bloodied his head — recalled King’s famous challenge: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is: ‘What are you doing for others?’”
“What are you doing to serve others?” she asked, calling on the audience to do as King urged — “to commit ourselves to doing the best we can do for others, and that’s what he called on each of us to do.”
In the Forward Kentucky interview. she said Democratic senators should ask themselves, “What did you do to help the world today? What did you do to make a difference? Shame really does motivate people.”
Mosely Braun said she is still optimistic about the future, though she said Trump “hijacked” the GOP. “This guy was a TV celebrity who understood how to rally whites by scapegoating ‘the other’ — notably persons of color and immigrants.
“He understood how to build from that, even down to the ‘self-made millionaire.’ How do you have the nerve to call yourself a self-made millionaire when you got four million dollars from your daddy?”
She concluded the interview by urging again, “Keep doing good. Never tire in doing good.”
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