Indecency!
Wow, I came down with a knock-your-guts-out stomach bug on Tuesday night. I chose to stay home from our monthly meeting, to protect all of you, as I have said, to make certain I did not potentially spread any fungus. Like the food poisoning scene on the old movie Airplane. Vice Chair Bob Tatterson did a good job of running the meeting. Thank you, Bob. Looking at the minutes, we had 15 new people brave the cold as our numbers continue to grow! Thank you.
As a country, we really are at that point, where we cannot pretend that we are not barreling toward Hitler’s Europe. As many have pointed out, if undocumented immigrants were the issue, Trump’s Gestapo would be in Florida (1.6 million undocumented immigrants) or Texas (2.1 million undocumented immigrants), not Minnesota with 130,000 undocumented immigrants. As I write this, Frau Noem is sending troops into Maine. Maine, home of the best lobster rolls anywhere. The goal is to terrorize all of us.
There is a great opening article in the February Atlantic by Jeffrey Goldberg titled, “The Triumph of Indecency.” It begins with reminding us that after Trump was humiliated and livid about losing the 2020 election, he posted on Twitter, “Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big Protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, it will be wild!” History proved it was more than wild, it was lethal!
Goldberg goes on to remind us of Trump’s first year of his second term: “The pardoning by Trump of his cop-beating foot soldiers represents the lowest moment of this presidency so far, because it was not only an act of naked despotism, but also of outlandish hypocrisy. By pardoning these criminals, he exposed a foundational lie of MAGA ideology: that it stands with the police and as a guarantee of law and order. The truth is the opposite.”
I believe "indecency" is a perfect word to describe Trump, and we have been dealing with his indecency from his horrible treatment of John McCain and the reporter he made fun of who had cerebral palsy to most recently calling a reporter “piggy.” A week ago, he said “f*** you” to a United Auto Worker and gave him the finger in Detroit while touring a Ford plant. The auto worker simply spoke the truth in calling him a pedo-protector.
It is important that we record and repeat all of the indecent things he and his administration have done. According to Goldberg and our memories, “Trump has dismantled America’s foreign-aid structure, he has encouraged the United States military to commit war crimes, he has instituted radical cuts to U.S. science and medical funding and abetted a crusade against vaccines. He has appointed conspiracists, alcoholics, and idiots to key positions in his administration. He has destroyed the independence of the DOJ and FBI and applauded Putin for his barbarism and castigated Ukraine for its unwillingness to commit suicide.”
Indecency. We are seeing ICE bleed into our Northern counties. Andrew Sullivan wrote, ”It is one thing to find and arrest illegal immigrants; it is indecent to mock and ridicule them, and send them with no due process to a foreign gulag where torture is routine. It is one thing to enforce immigration laws, it is another to use masked anonymous men to do it.”
If you have ever been to Berlin, Germany, you will see brass plaques on door thresholds. They are called Stolpersteine, meaning "stumbling stones," a unique, city-wide memorial by artist Gunter Demnig to remember victims of Nazi persecution by embedding small, engraved brass plates in sidewalks in front of their last freely chosen homes or workplaces, marking individual lives lost to the Holocaust. Perhaps we need to start our own version of stumbling stones to mark the homes where our citizen and immigrant brothers, sisters and children are being taken by ICE.
So we will combat indecency by calling it out. Goldberg’s last piece of advice on tolerating and fighting Trump’s indecency comes from Winston Churchill: “When you are going through hell, keep going.”