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The unimaginable has happened. A dictatorship is forming over America. Men, masked and armed, terrorize the country. Citizens are beaten, gassed and murdered in broad daylight in the streets. How is this possible, and what can be done?

America is the first country in history to be based, not on an ethnic or cultural group, but on an idea. A country created during a rebellion against an oppressive colonial master, a King that sent armed men to invade and burn the cities of his colonies. The new government that came into being, wrote into its founding documents that no government agent (especially our own police or soldiers), could invade a person’s home, could arrest or confine a person, without going before a judge and getting a warrant. All of which is being violated on a daily basis by the thugs now being paid for with our taxes.  The President, the executive power, does whatever he wants. The federal government itself has become our enemy.

Like Adolf Hitler, our would-be dictator was elected to office, which he immediately set about to abuse. He destroyed a historic section of the White House, something the 9/11 terrorists, tried but failed to do. Next to it he is building a monstrosity four times larger than the building which has stood for centuries. He does this without consulting anyone. He murders people in fishing boats without consulting anyone. He shuts down massive Earth-saving wind and solar projects, without consulting anyone. He regularly insults: Blacks, women, foreigners and the press, with relish.

It is virtually impossible to argue with or persuade his many supporters. If you ask if they are bothered by separation of families, a common practice when slavery was legal in thirteen states, they say “but they broke the law.” If you tell them a woman was shot in the face three times inside her car, they say “she was trying to run over a federal agent.” If you say there are numerous videos of a young white man being beaten, gassed and shot ten times as he lay helpless and subdued on the ground, they say “he was holding a gun.” They believe as truth the absurd lies concocted and repeated by the highest officials in the government. There are only two sides to this discussion. It is like a war. You are either fighting for your rights, or you are, in your silence, supporting the atrocities now taking place.

Many men died to keep this country free. Then more died in the civil war to preserve the country and ultimately to destroy slavery. Throughout our history there have been grave abuses of human rights. Massive and illegal deportations took place to support our effort to enter World War One. The Ku Klux Klan flourished in many states and thousands of Black men and women, where subjected to unspeakable tortures and lynched in public. During World War Two over one hundred thousand members of Japanese American families, most of them citizens, were rounded up, held in stables and confined for years in concentration camps in the West. When the Civil War ended and Lee met with Grant at Appomattox, Grant’s secretary was Ely Samuel Parker, a Seneca, a full blooded American Indian. Lee stared at Parker thinking he was a Black and Parker said, “We are all Americans here.” 

The atrocities our government and citizens have committed against Native Americans are notorious. Throughout these events, other Americans fought against them, and in the end, they won. They won when they created the constitution and our government, and they won again during the Civil Rights Movement, which took place in the South between 1955 and 1965. That populist movement ended segregation and the legal suppression of the decedents of slaves throughout the South, something that had become routine since the civil war. Americans are a free people. It is in our DNA. It is in our history. It is a part of the very definition of being an American.  

Like the civil rights movement, the media, films, and pictures of these attacks, killings and abuses are creating a resistance, which is spreading. Because John Lewis and the Movement people of Selma were beaten and brutalized on television, the Voting Rights Act was passed by Congress, under a president from Texas, a former slave state. It was the bravery of Darnella Frazier, a seventeen year-old high school student, who had the guts to make a video of a Minneapolis policeman murdering George Floyd that sparked the Black Lives Matter Movement. Brave individuals, often young and female, are holding up camera phones to ICE in Los Angeles, Chicago and Minneapolis. Neighbors, often middle class white neighbors, are stepping out and joining the resistance. They blow whistles to warn Latinos, and immigrants, that ICE is coming in their unmarked SUVs. In the Civil Rights Movement, protesters were appealing to the American people and to the Federal Government. Today, now, the Federal Government is the enemy.

The Democratic Party has been a failure. Identity politics has been a self-defeating failure. They are out of power, and the much ballyhooed balance of powers has failed the cause of protecting our liberties. The Republican controlled Congress is so fearful of the wrath of the dictator that they remain silent, afraid to oppose even his most outrageous activities. Resistance, demonstrations, protests, non-cooperation with ICE is the only way to create the pressure for the Democratic party to act, and for judges to do their job. Women, queers, trans people, Blacks, Jews, Latinos, must, put their own self-interest aside, and unite to bring down the dictator. Shut the government down. Shut the country down.

Mexicans that walk across the border, that plant our gardens, clean our houses, cook and serve us food, and build our homes are our brothers and sisters, and once they set foot on American soil, they have the same human rights we all recognize as Americans. They are here.

The obvious lie of arresting “the worst of the worst” is camouflage for attacking and deporting Haitians, Africans, Mexicans, and Latinos. It is an outrage. It is disgusting. It is completely contrary to what it means to be an American.

The internet has fragmented our society. It has fragmented books, films, thoughts, information, and everything that once held us together as a society. That fragmentation also empowers us. Speak out! Text, post, blog, and use your cameras. There are too many of us, this country is too vast, our mountains and rivers too great, to let the twisted vision of a power mad human being, the embodiment of greed, to prevail. Do not go quietly into the night. Shut the country down.