How Lucky We Are to Resist Right Now: A Layman’s Thoughts on Resisting Trump

“Look around, look around, at how lucky we are to be alive right now. History is happening…” – “The Schuyler Sisters” from Hamilton, An American Musical.

Upon a recent listen of the soundtrack to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s popular Broadway musical “Hamilton,” the lyric above struck me. While the times are tumultuous and pose great challenges, they offer some incredible opportunity for our communities to stand and activate. The American revolution surely posed similar moments of fear, shock, and resolve for those people living in those times. In the face of danger, uncertainty, and fear, a community came together to form the nation we now live. I, for one, know plenty of passionate and inspiring young people who will stand and refuse defeatism along with the oppressive and unconstitutional policies perpetuated by this current administration.

Millions struggle to process the recent happenings in our government, myself included. I don’t offer any action-based silver bullets to cure our current predicament. I find myself reading more books than I can keep up with, searching for wise words, keen analysis, or solution-oriented action items. Perhaps, I am in search of a leader to galvanize around. Perhaps, I am in search of some new, groundbreaking policy solutions. Perhaps, I am searching for any thread of sanity pulling in any direction that leads away from the current state of our nation.

I find myself less interested in talking about semantic nuances of identity or the mundane details of some politically provocative event, as much as I am interested in acknowledging where we are and wanting actions, wanting something to do. We all process in our own ways and in our own time, but I have lately bordered on insensitivity in moments of perceived need for agency.

It is not that I am looking for a quick fix, but I am looking for something productive and positive that I can do with my time. While I find it mildly amusing to consider how corrupt or messed up our government has been in the past by reading about Cheney, Rove & Co., I am more interested with how we fix the current issues and political climate. If anything can be learned from Cheney, Rove & Co., it is that conflict of interest and corruption is not new. However, the Trumpian flavor of blatantly flying flags of unconstitutional, prejudiced policies in the face of all comers is new. Inventing facts and controlling information is new to the United States, but straight out of the dictator’s handbook. We have never seen a Machavellian shadow rear its head in modern American history. With that said, three takeaways come to the forefront of my own resistance and corrective efforts.

1. Fatigue Factor

As a person of color, I am well aware of the fatigue that sets in during moments when I become overwhelmed with having to educate a great too many people in every forum I find myself. Minority communities are well aware of this experience. I fear that this administration will create a fatigue in a large contingent of the progressive resistance, for it takes too much emotional bandwidth to maintain the appropriate outrage for all the gaffs this administration commits. Four years of outrage is unsustainable.

I propose making a list. Every time this administration steps in it, write it down, date it. Write down every time a Congress member says or does anything offensive, illegal, or worthy of public reprimand. Review and revisit the list regularly, so that you do not lose sight of everything that is going on.

Then, engage in the level of resistance that you find appropriate, whether that be demonstrating, posting on social media, contacting your representatives in Congress, etc. There will be actions and policies that impact those of the resistance in different manners. We must allow everyone to feel what they feel, but maintain a united front, for our goals of righting the ship are only frustrated by division amongst us. (This is not to say that those perpetuating toxic or counterproductive activities are given free license.)

2. Humanize Everything

These issues are human issues. We cannot allow Trump to out humanize us. He has successfully appealed to enough Americans’ issues of importance to get himself in the White House. Eight years of Obama were not working for a huge contingency of the American electorate that see our paradigm shifting away from an industrial work force as a personal attack on their livelihood and generations of their families’ livelihoods. These are not necessarily issues created by President Obama, but for a large swath of the electorate, they were impacted enough to seek change in whatever form they could find. We need to acknowledge how he won before we can attempt to identify avenues toward future victory.

Similarly, we cannot allow ourselves to cast wide our condemnation of all who voted for him, despite how you feel about the millions that cast their vote for Trump and how their votes simultaneously asserted that your value as a person was less important than theirs. While I believe that all racists voted for Trump, I do not believe that all people who voted for Trump are racist.

We need to humanize Trump supporters. Every single person who voted for Trump had a series of life experiences that cultivated in them their political stances. We will never successfully break through to any of them by painting them with a broad brush. While from a political science standpoint, we do not necessarily need to win them all back in order to reclaim American politics in 2018 and beyond, we do need to make peace with whatever it is that is causing this fissure and fracturing of the American electorate. We must humanize the issues and attempt to understand each of the reasons they believe what they believe. This allows us to see what they see, understand how they got to a place where voting for Trump was their best perceived option, and, most importantly, gain the ability to find solutions to those reasons that pushed them to vote that way.

For example, it is never productive to approach someone and simply call them a racist. That sort of name-calling is never going to produce the results we want, i.e. for that person to critically examine their conduct and character and realize that the impact of their actions is deeply hurtful. Rather, the most effective means of persuasion is compassion and understanding. We must meet someone where they are, attempt to understand why they did or said what they did. This does not mean that directness is not necessary, because it is. One can be direct within a compassionate approach.

Not everyone will be on the same page. Understand that there will be differences amongst the right and left sides of the political spectrum. What is of the utmost importance when engaging with others that hold differing ideals is to remember that they are but an amalgamation of their experiences and they could be anywhere in the world, but they are present and engaging with you. Of late, it appears so much more frequent to see vitriolic or aggressive attacks of those with whom we disagree… forgetting that such attacks frustrate our ends. That very reality that they disagree with us should force us to seek to understand and through such understanding, bring and lift others up through compassion, empathy, understanding, and education.

Wokeness is a spectrum. Not everyone woke up on third base. Everyone learned and grew through their life experiences and their efforts to educate themselves. Let us not be self-righteous in our “wokeness,” but use that knowledge as the tool that it is. Knowledge is nothing if it is left isolated and idle. Let use leverage the knowledge of the group to further our ends and not wield it like a weapon against those who are not yet on our level.

3. Locus of Control

Washington, D.C. is far away. You have a life to live. Focus on what you can do in your day to day. You have family, friends, and plenty of others that need you, depend on you, and care about you. So, treat others the way you want to be treated. Focus on living a life worth living. Get involved in your local community to help make it more like the community you want live in.

You can control how you treat people and how you spend your time and energies. Be active in the resistance to the extent that you are able, but great emphasis must be placed on not investing too much energy in things that you have no control over. Local politics and government are hugely susceptible to local activism. Identify ways your community can resist and help your elected and local leaders implement that change.

In closing, in a funny way, we have a lot to thank Donald Trump for. If Hillary Clinton would have become the 45th President of the United States, I am certain that this level of momentum and activation of the masses would have never happened. How lucky we are to be alive right now, to make this moment in history be remembered as the moment the American electorate woke up and demanded a new direction.

Then, on the other hand, a friend recently reminded me that the Republicans and white nationalists truly only have a few more years (2040?) until the American electorate is comprised of a majority of minorities… because we know how most minorities tend to vote.