Why The New Wave Of Authoritarianism Terrifies Me

Perverted idealism is threatening the rights of those among us who are willing to speak out against the tyranny that Trump is trying to convince us is the new normal.

I was born in New Haven, CT in 1960. I grew up going to the drive-in with my family, getting an ice cream off the truck that came by our house in the evening and saying the pledge of allegiance in school every morning. Because I went to a private Jewish academy we sang Hatikva after the pledge and then got down to do our daily work. We pledged and sang proudly. I still do. But I grew up in an America that held onto a piece of history that haunted and terrified me as a child. I grew up learning to Never Forget. I grew up in a community where some of the adults I knew had numbers tattooed on their arms. I grew up in a world that consisted of people that were only acknowledged by the lighting of candles twice a year, in memory of them. Candles that burnt memories into our hearts of those lost in the camps and the ghettos of Eastern Europe.

I would say I had a fairly normal childhood. There were things I understood, and there were things I didn’t. In 3rd grade a book report was assigned and had to be from a book about an historical event. I was busy reading the Nancy Drew mysteries and hadn’t read a book for the report, so I cheated. I knew we had a book in our case at home that was titled “I Never Saw Another Butterfly”. It was a book of poetry. A book of poetry written by the children of the Treblinka Concentration Camp. Written by children before they were liberated, or more commonly put to death. I chose this book, not for the significance of its content, but because many of the pages were only a few lines. I could read it quickly. I could write my book report quickly. I could go back to the fantasy world of Nancy Drew and her lily white pals AND complete my report for school.

On the day I was to give the report I brought the book with me to school as we had been instructed, I liked my teacher, she seemed to genuinely care about us and what she was teaching. Her name was Mrs. Cohen. She was very animated, often sliding across the front of our class room making a big point about something important using her arms and hands expressively. I liked that she “whooped” sometimes when something struck her as truly extraordinary. I also liked her ease in her practice of her Judaism, she was comfortable with it, she didn’t use it as a source of otherness or bigotry as some adults did, and I was starting to notice this. She seemed to rejoice in our religion, enjoy its nuance and beauty as I did. But she was a lady with a number on her arm. I was afraid of that. I had seen the darkside of the adults with number tattoos, tears in their eyes and pain on their faces.

Mrs. Cohen made me go last in presenting my book report. She let the boys who all seemed intent on writing about wars and battles go first (it was 1968), and the one other girl in the class who wrote a haltingly bad synopsis of a book about the invention of the toaster take her turn ahead of me. She went before me, really, reporting on a huge historical event. Toast. When it was finally my turn, I was certain I was being singled out for having cheated and reported on a book of short poems. Mrs. Cohen came up to the front of the room and took my book and held it tightly to her chest. She put on one of those faces I was afraid of. A face of tears and pain that grown-ups were not supposed to let out when kids were around and told us what it meant to her to hear the poems of other children that had been in the same camp as her. She was a survivor. She rolled up the sleeve of her batik blouse and showed us her number. She had cheated death, maybe she had known some of these children when she was a little girl, alone, in a barracks, looking for beauty but surrounded by horror and death.

There have been moments in my life when I have felt shame, but this was one I will never forget. I will never forget how I felt when I realized that Mrs. Cohen thought I had done something magnificent and meaningful, when I had only done something that was easy and half-assed. I had cheated, taken the easy way. I will never forget the sight of raw emotion on the face of my teacher as she gave us one of our first lessons on the horrors of humanity. I will never forget the feeling of no longer believing that I lived in a safe country, that nothing like the horrors we heard about Germany, Hitler, the Nazis could ever come to the civilized, modern city that I called home. The city that housed a beautiful world famous University with a Hillel society and a Kosher Kitchen I visited often with a friend whose father was the Hillel Rabbi. I thought those nightmares were so far away until I saw them written on Mrs. Cohen’s face, and then I knew that I would have to convince myself regularly that the world was safe, that my country was safe, that the people who were in charge of my country were altruistic and knew what they were doing.

Those beliefs of safety have faded, have become harder to convince myself of, as I’ve gotten older. First with Ronald Reagan, then with the younger of the Bushes. I felt less safe with these leaders, less sure that they knew what was going on in and how to deal with the complex problems of the world. I still believed there must be a man behind the curtain, a great and powerful man, who did understand and was handling all these complicated problems so that the citizens of my great country would be able to continue enjoying the beauty that was democracy.

Yeah, I grew up in a more innocent time. I grew up in a time of protest and controversy. I grew up during the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War. I grew up in a time when the government, while not always supporting the rights of its citizens to be outraged, allowed their dissent. Today I am not sure that our government is still following that metric.

I listened to a program on NPR today as I was going to babysit for a friends son. The point made by the commentator was about the stance Mr. Trump is taking toward the protesters in Portland, OR. The violent stance he is taking there, and threatening to take elsewhere. He is using the defense of a federal courthouse as the reason for violence against the citizenry of the city. He is putting the value of a thing, a building, as higher than the value of the people protesting in front of, and around that “thing”. He has given them names, “anarchists” “agitators” “trouble makers”. But regardless of who they are he is labeling them as “not us” so therefore not of value. The thing he wants his unidentified federal forces to defend, the building, is of more value than those “others”.

This is horrifyingly familiar to anyone who grew up as I did in a close Jewish community that included many Holocaust survivors. Trump is stretching the law, stretching his power by finding loopholes to put down one group of citizens he has deemed of lesser value. He is doing this to bolster favoritism with his followers whom he has given extra value status. He has created a mythic America where these agitators are risking our freedom, threatening the perfect America Trump continually refers to. These “others”, much like the status of “other” assigned to immigrants by Trump, according to his rhetoric are threatening our great nation. He is, however, threatening those very ideals of freedom, democracy and our constitutional rights by abusing his power.

Are we headed for a Holocaust? I don’t know. Authoritarian regimes begin with the slow slide of violence and small abuses of power. These slights have been escalating almost daily in the past months. The violence is predominantly perpetrated by the feds, using protesters who are mostly peaceful, but not always complacent as their excuse for escalation.

I think we are in need of a serious course correction to avoid the type of authoritarianism that keeps people down, and exploits, abuses and does serious harm to those in the minority, be it race or class. Trump wants us to believe in a myth. That without the so called agitators and instigators who are “oppressing” us, he could make America great: all sunshine and glitter, a chicken in every pot, a life of luxury and leisure, prosperity for all GOOD Americans. He is headed down that path of deception with his “silent majority” sowing lies and misdeeds to secure a win in November. I am personally horrified.