Remembering Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr on his 97th Birthday
by Diane Sare
Jan. 15, 2026—On January 8, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem appeared at a press conference in New York City to discuss “immigration enforcement.” This was the day after the tragic and completely avoidable death of Renee Good, who was shot and killed by an ICE officer in Minnesota. Noem was flanked by 4 large placards, each with a photograph of a young man with the word “ARRESTED” in capital letters across the top, no name, a list of crimes, and the words “Dominican Republic,” presumably to make a point about their country of origin and, given the topic, that they probably had not entered the United States legally. On the podium, in all caps, it said, “ONE OF OURS, ALL OF YOURS.”
The optics seemed to indicate that Noem would be leading a hunting expedition to eliminate every person from the Dominican Republic, or whatever group these young men had in common (indicated by YOURS), probably in the same way she had shot her defective dog so many years ago.
As far as I am aware, there was no one at that conference who refused to speak, saying, “I will not stand behind a sign promoting genocide.” Before you object, please consider what “ALL OF YOURS” means. What does “ALL” mean but all? Eliminate them. Kill every last one—every member of whatever group you’ve determined produced the criminal. That is the legal definition of genocide.
This is precisely what Bibi Netanyahu is doing to the Palestinian people, funded by our Congress. This is what terrified and enraged Americans screamed after 9/11: “Kill them all!”—even if they didn’t know who “them” actually was.
The reason we are hurtling toward the inglorious end of our species in a nuclear war is not because of the Kristi Noems, Donald Trumps, or Joe Bidens of the world, and it is certainly not because of President Putin or Xi Jinping. We are lurching toward doom because your neighbors (and perhaps even you) won’t stand up against popular opinion. They don’t have the courage to stand up for the humanity of their fellow human being.
Our government has become remarkably cruel, and it didn’t start with Donald J. Trump, although he is no exception to the trend. We tortured Iraqi prisoners under George W. Bush, and reelected him for it, and when Obama decided to assassinate people with drones, including American citizens, we reelected him as well.
If you revel in violence against another, why would you expect justice for yourself? And so we have no justice in the United States today. We have only the force of punishment. So our President believes that he can rule the world by threatening an attack “like you’ve never seen before.”
This state of affairs, this lack of justice, was not imposed on us by someone else. We have no justice and no peace because we don’t demand justice.
On December 1, 1955, a seamstress named Rosa Parks, after standing on her feet all day at work, refused to give up her seat on the bus ride home to a younger white man who boarded at a subsequent stop. For this, she was arrested.
A 26-year-old new pastor, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was chosen to lead what became known as the “Montgomery Bus Boycott.” He wrote about it this way:
“A boycott suggests an economic squeeze, leaving one bogged down in a negative. But we were concerned with the positive. Our concern would not be to put the bus company out of business, but to put justice in business.
“As I thought further I came to see that what we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an unjust system….
“Something began to say to me, ‘He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.’ When oppressed people willingly accept their oppression they only serve to give the oppressor a convenient justification for his act. Often the oppressor goes along unaware of the evil involved in his oppression so long as the oppressed accepts it. So in order to be true to one’s conscience and true to God, a righteous man has no alternative but to refuse to cooperate with an evil system.”
Apparently there were no righteous men standing with DHS Secretary Kristi Noem at that January 8 press conference.
If we desire justice, we have to refuse to participate in injustice. This means standing up against any word or action that would portray another human being as less than human.
In 2004, then-U.S. Presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche said the following about Dr. King while visiting Talladega, Alabama:
“The only way you can renew a nation—as Martin made a great contribution to renewing the United States—is, you have to go to the forgotten man and woman, especially to the “have-nots,” and if you can express a loving attitude, toward the problem of the have-nots, those who are the lower side of life—then, you are capable of representing the principle, upon which modern government should be based. The same principle that Jeanne d’Arc made possible, in a sense, in her contribution to the emergence of France as the first modern nation-state, committed to the general welfare.
“If you want to be a true politician, you must be committed to the general welfare. You must be committed to mankind. And to be committed to mankind, is to look at the person who’s in the worst condition, in general—and uplift them! Then, you really have proven, that you care about the general welfare. If you don’t go to those people, you’re not with the general welfare. If you don’t have your roots in a fight for the general welfare, you’re not capable of leading our nation, which is a nation Constitutionally committed to the general welfare.
“Martin had that.”
This is how we will renew our nation now.