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Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
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2022
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2021
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Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
20 January 2025
Well, it's ironic, to say the least. This year Martin Luther King, Jr. Day happens also to be Inauguration Day. You'd be hard pressed to find two more different people than MLK and the new president. "More different" puts it rather mildly. There couldn't be a greater contrast.
Revelations. The fountain in Moscone Center dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King, Jr., circa 2020.
We admire the integrity of Michelle Obama who, defying custom, will not attend the inauguration. She's not explained herself but, no longer a public figure as she was when she was First Lady, she doesn't feel obliged to play the game.
And we'll add to that some polite applause for Nancy Pelosi, who is also skipping the show. She's recovering from hip surgery, which is enough of an excuse, but she doesn't need one either.
You get to a certain age and you have no time for such nonsense. Life gets shorter and shorter, after all.
But it would be unwise to entirely ignore the inauguration of a convicted felon as president. As King put it in 1956, "Let no man pull you so low as to hate him."
Responding to posts calling for people to watch the MLK service instead of the inauguration, King's daughter Bernice King wrote on Instagram, "I certainly understand the desire to tune out rhetoric, ideology and policies with which we passionately disagree and which contradict the spirit of the Beloved Community*. However, we must pay attention to what President-Elect Trump speaks on that day, even if by transcript and video later."
Those words, we suspect, won't be engraved in any stone. King's however have been. You can see them day or night surrounding San Franciso's dramatic Revelations memorial in Yerba Buena Gardens.
Today we'll honor that distinction.