The question is, “Can our democracy hold or will the authoritarian man in the White House take over completely? I wish I had a crystal ball and could give you the answer, but don’t. All I can say is, “It is up to all of us.” How many of us fight hard enough to turn the tide. It will not be easy.
“These are the times that try men’s souls,” said Thomas Paine in his pamphlet The Crisis in December of 1776. I fear that we have arrive at that point again. We have a President who clearly wants to act as a king, a Congress who will do nothing to stop him, and a judiciary that is struggling to keep the want-a-be king in check.
The question is, “Can our democracy hold or will the authoritarian man in the White House take over completely?”
I wish I had a crystal ball and could give you the answer, but don’t. All I can say is, “It is up to all of us.” How many of us fight hard enough to turn the tide. It will not be easy.
The right wing in this country has had an agenda of smaller government and less government aid to the less fortunate. That view has been pushed by the right wing with limited success from 1980 to 2016. Then the right wing got the salesman they were looking for. A pitch man who could tell you what was wrong this country and that if you elected him, he knew how to fix it.
Much of what he did came straight out of the authoritarian playbook. You tell people that there is this other group that is nasty and evil and out to get you. You plant fear and then you tell people that you can protect them. Trump has used the fear of the immigrant skillfully and made millions of American fearful of the immigrant hordes flowing over our borders. He suggests that they are all rapists and murderers. The odds are that out of millions of immigrants there are some. But the truth is that if you are assaulted or killed, it is much more likely to be by someone native born.
It is clear that immigration is a thorny problem. It is in fact a problem in many places in the world. There are many problems that cause this to be the case. Poverty, political instability, drought, chronic flooding to name a few. In many places this is made more severe by climate change. Let me be clear it is rare for people to migrate for minor reasons. People have a fondness for the culture they grow up in. People migrate because for various reasons they feel they have no other choice. If you actually talk to these people, you will find stories of severe hardship and persecution that forced them from their homeland, problems so severe that once deported they will often turn around and try again.
The fact is that the immigration problem is very hard to solve, but Trump really has no interest in solving it; he wants to use it. He wants to use fear of the immigrant to get us all to accept that his use of the national guard and military is necessary for our safely. Don’t believe him. The guard and military on our streets during ICE activities make us less safe. Let the police do it as they are trained for that sort of thing.
When large numbers of people are rounded up on the streets, mistakes will be made. Innocent people will be detained. It does not appear that there is any attempt to find the undocumented criminals to deport first or even to sort out those with final deportation orders, but to simply gather up any undocumented people they can find. How else can you detain 3,000 people per day?
The Trump administration is operating on a program of fear and hate for people such as immigrants, foreigners, people of color, and the poor. We must counter this with a campaign of love, love for all of God’s children. We must demonstrate for inclusiveness, love, and compassion. Tell the world we do not want to be the kind of a country that Trump is trying to turn us into. Demonstrate non-violently but demonstrate. Make Thomas Paine proud.