Don't Tread On Me

How many lives have been sacrificed for god and country? And honor, don’t forget honor. When we get worked up about a cause, we go for glory and blood.

I’m beyond most of that now. I never would have joined a religious crusade, and I was happy I had a high draft number when we were slogging through Vietnam. I’ve mostly avoided fights. I did get decked once, but that wasn’t much of a fight. I never saw the punch coming.

I’ve had plenty of what men in business call negotiations, but what are really tests of will, the step right before fist meets face. They can be both stressful and exhilarating, the way minstrels and poets romanticize brothers in arms.

I’ve turned to contemplation, and it’s nice but lacks a clarifying climax, kind of like my early back-seat exploits at drive-in movies. I've known the passion of anger, though, the sudden rush of its energizing tonic. I don’t exactly long for it, but I recall it the way a man sitting on a park bench on a cold clear day with a blanket over his shoulders might remember striding purposefully forward in his shirtsleeves.

I remember that feeling well enough to realize it is stirring in me now. I have been first nudged and now jerked out of my somnambulant bliss by a threat graver than any I remember in my lifetime. This time the threat is not from without, but from within. The face, and the source, of the threat is the president of the United States.

By now I’m sure I don’t need to remind you of the harm he has done in mere months, trampling on civil rights, alienating allies, adopting disastrous economic policies. Hardcore MAGA may be happy with his actions (although even they are beginning to have second thoughts about his economic wrecking ball), but most of the rest of us are not.

By viciously demonstrating that it is dangerous to oppose him, he has intimidated many into silence. Too many big law firms, the praetorian guard of the legal system, have not only failed to oppose him, they have capitulated with promises to defend his causes, for free, and to no longer promote reforms like employment diversity that he opposes. 

Opposition is not for the faint-hearted. Not only does the president have all the levers of power, he has his brownshirt MAGA vigilantes. He has shown a willingness to delay obeying, or even ignore, court decisions that restrict his actions. In any event, the glacial speed of the judicial process is no match for his blitzkrieg of lawlessness.

I’m not faint-hearted, not in this moment, at least, but I worry I may be impotent, as pitifully ineffective as an old man facing down a Russian tank in Ukraine, hoping to save his family, willing to give his life for them, when the likelihood is that he will die in vain and what he fears will happen or not will in any event be entirely outside his control.

So how to fight? I’m not sure yet. 

Joining others where I can help, I think, whether marching at protests or raising my voice like this. All I know is that I have to do something, as surely as I would if someone broke into my house in the middle of the night and threatened my family. We’re down to a level of threat and response that is that basic, that compelling. 

We can resist or be subjugated.

How to Make the World a Better Place

Do your best. Do right. Be honest. Be compassionate. Help your neighbors in need.

That’s a decent life. Very Jimmy Stewart.

And if trouble came to town and threatened his family and friends, we all know what Jimmy would do. He’d stand up straight with his hat tipped back, squinting, and ask what he could do for them and whether they wouldn’t like to just move on.

But what if the trouble was bigger than a few men? What if it was all around, almost invisible, jumping out of the shadows in black masks and spiriting people away, people who weren’t expecting it, who didn’t think they’d done anything wrong, who were unprepared and defenseless.

If Jimmy were the sheriff, he’d run those bandits out of town. He’d rally the townfolk to help him.

Well, trouble has come to our town, and the sheriff isn’t Jimmy Stewart. Indeed, the sheriff is just the opposite, more like Black Bart.

Now what? People are cracking open their drapes and peering out to see what Bart is going to do. He and his gang are in the saloon getting liquored up, slapping the barmaid on the ass, shooting at the feet of the town lawyer, telling him to dance and laughing as he tries.

There’s no judge to hold Bart back. The judge is a circuit judge, and he’s somewhere else just now, out in the vast territory, god knows where.

Maybe Bart and his gang will raise hell, scare everyone for a bit, get heir sadistic kicks and move on. That’s what everyone peeking out the window between parted curtains is hoping.

Bart doesn’t leave though. Word goes out that he’s running a lawless town and desperados come from all over the territory. There are no rules. Bart and his boys do what they damn well please. They take the women, humiliate the men. Standing up to them seems hopeless. Worse than hopeless, lethal.

But then someone does. 

It’s the blacksmith, a hard man with a kind heart, or the lad not much older than a schoolboy with the reckless courage of the young. They set traps for Bart’s men. They steal their guns in the night. They cut loose their horses. And after each daring act of resistance, they hide in plain sight, going on about their business with the downcast gaze of obedience. Some of them are caught and shot. Some manage to slip out of town, but most stay, not out of fear but out of determination to save their town and their families and neighbors by undermining and routing out the pestilence that has descended upon them.

Did they succeed in taking back their town? Yes, but it took a long time and a lot of suffering. Was it worth it? Bart lies dead in an unmarked grave, or that’s the story that is told, but maybe he just slunk away in the night when he realized the town was stronger than he was, had more guts, had more to live for. The children of the blacksmith and the young lad who were the first resisters go to school in a new building erected on the site of the old saloon from which Bart unleashed his terror. They read about Bart in their school books the way they read about all history, with open and welcomed curiosity, and without fear. 

So what do you think, was it worth it?