82. On remaining awake through a great revolution

Greetings, friends. For years, I have considered myself a utopian humanist. I believe that the greatest good is the permanent and sustainable actualization of the potential of as many human beings as we can lift up.

I believe that the surest way to achieve that is for society to provide its members with the foundations of their hierarchy of needs: Clean food, water, and air, adequate clothing and housing, complete health care, and education into adulthood.

I believe that anything less is a false economy: Anything less and some members of our society scrape to survive, in ways that make life worse for all of us.

For years, I was convinced that utopia was possible for all humanity, if we had the will and the inspiration to achieve it. Bill Hicks said it better than I could:

Take all that money we spend on weapons and defenses each year and instead spend it feeding and clothing and educating the poor of the world, which it would pay for many times over, not one human being excluded, and we could explore space, together, both inner and outer, forever, in peace.

That is some Star Trek shit right there and it is the world that you and I and everyone else deserve to live in.

I spent November 6th 2024 in a state of shock, but I woke up on the 7th with a sense of grim determination, and an acceptance that utopia is not in fact the world we are going to live in.

For nearly the entirety of my 47 years, the world has gotten progressively better in its slow march to utopia. Only a few years before I was born, the Clean Air and Water Acts made American communities safer to live in. Women gained economic independence in the United States, and with it, reproductive rights, and growing political power.

During my lifetime, tetraethyl lead was banned as a gasoline additive in the US. The hole we made in the Earth’s ozone layer began to repair itself, following a ban on CFCs that was driven by broad, international, scientific consensus. The Cold War ended and Soviet domination of Eastern Europe went with it. The Paris Agreement proposed to address the hazards of global climate change from rising levels of atmospheric CO₂. Same-sex marriage became legal in the United States and transgender people gained public recognition and acceptance.

During my lifetime, child mortality continued to plummet in nearly every country. Smallpox was finally eradicated, and polio was nearly eradicated. The Green Revolution swept the world, making famine became less intense and less frequent. Life expectancy rose nearly everywhere. War became less intense and less frequent across the globe.

Those of us who were born in the last 50 years, maybe since World War II, could reasonably be excused for thinking that human progress was linear in nature, and could be expected to go on in the same direction forever.

Some of you were clued into the realities sooner than I was. I am an idealist and I cling sentimentally to Lincoln’s “better angels of our nature”. Well, my better angels went clear out the window on November 7th.

This morning, as I write this, an overtly fascist administration is taking executive power of the national government of the United States of America.

Today is also the national observance of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who was truly an advocate for the better angels of our nature, if ever there were one.

In his final Sunday church sermon delivered in March 1968 at the National Cathedral in DC just days before his assassination, Dr. King addressed what he called “Remaining Awake through a Great Revolution”:

When Rip Van Winkle went up into the mountain, the sign had a picture of King George the Third of England. When he came down twenty years later the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States. When Rip Van Winkle looked up at the picture of George Washington—and looking at the picture he was amazed—he was completely lost. He knew not who he was.

And this reveals to us that the most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not merely that Rip slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountain a revolution was taking place that at points would change the course of history—and Rip knew nothing about it. He was asleep. Yes, he slept through a revolution. And one of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution.

So, shall we attempt to rub the sleep from our eyes, and see our world as it is, in this the year 2025 of the Common Era?

Our government is now led by a felon who was convicted of electoral interference, who was accused of fomenting insurrection and other official misdeeds, and who, not incidentally, was found in court to be a sexual assailant. These are facts.

This would not be the first time in modern history that a fascist party was brought to leadership in the national government of a highly developed nation by legitimate, democratic means.

The Reichstag fire of 1933 burned the German parliament building just four weeks after Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist Party came to power. The Nazis loudly blamed the fire on the country’s Communists, claiming it to be a deliberate incitement to civil war. The fire may have been a false flag operation, or it may have simply provided the Nazis with a timely excuse. They promptly pushed through the Reichstag Fire Decree, which curtailed the civil rights of the German people:

Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124 and 153 of the Constitution of the German Reich are suspended until further notice. It is therefore permissible to restrict the rights of personal freedom, freedom of expression, including the freedom of the press, the freedom to organize and assemble, the privacy of postal, telegraphic and telephonic communications. Warrants for House searches, orders for confiscations as well as restrictions on property, are also permissible beyond the legal limits otherwise prescribed.

This was entirely legal, and began the political process known as Gleichschaltung, which means “coordination”, i.e. “you coordinate with the Nazis or you get thrown in jail.” By the end of 1933, the Nazis had prorogued the German state legislatures, sacked any civil servants who weren’t on board with the Nazi program, banned labor unions, and banned all political parties that weren’t Nationally Socialist. The following year, they dissolved the state governments entirely and made the head of state into the de jure ruler of Germany for life.

I cannot emphasize this enough: All of the initial stages of Gleichschaltung were legal enough under the Weimar constitution. They were also enough to sweep away the few checks and balances keeping the Nazi Party from establishing the principle that “legal” was whatever the Nazi leadership dictated it to be.

Those checks and balances have already gone out the window in the United States. The Federal executive and legislature, as well as its highest court, are now firmly in the hands of the fascists. That same court has already established the legal principle that the President cannot be held liable for, basically, any action taken while in office.

Everyone you’ve seen on social or traditional media clutching their pearls that some action that the Felon-in-chief has taken, or is about to take, is illegal… These people are fooling themselves, if they think the laws of our nation will be applied.

Where does that leave us?

Fascism demands an other on which to fix the hatred and the attention of its adherents, to get their supporters to look the other way while the fascists loot the nation’s pockets. Always they prey on the least powerful minorities, which in our case will be transgender people and undocumented immigrants.

There are already rumors of massive Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids planned for as early as tomorrow. I can’t see a reason this won’t happen. It will satisfy the fascist base that they elected the right people. The folks rounded up by La Migra can’t vote anyway.

Since that alone won’t do it, I would expect a Reichstag fire. The actual act of terrorism might or might not be committed by a Leftist, but it will be blamed on the Left, and used as a cudgel to arrest and permanently detain anyone who speaks out publicly against the Felon’s regime. Most of us will never actually be arrested, but the arrests will have a chilling effect on public speech.

I expect that street demonstrations will result. In places that are already Republican controlled, this will lead to vicious police violence against mostly unarmed and peaceful demonstrators, which will make people think twice about joining.

In more liberal places, I would expect urban demonstrations to be assaulted by squads of fascist “militia”, who will be permitted to conduct the same violence or worse, while the local and/or state police look the other way.

In fact, I expect the fascists to form a semi-regular national force like the Nazi Sturmabteilung, this one made up of all the eager camo-wearing play-actors who showed up to the January 6th insurrection plus their idiot cousins. Fascism thrives on making its believers feel powerful over others.

Of course, if that doesn’t work, the Republicans can always send in the military. Sure, the law technically prevents the Federal government from deploying the US Army as an occupying force. Any unit commander who objects will simply be sacked and replaced with someone more compliant. Do these people act like they will be held back by a mere law?

Some state governors may try to resist these incursions. Gavin Newsom never could resist an opportunity to make himself look like a hero. When Los Angeles is on fire, and Congressional Republicans talk about putting “strings” on Federal aid, California’s state politicians may take a hard look at the money that’s leaving the state for the national treasury. I have no idea where that ends, but there sure could be a Fort Sumter moment in there somewhere.

Elsewhere around the world, the Pax Americana that has held the globe in relative peace since the 1990s is probably going to simply fall apart. I hesitate to anticipate the fall of Ukraine to Russia, because the Ukrainians are so stubborn and the Russian oligarchy so corrupt and incompetent, that I don’t think this is a given… unless the EU backs out of supporting them as well, in which case, I don’t know.

If Ukraine falls, then the Baltic states are next. This would test Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO’s “collective defense” pact. If NATO doesn’t try to defend the Baltic countries from the Russians, then NATO is done, finished. You think the Felon will send troops against his buddy Putin? Will NATO hold together without the US?

Taiwan has maintained its independence in the post-war era due to America’s “strategic ambiguity” around supporting Taiwanese self-defense. China is sitting on a ticking time bomb of aging demographics and stagnant economic growth. If the PRC doesn’t invade Taiwan soon, they may lose the opportunity forever. You think the Felon will send troops to stop his buddy Xi?

There are probably another half dozen simmering conflicts around the world that I haven’t thought of and which the threat of US intervention has heretofore kept a lid on.

Meanwhile, we fully missed our chance to arrest global climate change. Just blew right through it. The insanely wealthy people who run the fossil fuel industries are back in the driver’s seat and have no intention of making it possible to stop buying and burning their carbon.

Climate change disasters are going to continue get worse and more frequent. This will put a progressive strain on housing, food, and water supplies around the world. We saw it in the run up to the Syrian civil war and we see it now in the recent jump in housing rental prices in LA. This strain on basic resources will in turn lead to further displacement of people around the world as they flee climate crises, which will in turn stoke political instability pretty much everywhere.

Supply chains will be increasingly disrupted, leading to unpredictable shortages of materials and goods everywhere, which will cause economic inflation. Interest rates are not going back down anytime soon. Meanwhile, the fascists will pour the wealth of the nation into their own greedy pockets.

All of this was going to happen anyway, but the rise of American fascism just serves to guarantee it.

Eggs are going to get more expensive. Housing is going to continue to get more expensive. Medicines that you and your family members depend on will become intermittently unavailable. Stuff we take for granted, things you used to be able to just run down to the grocery or the department store to buy, just might not be there.

The quality of life of most Americans, which has been in decline for years, is now going to drop even more precipitously. The fascists will do their best to blame it on us, as more and more Americans spiral into homelessness and desperation. The dispossessed will merely become further targets for the fascists to demonize.

The United States has faced down fascism and institutionalized hatred before. We beat the slavers in the Civil War, and we whipped the fascists in World War II, albeit both times at great cost. Except that, both of those times, the military and industrial might of the United States was on the side of freedom. There is no political or military force in the world that can face down the United States on its own turf. No one is coming to save us.

I did not unleash this dismal tirade in order to dismay you. Partly I had to get it out of my head, because it’s a lot of what I think about when I’m alone walking or in the shower.

Mostly I think that, in order to cope with the reality that is upon us, we first have to face it fully awake, both eyes open. Let us not “find [ourselves] living amid a great period of social change, and yet… fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands.” Let us not end up sleeping through a revolution.

The world we grew up in is no longer, and the one we anticipated we might grow old in will now not be.

I think about the price of eggs a lot, partly because, the last time there was a run on eggs at the grocery, Besha and I hardly noticed. We had at the time four chickens. When all of them were laying, we actually had more eggs than we could eat. In the summer months, we’d give them away. Those chickens were a form of resilience against climate change and supply chain instability.

I am not proposing that you run out and buy a flock of chickens and a coop to put them in. I am suggesting that you, my friend, think about what resilience means for you and your loved ones in the coming months and years. I’d like to talk about this more soon.

Old Dr. King himself was into that “Star Trek shit” as I so eloquently put it earlier, and we know this because he even talked Nichelle Nichols out of quitting her role as Lt. Uhura. King believed what I believe and Gene Roddenberry believed and what Bill Hicks believed and what I know you to believe, which is this:

We all deserve to live in a world where all human beings have dignity and agency and the capacity to realize all of their given talents to the very fullest.

We live in a world today where that is going to get harder, not easier. Those of us who believe any part of what King believed have to look to the most vulnerable among us, because they are the ones getting hit by it first. We must make it as hard as possible for the fascists in America to have their way, now, before it gets worse.

On this observance of Dr. King’s birthday, I take comfort from among the final remarks of that last Sunday sermon:

Let me close by saying that we have difficult days ahead in the struggle for justice and peace, but I will not yield to a politic of despair… The cards are stacked against us. This time we will really confront a Goliath. God grant that we will be that David of truth set out against the Goliath of injustice, the Goliath of neglect, the Goliath of refusing to deal with the problems, and go on with the determination to make America the truly great America that it is called to be.

I say to you that our goal is freedom, and I believe we are going to get there because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be as a people, our destiny is tied up in the destiny of America…

For more than two centuries our forebearers labored here without wages. They made cotton king, and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of the most humiliating and oppressive conditions. And yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to grow and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face will surely fail.

We’re going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. And so, however dark it is, however deep the angry feelings are, and however violent explosions are, I can still sing "We Shall Overcome."

We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.

The arc of the moral universe is longer, much much longer, than I naively thought it was for my entire life, up until now. But I still believe that it bends towards justice, because we will bend it there.

If you’re still reading this, my friend, I send you my love. Please take care of yourself, especially today. I trust we will get through this together.