I hear this all the time.
"We don’t have to worry yet. Things could never get that bad here."
It has.
Over and over again.
The Tulsa Massacre and the Klan.
The genocide of the First Nations and the Trail of Tears.
The Japanese-American internment.
The Chinese Exclusion Act (and the whole idea of "legal" immigration).
McCarthy’s infamous "list" – that did not even exist – but destroyed lives and careers.
So yeah, it has gotten that bad here. And will again.
It has already started.
- Threats against the FBI, with agents possibly doxxed by Trump himself.
- Wannabe-brownshirts threatening people – sometimes with swastika flags – in Idaho, Rhode Island, Michigan, California, North Carolina, and Illinois. (And that’s just what I found on the front page of a web search.)
- People laughing about shooting up school kids.
- Publicly asking "when do we get to use the guns"?
- Having politicians referring to the Holocaust as "know-how" for enforcing racial purity speak at their major conferences.
- And if January 6th wasn’t enough, there’s a seemingly never-ending pile of evidence that they don’t think the rule of law applies to them at all.
Maybe you think you’ll get to wait until it’s gotten that bad.
IT ALREADY HAS.
We’ve seen it happen before – and we keep forgetting that the final change to fascism does not need to wind through the courts. That final step can happen in days. Perhaps violently, such as in Chile, or quasi-legally, as happened in Germany.
We’ve gotten used to thinking that you’ll have time. That you have time to prepare. That you’ll have a chance to do something. That you’ll risk speaking up when it gets really bad.
That time to speak up, the time to prepare, the time to resist these bigots and fascists is now.
Before we don’t have any time left.
Featured Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash