The great Czech dissident Vaclav Havel said once that to survive under communist tyranny he lived by the rule of “as if”. “I decided to behave as if I were free.”
That’s good advice. There’s no magic formula that guarantees we won’t suffer in the current Republican Fascist regime; the best chances involve selling out to the fascists which is not acceptable. Never mind how history will judge us, we should judge ourselves harshly if we “bend the knee” to President Friend-of-Epstein.
I will quote from a speech you can find in full at a link: “The worst thing is that we live in a contaminated moral environment. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought. We learned not to believe in anything, to ignore each other, to care only about ourselves. Concepts such as love, friendship, compassion, humility, or forgiveness lost their depth and dimensions, and for many of us they represented only psychological peculiarities, or they resembled gone-astray greetings from ancient times, a little ridiculous …
The previous regime — armed with its arrogant and intolerant ideology — reduced man to a force of production and nature to a tool of production … It reduced gifted and autonomous people, skillfully working in their own country, to nuts and bolts of some monstrously huge, noisy, and stinking machine, whose real meaning is not clear to anyone.” Havel goes on to discuss how in the end most people in Czechoslovakia wound up complicit. I recommend reading the whole thing.
In other notes on resistance and activism:
“We can commit to rebuilding faster than they imagine possible. Their comeuppance won’t be purely legal and political, but psychological, too. As their empires crumble, they’ll see they sacrificed them all for nothing.”
“Keep your fear small and your love big.” And from the same post, “Support both the individual AND the community: no one gets thrown under the bus.”
The Smithsonian pulled mention of the Felon’s impeachment from an exhibit. After an outraged response, the mention is back.
Trump-supporting Jeffrey Epstein attorney Alan Dershowitz still gets no respect. And doesn’t deserve any.
Even the stuffiest Senate Democrats are starting to sense the zeitgeist is changing.
The Felon is demanding Texas redistrict to give him more seats in the House. This is very bad, and about as blatantly undemocratic as conceivable. I’m proud that despite threats from Governor Abbott, Texas Democrats are fighting back. The Texas House failed to achieve quorum, though Abbott swears he’ll keep calling special sessions.
Historian Kevin Levin reminds us of how communities a few years ago removed Confederate statues (almost all legally, contrary to the Felon and Hegseth) and that during Reconstruction, Virginia had a biracial government that worked. This is one of the things that give me hope: people know that there’s a better path. That we’ve trodden a better path in this country. Much as people like Pete Hegseth want to go back to the days when white male dominance was just a fact of nature, I don’t think they can pull off a big forget.
I hope everyone’s doing well and contributing to the resistance if you can (not everyone’s in a position to fight). And (again, if you can) let’s act as if we were free.
