By Laura Haight
President, DWGC

In the Bulwark recently, Jonathan Last wrote: “The American Age is over, and it ended because the American people were no longer worthy of it.”

Let that sink in for a second. It’s a harsh statement but as much as I don’t want it to be true, I believe it is. We gave up our power, we stopped reading, we stopped respecting education and educators, we stopped participating in the “government of the people, by the people and for the people,” we turned inward and away from the ideals of the past. We started viewing “others” as taking something away from “us.” And we turned a deaf ear toward traditional media, choosing instead to believe podcasters and influencers who better represented what the disaffected were already thinking. 

Sherilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, wrote a frighteningly prescient piece recently noting that Trump’s current practice of disappearing immigrants is just testing the fences. He has successfully deployed thugs wearing no badge or identification, to pull random people off the street with no warrant, and ship them off to a foreign country’s jail with no due process. So far, Trump is basically ignoring court rulings, including from the Supreme Court. 

But worse is the normalization of these actions; the official dehumanization of individuals not yet convicted, but certainly not presumed innocent. Once we allow the rights of any person to be swept away, we open the door to more. We give Trump and his personal army the ability to arrest anyone it deems to be a threat to “his agenda.” And to send them – American citizen or not – to jail in El Salvador. 

Will we be seeing this on the streets of Greenville eventually? Has it already happened? 

We cannot turn a blind eye. We no longer have the luxury of saying we are for democracy. Now all of us have a role to play in fighting for that democracy. 

Believe me, I know how lofty and overblown this sounds. I reread and rewrote this several times. But the fact is, the American Age may not be dead yet, but it is on life support. And all of us have a part to play in saving it. The acts of “doing something” that we talked about during the election cycle are much more crucial now.