PSYCHOSCAPES: A call for young people to man the barricades

Waving Goodbye to our Democracy
CC Jean Stimmell

For the second time in my life, I hear a low, rumbling sound growing louder each day. It serves as a warning of what I hope will be a major earthquake—a seismic release of long-suppressed rage at our aging, faltering leaders of both parties who, through arthritic paralysis, created an opening for Donald J. Trump, a petty dictator, to take control. Exploiting our elderly politicians’ lack of vision and charisma, he has seized the reins and is guiding us like lemmings off an existential cliff called Planet Earth.

I’m old enough to have felt this tremor before, when the repressed, sanctimonious 1950s crumbled beneath a massive earthquake called the sixties. We had our own slogan back then: “Question Authority.” Another popular saying from those days was “don’t trust anyone over thirty.”

We challenged our elders because they were fixated on the status quo, obsessed with looking back at past glory rather than moving forward. And now, it’s happening again!

Questioning authority for us in the sixties was a fundamental challenge to the entrenched, wealthy elites who were feathering their own nests at the expense of ordinary people. It also challenged the repressive social norms of the 1950s, which felt like a throwback to the Victorian Age.

When we were young, we had a president who, rather than admitting defeat in Vietnam, kept the war going by sacrificing 58,000 of our generation as cannon fodder in his illegal, immoral war.

Additionally, he orchestrated a break-in of the Democratic National Committee, hoping to gather dirt on his opponent to help him win a second term as president.

This petty theft was a misdemeanor compared to his war crimes. But back then, Republicans refused to tolerate his corruption: they joined with the Democrats and drove him from office. Unfortunately, Republicans today have turned belly up to Trump. Our precious democracy is now facing a far greater threat than it did under Nixon.

And it’s not just me rehashing old sixties memories.

Thomas Friedman, columnist, author, and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner, who is usually circumspect and scholarly, had this to say about Trump last week: “Of all the terrible things Donald Trump has said and done as president, the most dangerous one just happened on Friday. Trump, in effect, ordered our trusted and independent government office of economic statistics to become as big a liar as he is.”^⁠1

Off the top of my head, here’s a quick list of what Trump has already accomplished in only six months. He has assembled a secretive, masked army called ICE, reminiscent of the Gestapo, abducting suspected immigrants off the street and disappearing them.

He’s following Hitler’s playbook of scapegoating a minority; this time, it is immigrants, confining them to black site prison camps and foreign prisons that resemble concentration camps. Even more horrifying, according to CBS News, he is "looking into" how to send "homegrown criminals" who are Americans to foreign prisons.^⁠2 Then, no one will be safe, because, in Trump’s eyes, any person who dares to oppose him is a criminal.

Trump is breaking the law by using our military to suppress peaceful protests against his overreach; he is criminalizing colleges, intimidating law firms, hindering the judiciary, and, as I write this, planning to have the FBI arrest Texas lawmakers.

Perhaps, worst of all, Trump, on his first day in office, reversed the Biden administration’s policies on climate change and scientific integrity, instructing federal agencies to prioritize fossil fuels over renewable energy.^⁠3

Sadly, I agree with Thomas Friedman, who concluded his column by writing, “though I am a congenital optimist, for the first time I believe that if the behavior that this administration has exhibited in just its first six months continues and is amplified for its full four years, the America you know will be gone. And I don’t know how we will get it back.”^⁠4

We are not headed toward authoritarianism: we are in it. Time is growing short to save our democratic way of life.

The time to resist and rebel is NOW!

xxx

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