What if MLK were a doomer?
I know so many things are bad in society right now. Aside from global warming, we are collectively better off than any human generation in modern history.
I have no intention of dismissing the bigotry today. Racist gerrymandering is stripping votes from people of color. ICE raids have attacked U.S. communities. The list of anti-trans legislation in the U.S. and the UK (and probably other places) is growing longer and longer. The list of bad is long.
But I can pick so many points in our history where things were so much worse. Let's start with the fact that the U.S. legalized gay marriage in 2015. Yes, we're backsliding on queer rights, but we're still far ahead where we have been historically. Talk to an old gay man who's been in a platonic marriage because of what gay rights were like 50 years ago.
Let's consider the cold war & the red scare, where even the appearance of supporting communism would put you in front of a government review panel, and you'd lose your reputation and your job.
We have proposals like the SAVE Act which would force millions of women to procure birth and marriage certificates in order to vote. A horrible piece of legislation. Women couldn't even vote before 1920, and they got the right to vote because women fought for it for decades.
Black people were widely enslaved in the U.S. until ~1865, but were freed through a civil war. The KKK then terrorized black folks and carried out lynchings for many years, including a 1920s resurgence directed more toward political oppression than violent oppresion (there was still violence, don't get me wrong). In 1954, Brown v. Board of Education ended segregation on paper, even though it persisted for years in less explicit forms.
We got the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to protect the black vote from attempts at voter suppression. Sadly, that law has been almost completely obliterated by recent supreme court decisions, but even so we are still better off than we were before it was passed.
On global warming, there are scientists and engineers developing new technologies. Factories bringing costs down. Governments subsidizing industrial improvements and requiring sustainable technology. We cannot all escape the damage caused by Global Warming, but the more of us who fight today, the fewer of us will suffer tomorrow.
Health care is too expensive and hard to access, but the treatments we decry as too expensive today (they are way too expensive) were entirely unavailable 100 years ago. Heart bypasses began in 1960. Now, heart disease might bankrupt you. Before, it just killed you. Bloodletting continued into the 1800s, and in that period doctors were resistant to even washing their hands. We deal with some vaccine-deniers today (including our Secretary of Health), but much of human history didn't even have vaccines.
Jews persisted through the holocaust. Native Americans persisted through colonial genocides. Japanese people persisted after American concentration camps. Chinese people kept immigrating after the Chinese Exclusion Act. Factory workers persisted through 12+ hour shifts with no safety protections. And so on and so forth.
None of these horrors are forgiveable. Our country and others globally have done so many terrible things and are continuing to do them.
But to look at our moment in history and feel that we're doomed, that there's no point in trying, that we've already lost, is an ahistorical view. It discounts hundreds of years of struggle. Hundreds of years of oppressed people fighting for their rights. Hundreds of years of meaningful progress.
And still today, there are millions - billions - of oppressed people, millions of people fighting for our rights. People who want the freedoms promised to us by our constitutions and laws. Freedoms we deserve by birthright.
Feeling a sense of doom at times is completely understandable. Life is heavy, and emotions can be even heavier. We all are allowed our periods to be depressed and down and feel like giving up.
But sinking into that doomerism is not only abandoning the hope of a better society tomorrow. It is abandoning the millions of people who are actively facing oppression, the millions of people who are actively fighting, the millions of people who deserve to be supported, to have you on their side, to have you fighting with and for them.
Your doomerism will not stop progress, because there are so many of us fighting. But your doomerism will slow us down. It will make it harder to secure our rights. It will not only slow progress toward a better future, but it will hurt those you care about today.
All the horrors we've overcome have been overcome because people believed in it, worked on it, fought for it. Believe. Work. Fight.