Rest. Reflect. Respond -Part 4
On Nihilism
On my van tour this summer, I spoke about my struggle with the cancer that is nihilism since 2016. I’ve heard a lot of folks saying that we need to just allow the nation to feel the pain of Trump’s policies, so they will learn their mistakes. So, they say, just sit back and allow Trump to have his way such that people learn.
In my depths of nihilism, I had similar thoughts about climate change. After all, humans won’t seriously change their personal wasteful behavior, nor will they hold politicians accountable until they feel the real pain of global warming.
One can make the argument that masses of people in Germany and Italy had to feel the full pain of falling in behind fascistic governments in order to see that for the dead end that it is. One can further that point by suggesting that humans, with their myopic views and refusal to study history, will probably advance tyrants about once every 100 years because those who remember the last tyrants are gone and the siren songs of the authoritarians are too strong for those younger generations, who did not experience their poison, to resist.
Only after cataclysmic disaster will power be given back to those with a more tempered world view. To be clear, the theory in both the context of climate change and Trump, that means destruction, pain and even death.
There is a problem with that. Aside from the obvious problem that millions could be displaced, traumatized for generations or killed, accepting that as a reality relegates us to a life that is “nasty, brutish and short.” History shows that there have been many times where people were able to avoid a return to rule under despots. Most notably for us, the American Revolution and President Washington’s decision to leave office rather than become a king provide an example of people choosing human progress over power.
The other problem with this way of thinking is that standing by and allowing Trump’s Christian Theocratic and oligarchic allies to “teach them all a lesson” does not give those people who are being harmed a north star, a way out. Take the person who voted for Trump because they believed the lie that Biden was responsible for inflation loses their job and can’t find a job because Trumps tariffs have tanked the economy. If they don’t hear from Democrats that there is a better way (without shaming them for their vote), then that person may turn to even more extreme politicians with even simpler and just-as-unworkable policy ideas than Trump’s.
I’ve also seen many people talking about how they need to gear up for violence. That is a choice. I lived in Sarajevo for about two years, just as the war was ending. Ask anybody there and every one of them will tell you, they wish they could rewind time and find a way to stop the first shots, to find better ways to communicate with others in their country and to resist the leaders who lead them down that horrible path.
Hoping that things will reach a bottom in order for things to get better is a lazy way out, which will only result in more problems that we could never predict.
On nonviolence
When I was getting my graduate degree from the American University I was getting a mixed degree with two focuses: conflict resolution and US foreign policy.
I had a professor named Professor Aabdul Aziz Said. He had a long career spanning back to the 1950s in which he served as an advisor for government and powerful people all over the world. He told a story of the days during the First Intifada (1987-93) in which he was trying to advise the leadership of the leaders at the time, the Palestinian Leadership Organization (PLO).
He implored them to study and adopt the nonviolent tactics of Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and others. He made the case to them that, a well-disciplined nonviolent army will gut the power of the narrative from the Israeli government, which had for years by then been forcibly removing people from land their families had occupied legally for generations. If, as they ultimately did, they resort to violence, they are simply providing their foes with the justification they needed to continue what they were doing.
He explained that it was one of the biggest regrets in his career that he could not convince them that they would be better off with a nonviolent strategic approach.
On the issue of Israel, by the way, I firmly believe that you can disagree with the decisions of a government while still agreeing with their right to exist. This is not the topic of this blog series. But it is worth saying. I didn’t disagree with my country’s right to exist, just because I thought the US’s approach to using drones in Afghanistan.
There are several problems with attempting nonviolent protests in our modern world. First, many police authorities have figured out how to disperse nonviolent protests easily. Second, opposition is very good at triggering violent reactions in the crowd in order to justify a response. Third, the “old” tactics that got attention in 1960 illicit nothing more than a yawn today.
But, if you know that Trump is going to do everything he can to undermine voter rights, women’s rights and the entire power structure of our government irreparably before he can be held accountable in 2018, then we have no choice than to gum up the works as quickly and creatively as possible.
However, like with the Frist Intifada, if you choose violence, you are giving Trump, the Proud Boys or whatever paramilitary groups he empowers a reason to blame it all on you.
On our moment
If you read your history books in high school, or watched your period piece drama in the theater, and you thought, “I would have fought on the right side of history,” now is your time.
We already know that the people making excuses for Trump and his band of miscreant leaders would have been the people who were on the wrong side of history in those dramatic movies.
For my part, I’ve been invigorated by this moment. After years of feeling lost, feeling that none of it matters, feeling that I was not part of progress anymore, I can see that I can be. We all can be.
A nihilist will tell you that nothing you do has meaning, so just live for the moment. Every empire will fall. Every person will die. The Earth will fall in to the sun.
But they are giving away agency for their lives to people who will happily take it from them and throw them aside like used tissue. They are making their lives flat, grey and disposable. They will tell you that your government is too corrupt to fix so that you will feel deflated. They will tell you not to trust any information so that the public will look only to them for their information. They will tell you that “other” people are a threat, depriving you of the exquisite bouquet of variety that makes life the most delicious meal anyone could ever eat.
It does not matter whether our country falls apart in 200 year or 100 years. What we know is that the people we value, the ideas we value and the country we value are all here now.
Why would you not want to be in the thick of the fight to save it?
I don’t have all the answers, and perhaps this entire writing exercise has been my way of processing grief. But I hope we can be inspired together to ask the questions, find the best path forward and fight like we know we are on the right side of history.
