I have been thinking about defiance over the past week.
A half mile from my house, a homeowner has put four-foot high standing letters in their front yard that light up at night. The letters spell out "RESIST." I see them every day as I drive by.
A friend sent me a link about a non-profit,
Unidos MN, that was holding Legal Witness Training at a church in Minneapolis. The organizers originally expected an attendance of about 150 people. So many people registered, however, that they ended up moving it from Holy Trinity to Central Lutheran.
Fifteen hundred people showed up.I was one of them. The purpose of the training was to recruit volunteers to agree to receive text alerts when word came from the dispatchers that ICE was doing a raid to arrest immigrants. People go out to serve as legal witnesses, to hold police responsible and to share rights information with those being arrested, and to be there as moral witnesses, to let immigrants know that they are not standing alone.
The presentation seemed well thought out. The organizers stressed that the intention is not to provoke confrontations, but, they admitted, sometimes these things can go badly. Most raids occur between 4 am and 8 am. They advise letting someone know when you are about to go out to witness a raid, just in case. Make sure your phone is passcode locked, and not openable with biometrics (I privately thought it might be better to carry a burner phone).
It all sounds daunting. But the reality of what is going on in this country is daunting. Can I stand by and do nothing? What SHOULD I be doing?
The whole experience led to a lot of thinking about what we are facing, about fascism and the duty to resist. I kept thinking how familiar it all seemed and poked at that thought until I found the connection.
You see, I spent seven years writing daily with a dozen other writers in an online collaborative story about people living in a fascist regime and taking it down in the end. I'm talking about Alternity. I wrote stories about people who resisted covertly and others who resisted openly. I wrote about people who worked within a cruel bureaucracy, trying to save as many as possible. I wrote about people who bought into the regime because of the power it gave them, addicted to the thrill of being able to force others to do what they wanted. I wrote about people who left their lives behind to fight openly, and how some won, and some sacrificed everything.
Writing Alternity was the best preparation I could have imagined for living in these times. We wrote about the insidious nature of propaganda, and groupthink, and about being betrayed by family and friends and the despair of watching people you love willingly swallowing poison and turning against you. We wrote about the little accommodations to evil that are so easy to make and the terrible things that those little compromises can slowly lead you to do. We wrote about the erosion of morality and the building of courage. We wrote about what happens to people when everything is falling apart all around them.
I look around today and almost marvel: we're living it. We are in the beginning stages of Alternity. When we wrote the story, we assumed that of course
it will never happen here. But now we see fascism on the rise, and what are we going to do about it?
What am I going to do about it?
I remember reading
Corrie Ten Boom's autobiography when I was a kid. I thought about the movie I saw about
Sophie Scholl and the
White Rose. Absorbing those stories led to a kind of moral exercise, a thought experiment examining the question, "What would I do in that situation?" Of course, you think that you will be brave. You will stand up to the powers that be to protect the oppressed innocent; of
course you will.
Yet, my finger hovered for an inordinately long time over the sign-up button below the question on the app: "Are you willing to volunteer to be a legal witness?" I felt sick. I felt afraid. It is still difficult to believe that this is actually happening. And yet I know, from writing Alternity, that fascism builds its momentum by convincing people that its power is overwhelming. You must stand up from the very beginning to say, "No."
I have come to deplore JK Rowling and all the hatred she represents. And yet I found myself thinking: "Am I a Gryffindor or not, dammit?"
In the end, I haven't yet committed to being a legal witness, but I will be attending the next training to learn more. I may yet sign up, or I may find another role, another way to assist. In the meantime, I've used my position at my job to pass much of this information along to church leaders to let them know about this initiative.
I learned this week that courage can seem easy when all you're doing is dreaming about what-ifs. It is a lot more difficult when you are facing the necessity of being brave in real life. And it is going to get much more challenging. We are just at the beginning.
Worse is yet to come. So the defiance has to start now.
About the design: one of the things I picked up in my reading this week was the historical tidbit about why red lipstick was so popular in World War II. Apparently, the word filtered out from Germany that Hitler hated women wearing makeup. When women were invited to join his entourage on his retreats, there was a strict dress code that they couldn't wear makeup, particularly red lipstick.
So American women started adopting red lipstick as a marker of resistance to fascism.
The starfish is included because of that old story about the man who walks along a beach, throwing starfish back into the water after a storm. When asked why he bothers, that his actions are useless because there are so many starfish littering the beach, the man picks up another starfish, throws it in, and says, "I made a difference to that one."
The ouroboros (the snake in a figure 8 devouring its tail) is included in the design because it was Voldemort's symbol of the regime in Alternity.
Central images: Men in black jackets with "Police ICE" on the back converge on a front door decorated with a Christmas wreath. Lower center, semi-transparent: an ouroboros (a snake curled in a figure-8, swallowing its own tail). Bottom center, over the ouroboros: an open white rose. Behind the ouroborus, lower left corner, a hand tosses a red starfish (center). Lower right corner: tips of a woman's fingers apply fire engine red lipstick to a pair of lips (directly over the starfish). Defiance
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