This tweet crystallized something for me tonight. It’s war.
The church I attend was overflowing Wednesday Night, and again today. People are talking about their own direct experience. A gay woman in a movie line in Boston accosted by a man who overheard a conversation and gathered she was gay. He followed her to near the bathroom and said “After we get rid of the Mexicans, we are coming after you.” Since then, she has been fearful to talk to friends in public places without looking around.
Our pastor — a woman — related how the morning after the vote she was out on her lawn with her 3-year-old about to go to daycare when a man in a big car with a trump sticker came by and gave her and her daughter the finger — as she had a Clinton sign up in her yard. Her sermon today revolved around “Now We Will Fight.”
Also in Lexington yesterday, a group of trump and confederate flag waving pickups — a convoy, drove down the street in front of the house where the head of the Massachusetts ACLU lives, and through other parts of down.
All over this country, people are experiencing unexpected violence, both physical and emotional. Reports are everywhere.
I have been trying to make sense of what has happened since Tuesday. I have been to demonstrations, have followed social media, and have trouble sleeping, but still can't grasp what has happened. Below is my sign for our anti-trump rally in Boston on Friday.
My sign for our anti-trump rally.
But I have a frame now. It’s war. We are feeling the way a nation feels when suddenly it is attacked.
We know things will get worse.
We are afraid we cannot protect those we love.
Things we have happily relied on for years may be destroyed.
But we will come out the other side, because we are all going to fight.
But what are we fighting? Racism and misogyny yes — but not the voters in Ohio and Michigan who chose Trump.
They have been exquisitely targeted in a political campaign by the most voracious of the billionaires.
We always knew the Republican party has been a front for billionaires to try and take more of our national wealth in a free and unfettered manner. This is why they fund Heritage and other think tanks so people like the Hedge Fund Manager Robert Mercer (who’s daughter is on the transition team, and who has funded Breitbart as well) can make the case to erase entitlements like Medicare and Social Security, lower their taxes, and enshrine their control over most of America’s wealth.
They are the front for the Koch Brothers, who want the freedom to earn more billions from their oil and gas during the last generation before catastrophic global climate collapse makes such businesses impossible. So they fund climate deniers, rail against the EPA, and all pollution regulations.
Trump is a perfect vehicle for those who have captured the Republican party and our government. Incurious, pathologically narcissistic, unable to focus, they know he simply has to be fed adulation and fake deference, and he will do whatever is suggested to him.
It is a tragedy that the democratic side failed to differentiate from Wall St., and thought that maybe our billionaires could fight their billionaires. That thinking is no longer operable. We are at War.
I believe many Americans who were sick of corruption and exploitation did vote for Trump, because they thought he was the lesser risk. The war is about winning them back to the reality of what is happening in America.
No billionaire has American worker interests at heart. They have emerged winners from a society of systemic exploitation, and cannot escape that mindset, even the liberal ones. Trump encapsulates this: a gilded life built on his father’s money, debauchery, bankruptcy, tax evasion, support from Russian oligarchs, and dark money — all to present the illusion of fantastic wealth and privilege.
He is so vulnerable to manipulation by the real oligarchs it is scary.
Our war is a war to protect American institutions and the idea of democracy from being sundered and broken by the resurgent billionaire fanatics who want all the wealth.
Bernie and Elisabeth Warren both spoke to this. They will now become the center of our party.
But we need allies. Reporters who understand that they are living in a heroic time and who will defy their corporate masters who will want to only get along with the new power structure.. at the expense ultimately of press freedom.
We need, all of us, to fight personally racists and sexists wherever they show themselves, whether in speech, reactions or indifference. One encouraging thing is the way in which people have begun to fight back: Wellesley college students publicized the names of the right wing tormentors who came to the black student center on campus with Trump and Confederate flags. Their fraternity kicked them out, their neighboring university took action. They paid a price for their racism.
Chili’s has been called out after a trump supporter demanded a manager refuse a black veteran a free meal in Ceder Hill, Texas. National corporate is involved, and hopefully the manager will be fired.
And we need to fight for Black Lives Matter by keeping up our vigilance and pressure against police who still murder Americans for the crime of being black.
We are all in the war now, whether we asked for it or not. That is the nature of war. Once it is here, it is here. There is no going back. The only question is how did you act during the war.
This is what I have come to. Now let's get organized and fight.
We will fight this takeover in our schools. We will fight it in our communities. We will fight it in social media and in the press. We will fight it in the democratic party. We will fight it at our workplaces. We will fight it in the streets. We will fight it with our money. We will fight because we love our country and our people, and we will not allow our enemies to destroy 230 years of ever more progressive American democracy.
