Living a moral life in an age of bullies requires collective action; it cannot be done alone. Each of us must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance.
This is what civilization demands. It’s what the struggle for social justice requires. It’s why that struggle is so critical today, and why we all must be part of it.
It’s hard to disagree that we all need to be part of a vast network of moral resistance. The damage to our society that the Project 2025 government is busily doing is pure, punch-you-in-the-fucking-face fascism in action. Opposition to such bullying, lying and flagrant disregard of law would seem to be a bipartisan effort, except to tens of millions who respond to the reasonable fear and insecurity that accompanies powerlessness by following a strongman who have no qualms about bullying. The bully, they feel, will protect them, so they revere him and justify his bullying as part of a larger plan that humans cannot comprehend. The face eating leopard will never eat their faces, they believe, because they faithfully worship the mighty predator.
We must organize and participate in a vast network of moral resistance, as Reich says. It is our only hope to save our professed, widely shared values about justice, human equality and the inherent dignity of every individual. These values are under determined attack by literal American fascists who believe in an inalterable hierarchy of unaccountable power and privilege for superior citizens. The frustrating question is “how, exactly, do we organize and participate in this desperately needed vast network of moral resistance?”
I have been trying to find a way to get directly involved and have so far come up with very little, outside of signing up for, and donating to, my local Democratic organization. This is part of our dilemma as Americans. We are programmed, from birth, by thousands of hours of ads viewed in our earliest years, to be avid consumers. There is a seductive illusion of freedom created by the vast variety of consumer items we have the complete liberty to choose among (assuming we can afford to buy them). This phantom freedom also creates a childlike dependence on the cool things we can buy at retail superstores and other, less tangible, shiny objects sold to us by hucksters.
Our politicians? They need millions of dollars to run for federal office, and that money doesn’t come cheap, most of them feel they have to take it from whoever offers it to them, if they are going to win elections. We wind up with Chuck Schumer and company as the compromised Opposition party whenever Republicans are in the majority. The Democratic party can’t condemn an American ally for starving a besieged, captive population in an area that ally is constantly bombing. Desperately hungry people, lined up for food, are shot dead by an occupying army on a daily basis. But the Democrats corporate and lobbying sponsors would be furious about an official Democratic party condemnation of these war crimes by a beloved American ally. So Amy Klobuchar condemns Israel’s actions in Gaza, decries the forced starvation of the victims of Israeli policy, and two days later smiles in a photo with Benjamin Netanyahu, visiting the US to show that he can come visit his allies with impunity.
This is what decency and civilization demand. It’s what the struggle for social justice requires. It’s why that struggle is so critical today, and why we all must be part of it. It’s why, at a moment when the forces of fascism are so organized, well-funded and gleefully defiant in their sadism, terrorism (masked ICE squads accountable to nothing but unelected American Nazi Stephen Miller) and contempt for our experiment in democracy (which has allowed them to legitimately take power, as Mr. Hitler did back in 1933)
On Thursday, Trump’s loyal, cowed and bullied senators, who have already voted for cloture rather than allowing any further debate about Emil Bove III, their boss’s cynical pick for a lifetime seat on the federal appeals court (the cadaverous looking, bullying, morally repellant Bove has never been even a traffic court judge) will likely have the votes to put a man currently the subject of contempt of court proceedings into lifetime office as a judge. The contempt proceeding against Bove has been delayed for months by a temporary restraining order (which usually last a week or less) granted by Noemi Rao, rabid Federalist Society federal appeals court judge crazed in her assertions of illimitable Trump Executive Power and her vigilance against “usurpation” of such power) allowing Trump’s lickspittles to put Bove onto the one man short list to replace Alito or Thomas.
How do we organize and participate in a moral movement to stop that, by Thursday? The war against fascism is a war of attrition, and we all have to keep doing our part to protect values we all believe in, values under attack by a lawless regime fueled by bullying, death threats and the thrill that unaccountable sadism inspires in millions of our fellow citizens. God bless these United Shayyyyysh.
gratuitousblahg 