Martin Luther King died too young. Yet his short life was full of meaning, relevance, and inspiration. Though more than a half century has passed since his assassination, he remains the foremost public figure of the 20th and the first decades of the 21st century. While no one since then measures up to King as a visionary, moral leader, champion of justice, and untiring and courageous proponent of a big tent strategy and tactics, each of us in our own way can carry on King’s legacy in trying circumstances that even MLK could not have imagined.

It’s good that President Biden expressed outrage over the recent Israeli strikes killing humanitarian aid workers in Gaza. But that isn’t enough. The cessation of the weapons pipeline to Israel and a permanent ceasefire are in order. Both, in fact, are overdue and would politically and logically follow from Biden’s earlier criticism of the Netanyahu government and its conduct of the war against the Palestinian people.

One of the more peculiar twists of the present moment is that sections of the left and anti war movement are objectively aligned with the Republican Party and MAGA movement as far as military aid to Ukraine is concerned.Both are soft on Putin too, while insisting with no sense of irony or shame that the Ukraine government is nothing more than a beehive of fascists.

No surprise, Putin blames Ukrainians for terror attack in Moscow. That his scorched earth-terror policies against Muslims in the former Soviet Union and elsewhere might explain the terror he chooses not to mention. Putin in my view is one of the leading figures in the rise of authoritarianism — some call it illiberalism — in its various forms worldwide. It goes without say that Trump is too.