E Pluribus Unum

April 1, 2023

     While Trump’s indictment yesterday is a decisive step towards accountability for an irredeemably corrupt, dissembling racist, we should not mistake circulating memes of Trump in prison garb for action.  With the indictment, Trump’s fate, at least on the New York charges, is out of his hands and out of ours and we should not confuse our armchair advocacy for activism.

       In the rest of the world, ordinary people are taking to the streets in massive numbers to protest authoritarianism and exploitation.  In Israel, thousands of people took to the street to protest Benjamin Netanyahu’s proposed judicial “overhaul” that would dramatically weaken the country’s supreme court and allow the Knesset to overturn any of the court’s rulings by a simple majority vote, (Source:  “What are the Israeli protests about and what happens next?” by Bethan McKernan, TheGuardian.com, 3/27/23).

      France has seen two weeks of escalating protests and labor action since French President Emmanuel Macron pushed through a pension rescue plan that would raise the country’s retirement age from 62 to 64.  On Tuesday, “740,000 protestors joined 240 rallies throughout the country,” and as many as 1.3 million people protested on March 7th (Source:  “France wracked by more pension protests amid rising violence,” by Pauline Lockwood, Hannah Ritchie, Pierre Bairin, Oliver Briscoe and Sara Noor Haq, CNN.com, 3/29/23).

     Yet here in the United States, where elected officials have waged an unceasing attack on women’s bodily autonomy, Black people’s history and the right of LGBTQ people to exist, we are strangely passive.  Have we been lulled into complacency by the endless parade of distractions in our culture, from March Madness to Taylor Swift Tours?  Or have we been driven to despondency by the ubiquity of the challenges to our liberty and humanity?

     Tuesday’s grim news that another school shooting with an AR-15 at Covenant Christian School in Nashville left three precious nine year old children and three caring adults dead was met with numb inaction outside of Tennessee.  We sit on our hands as people we elected not only do nothing to stop the carnage, but actively make it easier for gun violence to escalate, passing permitless carry legislation and refusing to entertain common sense provisions like red flag laws or magazine capacity limits that enjoy widespread support and might have prevented this tragedy.

     Instead, hate mongering politicians and pundits have exploited the shooter’s gender identity to double down on vile rhetoric with the goal of making trans people even more vulnerable to violence.  They claim that transgender people are a threat to public safety, despite the fact that “96% of the mass killings involving a single shooter were committed by men,”(Source:  “Nashville shooting exploited by right to escalate anti-trans rhetoric,” by Finit Nirrapil, The Washington Post, 3/30/23).

      Far from being a threat, transgender people are targets, disproportionately the victims of both state and individual violence.  38 trans people were murdered in 2022 (ibid) and 435 bills have been introduced in virtually every state in the union aimed at criminalizing gender affirming healthcare and prohibiting trans kids from participating in school sports, (Source:  “Mapping Attacks on LGBTQ Rights innU.S. State Legislatures,” aclu.org, 3/28/23).

     This is nothing less than attempted genocide.  It is entirely consistent for the people who viciously attack trans children to be indifferent to the brutal and capricious slaughter of cisgender children.  Is there any doubt that the zeal to suppress Black history is motivated by the determination to prevent schools from cultivating empathy in white children and pride in Black ones?   Protecting white children has nothing to do with it.

    Why aren’t we in the streets like the people of Israel or France?  Is it because we don’t see threats to trans people as affecting us?  Do we not care about the literal whitewashing of history?  Do we feel powerless?

     If anything, Trump’s indictment should show us that the institutions we have long pointed to as evidence  of “American exceptionalism”  are not dead yet, despite the determination of an army of autocratic wannabes to kill them off.  It’s time to get off the couch and remember what our country’s motto, “e pluribus unum” means — out of many, one.  Let’s act like we mean it.