At Trump’s Wisconsin superspreader rally, instead of Old Glory, they flew a symbol of white supremacy, state violence, and fascism. Our flag has been replaced by a neo-Nazi symbol of hate.
I was watching the “Yes We Can” video yesterday, trying to pull myself out of a tailspin of despair. Then I watched this new song, this time for Biden/Harris (which, fair warning — this made me ugly cry, so…). What struck me most about the second video is how much darker the world is now, how much more violent and brutal it has become.
My wife and I have three competing future plans. The first is to buy a house when this election returns us at least for the moment to a place of sanity and hope. The second is to take the savings we’ve amassed to buy a house and use that money to flee the country forever if we do not win in November. And the third is to find a place to hide our daughter, and to fight if the election is stolen, if the will of the people is upended. Watching the first video reminded me that it felt so very dark by the end of the Bush Administration. We had raped and tortured people to death. We had invaded a country and killed countless innocent people for the ego of a maniac too stupid to be in the Oval Office, surrounded by bloodthirsty neocons sucking the oil out of the desert like leeches. Obama’s campaign, a campaign of decency grounded in the highest of our values, was like a life raft for me, and when he won, it was like this giant weight was lifted off my shoulders.
And then the shadow began to rise again. Idiot racists in teabag hats bussed around the country by billionaire oilmen were throwing a massive wrench into the health care law we were promised. Hope began to dwindle as the party was betrayed from within. People watched as the Obama Administration took a pass on holding the banksters and the Bush administration torturers and liars accountable for their actions. We lost faith, and in 2010 we lost everything.
And then, we won again. At least the white house. But we were crippled everywhere else. Our victories were fleeting, as hard as the Obama Administration worked to make things better (And they did make things better). We lost a Supreme Court seat, so desperately needed, and then…
This. This current everything.
It is very dark indeed. And it’s so dark right now, you can barely see the sun. There are days I am convinced it’s not there. I sometimes wonder if it feels this dark for the Right wing in this country when we’re in power. And I ask myself “How could it?”. How could it feel darker with Democrats in control when by every measure — economic, national security, and just plain decency — we are better for this country than the Republicans?
This darkness — this violent hate writ large across the entirety of our government at the hand of a conservative party turned fully fascist — I don’t know how we can go to war with it again after this. If this isn’t a complete rebuke of this evil — and there’s no other description for these last years I can think of — if this isn’t a total refutation of this present fascism… what are we to become?
We vote. And we put our blood and our money and our sweat and our tears on the line. We show up. We play by the rules when we know they will not. We tie our hands behind our back and kick at the darkness anyway because deep down we know it’s right to play the game with honor. But why can’t we strike a decisive blow?
The President of the United States is holding fascist rallies in front of a fascist degradation of the flag, and everyone gazing at this grotesquery thinks it is the ultimate symbol of American Patriotism. We are poised again to save the world from this present darkness, if enough of us vote. We will have to spend enormous time and political capital just to save our country, and our world from the worst impacts of climate change. We will have to spend political capital and time and great reserves of energy to unravel the tendrils of corruption this fascist Party has laid out for us to deal with. We will have to likely rise up against an attempt at scorching our shared earth when this President loses. We have to spend so much time making up for their ever-more-radicalized methods that we are almost never able to do what we promise to do.
And then we lose faith.
If the people give us this victory, we cannot allow this darkness to regroup and reform. We absolutely have to keep the pressure on them. We have to shame them publicly. We have to expose every corruption. We have to dismantle every armed white supremacist organization. We have to keep them out of power for at least the next decade — and they must be kept entirely out of power, for once they get control of a single branch of our government they build an insurmountable wall and laugh as we break ourselves against it.
I don’t hold any illusions that we can truly break the back of our millions-strong fascist party. It will always be there, a tumor in our body politic, which will require chemotherapy from time to time to put back into a state of remission. But for this moment, we are standing over the very darkest of precipices — a cliffside so bleak and so deep that the we will take the entire world with us if we fall down it.
We truly thought we’d overcome the darkness in 2008. I remember feeling so light, so ready for something better. We have to stay on a forward footing this time. We have to go to war against these fascists — that’s what they have become — and we cannot let up until they are run out of every possible avenue of power, at every level.
And I have to say, I think that in addition to accountability and a massive influx of sunlight to disinfect our institutions, we also must act to make everyone’s life truly better. We need to unravel the systems that keep people so on the edge of disaster that they’re vulnerable to the sort of demagoguery and fascist rhetoric that helped fuel this movement all the way back to the Tea Party. We need to simply win the fights in congress. We need to get everyone health care. We need to beat this disease. We need to raise everyone’s boats. Think we can do that?
I have some hope that yes, we can.
Every voting line is a beacon of light. Every person who stands their ground for hours on end to cast their ballot is a beacon of light. Every person who makes phone calls and tussles on the internet with racists and stands shoulder to shoulder in the streets against the Proud Boys is a beacon of light. Every person with their fist raised against the flag they have chosen to fly above our shared flag is a beacon of light. Enough beacons, and we have stars. Enough stars, and we can see to travel through the night.