Fighting for our lives

July 24, 2018

 

We awaken every day with an escalating sense of grim foreboding, literally not knowing what fresh dangers await.  In a scant 18 months, Trump has re-made this country, subjecting us all to a disorienting instability where we can take nothing for granted.  We now live in a country where decades’ long safeguards, customs, ethics and principles can evaporate in an instant, while no one with any power lifts a finger to stop or utters a word of rebuke.

Witness, for example, Trump’s reckless Twitter threats to Iranian President Rouhani.  On Sunday, Trump sent an  unhinged fusillade over the internet, tweeting in all caps like some deranged suspense movie villain.  Although the tweet was endlessly mocked on Twitter as an obvious gambit to change the subject from the mounting evidence of Republican complicity with Russia, for Iranian and Iranian-American people, the tweet is no laughing matter.  Trump may be a cornered rat, but he’s a cornered rat with the nuclear launch codes.

For immigrants to flee unimaginable violence in Central America, only to be faced with the Hobson’s Choice of agreeing to deportation back to the same hellscape in order to have the chance of being reunited with their kidnapped children, the danger of this administration’s deliberate cruelty is not theoretical.  When we add this administration’s criminal incompetence and contempt for the law into the mix, there is a very real possibility that the majority of these families may not be reunited by the court ordered July 26th deadline.

The fact is that the torrent of hatred unleashed by this “President” fills us with ever- increasing dread.  Every day brings news of a new incident  where hateful bigots try to weaponize the police as their racism valets, to enforce their sense of entitlement to segregated spaces, be they pools, parks or Yale common rooms.  We have seen overt examples of anti-Semitism, from the synagogues vandalized with swastikas to the regurgitated Nazi chants of “Jews will not replace us,” in Charlottesville.

When hate-filled bigots evade consequences for these acts of intimidation, they escalate from word to deed.  Ten days ago, a terrorist’s effort to blow up an entire Florida condo where Jewish people resided was thwarted in the nick of time.  When the police apprehended the suspect, he had already poured two canisters of gasoline down the trash chutes and had a storage container filled with explosives (Source:  “Man Tried to Burn Down Condo to ‘Kill All Jews,’ Police Say,” by Sarah Mervosh, The New York Times, 7/12/18).  Late Sunday, 18 year old Nia Wilson was stabbed to death in Oakland on the BART train by a random white man, who then attacked her sister. While the police do not yet have evidence linking the murderer to white supremacist groups, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Nia’s race and gender were at least part of the reason for his random attack, or at a minimum, the reason that no one intervened as two young women were repeatedly stabbed (Source: “ ‘Blindsided by a maniac:’ BART stabbing leaves one sister dead, another injured.  Suspect in custody,” by Allyson Chiu, The Washington Post, 7/24/18).

So forgive us if we forswear “civility.”  Understand if press coverage that treats politics like sports — critiquing performance and cataloguing “winners” and “losers,” leaves us disgusted.  Don’t look for sympathy if your coverage draws opprobrium for appearing to normalize a corrupt and reckless bigot.  We are out here fighting for our lives and the lives of our children.  We don’t have time for your feelings.

#Sayhername

#NiaWilson

#NoHate

#SPLC

#CAIR

#ADL