"Right about now, something terrible is happening in America. Society is one tiny step away from the final collapse of democracy, at the hands of a true authoritarian ... Meanwhile, America’s silent majority is still slumbering at the depth and gravity of the threat."
Umair Haque, America is Dying.
Haque shares his experience: "We survivors of authoritarianism have a terrible, terrible foreboding, because we are experiencing something we should never do: deja vu." Parents fled from collapsing societies and now their children are witnessing this in America.
Where can we, the masses, go next? What will we lose besides our homes, drinking water, access to food and medicine?
Remember Europe of the thirties where strongmen rolled over the continent killing millions and destroying civil society? Remember how these came shortly after The Frankfurt schools, social justice, and women's suffrage protests? The sweep of fascism was the boot on the face of humanity.
Then the forties. Images of starved naked bodies piled up in pits. Then refugees who escaped the gas chambers. It was not just a documentary to precede the materialist boom. It was not just a drama with a happy ending.
For millions of people it was despair, torture, starvation, and mostly the loss of their families, their dignity, puncturing the idea of humanity as a civil, conscious species. It was a time when brutality defined the human experience, regardless of where you were born.
The question in the minds of oppressors and the oppressed was - is this really human nature? Is there anyone I can trust? Who won?
Not the masses. This era brought new ideas, new inventions and new political movements rising out of the horror of our own shadow.
Then the opportunity to engage in materialism, unions, psychology, free love, free choice ... and new forms of ideology. The struggle for social justice drowned in advertising of shiny cars and kitchen appliances, women as housewives and sex objects, men as muscled warriors, movies and movie stars.
Remember the voices who said never again regardless of whether they suffered personally.
All of the rights we have were hard won by a minority, by adults who were bullied because they took life too seriously, people who think too much, people who spoil dinner parties by raising questions of prejudice, racism and misogyny.
Perhaps you are irritated by the woman at a school board meeting who demands our children be educated about the economic and social problems she thinks we are facing. Perhaps angry at all the statistics she throws out when all you want is to deal with that particular school or class.
Or you quickly throw out the newspapers that cover stories on social injustice so you don't get depressed by the headlines?
Anyway you know who is blame. You have a long list of problems caused by 'others' who have 'failed' to get a job, a home, pay their bills. And no, you are not going to read how our forefathers treated the indigenous people, or how women are treated, or how African Americans arrived in slave ships. You've heard it all before and you've had enough. You're sick of it all.
It's too much. But it feels like it's pointed at you. As though you should have studied the history of fascism to compare where we are at before it's too late.
No, it's not about being right. It's about being moved to do something you can do. At the very least, understanding how fragile we are. Understanding that hate never helps even if you hate the bad guys.
It's about seeing how fragile you are and how fragile we all are to the longing for escape, and there are no boats or planes that guarantee our future, which doesn't excuse us from caring or doing something.
This is a shared responsibility to care about people and places you've never met. To have compassion and curiosity, not a gun. About restoring human relationships, enabling a space for us to grow, work, play and to love.
