Here, There and Everywhere

 I'm scared this morning.

As a person of Jewish descent (and not just descent, but who identifies as Jewish, though I'm also Unitarian Universalist:  it's complex, but it's who I am, and really the two fit together synergistically and form a beautiful theological/spiritual/religious complementary whole for me, but I digress), I'm scared.  As a liberal, with brazenly liberal bumper stickers adorning the entire back of my little hippie car, I'm scared.  As a student of the Holocaust, I'm scared.  As an American citizen who loves and cherishes all the best of what my country stands for, I'm scared.  As a loving, kind human being, I'm scared.

I don't even know exactly how to begin, how to write this, how to express this fear to you.  But I've been paying attention, for four years.  I've been seeing an arsonist in the White House, for four years, lighting bonfires of hate.  I thought, when he left, we could heal.  I still hope, and know, that it is possible.  That we can.  Yet it is literally sickening and terrifying to see:  we also might not.  Things might get worse, as those fires didn't just go out when 45 left Washington, DC on that plane.  The fires of hate are now burning out of control.  The fires he set.  For four years.  Before saying that he will "be back, in some form”.

I have zero fear of him coming back in 2024 as a presidential candidate.  Zero.  Not going to happen.  But I’m very afraid of all the hate he, over four years, summoned forth, blew dog whistles for and to, and told: it is okay to come out and play.  Now the haters are out and proud.  Now the haters are scary and loud.  And the scariest thing, as survivors of the Holocaust always warned, the scariest thing, is not the loudest voices of hate but those who enable them.  Those who are complicit.  Those who do not speak out against them, while there is still time. 

And that is why I’m so scared this morning:  because of the so-called “leaders” in the Republican party who aren’t even just silent and complicit, which would be terrible enough, but who are encouraging the loud, hateful, violence-inciting voices, and actively attacking and threatening anyone within their own party who does have the courage to stand up to it.  Q-Anon, specifically, is very anti-Semitic, using old tropes (such as the classic "rich Jews are controlling the media and the entire world"--their new code language for this is “George Soros” and “global elite”) and even the “blood libel” (new code:  their whole nightmarishly fantastical, delusional thing about rings of pedophiles drinking the blood of children, etc.--it is so bizarre that I literally find it too sickening to even write about, but it’s all just plain, old anti-Semitism, dressed up in new garb, new code words, which anyone who has a terrifying, chilling understanding of history can see directly and clearly right through).

Anti-semitism is on the rise, racism is on the rise, xenophobia is on the rise, hate is on the rise.  Hate is bringing weapons and confederate flags into the Capitol, and killing six people, trying to overthrow a democratic election.  Are the Republicans doing anything about this sedition and treason?  No, in fact, they are calling the impeachment, which is a constitutional imperative and necessary to uphold the rule of law, quote:  “vindictive”.  They say we should just let it go, for the sake of “unity”.  What are we uniting around, lawlessness?  Violence?  Sedition?  Treason?  Hate?

There’s a Q-Anon member of congress now.  She says the Parkland shooting was a “false flag operation” staged by none other than, you guessed it, George Soros. He really gets around, doesn’t he, controlling-the-world-wise? I mean, he also supposedly staged the entire original Women's March in 2016, which I participated in. I never got a check from George Soros, amazingly.  She (the Q-Anon member of congress) bullies and harasses teenage victims of said mass shooting.  She says that Jews started the wildfires in California via lasers from space.  Are the leaders of her party standing up and condemning all this, in the strongest language possible?  No, they are putting her on an education committee.  Let that one sink in:  the person who harasses Parkland victims was put on an education committee.

The Republican "leaders" say we should just not be “vindictive” about a violent, treasonous coup attempt incited by the then POTUS.  Just let it go, they say. That was, what, three weeks ago? Don't be stuck in the past! They think they should be allowed to carry guns into Congress, and not wear masks in Congress during a lethal airborne pandemic.  They think Q-Anon members should be put on education committees.  They don’t stand for the rule of law, or up against hate.

The anti-semites, the racists, the xenophobes, the "us and them"ers, the haters, were emboldened for four years.  Now the bonfire is burning out of control.  And the Republicans aren't speaking out against it now. They are adding kindling.  And gasoline.  And I think of Germany, before I was born.  Really not too long before, in the entire span of human history.  It seemed like “so long ago”, when I first learned of it.  History.  Something traumatizingly terrible even to learn about, yet it could never happen here in America, thank goodness, thought I as a child.  Thank God I’m in America.  Thank God that happened a long time ago.  How could the German people let that happen?  We would never let that happen here.  That’s what I thought I knew as a child, when I learned of the horror of the Holocaust.  Anne Frank never, ever thought what happened in Germany would happen either.  She was German.  And Germany was a civilized country.  Why would her fellow Germans turn on her? It never crossed her mind, until it happened. The German Jews were proud Germans, going back many generations in many cases.  Just as my German Jewish family did there.  My family that I’ll never know.  Because it did happen there.  And it could happen here.  Or anywhere.  If people don’t stand up, and speak up, in time.