I watched the 2019 film, “Resistance,” starring one of my favorite actors, Jesse Eisenberg, who performed the character of the famous mime Marcel Marceau. The film portrays the incredibly true story of the partisan movement in Nazi-occupied France in which Marceau played a leading role.
Marceau and his compatriots worked tirelessly to outsmart the Gestapo and its southern France Chief, the notorious Klaus Barbie, known as the “Butcher of Lyon,” who murdered Jews and resistance fighters under the collaborationist Vichy regime.
Marceau and his group were able to save thousands of Jewish children, and they helped smuggle many of them through treacherous steep woods to eventual safety in neutral Switzerland.
While not as dramatic and hardly veiled or clandestine, literally millions of good hard-working U.S. residents and others throughout the world labored diligently over the past four years to turn back the Christian white supremacist neo-Nazi nativist tide and eventually saved our fragile democracy until the armistice was realized on Wednesday, January 20, 2021.
As we all know, however, our work, our vigilance is never completed because there still remains much work to do, work that was not finished even before the past traumatic era under Donald Trump. In his case, demented failed would-be autocrats never die. They simply retire to a golf course in South Florida.
Resistance movements have surfaced throughout the planet in the attempt to depose autocratic leaders in countries from Israel, Turkey, the Philippines, Hong Kong, and throughout Mainland China, to Russia, Hungary, Poland, and beyond.
The extremely bigoted legions remain in the United States, those that had been waiting in the margins until Trump invited them to join the center in his misguided campaign of divide and conquer for his own personal political and financial power grab. He merely created the spark and the oxygen to the combustible fuel waiting to be ignited. These extremists do not simply evaporate with a change of administration.
The Trumpian age must be understood as a national wake-up call, one that has set off a blaring siren, an alert to those who had not previously counted themselves among the throngs of progressive political activists.
This age represents a call to action for all to join with others similar and different from themselves in a collective movement to make the United States live up to it mission statement of providing “a more perfect union” and ensuring each of us the promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” and most certainly, “liberty and justice for all.”
Benjamin Franklin was one of the nation’s “founders” who attended the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to draft our now-famous founding document. At the age of 81, though the perennial optimist, he had no illusions and thought it impossible to expect any group of people, no matter how wise or brilliant, to create a “perfect production.” However, even “with all its faults,” Franklin believed that this Constitution was far superior to any alternative that could possibly emerge.
He had a warning, though. As the story is told, when departing the Constitutional Convention, a group of citizens approached Franklin and asked him what kind of government had the delegates created?
His response: “A republic, if you can keep it.”
And it is up to all of us, people of goodwill who believe in this constantly evolving experiment we call the “United States of America.” It is up to us to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States” even when, especially when, our duly elected representatives fail in their oaths of office.
Voting is not only our right but also our duty. But voting is certainly not enough to “keep” this republic. We cannot vote and then retreat to our lives and assume our representatives will cure all the ills of our society, unfortunately of which there are many.
Continuing the very apt analogy, a plurality of the people in German voted in the Nazi Party in 1933 and its leader Adolph Hitler who promised to invigorate the economy and rid the nation of their internal enemies (Jews, socialists, communists, and others) while protecting the nation from foreign influence and degradation.
In other works, he promised he would Make Germany Great Again!
As residents of our country, we have an obligation to remain vigilant, to keep resisting the forces that would take away our republic. We must remain vigilant that another snake oil seller never achieves any elective office: local, statewide, or national.
The bastions of bigotry and oppression from patriarchal Christian white supremacist nativist extremists as well of the less obvious more “palatable” actors of deception stand in the ready. To keep and to ever improve our democracy takes constant work, constant resistance, and constant vigilance.
But this work pays perpetual dividends.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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