Known globally as one of America’s most prominent and inspiring civil rights leaders, Reverend Jesse Jackson Sr twice ran for US president. He has died at 84.

Throughout his lifetime, he fought to promote social justice, economic equality and political empowerment for marginalised communities — and worked hard to encourage voter uptake from the disillusioned and excluded.

Little wonder he was outspoken against the South African apartheid regime and on Palestine. His six children described their father as a “servant leader”.

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When I think of Jesse Jackson, I recall the iconic image of him standing on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in 1968, moments before his mentor Reverend Martin Luther King was assassinated.

I visited the site over a year ago. Now transformed into the National Civil Rights Museum, it documents the Jim Crow era both men were born into; where segregation and racism was formally normalised.

The interactive display was both moving and disturbing. It was also hopeful; a reminder of people-power movements led by those shaped by a Baptist church culture that grew the most compelling orators.

I have a personal memory of meeting Jesse Jackson one special afternoon many years ago in New York, while travelling with Deirdre Nehua and Syd Jackson.

Fearless treaty activist
Syd, one of our most fearless unionists and treaty activists, passed away in 2007. Both men were intelligent, witty and passionately Kaupapa-driven; powerful speakers who used their gifts and life experience to build movements at home and beyond.

They marched and organised sit-ins. They spoke out when it wasn’t popular, put their hands up when others hesitated. They got off the fence and made a difference.

We were introduced by a mutual friend as “Māori activists from New Zealand”. A puzzled Jesse gazed at Uncle Syd.

“Where did you get that slave name from, my brother?”

Deirdre and I glanced at each other. Uncle Syd responded with a deft explanation that referred to his Welsh whakapapa and included the words both “rugby” and “colonisation”.

Afterwards, the three of us bounced around New York beaming. We’d met an inspirational leader and he now knew “Māori brothers and sisters at the bottom of the South Pacific” were in the same waka; fighting the good fight.

In the many tributes to Jesse Jackson, I noted the odd commentator described him as a “populist”. It’s a term that conjures up those who frame themselves as saviours by fomenting division and exploiting fear.

Inclusive and reformist
Yet Jesse was inclusive and a reformist. Their point was about how he built coalitions that brought African Americans, Latinos, unions, rainbow communities, poor whites and working class together to fight for basic human rights inside the existing system. It’s said he frequently used his platforms to highlight Native American and Indigenous-led causes.

This week The Washington Post noted how colleges in the US are dismantling affirmative action stategies designed to overcome restrictions on participation due to race or income. Back here, calls have been made for a referendum on electorates set up to specifically provide a voice for signatories to Te Tiriti, in a system not designed by or for them.

Next week, a champion who railed against inequality will be laid to rest in his beloved Chicago. For us in Aotearoa, it’s an opportunity to reflect on his coalition-building record in this era of division and truly look around; to understand who and what the real threat to our sense of nationhood truly is.

A man of faith and hope, Jesse Jackson’s words are as relevant now as they ever were. Words matter. So does his call to action.

“It’s time for us to turn to each other, not on each other.”

Moe mai ra e te Rangatira.

Moana Maniapoto MNZM is an Aotearoa New Zealand singer, songwriter and documentary maker, and presenter of Te Ao With Moana. This article was first published on the Te Ao FB page and is republished with permission.

It was a cold day in Washington, DC, on Tuesday when Donald Trump was sworn in for his second stint as President of the United States of America.

On account of freezing temperatures, the inauguration ceremony was moved indoors to the Capitol Rotunda, and the weather became a primary focus of much pre-inauguration media commentary.

The Reuters news agency reported that this was “one of the coldest inauguration days the US has experienced in the past few decades”, while also providing other crucial ceremony updates such as that “Mike Tyson snacked on a banana in the overflow room”.

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I, myself, watched the event on my computer in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, where it is precisely the opposite of cold and where I have spent the past several days battling the scorpion population that has taken up residence in my house.

By the end of Trump’s swearing-in, however, I was undecided as to what was less pleasant: killing scorpions or watching the next episode of American dystopia unfold.

I tuned in at 11am, meaning I had a full hour before Trump took centre stage; for much of this time, the audience in the rotunda was treated to musical selections befitting a carousel or a circus.

The frigid weather outside was, meanwhile, at least probably good practice for life on Mars, a territory Trump would soon claim for the United States during his inaugural speech: “And we will pursue our manifest destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars.”

Not the only territorial conquest
This, to be sure, was not the only territorial conquest Trump promised. He also reiterated his determination to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America” as well as to seize control of the Panama Canal because “American ships are being severely overcharged and not treated fairly in any way, shape, or form”.

But the Mars comments earned a maniacal grin from one person in the audience: the gazillionaire Tesla CEO Elon Musk, known for such ideas as that the “next really big thing is to build a self-sustaining city on Mars and bring the animals and creatures of Earth there”.

Musk was one of various representatives of the earthly super-elite who — unlike poor Mike Tyson — made the cut for a spot in the rotunda. Also present were Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Shou Zi Chew, the CEO of TikTok.

As Al Jazeera noted the day prior to the inauguration, Apple CEO Tim Cook reportedly donated $1 million to the ceremony, while “Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta have said they would donate $1 million, along with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, who donated $1 million”.

As of January 8, Trump’s inauguration fund had already racked up a record $170 million.

Anyway, what better way to “Make America Great Again” than by supercharging the plutocracy?

Declaring at the start of his speech that “the golden age of America begins right now”, Trump went on to express numerous other hallucinations, including that “national unity is now returning to America”. Never mind that the tyranny of an astronomically wealthy minority is not exactly, um, unifying.

Luckily on Planet Trump, reality is whatever he says it is. And Trump says that “sunlight is pouring over the entire world”.

‘Historic executive orders’
In his speech, Trump announced a “series of historic executive orders” that according to him, will jumpstart the “complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense”.

Among these executive orders was the declaration of “a national emergency at our southern border”, paving the way for the deportation of “millions and millions of criminal aliens” and entailing the deployment of the US military “to repel the disastrous invasion of our country”.

Under Trump’s command, the US “will also be designating the cartels as foreign terrorist organisations”. Then there’s the new “official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders, male and female”.

And of course, the more emergencies, the better: “[T]oday I will also declare a national energy emergency. We will drill, baby, drill.”

Recoiling at the very thought of environmentalism, Trump proclaimed: “We will be a rich nation again, and it is that liquid gold under our feet that will help to do it.”

And if we happen to destroy Earth in the process, well, there’s always Mars.

As usual, the continuous invocation of God during the inauguration ceremony made a fine mockery of the ostensible separation of church and state in the US, and Trump revealed the reason he had survived a July assassination attempt in the state of Pennsylvania: “I was saved by God to make America great again.”

Overlap with Martin Luther King Jr Day
Last but not least, Trump took advantage of the overlap of his inauguration with Martin Luther King Jr Day, celebrated annually in the US on the third Monday of January, to pledge that “we will make his dream come true” — which would probably be easier if Trump himself weren’t a bona fide racist.

Indeed, Trump’s notion that “our power will stop all wars and bring a new spirit of unity to a world that has been angry, violent and totally unpredictable” would seem to be distinctly at odds with King’s assessment of the US as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world”.

None of this is to imply that the Democrats have not done their part in terms of purveying global violence or upholding plutocracy, perpetuating brutal inequality, terrorising refuge seekers, and so on.

But Tuesday’s inaugural charade was an exercise in nihilism — and, as I return to my scorpions and Trump goes about making dystopia great again, I think I’ll take Mars over the “golden age of America” any day.

Belén Fernández is the author of Inside Siglo XXI: Locked Up in Mexico’s Largest Immigration Detention Center (OR Books, 2022), Checkpoint Zipolite: Quarantine in a Small Place (OR Books, 2021), and Martyrs Never Die: Travels through South Lebanon (Warscapes, 2016). She writes for numerous publications and this article was first published by Al Jazeera.