America's "existential fork in the road." Which road to take?
PM Carpenter
A morning email from a friend, a kind, caring woman of unusual insight and keen perceptions:
Something I’ve noticed…I follow a lot of crafters and quilters on social media. I get lost in the creativity. But after the Pretti murder, they are stating their political leanings against Trump/Noem/Bondi, etc. in their posts. I have never seen anything like this in the years I’ve been on social media. I realize this is anecdotal and it’s certainly not the turning of the tide, but it’s definitely noticeable to me. And these posters are saying, “I don’t care if you follow me, if you support this administration then either remove yourself from my followers or I’ll do it.” When you stop to think almost all of these posters are depending on clicks for income, that says something.
What I’m getting is that regime change has to come from the bottom. We can’t wait for the people at the top to do it because it won’t happen.
My reply.
You're right about regime change coming from the bottom, and it's interesting what you note about quilters — not exactly Black Panther types. What interests me is which direction the bottom will go: sit-ins vs. aim, fire. Probably a 99:1 mix, with a 1:99 ratio of media coverage. The debate over which is advisable is eternal; pick a card, either card, Old or New Testament?
From there I noted — conceded is more accurate, with great reluctance tossed in — that “I lean rather strongly” in siding with the former; i.e., the Wrath of God version, seeing how “the goons in power appreciate only power. Peaceful protest evokes only snickers [from them].” When I spelled out to my friend such a personal disinclination yet undeniable predilection, profoundly inescapable was my even more profoundly overwhelming sorrow that such loathsome and otherwise dismissible human garbage, from the masked to the “presidentially” sealed, could succeed in dragging me into their sewer. Nonetheless, here we are, together at last.
“The debate” referenced above — loosely, as I put it, sit-ins vs. aim, fire — is an old one featuring advocates and adversaries from Gandhi to Malcolm X. The concept and exercise of non-violence worked out far better for the Mahatma than for his philosophical disciple Martin Luther King. Britain’s oppression of Indians came to a thumping, dispositive end. While the peaceful Civil Rights Movement scored battle victories, the U.S. government’s Reagans and Trumps still hold the weaponized cards in the war for Black socioeconomic and political equality. You have to wonder about the road not taken. Is the argument on its behalf persuasive?
That question is a matter of intellectual parlour games and for the counterfactual historians who play them. Today is no game. Today is reality as brutal as official church bombings. And as concise as any was the question Paul Krugman posed this morning: “What happens when [Trump, Miller, Noem et al.’s] determination to keep terrorizing the American people collides with public outrage”? He wrote, “One safe prediction is that Trump will try to subvert the November elections.” That’s already underway. A safer prediction is that Trump will double down — less a prediction, really, than a personality trait. Continued Krugman:
Many Americans are grieving over the murder of Alex Pretti, who was simply trying to defend a woman being assaulted by federal officers when he was executed. Beyond the horror of the moment, however, we’re at an existential fork in the road. Let us hope that this country wakes up to the full magnitude of what is happening before more martyrs are offered up as sacrifice.
There exists the most extreme object lesson in the full magnitude of what did happen repeatedly in the human face of non-violence. A mere handful of Einsatzgruppen SS would round up, line up, and one by one execute a hundred or more Jews. Peacefully they went down. Throughout Eastern Europe, the mass execution of sacrificial Alex Prettis — an analogy brought to mind by another friend who, moments ago, emailed this:
An existential fork in the road — an unsurpassably precise assessment of where we’re at. Yet surrounding it is the fog of horror obscuring the directional roadsign. Which path takes us beyond “hope”; which one awakens the country to what’s happening; which — violent resistance or peaceful protest — minimizes the “martyrs offered up as sacrifice”?
For there will be more, because Trump Derangement Syndrome defines not his opponents, it defines Donald Trump. What little rationality he possesses lies only in his respect for countervailing powers of force.
When even “quilters on social media” are shouting Enough, I’d say the prospect is ripe.
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