Rapid grassroots airport protests mounted the first effective resistance to Trump’s Muslim ban

Evidence

Hope may be harder to find these days than in 2008, but it hasn’t disappeared. Finding hope is necessary for the simple facts that despair is not an option and resignation will never lead to solutions. Where hope lies today is not with our elected officials but with the people of the United States who are bravely willing to stand up to injustice when they see it. During a cold weekend in late January 2017, tens of thousands of people ran to airports across the country to protest and block Trump’s first attempt at a Muslim ban. This rapid mobilization was one the most inspiring things I have ever seen, and it’s been followed by tens of thousands of other, lesser known, but no less meaningful acts by individuals in support of Muslims, immigrants, refugees, and others. In these acts of solidarity lies an important lesson that we have been learning profoundly since the election of 2016. As a nation, we all share in the responsibility to take care of one another. And since the health of the nation is directly related to the state of its weakest members, the fight for the rights of Muslims Americans or immigrant Americans or Native Americans or African Americans or LGBTQ Americans is the fight for the rights of all Americans. … In his 1964 speech titled “The American Dream,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told his audience at Drew University a simple but important message. King began his address by describing the “schizophrenic personality” of the United States, where “on the one hand we have proudly professed the great principles of democracy[, but] on the other hand we have sadly practiced the very antithesis of those principles.” He followed by telling his listeners that “the shape of the world today does not afford us the luxury of an anemic democracy.” King then offered a pointed solution to these problems, a solution that he delivered almost in the form of a commandment. “We must all learn to live together as brothers [and sisters],” he said, “or we will all perish together as fools.” — Moustafa Bayoumi, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? Being…, 1013