I’ve been repeatedly returning to your ‘History may not repeat itself’ post in ever-increasing horror. Any thoughts now that there was evidently a bill introduced today to withdraw from the United Nations?

copperbadge:

Only that we knew this was coming. Trump openly said he’d do it; he’d already said it by the time I wrote History May Not Repeat Itself. Now he’s doing it, soooooo. (To be fair, apparently some whack job introduces this bill to leave the UN ever year. Still…this is not a normal year.) 

Maybe I’ve had time to become numb to it, but that’s why I wrote that post: because I saw the writing on the wall, and I wanted other people to see it in time. If my friends and loved ones have to flee this country, I would rather they flee than die, and I want to be ready to help them. If necessary, I want to be the one to say, go now. History May Not Repeat Itself reminds me that the time hasn’t come yet, and hopefully will never come, but at least I have a map. 

I can be numb to the ongoing anxiety of this country’s infestation of plague rats and still engage in activism and protest, so there’s that at least.

In some ways I’ve been watching this happen since Dubyah was president; the parallels between millennial America under Bush and the disintegrating Roman Empire are there for anyone who wants to plow through Tacitus. (It’s not the most engaging classical lit ever but it’s better than some.) I haven’t gone back to Tacitus in years because I find the parallels frightening and depressing, but I should check in on him, and I’m willing to bet I’d find a Donald Trump in the fall of Rome. 

This is why protest is so important now: because they’re going to try to do everything they said they’d do, and every single thing we stop, even temporarily, is one less brick in the road – or the wall – that they want to build. Fighting now is hard, but fighting now is a cake walk compared to what’ll happen if we don’t. And maybe it’ll happen anyway, but I don’t plan to go gently. 

I don’t have much money and I’m not that politically astute and I’m bad at debate. All I have are words, but I’m good at those, so the most powerful thing I can do is to keep writing and hope someone brighter and stronger than me can use what I say to do more than I can. And that those who have even less power than I do can use what I say to protect themselves because hell knows if I’ll be able to. 

So yeah – I guess the TLDR is that Trump, Pence, and his ilk are many things, but they’re pretty up front about what they want and how they mean to get it. Listen to them and fight as if every single thing they say is what they intend to do, because for all their propaganda, it probably is.