Rev. John H. Bennett
Jefferson City
Dear Editor:
In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton received almost 3 million more votes than Donald Trump but due to the vagaries of the Electoral College, Donald Trump emerged the victor (306 to 232 electoral votes). And our nation has been under siege by racist, unjust, and morally deficient policies and actions ever since, culminating in a Trump-inspired attack on our nation's Capitol in a continuing attempt to subvert our democracy.
The Poor People's Campaign, A National Call for Moral Revival has issued a statement with which I concur: "This attack was carried out at the behest of a narcissistic President and his enablers (including Josh Hawley), who have followed a divisive political strategy that is as old as the deconstructionists of the 1870s and the Southern strategy of the 1960s. We know that the only antidote to this poison in our body politic is a moral fusion coalition committed to reconstructing our democracy.
This week's violence is a reaction to record turnout of people of every race, income, region, sexuality, creed and conviction who voted for candidates that pledged to expand health care, raise wages, address systemic racism and poverty, in the general election and the Georgia run-off. It took place as we witnessed cracks in the Southern strategy, which had kept people divided by race for decades. This was an assault rooted in a refusal to believe the legitimacy of an election where people of color and poor and low wealth people united to vote out an extremist President and Senate majority."
In spite of the trauma of the past week, we can still affirm "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice" as stated by abolitionist Theodore Parker and oft-quoted by Martin Luther King Jr. That moral arc was bent toward justice in the election of the Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jewish activist Jon Ossoff in the Georgia run-off. Both were closely tied to the late champion for justice, Rep. John Lewis; Rev. Warnock, as pastor, and Jon Ossoff, as intern. Rep. Lewis is now dancing for joy in heaven!