On the Challenges Ahead
On election night I was at a party downtown, on the second floor of a new pub, with the architects of Prop. 62, may it rest in peace. A big TV screen showed the national election numbers, which grew more and more worrisome by the hour, and servers ascended the staircase with fried appetizers. I expressed concern to one of the guys who ran the campaign. Don't worry, he said, she's got it in the bag. But I kept looking at the screen with grave concern, and then the numbers on the local propositions started rolling in.
That Prop. 64 passed was no big surprise, and that Prop. 62 did not look like it was going to pass was a disappointment. We didn't know yet that 66 was going to pass. But the national scene already looked pretty disturbing.
Embarrassment and defeat stood in the room like stale air. I left the party and hopped on my scooter, riding to Hastings. The Democratic Club had invited me and Chad to see the election results with them on the 24th floor. The Sky Room offers stunning views of the city, and many of my students were expected to be there.
But by the time I got there and parked at the front door, people were leaving the building in tears. Night enveloped me, standing there, placing my helmet in the top box, as poison spread through my organs. I thought, this is it. I live in Nazi Germany now, and I'm one of the Germans.
This is why, in the weeks that followed, the White Rose Society became a beacon of light for me. I distributed hundreds of white rose lapel pins to my students, wore one consistently throughout the semester, even tattooed one on my right arm, as a reminder to wake up every morning and fight the Nazis. I changed my timetable to give priority to TV interviews about Trumpistan and its displays of gratuitous cruelty.
A word about the term Nazis. It has become fairly fashionable among my friends in the progressive left to award the right to speak about an issue primarily, and sometimes exclusively, to the people most affected--should I say, more traumatized?--by the issue. I don't subscribe to this modus operandi, for reasons I'll explain in a future post. But even if I did, I think I belong to the tribe that has every right to call things what they are. People recoiled from the term because they don't think it's that bad. Their mistake, I think, is that they compare Trumpistan to the Germany of the 1940s, or even late 1930s. The correct comparison is to the Germany of 1933, fresh after the election, when conscientious people could have still tried and organized en masse to stop Hitler.
I had a conversation about this with Daniel Acland of the Goldman Institute where I was there to give a talk. Dan impressed me--not a knee-jerk leftie but a very thoughtful one. He thought that Turkey was a better comparator: Germany, he said, was already internally weak and rotting when Hitler exploited its illnesses to assume power (via a democratic election, of course.) Dan's point is well taken. And yet, here, too, I see cynical exploitation of people voting against interest, or out of a twisted version of religious sentiments, and I see serious peril.
Irrevocable damage has already happened. The gratuitous way in which deportations are occurring became crystal clear to me last month when I was in Mexico City. Mexican television, I'm told, is running every night a personal story of one of the returning folks. Many of them have no criminal histories and arrived in the United States as toddlers, and now forced to make their way in a country they do not know or understand. The retreat from the Paris agreement is an absolute disaster. Unbridled, unfeeling cruelty with no rhyme or reason is already unleashed, to the cries of joy of folks living their lives in moral slumber. Today's attack on transgender military personnel are merely the latest in a series of humiliations, and will certainly not be the last.
I go to protests not because I think they directly impact our political realities. I go to remind myself that I am not alone in living and breathing to eradicate this great evil from this land. The really boring work, door-to-door, phonebanking, donating money, is being done as well and will have to be done effectively for us to reclaim the legislature by 2018. In the meantime, basking in the creativity and enthusiasm of others is a salve to the soul.
That Prop. 64 passed was no big surprise, and that Prop. 62 did not look like it was going to pass was a disappointment. We didn't know yet that 66 was going to pass. But the national scene already looked pretty disturbing.
Embarrassment and defeat stood in the room like stale air. I left the party and hopped on my scooter, riding to Hastings. The Democratic Club had invited me and Chad to see the election results with them on the 24th floor. The Sky Room offers stunning views of the city, and many of my students were expected to be there.
But by the time I got there and parked at the front door, people were leaving the building in tears. Night enveloped me, standing there, placing my helmet in the top box, as poison spread through my organs. I thought, this is it. I live in Nazi Germany now, and I'm one of the Germans.
This is why, in the weeks that followed, the White Rose Society became a beacon of light for me. I distributed hundreds of white rose lapel pins to my students, wore one consistently throughout the semester, even tattooed one on my right arm, as a reminder to wake up every morning and fight the Nazis. I changed my timetable to give priority to TV interviews about Trumpistan and its displays of gratuitous cruelty.
A word about the term Nazis. It has become fairly fashionable among my friends in the progressive left to award the right to speak about an issue primarily, and sometimes exclusively, to the people most affected--should I say, more traumatized?--by the issue. I don't subscribe to this modus operandi, for reasons I'll explain in a future post. But even if I did, I think I belong to the tribe that has every right to call things what they are. People recoiled from the term because they don't think it's that bad. Their mistake, I think, is that they compare Trumpistan to the Germany of the 1940s, or even late 1930s. The correct comparison is to the Germany of 1933, fresh after the election, when conscientious people could have still tried and organized en masse to stop Hitler.
I had a conversation about this with Daniel Acland of the Goldman Institute where I was there to give a talk. Dan impressed me--not a knee-jerk leftie but a very thoughtful one. He thought that Turkey was a better comparator: Germany, he said, was already internally weak and rotting when Hitler exploited its illnesses to assume power (via a democratic election, of course.) Dan's point is well taken. And yet, here, too, I see cynical exploitation of people voting against interest, or out of a twisted version of religious sentiments, and I see serious peril.
Irrevocable damage has already happened. The gratuitous way in which deportations are occurring became crystal clear to me last month when I was in Mexico City. Mexican television, I'm told, is running every night a personal story of one of the returning folks. Many of them have no criminal histories and arrived in the United States as toddlers, and now forced to make their way in a country they do not know or understand. The retreat from the Paris agreement is an absolute disaster. Unbridled, unfeeling cruelty with no rhyme or reason is already unleashed, to the cries of joy of folks living their lives in moral slumber. Today's attack on transgender military personnel are merely the latest in a series of humiliations, and will certainly not be the last.
I go to protests not because I think they directly impact our political realities. I go to remind myself that I am not alone in living and breathing to eradicate this great evil from this land. The really boring work, door-to-door, phonebanking, donating money, is being done as well and will have to be done effectively for us to reclaim the legislature by 2018. In the meantime, basking in the creativity and enthusiasm of others is a salve to the soul.
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