If my bathroom scales and memory are both accurate, I have lost over ten pounds in the last month, since the immediate run-up to the election. In the words of Homer Simpson, “that’s bad.”
I remember thinking around this time last year, that with the racial and political tensions we were facing something akin to the US of 1968. Now, it seems like we may be facing instead Germany of 1933. I hope I’m just being paranoid, that it’s the anxiety speaking still, but someone on Facebook (who has approved sharing, but wishes to remain anonymous) posted the following and my first major reaction was “I wish I didn’t believe you”.
My mother’s family were the Bronners of Frankfurt. German Jews had been barred from owning land up until the 1870s, but the succeeding years had been kind to us. Our family integrated with Christian society and became prosperous operating a small but growing soap making business. The 20s had been frightening, a decade of economic recession and a sometimes violent back-and-forth of progressives trading power with conservative reactionaries, and nobody was happy when Hitler rose to power, but we’d seen it all before, and the conventional wisdom said to batten down the hatches and ride out the storm. Life had never been better for Jews in Europe than it was in the 20th century. What were we to do, just leave?
In October of 1938 my great-grandfather was abroad on business in England when the German government revoked the passports of all its Jewish citizens and branded them with a scarlet letter J. In November, the largest pogrom Europe had ever seen erupted across Germany. The streets were littered with broken shopfronts. Temples burned. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and incarcerated.
My great-grandmother called her husand, and told him: don’t come home. She sold all her family’s assets at a fraction of their worth, found a forger to get Aryan passports, and sent her children on a train to Holland, telling them they were on their way to summer camp. They arrived in an orphanage, and many months later, their parents were able to find them, and they brought their family to America where they made a new life.
My father’s family were the Fischbeins of Oradea, a border town on the edge of Romania and Hungary. They were a family of textilers, and lacked the means and the urgency to escape. When the Third Reich occupied Hungary in 1944, my grandfather and his two brothers were made into slave laborers digging tank traps on the Eastern front where the Nazis treated them worse than livestock, and which they only survived because Hungary prevaricated so long in revoking the citizenship of their Jews that the war was nearly over by the time they were taken. Both their parents died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
I am a daughter of the Holocaust. Both my grandfathers survived it. Two of my great-grandparents died in it. You can search the Old Country for my grand aunts and uncles but you won’t find them, or anyone who remembers them. I am a descendent of the lucky and smart. I grew up with these stories, always aware that my existance on this earth was tethered to reality by the merest gossamer of probability and shrewd judgement. I grew up always knowing that it happened there and it could happen here.
Generations repeat themselves every twenty years, and crises repeat themselves every eighty. 1776. 1860. 1942.
2025.
None of you understand how serious this is. You don’t understand how bad it’s going to get. You all think this is 1938. I’m telling you, it’s 1933. Ask yourself how your great-grandparents died. That’s how you get to die.
I feel sick. I feel like I lost a family member; like I buried my future on November 8th, and every day since then the panic and dread have been rising in me. Remember this: history is written by the winners. Lincoln and Roosevelt both had authoritarian tendancies, but they won, and so we lionize them. We don’t know that Trump isn’t the next Lincoln or Roosevelt; timing suggests he might be. Our grandchildren might look back on this crisis of American supremacy in the global era and say “Trump was the strong man that the times called for, and it was sad that the Muslims and Mexicans and Trans people and Jews all had to go so that we could be safe and unified.”
I want to tell you to stay and fight for your country and your values but I don’t really believe that is a fight that can be won anymore. You think your whiteness will save you, but your whiteness can be taken from you. You think your constitution will protect you, but your constitution can be ignored, amended, and repealed. You think the decency of your neighbors will defend you, but their decency will melt away the moment their backs are to the wall.
It’s time to run.
Open bank accounts in other countries. Visit. Learn the languages. Grow roots. Marry foreigners. Get your documents up to date. Keep a bag packed. Be ready to leave in an instant, and never look back.
Guns don’t save lives. Passports save lives.
I try to have hope. I am part of several communities (quiz bowl, the greater geek community, and especially those I have met through cosplay) that I would like to believe would have nothing to do with this rising tide of white nationalism. But what power do these groups have?
I feel trapped. I want to be a force for change, but the mental problems I’ve been dealing with make it difficult to interact with strangers which rules out many forms of activism. I can try to contribute financially to organizations that will hopefully be forces for good, or prepare to desert the sinking ship of state, but limited financial resources make that seem impossible as well. Plus I have these new medical bills to deal with.
I don’t know for sure (because I’ve been afraid to ask), but I suspect my boss is a die-hard Republican who wholeheartedly supported Trump’s campaign–I did overhear him discussing celebrating the election results–so it’s hard to go to him and say “you need to pay me more money so I can prepare to get out of the country” (or “support Planned Parenthood, or the ACLU, or the Human Rights Campaign, or the SPLC, or Fight for the Future, or, or, or…”).
So, please, help me believe that this nation, that people are better than this. Stand with your neighbors. Don’t let hatred and fear triumph. Don’t let corporate interests and small-minded bigots determine our future.
Peace.