Living in Interesting Times: Now What?

I was born in Germany, nineteen years after the end of World War II. Growing up in the US, I often wondered what it was like to live in Germany in the 1930s, to watch Hitler gain power, to see Jewish neighbors taken away by force.

The world I live in today feels eerily like what I imagined then, except it's 2018 in the United States. And I feel completely helpless.

The government grants "thoughts and prayers" to domestic terrorists white men who routinely shoot people at malls, movie theatres, dance clubs, schools but refuses to take any action that would limit their impact. The government incarcerates people of color, deports people born in other places. The president was elected with a minority of the vote under a system that, whether it was designed to do so or not, it must now be acknowledged that it deliberately disenfranchises people of color, immigrants, urban residents, and the poor. Washington's current crop of "elected" officials seems to be at war against women, poor people, trans and gay people, people of color, and the earth itself -- anyone, in short, other than heteronormative white men with economic security.

But as the president fires increasing numbers of public servants, the real goal seems to be to destroy democracy.

This is "my" government. If I don't actively resist, I believe that I am complicit.

Yet I have little power. I am not a scholar of political science and I don't feel sure I understand what Trump and his allies (or his puppetmasters?) are up to. In my classes, while I don't pontificate on the news, I do raise issues of power and justice as they relate to language, environmental issues, and medieval literature, and point out how those cultural formations influence the present.

And so I feel paralyzed to act on any scale that feels meaningful.

Also, I am busy, with work and family responsibilities, and I am tired.

My sense of disquiet about current events keeps growing, threatening to become real panic, yet meaningful resistance seems out of reach. Acts like chaining myself to the fence at the White House grounds or hunger striking don't seem like they'd have much more impact than blogging, bloviating on Facebook, or joining another march.

Now what?