world we want

The drive to weaponize the military against U.S. citizens is intensifying. In spite of legal setbacks and widespread public concern, the authoritarian forces in our country recognize that their ability to hold on to power requires the use of force against the majority of people.

This is why we must take every action we can imagine to resist this drive to create a national army.  Its purpose is to protect the power and privileges of the few at the expense of the rest of us and the health of the planet. It is already being deployed to squash dissent, kidnap, imprison, or kill those who disagree with the powers that be, and those who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. All constitutional protections and concepts of due process are irrelevant as such a force comes into being. It is well on its way.

But it is not here yet. As Jamelle Bouie noted this week, no matter how much Trump wants to be a king, it’s up to the American people whether he’s treated like one. 

The current military mobilizations in LA and Washington D.C. are as much spectacle as substance. The aim of these deployments is to create a climate of fear, hoping that people will be less inclined to resist such actions, more inclined to acquiesce to the presence of troops on the streets, the disappearances of friends, relatives, and coworkers, be quiet as long as they are “safe.” In such an atmosphere people act as though they are living in a police state long before it exists. Bouie wrote:

The administration-produced imagery in Washington is, then, a projection of sorts — a representation of what the president wants reality to be, drawn from its idea of what authoritarianism looks like. The banners and the troops — not to mention the strangely sycophantic cabinet meetings and news conferences — are a secondhand reproduction of the strongman aesthetic of other strongman states. It is as if the administration is building a simulacrum of authoritarianism, albeit one meant to bring the real thing into being.

But the consequences of the current drive toward militarism are very real. They are destroying the lives of people on all levels. And they are driving people to take actions. 

In some places we are seeing elected leaders stepping forward with imaginative and bold responses. Most recently the governor of Illinois and the Mayor of Chicago took a forceful stand against any deployment of federal troops. They recognize that we are not in a normal time, and the outcomes are far from certain.

Gov. JB Pritzker responded defiantly on Tuesday as Trump threatened to send the national guard into Chicago. 

“When did we become a country where it’s OK for the U.S. president to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything, especially something we don’t want. Have we truly lost all sense of sanity in this nation that we treat this as normal?”

Gov. Pritzker is clear that  Trump is “searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities and end elections.”

Some judges are also playing an important role in defining that what is going on is for reasons far beyond any made up emergency. This week Judge Charles Breyer of the Federal District Court in San Franciso ruled that once the troops deployed in Los Angeles, was “a top-down, systemic effort to use the military to perform law enforcement functions” and “instigated a monthslong deployment of the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles for the purpose of establishing a military presence there and enforcing federal law,” he wrote. “Such conduct is a serious violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.”

But neither elected officials or judges can be depended upon to stop this slide toward fascism. 

In the end it will be the actions of the rest of us that matter most. Here the people of Los Angeles and Washington D.C are showing us the way to resist. 

From Grand Juries refusing to prosecute to people to escorting neighbors to school and following ice officials to record and make public their actions, we are seeing unprecedented mobilizations to protect each other.  Such actions will not stop there. They too are creating a new climate in our country, one that says we are responsible for each other, that our fates are indeed linked, and that we can act in ethical ways that show life matters.  Such actions, as they grow, are forming the basis of the kind of world we want.