America, Love it or Leave it.

I’m reading a book about the rise of Nazi Germany, and it’s making me mad. I’m sad about what Hitler and his henchmen did to Jews and gypsies and anyone who opposed them, but I’m mad that it’s happening again. Right here in the good old U.S. of A.

Vienna is rioting, Hitler said. I have to go in to restore order. The Austrians implore me.

Muslims in New Jersey celebrated as the World Trade towers collapsed, Trump said, as part of his justification for his Muslim immigration ban. We need to get those people out of here, that was his message.

Hitler burned books and imprisoned anyone who wrote the truth about what he was doing. Trump has done a pretty good job of turning many of us against the liberal media, those purveyors of FAKE NEWS. Or, as the rest of us know it: the truth.

Hitler only wanted Poland, he told the appeasers. Trump has lied about his intentions on so many fronts, it’s hard to know where to start. Here’s one that’s going to hurt a lot of people: he promised to keep healthcare protections for pre-existing conditions; now his justice department is saying they are unconstitutional.

When I was growing up in the South, it seemed like a particularly patriotic area. Big signs along the highways proclaimed our love of our country and our culture: “Impeach Earl Warren” (the author of the Supreme Court’s school-desegregation decision, a clearly un-American point of view in the south in 1954). “America, Love it or Leave it” nicely summed up a widely held sentiment.

So, I did.

Or at least I left the part of the country that I thought was still uniquely in the thrall of Jim Crow’s inability to accept the outcome of the Civil War.

I went to L.A. It was not long after the Watts Riots. Ronald Reagan was the governor. I should have realized that racism and xenophobia weren’t confined to the South, but I was young and naive and idealistic. 

Now I know. 

I never thought Trump would be elected. I thought we were better than that. So did Jon Stewart. We were both wrong.

Jon Stewart said he quit The Daily Show because he was tired of being so angry. He said watching Fox News to get material for his show was like being a “turd miner.” He said he hoped he didn’t get “turd-lung disease.”

I wish he’d hung in there. Maybe he could have kept us sane and grounded enough to not fall under Trump’s charismatic spell. I doubt it, though. Only people who already agreed with him watched his show. That and those who wanted sound bites to mock him.

Well, I’m with Jon now. I’m angry. And, like him, I’m tired of being angry, but (no offense intended to Jon, who did yeoman’s work for 15 years) I’m determined not to quit. We’ve all seen what happened when the good people of Germany stopped resisting. That’s all it takes for the cancer of hatred to spread. 

We are our body-politic’s immune system. We are weakened now, but we are not wiped out. We need to fight. We need to attack. If we don’t, our way of life will die. Just as it did in Nazi Germany. Just as it did in Fascist Italy and Spain. Just as it does whenever good people look the other way until it is too late.