Going Along to Get Along
If we're real quiet, maybe they won't notice us...
There’s always a limit to how far authoritarians can go before they make life unlivable for the majority of the population—before they provoke the inevitable reaction that sets fire to a country, to half the world…
Homicide—historically—always leads to suicide; it may take six months, it may take an entire generation, or more—but the absolutely predictable end of institutionalized cruelty and oppression is always the same: Violent Reaction… Call it a natural law of cultural and political physics, call it Karma… Whatever you call it, this reaction will inevitably arrive—and, once again, the world will be turned upside down.
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In writing/talking about Trump, his cabinet of junkyard dogs and his army of ICE brown-shirts, I have no choice but to use the example of the NAZIS because, brothers and sisters, it’s déjà vu all over again.
This country—for all sorts of complicated reasons (the most elemental of which is that we will always have to deal with men who want to control everything)— This country is now on the same path that Germany was on in the late Twenties and early Thirties of the Twentieth Century.
And one designated lane of that particular highway to hell, was—and always will be—the natural impulse to stay silent; to avoid trouble by keeping your head down, exactly the same way certain species in nature avoid predators—by going completely still, hiding in burrows, sticking their heads in the sand—by conforming.
But human beings, especially human beings who have a history of fighting for their independence from a hereditary king, are not small, helpless creatures whose only option is to hide till the threat is gone and the danger blows over.
Sometimes—and, hopefully, before it’s too late to do anything else—we are compelled speak up. This is naturally, given the forces massed against it, a scary thing to do. But—as we have seen many times in our own history and in the history of the world—it’s something that has to be done.
The founders of this country declared that the absolute basic requirement of any people who want to remain free is to have the guaranteed right to criticize their government—to speak up. In fact, until they were left no alternative, the founders virtually pleaded with the King of England to allow us these rights, exactly so there wouldn’t be a rebellion.
If you don’t establish the basic right to peacefully protest, to express disagreement with the government; and if you don’t constantly support that right, then the natural predators that are always waiting on the edges of civilization will rush in and devour every last one of us.
The people who want to run everything see us as a bunch of troublesome infants waiting to be fed whatever diluted garbage they decide will be profitable to feed us. The last thing they want to hear is the slightest disagreement with their plans; if they could eliminate living, breathing citizens, they would—happily replacing us all with AI units built to do exactly what they’re programmed to do—and nothing else. If a there’s a faulty unit then it’s off to the re-education camp.
When we arrive at the point where our President holds a “round-table” to “discuss”—among other delusional threats to America—the upcoming No Kings national protest against his trampling of the constitution; when he actually defines our natural right to criticize him as “hate speech,” then he’s doing nothing less than declaring the end of democracy; what he’s also doing is giving his cult of armed bigots and pet police permission to attack this protest.
Again, I feel the need to re-tell an old joke I heard from one of my uncles (a man who lost most of his family in The Holocaust………..
“…Two Jewish men were in Auschwitz, kneeling in the mud—about to be executed by an SS Lieutenant… The Nazi says, “Any last words, Jew scum?” One of men turns his head and says, “Go to hell, you Nazi pig!” The other man leans toward the one who cursed the Nazi and says, “Shh, Mendel, don’t make trouble…”
It’s established, in some dimension where the the fate of nations is determined, that Trump, being what he is, and being controlled by the kind of people who control him, will increasingly come to resemble every historical dictator; and then the world will be transformed, as it has before in our history—first into a vast battleground, and then into a vast cemetery.
As awake-and-aware people who can see clearly what’s happening to us, we have no choice but to speak out against this blatant theft of our basic rights. If not as Americans, than simply as human-beings who have a natural wish to live our lives with freedom and dignity.