Opinion: What Were You Doing When the Repression Took Hold?

The following column appeared previously in the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

Democracy works only if voters are well-informed, engaged, and committed to getting to the polls.  Throughout 2024, conservative broadcast and “social” media misinformed audiences about crime, immigration, the economy, and more.  People hunkered down in their social media silos.  Democrats bumbled.  Independents checked out.  Sycophantic pols who previously labeled Trump delusional and/or criminal lined up behind him.  Billionaires anxious to increase their riches praised Trump, lavished millions on him, and their propaganda machines fawned over him. 

My faith in our democracy plummeted.  Now we are saddled with a megalomaniacal, venal, narcissistic leader and his cronies.  They are threatening to sic the military on peaceful demonstrators at home, and on Mexico, Panama, and Greenland.  They taunt, abandon, or even attack our allies, and emulate and embrace autocrats.  They seek to impose Christian fundamentalism and onerous tariffs on Americans, cease efforts to protect public health, public lands, and environmental integrity, and decimate public education, among other atrocities.  In the minds of some, these actions will make America great again.

In July, 1846, Henry David Thoreau spent a night in jail because he refused to pay six years of a delinquent poll tax at a time when America was waging what he viewed as an unjust war (Polk’s Mexican war) and while slavery was still practiced. According to some accounts, Ralph Waldo Emerson visited Thoreau in jail and asked, “Henry, what are you doing in there?” Thoreau replied, “Waldo, the question is what are you doing out there?”

As Trump is about to take control, I lay awake at night, at a loss for what to do.  I recently sought advice from my Congress members, Senators Warren and Markey, and Representative McGovern.  I sent this email to their offices:

Dear (Senator, Representative)

I am writing to ask a few serious questions. 

What can be done to prevent Trump’s use of military force to take over Greenland and/or the Panama Canal?  Do the Democrats have any strategies?

For more than 6 decades, I have venerated truth, compassion, science, and equality.  How should someone with those principles react to the kakistocracy of billionaires about to take control of our country?

As we enter the second Trump presidency, are “good Americans” to act like the “good Germans” of the 1930’s, i.e.: roll over in acceptance of mounting tyranny and lawlessness?  

I would appreciate a more detailed response than “Thank you for contacting my office”.

I am still waiting for more than the auto-reply “thank you”.  Withholding income taxes as a form of civil disobedience is no longer an option for most of us.  But it is looking ever more likely that conventional political opposition is futile.  Our system of checks and balances has been short circuited by fealty to a disordered demagogue.  Actions formerly unthinkable; rounding up, imprisoning, and deporting millions of people who work at the bottom rungs of our economy, curtailing press freedom, the prosecution of Trump’s opponents, coercing or even invading our former allies, are ideas brandished about or promised by the incoming administration. 

It seems likely that some outrage or another will trigger public reaction.  When some form of civil disobedience or protest lands people in jail, it will fall to all of us to look in the mirror and ask not what are they doing in there, but what are we doing out here?  Are we ready for that?

John Varner is a resident of Amherst’s District 3.