I lived through the 60s and was old enough to protest the war and be a part of the culture. I wept when they killed MLK and then Bobby. I was 14 when we entered the 1970s. And I have not felt that particular type of angst since then. And yet I still believe this is worse. Not because I can compare what we endured and what we felt back then to now. But rather because we still had reasonable hopes back then.
We protested the establishment, but the basic fabric of the Republic never came close to unraveling. We talked about the environment and pushed through some protections, mostly in the early 70s. We started Earth Day. We protested nukes. But it would be years before the slow menace at our poles would even be noticed, much less talked about. Or the creeping presence of plastic everywhere. Or the real rape of the rain forest. Few were talking about the ecocide, and none about our own extinction.
Now, in the third decade of the 21st century, fascism is at our door with a battering ram, and no one knows if it will hold. And after being called global warming and then climate change, we are now calling it climate disruption. It rolls off the tongue. But few have any idea what this "disruption" will entail. And that is not all. We are overseeing the 6th mass extinction, and this time, we are the cause. How does it feel to look into the infinite dead eyes of our own extinction? Stay tuned.
A number of years ago I joined millions of my fellow citizens as we watched our election turn into a slow motion bloodless coup d'etat, courtesy of the Russians who laughed their asses off, and the GOP, who laughed all the way to the bank. I watched as the whole political world simply ignored what was obvious and proceeded to normalize a low life criminal as our "president". I watched as the electoral college certified him, under heavy protest. And I watched as he, his criminal administration, and the corrupt senate, and for a time, the house, gutted everything that truly did "Make America Great". It was a coup, but not a total one. It did not stop the midterms in 2018 or the 2020 general election. And we still have two parties.
And when the next election finally arrived they attacked the United States Capitol in an attempt to overthrow a legitimate election. Again. He made "jokes" about being president for life. Do any of us believe he actually thinks that is funny?
He is dead serious. Anyone who thought that he, and more importantly, his followers, would go away when they were forced to vacate the White House were sadly mistaken. The second attempt at a coup was bloody, but was stopped by some quick thinking, fast footwork and luck. What if the luck fails to hold? What if the next front man they put up is a clever smooth talker instead of a cheap gangster?
Beyond what he is doing to our Democratic Republic with his mere presence, there is what he and his followers are doing in regards to our gravest problem--climate change and anthropogenic extinction.
If this Republican party, which has rolled back every regulation for environmental protection they could, and never met an oil rig they didn't love, "wins" the midterms next year, or the presidency in three years, it won't just be temporary despoiling of a limited area. It will be game over, and we ALL lose. Every living thing.
I am not even sure what winning looks like, for us. For the Republicans it is clear. Winning means imposing Guns, Jesus, and the most appallingly brutal free market capitalism on the rest of us. It means we lose our first amendment rights by the forced silence of fear, or by literal force. It means a return to the “pecking order” of the 19th century, when women, Jews, and anyone with darker skin “knew their place”. And gays kept it in the closet so deep it never saw the light of day.
But what winning looks like for us is a harder call. What most of us really want is a country where everyone has a fair shake. We want to be kind. We want everyone to see what we see in the value of diversity. We want a fairer economic system. And we want to carry the people in the red hats with us. The problem is that they don’t want to go. And we can never relax and just govern as long as they are mixed in with us in cities and states across the country. It isn’t like the last civil war when there were geographical boundaries. In this current conflict it is about what you believe and whether you think this can be imposed on others. Imagine being fair game to be shot in the street for being a Democrat. That may sound crazy, but there are fellow citizens who think that is acceptable right now. They may be your neighbors.
So out version of winning is not possible. I don’t believe that the onset of a totalitarian America will look like cities burning or great unrest. If there is such it will be over quickly and we will lose. It may not even be uniform across the various states. The Republicans pushing this agenda are going about it, as they have before, by relying on states rights. Which means that living in a blue state can be a hedge for us against complete loss of power.
It may also ultimately mean Balkinization of the United States. I have thought long about the two state solution for the United States, or even three state solution. As long as we share a government with those who love fascism and seek to impose it on their neighbors we can never rest. So, what does winning look like?
That is what makes this era worse than the 60s, as hard as they were. I hope that we will yet prevail. This war is not close to over. We are not, at this moment, winning. But I lived through the 60s and can live through this, at least to a point. And I will not stop fighting as long as I have breath. Who is with me?