Fired up. Ready to go
Civilian resisters get their marching orders
While 500 people gathered in San Francisco’s Japantown on a damp, blustery Sunday afternoon to mark the 75th anniversary of FDR’s wartime executive order interning Japanese-Americans, 750 others filled a theater downtown, brought together by the not unimaginable possibility that history could repeat itself.
Hadil Mansoor Al-Mowafak, a 21-year-old Yemeni human rights researcher, whose name is on an American Civil Liberties Union suit stopping President Trump’s original Muslim ban, was one of the speakers. A student at Stanford University, she can’t go home to visit her husband and family. Not if she wants to come back. Noting how Trump’s executive order came down within days of the botched U.S. raid in Yemen, killing a number of men, women and children, she asked of the audience “How could a ban based on hate and discrimination provide any security at all?”
Myrtle Braxton, an 89-year-old community activist in the San Francisco Bay Area, recounted her experience traveling from Texas to California and back during the Jim Crow era, and how strange it was to be able sit anywhere while traveling on the train in California, but going back you had to get off in El Paso and move to the colored section. “We were citizens, yet we weren’t allowed to be citizens,” she recalled.
It was that kind of gathering for citizens in 2017 wanting to do something to push back against the depredations of the Trump era. A sort of peacetime rallying of the troops. ACLU’s Northern California director Abdi Soltani, an Iranian-American born in Los Angeles, recited a passage from one of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense pamphlets in 1776, just prior to the Declaration of Independence:
[A]t the conclusion of the last war, we had experience, but wanted numbers; and forty or fifty years hence, we should have numbers, without experience; wherefore, the proper point of time, must be some particular point between the two extremes, in which a sufficiency of the former remains, and a proper increase of the latter is obtained: And that point of time is the present time.
“We have that now,” said Soltani. “If Thomas Paine looked at us he’d say we’re good to go.” The audience most certainly was. A woman sitting next to me said she spent 14 straight days and nights replying to every single tweet Trump sent. “I had to stop. It was seriously raising my blood pressure,” she said.
Happening in our own backyards
I’ve been doing my bit, donating money to the Democratic candidate in a closely contested race that will determine who controls Delaware’s State Senate. According to the Sister District Project, which matches volunteers in true blue constituencies to help out, financially and otherwise, with campaigns in swing districts elsewhere. Delaware’s special election this Saturday, is one of the “down-ballot race[s] critical to helping Democrats defend or take back control of the states and bring fairness back to redistricting” prior to the 2018 mid-terms.
It’s also an example of one of the levels of engagement Soltani urged his audience to consider. It makes a lot of sense. While Donald Trump continues to take most of the air out of the room, the real action is taking place where Republicans have essentially run the table. “In states from New England to the Midwest and across the South,” reports The New York Times, “conservative lawmakers have introduced or enacted legislation to erode union powers and abortion rights, loosen gun regulations, expand school-choice programs and slash taxes and spending.” At least” 46 voter suppression bills have been introduced in 21 states, a Brennan Center For Justice survey finds.
“Progressives cannot afford to forget about what’s happening in our backyards,” Nick Rathod, executive director of State Innovation Exchange, a Colorado-based group focused on state legislatures, told The Times. “Some of it is even more egregious than what is currently happening in Washington, DC.”
‘Think global, act local’ won’t be enough. “State by state, from California to Florida, status changes, especially for non-citizens,” observed Soltani. “It’s our responsibility in California to think about the scope of the action.”
The liberal Bay Area, for example, could deploy some of its energy to its own backyard, the immigrant-heavy Central Valley, represented by some of the more fervent supporters of President Trump, like House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, climate science denier Tom McClintock and House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes, undying supporter of disgraced national security adviser Michael Flynn.
As Soltani and the other speakers said, the road will be hard and long. “Sometimes we have to march, sometimes we have to go to city council meetings,” said Braxton. To update Thomas Paine, it will be a time to try men’s and women’s souls. As Karen Korematsu reminded us, “all due process was thrown out the window” to make FDR’s executive order the law of the land. It took her late father, Fred Korematsu of Korematsu v. United States, 41 years to get his conviction for refusing to abide by the order overturned. And another 15 years to be award the Presidential Medal of Freedom. “Fred never gave up hope,” his daughter said.
Hadil Mansoor Al-Mowafak urged us to act “before too many wrongs accumulate.” She accompanied her talk with a slide show contrasting images of Yemen before and after the war on terror descended upon it. Her last slide contained simply a dark cloud slightly illuminated by light. She told the audience, “Every cloud has a silver line — and the silver lining is you.” She meant it.
