Now is the time for all Americans to come to the aid of their country

Yahoo

7 hours ago

(Photo: Brandon Kingdollar/NC Newsline)
So, I was at a protest last month in Cleveland, where I was visiting my dying mother. I told her I needed to leave her to go downtown for the protest on that damp, windy spring day. She understood.
The turnout was okay. My reporter's eye would have put the crowd at around a thousand. I usually attend protests in Raleigh, and the one a couple weeks previously hit around five thousand, though I'm told the protest I missed while I was in Cleveland was somewhat smaller. A little more recently I went to another protest, and that hit a nice crowd of maybe 500 or more in downtown Durham on a Thursday afternoon. Then I was going to join the one in Raleigh on the same day but a friend said don't bother, it's ending and had only a few hundred people.
So, I have a single question, a question for the folks of Cleveland and Raleigh and North Carolina and everywhere else:
Where the hell are you people?
What are you waiting for? Illegal deportations? Check. Anonymous secret police grabbing people up and disappearing them regardless of rights or status? Done. Wholesale refusal to respect the Constitution, whether that means abiding by judicial rulings and the emoluments clause or simply respecting citizens' first, fourth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amendment rights? Already there.
Nothing is lacking; all the signs and actions are there. The current regimes — both in North Carolina and Washington DC — do not respect the courts, the ballot box, the people, or the rule of law.
And here came nationwide protests and you — you personally! You! — where the hell were you? What, did you have errands to run? Yoga? The lawn looked like a mess? You had the sniffles? 'I was GOING to stand up to fascism,' we will say in the future, 'but I had an orthodontist appointment.' We laughed scornfully about Trump's refusal to honor World War I dead in France because of rain. Well, where the hell are we and what's keeping us away?
You guys: we don't have time for this bull. I mean we don't have time for all the protests, sure; that's part of the plan. If we're exhausted and poor and worn out, we're less likely to protest. But just like you never have time for a doctor's appointment until what the doctor could have quickly solved puts you in the hospital or the grave? We either protest now like our lives depend on it — spoiler alert — or we let them do as they please with our lives. Those are the only options. Nobody is coming to help us; those who can, like corporations (with the usual few noble exceptions: Penzeys, Ben & Jerry's, Costco) or political leadership, won't. Those who wish they could (the entire rest of what we once called the free world) can't.
It's us or nobody. And just the way more than a third of our population looked at a choice between trying to solve our problems on the one hand and electing a vast new and terrifying parcel of much worse problems on the other, said 'So sorry, busy, can't be bothered,' you — You! You personally! — are going about your business.
Dude. Your business is saving your life. You may love the game you're playing on your phone, and you should play it and enjoy it — but if you fall into the sea while you're playing it, don't keep playing: swim for your life. You may need to work out for your health, but if someone tries to kidnap you while you're jogging by, you don't get to say, 'I'd love to fight back, but, you know: leg day.' You have to inconvenience yourself.
A meme went around during the first Trump administration that said, 'I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.' It was a wonderful symbol of the great divide among us. Now we're in the same place, only I'm talking to my fellow non-Fascist Americans. I don't know how to tell you that when someone is trying to enslave you, you fight: you fight and you do not stop fighting, because it's now or never. I'm told that if we get 3.5 percent of the people in the streets, we're going to win. What are we telling them if we don't?
My wife tells me she has been taught that if someone has her in their control and plans to rape her, the calculations are complex. If I choose to go along, will that let me live through it? Should I run? Can I keep him talking? Will fighting make things worse? It's unimaginable but correct: whatever keeps you alive, do that, and live to work through the horrible consequences. But if in that situation your captor tries to pull you into a vehicle? Fight for your life: you won't come back out. Once he gets you in that car? You're as good as dead. Fight.
You guys, they've got us, and they're trying to pull us into the car. I personally am fighting for our lives. What do you plan to do? June 14th there's another nationwide protest, scheduled for the same day as the idiot birthday parade.
You guys, it's now or never. Fight or die.