We want to forget the painful, the frightening, the disturbing, or usually we do. Sometimes, we hold on to what hurts as if the immediate pain could stave off what lies deeper. Sometimes, we just don’t know what to do.
And sometimes, we can’t forget for other reasons. It has seeped too far into who we think we are. Or the pain or discomfort helps us act, so we think we can’t allow ourselves to forget. But how do we learn from pain without hurting ourselves even more, and without making ourselves sick? Sickened, yes. But not sick.
Many of us so want to forget DT. It has been an amazing relief to not see his face or hear his ravings on tv. But we can’t forget the crimes he committed or the vulnerabilities he exposed in democracy. He and his GOP supporters are doing all they can to force themselves back into the headlines, to get us to focus on our fear of him returning to power instead of the desperation in his efforts to manipulate media and politics to prevent arrest. The list of possible crimes he has committed and possible criminal and civil litigation is extensive. It is largely up to us to determine how and what we remember.
For example, he is planning to re-start MAGA rallies. His GOP never let the “Big Lie” die and are doing all they can to resuscitate it. We remember how DT tried to steal the election from President Joe Biden by falsely claiming the Democrats had stolen it. Most of us saw this live on tv. To distract us further, he and his GOP minions spouted disinformation from Russians claiming Democrats were in the employ of communists.
Now, the GOP are saying the insurrection attempt on January 6th never happened. On May 12, during a House Oversight Committee Hearing, GOP Representative Andrew Clyde said “the House floor was never breached.” “To call it an insurrection is in my opinion a bald-faced lie,” he continued. “If you didn’t know that TV footage was a video from January the sixth, you would actually think it was a normal tourist visit.”
He, with the support of most of the GOP, are attempting to turn the “Big Lie” into an ugly reality. Remember, the goal of “The Lie” was to crown DT as the Savior-King and deny political power to the majority of Americans⎼ deny the right to protest and the vote. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, in 47 state legislatures, the GOP have introduced 361 bills to restrict and suppress voting, despite no evidence of voting fraud.
Of course, they tried this before, just minutes after it happened. They feel they have created an unscalable propaganda wall and their followers will never try to scale that wall and hear, remember, or believe the truth. And they try to eliminate anyone who stands in their way. Remember how they treated conservative Liz Cheney for speaking truthfully about January 6th or how they tried to intimidate Democrats and other government officials.
But we remember that if the GOP win, we lose. No justice, no peace.
We remember that in DT’s America, there is no room for most of us except as servants and sycophants. He showed, while in office, a dangerous addiction to hate and vindictiveness. Hate crimes against African Americans in 2019 were at the highest level in a decade. In 2020, his last year in office, hate crimes against Asian-Americans increased 150%. Crimes based on religion increased dramatically and crimes based on gender were at the highest levels ever recorded. Although he is fortunately out of office, the hate he fostered and manipulated is still going strong in him and his followers.
We remember that the pandemic is still with us largely due to DT’s malignant incompetence, and how he and his GOP followers denied and many still deny the threat posed by the coronavirus. They lied about it, sacrificing lives to force people back to work too early, thus destroying the possibility of getting people back to work safely, and prolonging the possibility of dangerous strains of the virus developing.
They are still denying the safety and efficacy of the vaccines or of wearing a mask, thus leading people to their deaths. Right-wing propagandist Tucker Carlson called people who wear masks liberal “zealots” or “neurotics” and advocated that people who saw children wearing masks should call the police or Child Protective Services against the parents. Some DT followers denied on their death beds what was killing them.
Despite the fact that not a single GOP Congressperson voted for the American Rescue Plan, the last pandemic relief bill, they are now promoting as their own what they fought against.
They think that if conditions get too bad during a Democratic administration, or too violent, we will forget who it was who succored violence for years. Or if there is a new wave of the pandemic, we will forget who had given up any pretense of caring about and had never showed any compassion for those who were sick or who had died. We would, in fact, give up on the struggle for democracy and either not vote or vote for an impossible candidate. But when the time comes to do so, we will remember.
We have a window of opportunity now to create the democracy we wish for. President Biden has been stepping up, even more than many of us thought he would, and are already perceiving what a responsible, competent, caring President can do. According to the CDC, about 59% of the adult population has received at least one vaccination and now children from 12-16 are being vaccinated. Due to this effort and much of the country taking precautions, those fully vaccinated can soon return to relatively normal activities.
Our lives and sanity may depend on how successful we are in imagining the success of, and helping promote, Biden’s legislative agenda ⎼ in getting voting rights protection (HR#1) passed in Congress ⎼ in getting an infrastructure, jobs and the environment bill and reducing the concentration of wealth in so few hands, which has worsened since the pandemic. As of last month, 719 billionaires in the US held more wealth than the 165 million workers on the lower end of the wealth scale combined. According to Federal Reserve System figures, this is basically a reverse of what was true in 1990.
We can’t give the GOP the forgetting they wish for. When we have the opportunity to vote, we can remember a warning from 2017, from Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century ⎼ if the GOP win this next election, it might be the last vote we are allowed to participate in, so we do whatever we can to get out the vote.
Besides learning from and questioning the news as much as we can stand, and studying history, we can study ourselves. We can ask⎼ How can we treat each chance to vote as the only chance we have to vote? Each moment we can speak out as the best moment to speak? How can we be humane and compassionate to ourselves and others even when one political party in this nation threatens the very idea of being humane and compassionate?
We need to protect ourselves in a variety of ways and from a variety of threats. What DT represents is one of the worst. But hopefully, we won’t put so much effort into protecting ourselves from pain we increase it or wind up supporting what hurts us.
Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron, in her book, Welcome the Unwelcome: Wholehearted Living in a Brokenhearted World, provides one answer. When we can sit with our suffering, not adding any commentary to it, just feeling one sensation, then another, our walls can begin to come down. We feel we can face whatever is there to face. We find ourselves in the middle of what each human being shares- the existence of suffering. And for many of us, in the middle of pain, we find a longing to eliminate it not just for ourselves but for the whole world. In that enlargement of our concern and of our very sense of who we are, instead of an urge to forget we find a path to both personal and collective change and healing.
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This post is republished on Medium.
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Photo credit: Tyler Merbler on Flickr