Tag: resistance

The Moral High Ground

Politics has always been a matter of morality to me. I know politicians lie: I think you’d be hard-pressed to find one who doesn’t. Victories are exaggerated, the nature of or reasons for defeat manipulated, everyone is begging for money all the time but no one wants to admit it. I would like to live in a United States where the amount of money legally permitted to be spent on an election was severely limited and campaigns could only last for a certain amount of time, but our reality being what it is, I’ll take Elizabeth Warren identifying herself as being of Native American descent based on family lore over Aaron Schock using his government expense account to recreate Downton Abbey in his senate office and to go to the CMA ceremony any day.

Probably due to having grown up in the South, for a long time I had the distinct impression that the Republicans were the party of morals and family values, while the Democrats were self-aggrandizing, their fondness for money second only to their thirst for power. When I was about five I came home from school and recited the pledge of allegiance for my parents, altering one key phrase–I managed to change “and to the Republic, for which it stands” to “and to the Republicans, for where they stand.” My mother, despite still being a conservative at that point–at least as far as U.S. politics were concerned–had a fit; she did not forbid me to continue making the pledge at school when required, but she made very sure I understood what it was I was saying and that the Republicans were in no way synonymous with the Republic.

This perspective started to shift during the attempt to impeach Bill Clinton. I could understand finding him repellent for his inability to keep it in his pants; I could understand, and did myself, question bitterly his leadership skills when he launched airstrikes against Iraq, as I personally was convinced that he did so as a distraction from the allegations about his womanizing. What I couldn’t understand were the complaints that he was unfit to lead because of his womanizing. I’ve always been fascinated by histories of monarchies, particularly that of the British royal family, and as a teenager branched out to biographies of more recent political and military leaders. Many of the most revered of these men had affairs by the dozen. Horatio Nelson. FDR. Douglas MacArthur and possibly George Patton (with his niece, ugh). Churchill was known to have had at least one affair (very likely more), but I’ve yet to hear anyone fault his leadership on that score. You can desecrate your marriage vows and still be a good leader.

It isn’t so much that I think moral relativism is necessary in a political context; it’s that I don’t see how it can be avoided if we are to make useful choices, given the scope of the choices we have to make when we vote in an election. I believe that Bill Clinton used his position to persuade women to indulge his sexual proclivities, and I find that repellent, but in terms of scale it doesn’t match the vicious, degrading, and often physical harassment that Donald Trump has bragged about, let alone the credible claims of rape that have come from several women, including his ex-wife and another woman who was a child at the time of the alleged assault. Could Hillary have granted greater access to the President in return for donations to the Clinton Foundation, the proceeds of which she did not personally benefit from? Possibly, but I haven’t heard any convincing evidence that she did so (if you disagree, please feel free to enlighten me), and if the story is true, in no way does it compare to Trump’s refusal to divest himself from his businesses and the numerous ways his hotel empire opens him up to direct violations of the emoluments clause. If Hillary had won the electoral college as well as the popular vote, there would have been no immediate drastic change in the situations in Syria or the Ukraine, there would have been no quick fix for the military and moral quagmires that the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 set off, innocent people would have continued to die. If she had won, however, Putin would not have immediately intensified its assistance of Assad and attacks on Ukraine. Fewer people would have died. As I heard someone else point out recently on Twitter, I would far rather have spent the next four years arguing and wishing and voting to push Hillary further to the left than waking up every morning wondering if WWIII has started and if we still live in a republic rather than a dictatorship.

The U.S. has never truly had an inviolate moral high ground. The extermination of the native inhabitants of North America, slavery and later Jim Crow, the imperialistic acquisition of Hawaii, the voyage of the St Louis, the Vietnam War, the invasion of Iraq–we’ve never had a spotless record. What we did have was a government that didn’t silence people who spoke out against it; dissent has always been present and loud, whether it attracted only a handful of listeners or grew to such influence that it started the Civil War. Now I and the millions of other people who voted for Clinton are genuinely scared we are going to lose this. Putting aside all questions of financial corruption, climate change, women’s reproductive rights, and creationism being taught in school, if Trump’s refusal to denounce Duterte and his open admiration of Vladimir Putin doesn’t scare you, either you are not paying attention or you lack any shred of moral integrity, full stop. Even disregarding the allegations against Putin that are supported only by circumstantial evidence–the blowing up of apartment buildings, the manipulation of Russian state oil companies, the fifteen or so journalists he is suspected of having had killed–we have plenty of evidence that he’s an authoritarian dictator with no interest in preserving freedom of speech and no respect for the concept of innocent lives. He was not troubled by the distraught relative of one of the sailors lost in the Kursk disaster being involuntarily drugged live on television as she demanded answers from the then deputy prime minister; he has demonstrated that he is quite willing to kill hostages along with terrorists in the event of a crisis, as happened in the Dubrovka Theatre crisis and the Beslan school siege. If we have to work with Russia because it is better not to have the country as an enemy, because there are people who depend on the oil and gas that Russia sells to European countries, because the citizens of a country should not be conflated with its leader(s), that is one thing. It is quite another to hold up Putin as a leader to be admired and even emulated, as Trump has done.

In the months since the election I’ve started to separate Trump supporters from conservatives and Republicans as a collective group. There are plenty of Republicans–not least a number of the party’s most prominent leaders–who would not vote for Trump, even if they couldn’t bring themselves to support Clinton either. There are those who supported Trump and started to regret it as soon as two weeks after the election; there is the celebration on the part of the stridently anti-semitic, xenophobic, neo-Nazi demographic, of whom I expected no better. What troubles me most are those who have watched the actions Trump has taken in the weeks since his election, the steady stream of lies, deflections, and misinformation coming out of the White House and across Twitter, and yet continue to argue that all this is acceptable because of “the conservative agenda,” believing that said agenda is morally desirable and benefits everyone. I have often wondered what this conservative agenda is–the rise of Trump has proven that it is not in fact about fiscal conservatism, an admiration of honesty and marital fidelity, or a disdain for corruption and authoritarianism. The only thing it seems to be nowadays is the privileging of private (corporate) profit over the collective good, respect for personal autonomy, and human life itself. If the U.S. is to preserve the Constitution, let alone any shred of moral integrity, it’s a damn good thing the people are rising up against Trump’s Putinesque, Bannon-directed “conservative” agenda.

Resolution

I’ve never been much for New Year’s Resolutions. I think I’ve made lists a handful of times in the past, but I quickly lost track of where I put the piece of paper I wrote the things down on; the supplies I’d piled up for whatever effort was at the top of the list (usually learning French or Japanese, for some reason) were eventually dispersed, lesson books put back in their place on a shelf and paper requisitioned for other uses. I find myself faced with some gargantuan professional commission or personal task and everything else non-essential gets tossed aside. I don’t like this about myself, but I’ve learned over the past couple of years that changing things is easier if I divide large tasks into smaller, more manageable steps and remind myself of my ultimate goal regularly but not constantly.

New Year’s Day is not something I usually look forward to. This time of year is the occasion of a number of unhappy anniversaries for me, and while I have retained enough of my childhood memories of Christmas to give me the will to make December a festive sort of month, I never gained enough of an adult’s appreciation of New Year’s Eve for the same to be true of today. By the time I make it to New Year’s I’m usually somewhat overwrought and dreading the impending return to work.

This year is different. It is not that there were no new occasions to mourn: Anyone who has been awake this year knows that we have have dozens, even if you leave politics aside. 2017 is going to be a long year and I have no doubt I’ll spend a great deal of it feeling inadequate, tired, ill, grief-stricken, and quite frankly terrified if half of what Trump has talked about doing actually comes to pass. I have always cried easily, and I’m sure I’ll be doing a lot of that too.

This year, however, I do not feel without hope. Even in the face of what I expect the GOP and Trump’s cabinet to do. Some of the damage has already been done, and there will be more that we will not be able to undo. Parts of the fight were lost the moment that Trump won the electoral college, because there will be consequences for the environment and for vulnerable populations both domestically and internationally that we can’t roll back. We will only lose more, however, if we give in, and in the midst of the fear and feeling like every champion for equality and intersectionality in the cultural sphere is being methodically taken from us, I, and I think a lot of us, tend to forget that we far from powerless. We may not have David Bowie or Carrie Fisher, but we have their work, their legacies, their memories as inspiration–and we have so very many more champions. President Obama is not going to blink out of existence the moment he steps down from office, and he isn’t planning on retreating from public life to take up painting or womanizing; he’s organizing an effort to support Democratic nominees for the 2018 mid-terms and to stop gerrymandering. We have Lin-Manuel Miranda, Heather McGhee, Rebecca Solnit, Reza Aslan, Sarah Kendzior, so many strong voices and leaders in the cultural, artistic, and political spheres I can’t begin to count them. Those who voted against Trump still comprise the majority, even if you don’t count those who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Clinton either; not all of these people have capitulated. For all of the Republicans who managed to evolve from supporting more rational candidates to accepting Trump obediently or even enthusiastically, there are a great many who have not, and some of them have never ceased speaking out. There are others, even among those who supported Trump from the outset, who are unwilling to stand by silent while Trump openly colludes with Russia. There are governors and other state officials unwilling to comply with some of the measures Trump has alternately threatened and implied that he will impose; there are generals in the U.S. army who have been studying the extent to which the Constitution and the law permits them to disobey Trump’s orders, should they feel it necessary. I have said before, and I repeat again, I will not condone or collude in any act of violence, but civil disobedience is going to be necessary if and when the rights of the LGBTQ community, minorities, and women are rolled back and stripped away.

If we are going to have a real chance of dismantling Trump’s crass, meretricious cult of personality and counteracting the fascist and far right groups he is enabling (e.g. Richard Spencer and his revolting followers, the John Birch Society), we have to be better informed, better organized, more active than we are. This year, therefore, in addition to the usual renewal of my regular vows to be tidier, exercise more, eat less sugar and more vegetables, I intend to write and to read more, and read more seriously, as I did when I was still a student–more politics, more newspapers, more blogs–and to make a better effort to take part in conversations and demonstrations. I still have to earn a living, like everyone else, but there are phone calls I can make, letters I can write, dozens of other actions I can take.

The recent pronouncements that 2016 was the worst year ever are understandable after all the losses the country and the world endured, but they were hyperbolic as far as life in the West is concerned. It was not a repeat of 1937–we are not there yet, and we stand a reasonable chance of making sure we don’t get there again. We still have the means and the opportunity to be more informed, more compassionate, more understanding, better critical thinkers and less tolerant of corruption. Let’s make the most of it.

Right Here, Right Now

I had plans for Tuesday night. I had a bottle of decent prosecco chilling in the fridge and a bottle of very nice single malt, a lovely gift from some friends, ready to celebrate. The day itself turned out stressful for other reasons, and by the time it was 5 pm I was extremely on edge and feeling unaccountably panicky. By 10 pm I was feeling quite sick. I didn’t get a lot of sleep that night, and then on Wednesday morning I woke up to find myself a part of American Horror Story: Politics.

I believed the polls to the extent that the 25 to 35 percent chance of a Trump win bothered me; for those of you dismissing Nate Silver’s calculations as inaccurate, at no point did he discount a substantial possibility of Trump winning, even if it was never more than 50 percent. What I couldn’t believe as the vote came in was that so many women would tolerate a man such as Trump has shown himself to be–on camera, on the record, unfiltered–as president. I knew there were women who supported Trump, I saw them on television just like everyone else, I know a few personally, but I thought we had reached a stage as a country, as a culture, where a flat-out majority of women, regardless of race or ethnicity, had more respect for themselves than that. I have never been so bitterly disappointed to be wrong.

I don’t blame the Democratic party. I don’t think they’ve done a great job, I think Debbie Wasserman Schultz has done plenty of harm, but to believe that Bernie Sanders would have won where Hillary Clinton failed is to discount the common voiced again and again by conservative media and the conservatives I’ve spoken to personally that there is no daylight between socialist policies and Stalinism; that if we have universal, single-payer healthcare and repair our infrastructure and improve education, the next step is pogroms and gulags. You know, like they have in Denmark and the UK. It is also to discount the poisonous anti-Semitism that came out into the open during the months of Trump’s campaign. Having Sanders as a candidate wouldn’t have eliminated any of that.

I do blame the media, to an extent; I blame the thousands of hours given to obsession over emails that revealed very little more shocking than John Podesta’s recipe for creamy risotto and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Huma Abedin having a weakness for creme brulee. Clinton had already faced Congress a number of times over what happened in Benghazi, and then over the server; none of the recent so-called “revelations” brought to light anything substantial that wasn’t already known. Little time on television media platforms was given to covering each candidate’s policy proposals and actual political experience, and how these things would impact our lives in a practical sense. They could have done so much better. The thing is that we don’t force them to do better; we’re abandoning print media ostensibly because the online versions are cheaper and more convenient, but we don’t seem to be reading much of anything that delves deeply into facts. The problem isn’t that CNN, MSNBC, FOX, etc., are feeding us poison; the problem is that they’ve become the ‘circus’ part of bread and circuses, alongside reality TV. There are still voices on each of the cable political stations worth listening to–Shep Smith, Rachel Maddow, Christiane Amanpour, Sally Kohn, Joy Reid–but no one hour of news coverage or commentary per day is going to be sufficient to present a full picture. The television news media found that we preferred name calling, demonstrations of shock and outrage, and fuzzy human interest stories to confronting uncomfortable facts and searching for constructive ways to resolve problems, and by god have they given it to us. Enough of it to drown a democracy. So yes, they may be to blame, but so are we every time we discount a story of what’s actually happening in favour of watching Bill O’Reilly or Chris Matthews spluttering in outrage over their offended sensibilities. It’s all well and good to remember how nice it was to grow up as white boys in places where most women stayed home and minorities were barely visible (if present at all), and secure jobs that paid enough to support a family were available the day after you graduated high school, for those who didn’t want to go to college. The constant indulgence in nostalgia for those experiences discounts everyone else whose opportunities were denied in order to make that life possible, and it doesn’t do a damn thing in the way of confronting the fact that technology has moved on, demographics have changed, the pressures and dangers we face now are wildly different, and people are no longer content to be pushed aside and suppressed so that straight white men can continue to dictate the terms of everyone’s existence. We don’t live in that world any more, and this desperate pretense that we can somehow go back there is causing us very real harm.

I cried a lot on Tuesday night and most of the day on Wednesday. I’ve had a few breakdowns since then. I argued with friends who tried to tell me that it’s not as bad as it looks, that Trump’s supporters want at heart the same things that I want–safety and security, and the freedom to live in peace. I argued because I’ve been watching for months as his supporters have targeted journalists who spoke out against Trump with anti-semitic attacks, images of their faces, their children’s faces, superimposed on images of gas chambers with Trump flicking the switch. Threats of rape, beatings, lynchings. Children being told by classmates that they’re going to be deported once Trump wins. The LGBTQ community now has a vice president who believes that their respective sexualities can be tortured out of them, and the fear that their right to marry, so recently and so hard won, may be taken away from them. Trump has threatened to repeal libel laws so that he can sue those who criticize him, and on Wednesday implied that he would require all Muslims to register with the government (because that’s never gone wrong before…). In my worst moments, I wonder about the prospect of violence and what could happen where I live, a predominately conservative neighbourhood in a predominately liberal city in what was, as of last Tuesday, an almost evenly divided state, if the voting reflects the state as a whole. The rest of the time I am worried mostly for my friends who are part of the LBGTQ community, who are immigrants or the children of immigrants, who are people of color. I am a heterosexual white woman; I’m not an obvious target to the people I fear, at least not yet. It is up to me, then, and the other women and men like me, to support those who are targets–to put ourselves between the people who are the targets of the bigotry Trump’s campaign has enabled and those who seek to do them harm. I’d like to think it would be enough for this shielding will take the form of arguments, protests, votes, and petitions, but given the people Trump is appointing to his transition team–including Peter Thiel, a man who has publicly expressed admiration for Apartheid–I wonder how soon we’re going to have to act as human shields.

By mid-Wednesday I started to feel better. Anxiety and grief take a very real physical toll on me; I find it hard to sleep, hard to concentrate, hard to sit still at times, and my body has a knack for producing physiological reactions to my emotions. I can’t afford any of that right now. I started to play more energetic songs that I liked, even if I didn’t feel like listening to them, and I started to map out what viable options are left to protect what I value in the face of a government that appears entirely committed to taking most of that away. I will renew my second passport, as that remains legal for now, but I have no intention of leaving at the moment. This is my home; moving our household overseas is not an appealing prospect for myself or my father, even if it remains an option. I believe that the arc of the moral universe does indeed bend toward justice, although I worry about how long it is going to be. I believe the rise of these nationalist governments is the death throes of a white, male-centered supremacy that sheer force of numbers is in the process of overwhelming; the question is how many people will it take with it before it dies out.

The media has now by and large taken the tone that as Trump is president-elect, we must accept and learn to work with him. I refuse to accept this in the sense of treating any of the policies he has threatened to impose on us as normal, as a simple conservative alternative to the progressive policies President Obama pursued. It drove my mother mad for years that the conservatives she knew refused to treat the president with the respect he was due as holder of the office because he was black, because he was liberal, because of his education; I am not willing to engage in similar hypocrisy. When Trump is inaugurated as President, I will be willing to call him such; I don’t think it’s of much use to dispute the legitimacy of the electoral college at this point, however little I like it. I will not engage in violent protest, and I will not condone or connive in others committing violent acts against Trump or his supporters. I will, however, continue to protest, in whatever ways I can. I will write letters. I will donate to causes supporting the rights that the GOP is threatening to take away from us. I will not stand silent if I witness someone being attacked for their faith or their sexuality or the color of their skin. If I can get to a protest or a march, I will participate, as I have done before. If any conservatives happen to be reading this (unlikely as that is)–to those who are mocking and insulting liberals for questioning whether they want to stay in the U.S., for wondering if our rights are going to be taken away, for fearing the worst is coming–if you’re wondering what hypocrisy looks like, take a long look in the mirror. Conservatives have been whining for years about Obama was coming for their guns, which never happened, and there were plenty of conservative media figures who *promised* they would leave when Obama was elected but didn’t. We’ve already witnessed reproductive rights being rolled back, by some of the same people Trump is bringing into his administration. We already have evidence that our fears our justified.

Things will get better. In two years we have a chance at taking back either the House or the Senate, if not both; in four years, if Medicare is privatized, Roe v. Wade overturned, the ACA repealed, gay marriage once again prohibited, journalists are silenced, if we’re in a trade war with China and NAFTA is repealed, all of which Trump and/or other Republican leaders have promised in the last months and weeks, I hope that the combination of those of us who are angry enough now and those who will have buyer’s remorse over voting for Trump will make a Democratic victory a certainty. The party does need work, but we have a number of strong candidates rising through the ranks. The problem is it will not get better in time for the women who are going to die or be left severely ill from botched abortions if Roe v. Wade is overturned. For the people who are going to die all over the world as a result of accelerating climate change, from worsening economic inequality and the other financial consequences of lowering the U.S.’ tax rates across the board, from losing their health insurance, from any wars that Trump escalates or instigates. For the people who are going to die of their injuries after attacks by people who now believe that anyone they look down on is now fair game, as happened to a Saudi Arabian college student a couple of days ago.

This is the song that kept running through my mind on Tuesday morning, and I was so looking forward to posting it again and again, any excuse I could find, on Wednesday, instead of being unable to shake the lyrics of “This is not America”. This is the first political song I understood in political terms, being old enough to have a grasp, if not a full understanding, of the events that inspired it. I played it again and again back in 2008 following Barack Obama’s election, and I hope that I will get to irritate all and sundry with it the day after election day 2020, along with a clip of Daveed Diggs shouting “We Won We Won We Won We Won.” Because we will. I hope we will all be there to witness it.

Friday Fave: Dark Hour of Noon

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This is the first novel that changed my life, that shaped a part of who I am. I was nine years old, wandering through my school’s library, looking for longer books with appealing covers because I was still at an age where I liked illustrations–it would be another couple of years before I started to dislike them because I found my imaginings of the characters to be so much more interesting. (This book is also the root of my dislike of the idiom that you can’t judge a book by its cover–I’ve discovered a number of excellent novels because I

was attracted by their covers. I do realize that’s irrelevant to the meaning of the saying, but it still irritates me.)

I knew about World War II–my father was a child in London during the Blitz, and my mother remembers the German POWs who worked for her father and other neighbours when she was very small. Our bookshelves at home are still lined with biographies of Churchill and dozens of histories of the military aspect of the conflict. I was always more interested in the social side of history, though, and beyond watching Hope and Glory every time it came on TV, I didn’t know much about that side of things at that point. I picked the book up because I was intrigued by the illustration, and I loved the title; there was no synopsis on the back of the book, and most of the excerpt on the inside of the front cover is a discussion between two characters about the mythological heroes of Poland. I may have thought it was in part a fantasy story–I’d already discovered fantasy at that age, and was enchanted by all things mythology-related.

Fantasy is is decidedly not, although it is nightmarish in many parts. It follows Trina, seven years old in 1939, as her world is torn up by the Nazi occupation of Poland. She watches what her friends and loved ones endure at the hands of the invading soldiers, and soon decides to fight back in whatever way she can. The novel chronicles Trina’s life during the war, and the ways that she and several like-minded children mounted what resistance they could to the occupation.

It is still my favourite novel about WWII, and my favourite YA novel. I don’t remember how many times I read in the three years between my discovering it and graduating the school whose library owned the only copy I could find. I looked for it in every bookshop I went into, every garage sale. Everyone always thought I was talking about Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. A few years later I found another copy in the library of the elementary school attached to my high school and seriously considered how to steal it, leaving money in its place, but I never had the chance–it was not a room I routinely had access to, and I could hardly have come and gone unnoticed, as the librarians knew all the children they worked with. Then came the age of online book stores, just after I’d finished university, and Margaret found a pristine first edition for me one Christmas–one of the many reasons she’s an amazing friend. I shrieked like my nine-year-old self when I unwrapped it, much to my parents’ consternation. I spent that Christmas day re-reading the book, and have done so again many times since. It isn’t one of the books I carry around with me from country to country, because I’ve done my best to keep it from damage, but it is always on my favourites shelf.

It grieves me every time I see a list of books for children and teens about the Holocaust and this is not on it. At times I wonder if this is because too many parents and teachers found it too grim–it is grim subject matter, and unsparing in its depictions of the violence committed by the Nazi army and by those who resisted them–but most of the time I’m inclined to think it’s just because it wasn’t advertised successfully. Since the recent success of Elizabeth Wein’s excellent Codename: Verity and Rose Under Fire, as well as other YA novels such as A Northern Light, I keep hoping that it will be republished and get more attention. I’ve seen it mentioned in a few scholarly works on the representation of war in children’s fiction, but it doesn’t have the readership it deserves. I continue to hope it will be rediscovered, and that this will change.