The past two weeks, I’ve written about how we must disrupt. The vote is coming up soon on my city becoming a sanctuary city. The racists are out, with insane leaps of logic, like “What are the other side of the facts?” “I can’t believe you said ‘White People!’” and my personal favorite, someone tried to compare the Stasi to “Mexican immigrants.”
Because obviously East Germany’s secret police are the exact same as an undocumented immigrant.
I wanted to make an image that ties why I’m fighting for a sanctuary city status to who’s going to lose. 100 years from now, I hope we can look back and see Donald Trump as Millard Fillmore. Sean Trainor is a professor at the Department of History and Warrington College of Business Administration at the University of Florida. He wrote an incredible article on the parallels of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the modern Sanctuary Cities.
As I mentioned before, we all must fight locally to combat what’s happening nationally, we must tell our representatives to vote against Trump’s cabinet, even if they have some lame excuse as to why they are voting for them, and we have to slow down Trump’s governing ability to save our country the best we can.
I just started reading Chris Hedges’ “Wages of Revolt” and he put up the idea that society is either progressing or regressing but it is never stagnant. In the first few pages he attacked both the Neo-Liberal and Marxian view that things will always improve. I have complaints about Chris Hedges (Mainly his adopting ideas from the civil rights movement while having a very white perspective on the world. ) however, his prose and how he puts his ideas together makes him worth reading. As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Even though that is where the Neo-Liberals get their idea from, I don’t think of it as an arc, it’s more of a squiggly line.
Like Trump, Millard Fillmore was not elected to be president. (Fillmore became president when Zachary Taylor died in office.) Fillmore was from New York and was a lawyer and politician (Unlike Trump, he was qualified to be President) and was remembered best for the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the Compromise of 1850, both are key factors that lead to the Civil War. He also objected to James K. Polk annexing Texas, which I assume was because he wanted to keep the Mexicans out of America. Like Trump’s purge of life long diplomats, Fillmore purged the Cabinet (It’s a cool story, worth reading, but I don’t need to go into it now) and filled his Cabinet with those who supported the Compromise of 1850. After leaving the Presidency, his party, the Whigs, was no more. It was torn apart by the issue of slavery. The northern Whigs joined the new, pro-labor, abolitionist party, the Republicans, however, Fillmore saw no home for himself there. (But he would today!) So he joined the racist American party which later became the Know Nothings.
The Know Nothings are described by Wikipedia as:
The movement arose in response to an influx of migrants and promised to "purify" American politics by limiting or ending the influence of Irish Catholics and other immigrants, thus reflecting nativist and anti-Catholic sentiment. It was empowered by popular fears that the country was being overwhelmed by German and Irish Catholic immigrants, whom they saw as hostile to Republican values and as being controlled by the Pope.
Replace Catholic with “Muslim” and Irish with “the Jews” and you have the Alt-Right movement.
The Know Nothings are remembered in history by not being remembered. As for Fillmore, he was quiet during the election of 1860 when he spoke out against the Civil War in 1864, calling on the Union to end of the war because of the lives lost, he was called a traitor.
After the war Fillmore supported Andrew Johnson’s reconstruction, which lead to Jim Crow and 150 years of domestic Terrorism in the South we now call the Alt-Right. Of Fillmore, it was said by his biographer "No president of the United States ... has suffered as much ridicule as Millard Fillmore."
Good news is, that’s about to change. We have a new President who makes Fillmore, (Who really is much more complicated than I laid out here) look like Abraham Lincoln or John F. Kennedy.
(Millard Fillmore should not be confused with the unfunny and sometimes anti Semitic comic strip Mallard Fillmore.)
Those who supported the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 are remembered as traitors and treasonous secessionists who went down a dark path. Fillmore himself put the final nail in the coffin of the Whig party (Taylor did more damage than he. But that’s something for another day.)
As a nation we have always had a fairly open border. When I was in El Paso, my parents told me kids would sneak across the border as late as midnight trick-or-treating. Researching, I know that one of my political heroes Fightin` Bob LaFollette held hearings about the issue of migrant workers. Migrants have a whole other set of issues dealing with employers, however, if we fix this, the migrant worker program can be beneficial for everyone.
Today, a clown-fascist has declared war on this part of American history. Like the Fugitive Slave Act, Trump is attacking people who need our help. Here in Easthampton I am proud to carry on the Chris Hedges idea of “I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists." And at least so far in the book I disagree with Hedges, I believe the “Harold and Purple Crayon” scribble of the moral universe bends towards justice. Eventually.
If you can, please come out and support the resolution to help make Easthampton into a sanctuary city. I'm not sure what is happening, but Wednesday February 22 (One week from when this is posted) Easthampton City Council is discussing the issue of sanctuary cities. Please come down and fight fascists.
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