In these dark days, as we watch the erosion of our civil, constitutional and human rights take place before our very eyes, I am reminded of the lessons that history can teach us about these very troubling current events. The attack in Charlottesville, Va. marks a point in our country that is a direct result of a fanned flame that has not been extinguished. Lives have been lost amid the cries of race supremacy and the diminishment of human life. The response has been a lukewarm suggestion that we take a timeout, rather than a clear rebuke of the lack of respect that has given new birth to a growing faction that sees strong-arm tactics and brutal force as the answer to everything.
The fact that the person now occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. has all but issued an executive order instructing those who have sworn to protect and serve to disregard their oaths of office and target persons based on their race, color and accent—and then engage in acts of abuse and intentional cruelty — is clearly alarming. Bombastic rhetoric, rather than well-reasoned words of diplomacy, is now a daily occurrence as our standing on the world stage declines. Our president’s current encouragement of the use of force, violence and reckless plunder in place of rational thought is not unlike the actions that gave birth to the Nazi regime. That government met any form of opposition through its Gestapo (secret state police), which suppressed the voices of opposition. That is the same regime that claimed the calculated attempt at genocide was necessary for national and cultural security to make Germany “great again.” Have we lapsed into new-millennium ignorance? Have we grown so amnesic that we have forgotten the battles in the 1960s here in the United States? These battles pitted the skin-ripping forces of fire hoses and bloodthirsty attack dogs of our own government against those who dared to oppose oppression. In these struggles, police and politicians flexed their power as though it were an iron glove against those who sought what the “American dream” promised. Our forefathers testified with their bodies that the “dream” had evolved into what both Martin and Malcolm coined an “American nightmare.” The use of these — and other — dream-snatching acts of brutality was, by all measures, officially sanctioned terrorism against the people of the United States.
Contrary to what conservatives claim, opposition against the emergence of a military state and refusing to denounce who we are as a country and how we came to be who we are is not anti-American. Stating disapproval of bullying, as well as cavalier talk about the use of nuclear weapons that sets the stage for a worldwide armed conflict, is not being weak. Taking a stand against daily insults to truth-telling and opposing bald-face lies does not equate to supporting gang violence. It is not about encouraging lawlessness and is not disregarding the need for the proper protection of life; nor is it agreeing to the destruction of property and community. It is, however, about not letting ourselves be lured by the prescription of Novocain, which provides a false sense that harm is not being done to the flesh of our democracy and that, if we simply let the erosion go for a little bit, we can recover later. What faces us today is as close as America has been to a turn toward fascism.
With a president who has adopted the “Fuehrer principle,” thinking he is above the law, we find ourselves looking down the barrel of a loaded White House that is ultimately preparing to pull the trigger. The free press has been labeled as fake while being denied access to information that the country has an absolute right to know. The replacement of independent and credentialed public servants with devious narcissistic persons who are required to give a blood pledge to the person and not the people is, and must be more than, a warning sign for us all. The revolving door in the White House showing the entrance and exit of persons at the highest level of our government on a weekly basis is a glaring example of instability that is fertile ground for a claim that there is no need for checks and balances. It must be viewed as a distress call for all good men and women to come to the aid of that which we know is good and that which we know is right.
There is a battlefield being staged before our very eyes. The danger is that, if there is no attempt to prevent this setup, this battlefield may very well become the burial ground of our republic. From the travel ban leveled against persons based on their religion to the dehumanization of referring to young Black and Brown persons as “animals”; from the declaration that transgendered persons are too much trouble to have serve our country in the military, to the loosening of regulations that will encourage the contamination of the water supply and the destruction of the environment in and around communities of color; from the refusal to make the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes and for the repair of infrastructure to the belittling and abuse of women without apology or shame; and from the reckless use of offensive and crass language at the highest level of government to the disregard of diplomatic protocol that places our nation on the verge of war, the staging is nearly complete. These examples are but some of the underlying themes that have been introduced by the cast of a dangerous reality show who have come to realize that they can never be turned off. As the ratings from those watching go up (whether in agreement or not), the actors on this stage feast on their own notoriety and play this deadly platform out day by day and seemingly hour by hour. They play out the next subplot that will stir the pot and ignite the race, color and class conflagrations that can only be the real intended outcome of the behaviors I have described. In short, while the rich get richer, the divide between those who have all and those who have little widens.
One must acknowledge the fact that, in the past 200 days, our nation has been in a chaotic freefall. It can only recover by employing a strong dose of counter-Trumpism, which is otherwise known as respect, integrity, truth and a relentless focus on not accepting that which has entertained some since the middle of January 2017 as being normal or appropriate. Instead, there must be a dynamic and organized resistance against the destruction of that which we have managed to shape through half a millennium, during which we have been challenged with revolution, brutalization of native peoples, civil war, the sin of slavery, subjugating classism, demeaning racism and thinly cloaked gender abuse. We cannot let our ability to learn from our own history slip away like water. Doing so will provide fertile ground for the emerging fascist elements to take strong root.
We cannot delude ourselves. As a nation, we are in very deep trouble. America has a person in our highest office who has bragged about committing criminal sexual assault, has encouraged law enforcement to intentionally abuse persons with whom they engage and has treated the U.S. government like his personal candy store, into which he has invited his friends, despite his campaign promises of “draining the swamp.” The tactic of placing domestic opponents and other nations in a state of fear is being adopted, hate group by hate group. The creation of fear through the use of domestic terrorism is intended to silence. We can ill afford to be silent. If voices of dissent, rationality and reason don’t rise now and speak loudly, clearly and convincingly into the proverbial national microphone, the danger is that our future rights and ability to do so will be mowed down and crushed for generations to come.
Frederick K. Brewington is a civil rights attorney based in Hempstead, N.Y. and an adjunct professor of law at Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center in Central Islip, N.Y. He is the recipient of the New York State Bar Association’s 2017 Haywood Burns Civil Rights Award.
