Thoughts for a Rally

I was working in the Emergency Department on election night. People came in in droves with similar complaints — “I don’t know what’s wrong, I have a headache, I’m sick to my stomach, and I can’t stop vomiting.” It took me half the evening to realize that my patients were suffering the stresses of a nation divided. The body politic had fallen violently ill.

We as a nation have been struggling to balance faith and inclusiveness, national security with our identity as an immigrant nation, to blend past cultures and new traditions. But yesterday was different. It’s been building for some time — violence at campaign rallies, disparaging remarks about Mexicans, anti-immigrant themes. With each new alarm bell the counterpunch has always been “you can’t just keep comparing people to the Nazis.” Yesterday showed not only were those comparisons apt, they were prescient. Yesterday the people linking the alt-right to Nazism and White Supremacy were the participants, with their Swastikas and their Klan regalia.

One of our most cherished ideals is that everyone in our great nation is free to engage in peaceful protest, and to express their political point of view. But as heirs of Enlightenment philosophy, we are to wage wars of ideas — to win battles with the persuasiveness of a well-reasoned argument. We might find the views of our opponents offensive or repugnant, but we support their right to express those views peacefully. There was nothing peaceful about the “Unite the Right” rally, in deed or intent. It was designed from the outset to threaten, to frighten, and to spark conflict. Clubs and shields are not tools of persuasion, but of intimidation.

We have heard an anemic defense — “both sides do it.” There may be isolated incidents of violence from both sides, but this is a false equivalence. I look to the annual LGBT pride marches that occur almost without incident around the globe every year. The symbol is a rainbow — “everyone is welcome.” I marched on January 21 as one of five MILLION people in the Women’s March. There was no violence. There were no clubs or shields or guns. The false equivalence does not hold — the organizing ethos of the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally shared nothing with these events beyond being a gathering of like-minded people in a public space.

It is all too easy in reducing Nazism to a caricature of evil to forget that that extreme ideology rose in the middle of a nation that was a democracy before the rise of Adolf Hitler. To forget that there were protestors. To forget that Hitler wrote “Mein Kampf” in jail after a failed coup attempt. To dismiss the fact that families and friends were divided on the rise of the Third Reich. To underestimate the persistence of fascism. The question on all of our minds tonight should be, “how did the voices of Germans opposed to Nazism get silenced? And how do we avoid repeating their history?”

It is often said that “For evil to triumph, all that is necessary is for good men to do nothing.” It has been repeated by many great orators, from Edmund Burke to Winston Churchill to JFK. It has seeped into our collective unconscious to rail against complacency when there is desperate national or international need. It may have called you here tonight. Thank you all tonight for DOING SOMETHING.

No matter who you voted for in the last election, we must pull together as a community and as a nation. You may bristle at the idea of one more concession or still feel rightly aggrieved, but I appeal to you to see the greater good and duty that transcends any candidate, and any election cycle. If you lean conservative but are upset by the turn of events, I appeal especially to you, because you might be able to find inroads that those of us who were on the other side of the aisle could not.

In one of the most memorable but often misquoted moments of the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton talked about:

“ the basket of deplorables… The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it….And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up.”

As of yesterday, we can no longer deny that reality. It is clear from the headlines of the Daily Caller and statements from David Duke that the alt-right believes the country’s current political climate makes democracy ripe for the taking. But there was still more:

“Now some of those folks, they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America….that other basket of people….Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.”

An imperfect message perhaps, but a call in the midst of it all to rise up and be empathetic. To find common ground. To reject the violent extremism without leaving behind the people themselves.

We don’t always understand each other. We speak of “mansplaining” and “whitesplaining.” These ideas are useful to the extent that they call our attention to the imperfect ways in which we work together — but we must never lose sight of the fact that we are working TOGETHER. Toward a more perfect union.

I am as imperfect, too, and no doubt I will offend someone, somehow. But I take solace in the words of Bette Davis, who said, “If you offend no one, you must be doing something wrong.” Davis wasn’t arguing to be offensive as an end in itself. She was reminding us that while we might upset someone by expressing our beliefs, that the greater sin was in being so blandly inoffensive that you didn’t stand up for justice in order to avoid offending someone acting in an unjust fashion.

Related posts:

As Kotlin steadily spreads into the masses more and more Java developers are being exposed to “new” concepts which were actually available in other languages for years now. Algebraic Data Types (ADT…

The office of Assemblyman Randy Voepel is proud to offer internship opportunities to anyone wishing to gain valuable experience with the California State Assembly. 3. If you’re still in college, you…