A lot of people with whom I have talked over the past couple of weeks have told me that 2022 was not so kind to them and they are glad to see it go. Too many dear people passed away. Others have experienced personal illness or have a loved one whose health has taken a turn for the worse.

There were a lot of good things that happened in 2022. Kalvin Barrett became Dane County’s first elected African American sheriff and Brenda Yang became the first Hmong American to be elected to the Dane County Board. Diversity and democracy do continue to flourish.

There was even some solace in the fact that Tony Evers was re-elected so that an all-Republican state government would not happen, which would have taken us back to feudal days. And the big red wave of Republicans getting elected to federal elected positions didn’t happen either with the Republicans only holding a four-seat majority in the House of Representatives.

It would have been a three-seat majority if George Santos, a New York Republican, hadn’t committed fraud to win a seat in a Democratic-leaning district. Santos is wanted for embezzlement in Brazil. I await the day when he is led out of the House Chambers in handcuffs and is extradited to Brazil to face the music. And even though Santos “stole” this seat, except for the Nassau County Republican Party, not Trump or any other national Republicans have castigated Santos for stealing the election.

And so we begin 2023 with our King Holiday issue. Dr. King was such a thoughtful man. In today’s world, I could just picture Dr. King having 230 million followers on Twitter. Dr. King’s words are just as relevant today as they were over 60 years ago.

One of the cool things that I get to do in preparing our King Holiday issue is perusing some of Dr. King’s speeches to find one that is well-known, but is still so, so relevant to our times. I came across a speech that he gave at Shiloh Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia at the height of the Albany Movement when 500 people were arrested as the movement was trying to get the city fathers — they were all white men in those days — to agree to a five-point plan that would have secured basic civil rights for African Americans.

Dr. King came in and gave a tremendous speech that touched on white supremacy. As I read the speech, I felt he could have used the very same words to talk about today’s white supremacy, Trump’s use of the “Big Lie” to cast doubt on the 2020 election and the January 6^th Insurrection. Change a word here and there and it would have become a commentary on our modern times. How did he know what I would be thinking 61 years into the future?

It just goes to show you that the more things change, the more they stay the same. The same white supremacy forces that inflicted the South and the Confederacy live on today in the Proud Boys. And just like then, it is the Southern elite — now the Republican Party — that egged the poor whites on claiming that their country was being stolen and pushed them to violence. It was the poor whites who did their dirty work, just like Donald Trump manipulated the heck out of those folks to do his bidding. And Trump like many elite people, just moves on to the next thing — unless the Department of Justice prosecutes him for being the ringleader of the insurrection.

I urge you, at some point this holiday weekend, to read Dr. King’s speech, which is reprinted towards the back of this paper.

And then there are the 17 wonderful essayists, some of Madison’s Community Voices, who put their pens to paper — or hit their keyboards — to let us know what they think are the most pressing issues that the civil rights movement will meet in 2023. They are essays that take us across a spectrum of pressing issues, beginning with Dr. Charles Taylors examination of the roots of white supremacy and ending with Alder Barbara McKinney’s reflection on the beginning of the disparities as she sat at the Door of No Return on Goree Island in Senegal, West Africa where the slave ships departed for the Americas.

One of the most ominous clouds darkening the sky of civil rights in 2023 is the agenda — oh I meant docket — of the U.S. Supreme Court. The conservative group of 5-6 justices who are not representative of the American people and their views are set on pulling back America to the 14^th century. Increasingly they are becoming a second legislative body implementing policies that legislatively the Republican Party could not pass, like legislation on women’s right to choose, and legislation to eliminate affirmative action in higher education.

You thought 2022 was a game changer? These supreme legislators — I mean justices — were just warming up to 2023 when they will change America’s political and social fabric, a change that a good majority of Americans do not want.

Republicans have been recruiting very young — by Supreme Court standards — ideologically committed judges whose service and years on the bench are secondary so that they will be ready to overturn Supreme Court precedence on a dime. Beholden not to Supreme Court stare decisis nor the voters, the Supreme Court justices have become our masters for life, dictating what they think the law should be regardless of what the Supreme Court has said in the past. Your wife has been involved in issues before the court? There is no conflict of interest because you say there isn’t.

In other countries, there are autocrats like Putin and Jinping running the country. In our country, we have a panel of dictators like Thomas, Kavanaugh and Barrett.

I am being slightly off-the-wall here, but it is driven by the autocratic measures that this U.S. Supreme Court will force on us in 2023, eroding all of our civil rights. That is a Clear and Present Danger indeed.