A Holiday Message to Members of the Resistance

"To those of you who dug in and spoke out in whatever small or large fashion and who continue to do it to this day, thank you, much love, and take heart."

by Rich Herschlag

Joy to the world. We still have one. That wasn’t a given on January 20, 2017. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we were supposed to fold. The strategy was a sound one—essentially a political, cultural, and psychological blitzkrieg. An onslaught. A bombardment of verbal attacks, stark imagery and disinformation so severe, multidirectional and overwhelming that the natural physical and mental response is to allow oneself to go limp and ride the current downstream.

A lot of people did. To the millions upon millions who understand the demonization of immigrants and the systematic generation of wildly fallacious propaganda are the foundation of any autocracy, yet who nonetheless remained meticulously silent on social media and in person in an effort to “get along,” I still love you but my respect is diminished. I have a good sense of how you would have handled the early days of the Third Reich or the onset of the Pinochet regime. Happy holidays anyway.

To those of you who dug in and spoke out in whatever small or large fashion and who continue to do it to this day, thank you, much love, and take heart. You were supposed to read some kind of jingoistic writing on the wall and surrender on the very day of the underattended inauguration. You were supposed to suspend critical thinking, fear being left out, go with your pocketbook, and shut down. You were counted upon to feel overmatched, intimidated, and potentially humiliated. You were supposed to make nice-nice with thugs and call it civic duty. You were relied upon to display the Judeo-Christian tolerance your opponent lacked and to do it for the sake of your opponent’s cakewalk.

Instead, you reached back into national and personal history and found the truth in both. You reread the Constitution, made yourself heard, and risked injuring rightwing snowflake psyches. You weathered the incendiary attitudes and napalm-drenched talking points of demagogues and in return fired a point by point refutation of spurious claims. You risked delving into minutia that frustrated the right and sometimes bored everyone else.

You organized. You reached deep into the playbook of the civil rights movement and rarely flinched. Your positions were far less comfortable and satisfying than the pat answers of a rising political class who believes every indignity they have ever suffered is the fault of a dark-complexioned visitor they have never met. You avoided the draconian, desperado measures of a million villages in thirsty times past, where the well is closed to those outside of immediate family and tribesmen.

For our part, my better half and I have not only spoken out but have attempted to live our lives these past thousand-plus days in a paradigm diametrically opposed to Trumpism. We have housed wayward American kids trying to complete an education otherwise economically infeasible. We have made our home a free youth hostel to young people from a half dozen countries scattered around the globe. These folks have skin and souls from the entire spectrum of the rainbow and got to know the real America inside our helpful empathetic abode while just outside, the vacuous politics of tiny minds and smaller hearts raged on. The bond of these ambitious young people both with us and with our indomitable nation of immigrants will endure decades and generations after Trump and his band of thieves have passed from the scene.

We of the resistance have been called failures because we have often declined to reach out to those whose positions are repugnant. By repugnant we do not mean the gutting of particular environmental regulations or the tax breaks for entities that need them least. We accept policy differences, and they usually come out in the wash after an administration or two. By repugnant we mean the odious and heavy-handed labeling of people with nuances in custom, thought, appearance, language, ability and belief. By repugnant we mean the sadistic, relentless bludgeoning of anyone seen as an obstacle. By repugnant we mean the raising of paranoia to an art form whereby us-versus-them is both an organizational tactic and a religion. We’ve tried to avoid stooping to that level, but admittedly when your political opponent uses every sharp, dull or rusty knife in the drawer, it’s not easy.

The result is what you see before you. The Trump mob is currently some bizarre combination of arrogant and anxious, and that always means fear lies just below. They don’t know whether to give an inch or double down, and that very confusion represents our success. They never received the capitulation they were promised for Christmas ’17, Hanukkah ’18, or Kwanzaa ’19, and that unnerves them. The battle was supposed to be over by now with the only remaining question where to bury the bodies. Instead, they’re wondering about their bodies, their futures, their reputations, their archived video. This may look to some like a stalemate but it is the tip of triumph.

An old friend of mine told me last week what he wanted for Christmas was to wake up one morning and be told Santa came and Trump was gone. I told him that would definitely happen, but I couldn’t say which Christmas. As for this holiday season and to all the faithful who celebrate the human rights of everyone—have a good one, give yourselves a quick pat on the back, and rest up. It’s going to be a long year. But you are far from alone.

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Photo by Kristopher Roller on Unsplash