After several months living in Eastern Europe, I am now getting ready to return to America in a few more weeks. I wish I could say I was looking forward to being back in my home country, but this is not the case. While I will be happy to see friends and family, sleep in my old bed in my old apartment, stroll the streets of my town and resume teaching at my college, my heart will not be at ease.
During my time away, I have not been able to escape knowledge of what has been happening in the United States under the second Trump administration. I have been shocked, saddened stunned and horrified, again and again, by the ever-lengthening list of cruel and destructive actions by this administration, actions causing a massive pile of wreckage of institutions, programs, people and moral standards that I fear will permanently diminish America, a country once known as the champion of democracy and the world center of science, learning and culture, but now likely to join the ranks of corrupt, repressive, backward-looking countries and become a place that few will admire or want to visit in the future. I fear I will be returning to a broken and traumatized country, with the only people truly happy about what is happening those who howl for blood or delight in spectacles of destruction, similar to how large numbers of Americans used to bring picnic baskets to watch people being lynched. I fear that the film "The Purge" will come to be seen as a grim preview of coming attractions in America.
In the small city in New York State where I live, a place in recent years revived both socially and economically by immigrants, I imagine that houses and streets once filled with boisterous life will now be subdued, scared, silent--or even empty.
I am re-evaluating how I will live in America in the future. I think the damage being done is so vast and far-reaching that I will not see the country recover in my lifetime. Once programs are destroyed, dismantled or defunded, it will be very hard to rebuild them because so many Americans oppose government spending in general, thanks to many years of Republican propaganda that all government is evil, topped off by Trump's vicious rhetoric attacking all levels of government unless they serve his personal or political interests. I think it may take a long time before the majority of Americans realize we actually need a well-funded, professional and compassionate government. I am bracing myself for the possibility that I will be living in a downgraded, diminished, dysfunctional America for the rest of my life.
Drawing on the experiences of people I know in E. Europe, I realize that when a really horrible, irrational regime comes to power, it may stay in place for many years, and resistance may be futile for a long time as well, until a time comes when the national mood finally changes, the regime weakens, and people are truly ready to change. As I am 65, I am thinking that I will probably not see America turn around in my lifetime, because the problem is not just Trump. He has many standing with him, for quite varied reasons, but with the same result of allowing this brutal regime to take shape and ride roughshod over so many once-stable structures and assumptions. Many people have been trained to hate many things from immigrants to science to vaccines to educated elites to professional journalists to any effort to combat social ills like racism and sexism and they are fed more hate every day online.
A parallel with Nazi Germany is not to be ruled out. There too, the horrible plans of the incoming regime were public knowledge, but many chose to believe that things would not really get so bad as they did. By the time they realized they were wrong, it was too late to stop the regime from more and more extreme and frightening actions. The courts were not able to stop this, the media was soon disabled, and various sectors of society from educational institutions to professional organizations were successfully pressured into compliance. I see little reason to believe that the same will not happen now.
If you think the Nazi analogy too much, look to Russia under Putin or Hungary under Orban or Turkey under Erdogan or India under Modi for more recent examples of how autocratic regimes take shape, take root and then take their countries down with them. There is an established pathway to oligarchic autocracy which some call the "authoritarian playbook," and if you want to see the American version, just look up "Project 2025."
I see dark days ahead--VERY dark days--and expect to devote my remaining decades to planting seeds for the future, writing and thinking things for people of the future to use, when the darkness has lifted. For now, I will support who and what I can, avoiding suicidal actions of resistance that only invite suppression, but without much hope to do anything more than slightly reduce the damage and suffering now being inflicted to so many in our county and beyond, as in the worldwide increase in poverty, sickness and death likely to result from the end of the US AID program.
As far as I can see, America as we knew it is dead. I see only darkness coming down over the country in the immediate future, and I will seek to find a small, safe place with light to wait out this horrible time. I fully expect that in a few more months, even the small measure of protest expressed through this essay may no longer be possible in such an open, public way.
I will not stop thinking about what is happening, and I will not stop writing, but whether I will continue to be able to publish my thoughts, that is another question.
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