The Heart of the Matter

In one of my early posts on this site, I wrote "I have faith in the American people – faith that we're an unruly, insubordinate bunch scattered across a vast swathe of land, from our beautifully diverse cities to our remotest rural communities, that we are not easy to subdue and control, that even those who have supported the current authoritarian cult will not like losing some of the federal government's services that make our lives livable, that we have more power than is recognized and that some of us are already organizing to use it."

And in April I wondered, "When does the pressure break, the dam crack, the earthquake fault slip, the ferment explode the bottle? No one knows. But we can prepare for it, we can build toward it, we can lay the groundwork for it. And I wouldn't be surprised if the summer of 2025 exceeds the intensity and scale of the summer of 2020, the summer of the Black Lives Matter George Floyd protests. But I don't know. Neither do you. No one does. All we can do is keep showing up, keep speaking up, keep donating, keep connecting, keep our values close and our courage strong and keep an eye out. And not give up...."

I think this is it. It's begun. The Trump Administration has escalated, and so has the resistance to the Administration, to its brutality, lawlessness, cruelty, and destruction. They want to institute authoritarianism, a regime in which they have unlimited power and we have no rights. I believe they can do great harm, and no one needs to just believe that: we can see they have already. But I do not believe history is on their side, and I believe we are writing history with our voices, our donations, our bodies, our solidarities, our commitment to remain informed and engaged right now.

I believe we have the power to stand up for our rights and the rights of nature, the protection of the vulnerable (including nonhuman life and the planet), the rule of law, the values of equality, democracy, and justice. For the old E Pluribus Unum – out of many, one – motto of this country. To stand up in ways that matter and sometimes turn the tide. I see ICE protests from New York to Seattle (and a surprisingly intense one in Spokane, on the Idaho border) to L.A. with the No
Kings demonstrations Saturday likely to be huge and charged with fierce passion.

 And here's the beautiful thing I see, shining like a lighthouse across this stormy landscape. All that activity comes from love, and while a thousand things tell us in a thousand ways, and have all our American lives, that everything we want is private and personal and much of it is money and commodities, we are so much bigger than that. So much better than that. We want so much more than that, which is a testament to our idealism. By idealism I mean care for things beyond ourselves, where empathy, solidarity, generosity, commitment to the public realm and the collective good flourish. 

If the private and the personal were all we wanted, all we cared about, there would be no resistance and we'd just each be taking care of ourselves and our immediate
connections and goods, not the whole. But so many of us love justice, love
human rights, love equality, love the ideas, ideals, principles we are
defending right now while they are under attack as never before in this
country. We are often told anger is our superpower or secret weapon, but I see
(and experience) what gets called anger as protective energy, and you don't
feel that way about things you don't love and value. So the starting point and
heart of it all is love.

I am moved that so many people not under direct threat have chosen solidarity with those who are under threat, or arrest, or imprisoned for being an immigrant or looking like one to racist enforcement squads, or who are already deported. I'm
moved by the countless lawyers and law firms defending the vulnerable, the law,
and our rights. I'm moved by the politicians standing up, and this crisis is, I
think, a shift; they can no longer waffle, no longer smooth over the conflict
and the crisis, and that's a good thing. When California Governor Gavin Newsom says, "What Donald Trump wants most is your fealty. Your silence. To be complicit in this moment. Do NOT give in to him," the lines have been drawn clearly and the middle ground is no man's land.

The great scholar of authoritarianism Ruth Ben-Ghiat writes (in her highly recommended newsletter Lucid), "The real problem, for the Trump regime in the making, is that Americans are turning out in large numbers to defend the vulnerable by exercising their right to free assembly and protest. Authoritarianism depends on breaking the horizontal bonds of solidarity and empathy that lead people to risk their safety to protest injustices against others. The massive and exaggerated deployment of state security personnel and the display of arms and uniforms is designed to frighten people into hiding. There is nothing stronger than solidarity shown publicly, which is why the state responds with outsized threat and violent acts."

Authoritarians want our worst selves: gullible, fearful, hateful, obedient, tolerant of cruelty or actively cruel; being our best selves is at the heart of resistance (but of course all those good qualities need to lead to action). I don't want to be glib about the situation: millions of people are living under threat and in fear; many thousands have already been attacked; we are in the middle of the crisis
(here's a Washington Post piece noting "terrifying scenes are also unfolding in smaller communities around the country. They, too, are being invaded by what resembles a secret police force, often indistinguishable from random thugs," pretty strong language for the Post).

Even if we prevail, the harm is real and repairing the profound damage to the nation and society will be the work of years if not generations, to say nothing of the
repair to psyches. But I am not giving up. I'm hopeful because I believe in
civil society, I believe in our power, and I believe in our idealism. I don't
know what is going to happen, because we make the future in the present, but in
the present I see solidarity, commitment, principle, and courage.

p.s. My last Meditations in an Emergency essay caused Facebook to shut my account and tell me it was permanently gone. It's very clearly an essay in support of nonviolence as well as a meditation on what exactly violence is and who's committing it: "I believe ardently that nonviolent resistance is in the big picture and the long term the most effective strategy, but that doesn't mean it must be polite, placid, or please our opponents...."

I suspect this was because an algorithm seized on the word violence in
the title or something like that. Everyone who posted the direct link there
found that it was deleted with a warning message. And my account was
"permanently disabled" by a message saying there was no appeal. I
think the link is still banned, but I'm back in.

It's both frustrating and a reminder of one reason why I founded this newsletter, to
have a platform entirely under my control hosted by an honorable nonprofit (the
highly recommended Ghost.org, not Substack). I don't believe the attack on my
account was political censorship beyond the sloppy work of an algorithm or an
underpaid, under equipped content moderator, but it was a reminder of the
arbitrariness of so many of the systems we're subject to, and perhaps this
arbitrariness is both callousness on their part and confidence that the
arbitrariness lets us all know we're at the mercy of their indifference to
precision.

Thanks to everyone so moved to make a ruckus on my behalf on FB, and obviously that's not the big problem we're all facing, just something clogging up my ability to
try to offer information and encouragement to a lot of people I connect with
there. Somehow the ruckus drew in some people with contacts at Meta, who got my account un-disabled several hours ago, and I'm back there, but glad to be
here – and grateful to all the new subscribers who came in while that was going
on.

Welcome aboard.