We’re heading into dark times. This is how to be your own light in the Age of Trump My fellow Americans, I have a favor to ask you. Today is November 18, 2016. I want you to write about who you are, what you have experienced, and what you have endured. Write down what you value; what standards you hold for yourself and for others. Write about your dreams for the future and your hopes for your children. Write about the struggle of your ancestors and how the hardship they overcame shaped the person you are today. Write your biography, write down your memories. Because if you do not do it now, you may forget. Write a list of things you would never do. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will do them. Write a list of things you would never believe. Because it is possible that in the next year, you will either believe them or be forced to say you believe them. It is increasingly clear, as Donald Trump appoints his cabinet of white supremacists and war-mongers, as hate crimes rise, as the institutions that are supposed to protect us cower, as international norms are shattered, that his ascendency to power is not normal. This is an American authoritarian kleptocracy, backed by millionaire white nationalists both in the United States and abroad, meant to strip our country down for parts, often using ethnic violence to do so. This is not a win for anyone except them. This is a moral loss and a dangerous threat for everyone in the United States, and by extension, everyone abroad. I have been studying authoritarian states for over a decade, and I would never exaggerate the severity of this threat. Others who study or have lived in authoritarian states have come to the same conclusion as me. And the plight is beyond party politics: it is not a matter of having a president-elect whom many dislike, but having a president-elect whose explicit goal is to destroy the nation.
This too. Against Bargaining | Laurie Penny There are none so blind as those who won’t see—specifically, those who have been conditioned through generations of history lessons and Hollywood propaganda to be suspicious of authoritarian strongmen and yet still refuse to recognize an actual fascist when he struts into the White House with a Suicide Squad of goons. I studied Hitler’s rise to power almost every year at secondary school. You may well have done the same. Thinking back through those textbooks I memorized, though, one question was always glossed over: What was it actually like to be an ordinary German in 1933? What were people feeling, listening to the state wireless whine out the workings of the new world order? How many were pleased to see the blackshirts on their streets—and how many were simply keeping their heads down, telling themselves that they’d been through worse, that they should give the new guys a chance and see if they really meant what they said? How many tried to normalize the utterly unconscionable, because the alternative was despair? (snip) The trouble with the five stages of grief is that one of them is bargaining. As a rogue’s gallery of far-right ideologues, white supremacists, and howling authoritarian sociopaths line up to take control of the White House, bargaining is what well-meaning liberals have spent all week doing—at least, those who have not already been personally threatened into silence. They’ve hopped from denying a Trump win was possible to telling themselves and each other that maybe it’ll be alright, just as you might soothe a child in a storm shelter. Maybe the federal government will save us, or moderate conservatives, or Jesus. Maybe there’s something reasonable in the rage of disinherited white Americans who rolled Orange Hitler into the Oval Office. Maybe we should have listened to them more, had more empathy, even as Trump voters deny any possibility of empathy for those whose beliefs, nationality, or skin color happens to differ from their own. Maybe we shouldn’t have called their behavior racist, misogynist, extremist. Maybe it was us, we say, rearranging the traditional post-crisis leftist firing squad into a perfect circle. Maybe we had this coming. This, of course, is an internalization of the language of abusers everywhere.
Well, pot's legal here! I am out of denial but I kind of skipped those stages up to "acceptance" (which is NOT an option) and have gone straight to action. All I can do is write and share and work with people who know how to fight. I do not have money to donate but I will work for anyone I feel is being oppressed or die trying. I do know that every time I see picture of He Who Must Not Be Named with an American Flag behind him I nearly throw up.
