Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/galleryeditor/page/20/)
Rather than flee the country, I vowed that, if Trump won the election, I’d stay in the U.S. and fight along with the people who would be endangered by the new administration. I still feel that way — but I am not comfortable having an expired passport.
Does the discrepancy mean that the United States is more interested in finding some sign of life in planetary space than in preserving life on planet Earth? Does it mean that America’s elected representatives have concluded that Earth’s problems are intractable and it is time to move on, letting the rest of the world fend for itself? Or is the explanation simpler: space research and development have a constituency – and a Hollywood-enhanced glamour – which research related to the atmosphere and the oceans’ depths lacks?
So, on Tuesday night, I watched with shock as a man who is undeniably racist—not to mention misogynist and xenophobic—was democratically elected to the highest office in the country. No, he didn’t win the popular vote; and yes, the Electoral College is an obsolete system. Nonetheless, half the country voted for this man. Indeed, we are more divided than we knew.
Humanity needs a new life order with a new vision of leadership and unity. What is meant is not external leadership, but leadership coming from within. It is not the unity proclaimed through banners and election slogans, but the inner unity of people who coexist in trust to assist fellow beings and serve the Earth.
To begin to introduce Jules Feiffer, to any reader of cerebral comics older than fifty, is probably absurd. He has been around so long and played a handful of roles so central to the development of an evolving American comic art that it would be almost easier to define Feiffer without comics than comics without Feiffer. But the strange contours remain fascinating.
The dawn’s early light
is late, dim and damp,
a wrung-out dishrag gray.
Oh say,
can you see?
Trump brings to the stage the white anger against the neoliberal economy, and channels it against the minorities by using the Republican racist subtext.
The rise of fascism always seems to hit the world by surprise. Yet what we are now witnessing did not begin with Trump, just as German fascism did not begin with Hitler. Wherever people are prohibited to express their basic emotional and energetic drives, wherever they grow up and live in conditions of fear, mistrust and violence, the danger of fascism looms. Suppressed life energy dams up and turns into constant aggression.
As I watched the YouTube reprise of the encounter, it renewed the moment for me in various ways. There was the history of race and racial politics in South Africa to consider. Because I am Jewish, there was also the issue, both in South Africa and elsewhere, of how Jews have been involved both in and against struggles for freedom. There was the question of Israel, where precisely because of my South African experience, I am deeply critical of the politics of occupation, walls and partition. On this last point Mandela was remarkably clear. He emphasized to Koppel the sympathies of the ANC for the struggle of Jews against persecution; he pointed to the lack of racism in Jewish communities; he spoke of Jewish lawyers who had taken on political trials in South Africa when few others would; of the fact that he had been trained as a lawyer by a Jewish firm when almost no others were prepared to accept blacks; again he observed that Jews held leading positions in the ANC. ‘But that does not mean to say that the enemies of Israel are our enemies. We refuse to take that position. You can call it being political or a moral question, but for anybody who changes his principles depending on whom he is dealing, that is not a man who can lead a nation.’
The Kapp-Lüttwitz Putsch was a resounding failure ¾ in one respect. Kapp quickly declared himself Reichskanzler (sound familiar), but the Weimar leadership, already partly in exile, called on all Germans to strike. The resulting general strike was so effective that the putschists simply could not rule the country.