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Today marks the 61st anniversary of Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965. The Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, march for voting rights was halted by Alabama state troopers and sheriffs who tear-gassed and beat the marchers. A trooper beat Future Georgia Congressman John Lewis in the head with a nightstick.
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Given the brutality of the attacks, he was lucky to end up with a concussion. As serious as that was, it could have been far worse.
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The national press reported what was happening in Selma to the rest of the country. The outrage it generated across the country was a pivotal moment in the struggle for civil rights. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed later that year. It created federal protection for voters and outlawed the supposed literacy tests that kept Black people from voting if they couldn’t answer ridiculous questions meant to exclude them from participation in elections—things like how many bubbles there were on a bar of soap or how many jelly beans there were in a jar.
Brutality no longer outrages some Americans. They watch immigrants rounded up, zip-tied, frog marched into El Salvadoran prisons, and assaulted by federal agents in the process of detaining them. They read about people herded into facilities where there are bugs in the food and they sleep on concrete floors. They watch footage of American citizens being shot on the streets of Minneapolis and learn that an agency covered up the shooting death of a Texas man for a year. And they are unmoved.
How we became that country, or at least how MAGA became that country, is hard to comprehend. People readily swapped out their religious beliefs to worship at the altar of a man who doesn’t believe in kindness or decency. MAGA Republican politicians, which is to say virtually everyone in the Senate and the House, fear Trump more than they care about truth and justice.
Earlier this week, we attacked a girls’ school. The Wall Street Journal reported that, “U.S. military investigators think American forces likely were responsible for a strike that killed dozens of children at a girls elementary school in Iran, a U.S. official said. The investigation hasn’t reached a final conclusion.” The New York Times reported that the strike on the school in Minab “appears to have been part of an attack on an adjacent naval base in southern Iran, where officials said U.S. forces were operating.”
Today, Trump was asked about the attack and who was responsible. He answered with a lie. He said Iran was responsible. Even Pete Hegseth couldn’t back that up. Standing next to the president, he said the attack was still “under investigation.”
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Where is the outrage? On the anniversary of Selma, a moment that reminds us that Americans are capable of coming together and doing great things, MAGA remains enthusiastic about where Trump is taking the country while many Americans seem to have become numb from the constant barrage of truly horrible things this administration does and is perfectly fine with.
Trump always has an excuse. Then, he relies that something new will come along to knock the most recent outrage off of the radar screen: The Epstein files, Minneapolis, the attack on Venezuela, war in Iran. And it goes on and on. When it comes to the Iranian girls who were killed in their school, the one safe place that should have existed for them, the Trump administration will hide behind “we’re investigating” and hope everyone will forget and move on. Like always, Donald Trump counts on “luck” to help him avoid consequences.
We need the kind of national courage that took us from Selma to the Voting Rights Act in the space of five months. It’s difficult in a sense because there are so many different outrages that it’s hard for people who love democracy to pick one to coalesce around. They all deserve our attention.
But we can all condemn an attack on a school—and a president who lies about his responsibility for it. In fact, we have to, if we don’t want to become a country that kills people at will. What happened in Iran should terrify Americans because of what it means if we don’t face it. And that is especially true as the administration warehouses immigrants in this country and we hear stories of people dying in those places from lack of medical care and even homicide. There is great danger in moments like this, and that is precisely why we need to make sure we don’t let this go.
I wrote to my senator and asked for her views. Predictably, I have not had a response yet, but I hope everyone will contact their Republican senators and let them know that they’re watching. What if we all joined forces on this one issue and they got bombarded by millions of their constituents demanding accountability for this. It’s not difficult to do. Let’s try it.
How do we get started? I wrote to my Senators this morning.
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