On asking the question
Because sitting this one out comes at a cost.
It’s a simple one.
What are you protecting?
People stayed home from the No Kings rallies for myriad reasons. They didn’t want to be seen. They didn’t want to risk getting their names on a “list.” They didn’t want their boss / pastor / parent / significant other to know they were there. They didn’t want to get involved. They didn’t want to be seen as “radical,” as “overreacting.”
Was that you?
What are you protecting?
I almost didn’t go. I take care of my 86-year-old mother. “What if something happened to me—if some idiot drives into the crowd?” I thought. “Who would take care of her?”
It was my 86-year-old mother who told me to go.
It was my 86-year-old mother who told me that next time she would bring a chair and hold up a sign and protest with me.
Because the people of my mother’s generation remember World War II. They remember—vividly—what fascism can do. They remember starving children and gas chambers and mass executions and lampshades made from human skin, when the god of self-preservation stalked the land, denying humanity, murdering empathy.
They remember what their fathers and uncles fought and died for; how damaged others were when they came home; how many came home in a box, draped with a flag.
They see clearly what this regime is doing and they are determined to stop it.
Not here, they say. Not now. Not this nation, this beacon we have worked and fought so hard for. This nation defeats fascists; we don’t incubate them.
I saw this at the rally, how so many of the participants were in their sixties or older.
We remember.
And we laughed and danced and cheered at those who drove by, honking, and we remembered what it is to have community, to love your neighbor as yourself.
But although this latest rally was the largest government protest in American history, the crowds still aren’t large enough to convince the Rulers of the United States that we mean business when we say, NO KINGS. Some people think that marches—no matter how big—won’t matter to this regime.
Perhaps they are right.
Perhaps what we need is a nationwide general strike. Shut everything down. Make the financial pain on the billionaire class so sharp that they will have no choice but to stop shredding the Constitution and ignoring the law.
Some people say the billionaires are so rich, they won’t care about that, either. That all we will do is hurt ourselves.
Maybe they’re right.
But these are starting places, and they are good and necessary.
Because the next logical step after a general strike is too horrible to contemplate.
A civil war today will look far different from the one in the 1860s. The weapons are different; the country is different. We’re bigger, more spread out. And the lines of demarcation are not so easily drawn. Our counties, communities, and sometimes even our families are a diverse mix of blue and red. A war would cleave us asunder—neighbor against neighbor, sister against brother.
That much hasn’t changed.
A war would inflict the kind of harm that takes generations to heal. And generations to forget. And we do forget, despite the reenactments and the memorials and the statues. It is this forgetting that empowers the next war, and the next.
We don’t have that kind of time anymore. The weapons of our warfare guarantee it. The warming, writhing planet guarantees it.
We meet this challenge NOW, or we lose our shot at a livable future.
So I ask: What is keeping you on the fence? You’re worried about your job? Your friends? Your kids?
Ask yourself that question—then ask what will become of your kids if you choose to stay silent.
And then leaf through the dusty pages of World War II—the pages that still cry, never forget!—and ask yourself if your silence is worth it.
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez 🇨🇦 on Unsplash