Like millions of Americans, I ventured out to my local “No Kings” rally last Saturday. The Memphis version was held at the corner of Poplar and Highland, which to be honest, is a less than ideal site for a rally of 4,000 people. I get that it’s the spot where a group of dedicated folks goes to protest every Saturday, but the nature of the site — situated at the corner of two busy commercial streets — does not lend itself to a cohesive large rally.
But enough kvetching. It was an inspiring event, filled with humans of many ages and genres holding an enormous number of clever, provocative, and incisive signs. It was for sure a lot more fun than Taco Donny’s Birthday Dirge in Washington, D.C. — and probably better attended.
It needs to keep happening. The momentum swung for one day, and you could feel it, coming as it did on the heels of weeks of actions taken by this administration to intimidate and separate Americans into competing subgroups.
It’s the same song and dance that’s been used by tyrants for centuries: Create villains, evil “others,” in this case, a race of people who are predisposed to eat cats and dogs, and murder and rape, and who — men, women, and children — need to be deported. Also, we need to be afraid of people who dare to love their own gender, and people from “bad” countries who are taking jobs and privileges away from good Americans. Keep them out! Lock them up! Send them away! Only I can protect you, says the tyrant. (And only I, says the subtext, can pick you up off the street and take you away. Be afraid.)
That’s why last Saturday was so important. And why it needs to keep happening. Nothing scares a tyrant more than millions of people in the streets celebrating their freedom and making fun of those who attempt to rule by intimidation. They don’t call Trump “TACO” (Trump Always Chickens Out) for nothing. He is a coward with no moral center, a feeble old man in an ill-fitting suit who bends to the will of those who own him. Last week, we saw how Trump’s patrons in Big Agriculture and the hospitality sector got him to back off deportations of farm and hotel workers. Seems the CEOs are not amused that they don’t have anybody to harvest their crops or clean their rooms. Of course, it never crosses Fearless Leader’s mind that if he really wanted to stop illegal immigration, all he would have to do is start arresting and charging the employers who hire undocumented workers. But that won’t happen because employers give politicians money, and demonizing the working poor is much better politics.
Stopping the deportation of farm and hotel workers will make things worse for brown people just walking into Home Depot or school or church, or to their court hearings, where the latest trickery by ICE is to “drop charges” on someone who’s come to court for a minor offense and then corral them and haul them away outside the courtroom.
Conservatives and moderates get upset when analogies are made between what’s happening in the United States and what happened in Nazi Germany in the 1930s. They accuse progressives of unnecessarily “escalating the rhetoric.”
My friends, the rhetoric needs to be escalated. Heavily armed, masked, non-uniformed men are sweeping up people off the streets of our country without warrants, without a badge, without any justification for doing so except for the fact that said people have brown skin and might possibly not have proper immigration status. The proper terminology for these men is “secret police.”
The people they pick up are often “disappeared” — sent to corporate-owned detention centers or foreign prisons, or summarily deported without due process. Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines a concentration camp: “a place where large numbers of people (such as prisoners of war, political prisoners, refugees, or the members of an ethnic or religious minority) are detained or confined under armed guard.”
Sound familiar? It should. The United States of America now has secret police, and concentration camps where people are held without access to the legal system. It’s unconstitutional. It’s immoral. It’s outrageous. And it’s on us to fix it. Last Saturday was a good start.
