WHY I RESIST
In trying to organize my thoughts as I set out to clarify my concerns about the Trump Administration and the current Republican-controlled Congress, I find that I need to first articulate my basic values.
I grew up in the Fifties in a socially and politically progressive family. As a kid, I helped my big brother and sister campaign for Adlai Stevenson. When I was twelve we moved from liberal Palo Alto, California to Washington D.C. where my dad took on a job on JFK’s Council of Economic Advisors. My family was active through the 1960’s in the Civil Rights and the Anti-War movements.
After a couple of years as a Stanford undergrad who spent considerable time and energy in protest against the war in Vietnam and in support of the nascent gay rights movement, I up and moved to the Netherlands. Living happily in Amsterdam for 18 years before returning to my beloved Bay Area in ’88, my views on government changed and matured.
Raised in the Unitarian Church, I learned to see the world as an interdependent web of being and my fellow human beings as brothers and sisters. I wish I could say that my sunny optimism about the human race has remained unscathed, but my interest in history, civics and philosophy, along with the bitter reality of wars of choice and the massive hypocrisy made evident in the prejudice, discrimination and greed in which my country seems steeped, all took a toll. Sadder but wiser, I spent the Obama years reveling in the Yes, We Can spirit, even in the face of unabashed obstructionism.
I believe that all children and youth deserve good education and that health care is a right, not a privilege. I believe in the worth and dignity of every person. I believe that no matter how basic or unskilled is our labor, we all deserve a living wage. We need government to help ensure that our human rights are not infringed upon. Capitalism is a powerful engine for growth and prosperity, but unchecked it is a system that is amoral and destructive of our human potential. I believe that we must get money out of politics. I believe that teachers and social workers and nurses and doctors and daycare centers and our schools should be well-compensated, even as I believe that people who use the system to exploit others should be prosecuted.
Philosophically, I find that dualism and attachment are mindsets that create unnecessary suffering. I do not believe in Original Sin. To be honored for our contributions and respected in our many beliefs and orientations seems to me to be the grounds upon which we grow and prosper as a society.
In my idealistic early twenties, I’d write letters home from Amsterdam, crowing about the enlightened society I saw around me— universal healthcare, good education for all, progressive income tax and, above all, tolerance. My dear mother always wrote back. Being tolerant and inclusive in a largely homogeneous society, she pointed out, really couldn’t be compared with America’s grand experiment as the salad bowl of diversity and democracy in the modern world. As the years unfolded and Holland’s imperialist history came home to roost, I began to understand my mom’s point of view.
Living in a liberal suburban, upper-middle-class bubble, I could carry on now in the age of Trump, unimpeded on my privileged island. Well-educated, privileged, white, tall, healthy, reasonably good-looking and male, it really wouldn’t be that hard to carry on with a “what’s in it for me?” mentality. I don’t actually need to save water, eat a vegan diet, contribute all I can to good-doing organizations, be kind to strangers or help my neighbors.
My opinions about what Donald Trump and the Republican Congress are saying and doing are based on firsthand experience. Yes, I read the New York Times, the Guardian, the Washington Post and numerous other periodicals, blogs and opinion pieces. I believe much more in Science than I do in Religion. The fact that in the past several years I’ve witnessed the man who is now our President purposefully lie to the American people over and over again I find deeply unsettling. I believe that such things matter a great deal.
I don’t understand how some of my friends who are kind and thoughtful and are lovers of beauty and logic and civil rights can possibly stand behind our current president. I find Donald Trump’s history of unabashed racism, most notably in his seven-year quest to delegitimize our first African-American president, to be vile.
I do not claim that Trump is crazy, but I certainly see his behavior and speech as reflecting a deep-seated and utterly unacknowledged mental and emotional illness that is poisoning our country. I find him shallow, prejudiced, ignorant, self-centered, greedy and unkind. And I formed this opinion based not on the mainstream media’s portrayal of him, but on witnessing this man in action.
With a president whose values seem to have no depth, who believes that the richer you are, the smarter you must be, a man who surrounds himself with power-hungry, greedy sycophants, a petty, pretentious, vain person, yes, I’m highly skeptical of his decisions and his choices of who shall advise him.
Now I live in a world where friends and neighbors are fearful going out in public, knowing they may be snatched up and deported. In this brave new world, the right of my women friends to make decisions about their own bodies and reproductive lives is being called into question. My Muslim friends and neighbors feel understandably under siege because the un-American posture of prejudice and discrimination has been sanctioned by the Electoral College’s selection of Donald Trump.
Our 45th president and the Republican Congress have consistently chosen for policies that I experience as reactionary. When human value becomes based on economic privilege, our humanity suffers. Just as with public education, healthcare and civil rights, our governance belongs in the world of public service, not of the profit motive. And until we manage to get money out of politics, we shall remain the servants and not the masters of our leaders and representatives.
To my mind it is prudent to evaluate and periodically re-evaluate the need for every regulation, just as every bureaucracy needs ongoing scrutiny and sensible pruning. By appointing wealthy businessmen with anti-government beliefs and Wall Street bankers whom he’d just months ago reviled to Cabinet-level positions, the President has not chosen with prudence, but instead has put capitalistic values ahead of human needs.
And finally, a chief executive who prioritizes further building up our military over the work of our State Department is a dangerous leader. Trump’s pre-adolescent world view, as reflected in both his words and deeds, would be utterly depressing if it weren’t so terrifying. A man who cannot admit a mistake is a man I cannot trust. A man who treats women as Trump does does not deserve my respect. Our elected representatives, many of whom rejected Trump as unsuitable during the election, who now are eager to fall in line for business-as-usual under this man do not, in my opinion, deserve my respect either.
So while I set out this morning to lay the groundwork for my principled and specific objections to the President’s and Congress’s current policies, I find myself, at least for today, spent and sad. The politics of fear has, for now, triumphed over the politics of hope. And so, coming together with like-minded fellow citizens, I resist, I object, I decry.
Bear Capron, 20 april 2017