We're a bunch of dum-dums as my friend Kelly would word it.
I have a blog about my Grandparents. It is an extensive research project, mapping a time in history that is incredibly devastating and fascinating all at the same time. My Opa escaped from Nazi Germany, and few people in his extended family were able to say the same. He sat with a relative in Israel many years later and they came up with a estimated list of over 70 people lost from their family to the Holocaust.
I have letters from that time period, personal accounts and interviews, archival information that I have (with great help from my husband) assembled into a sort of chronological time line of an intimate story of someone who lived through one of the shittiest times in modern history.
Here's the catcher- not a huge amount of people read that blog. I've got some faithful followers and some really amazing connections through that process, but I get more hits on this personal blog where I just say whatever I want to say with zero research and hit publish.
I think the reason why is because we just don't want to do the work. I sure as hell don't. I get it, this is easier to read. It has more emotion and can be swallowed whole without too much work. It is exhausting to get informed. I am attached to my particular historical venture because it's my own grandparents. But we don't want to do the work because it's all in the past, it doesn't really matter, it was AGES ago. Except it really wasn't. And one of the primary questions researchers ask about the Holocaust is: how? Not why, but How. Because Germany was a very civilized culture. Germany did not fit the barbarian expectations. HOW? No one has really been able to fully satisfy that question, though many theories are helpful.
We never really know what makes people go from kind, peaceful people, to people who have no problem decimating an entire race or religion from the face of the earth. This is why you have some people hysterical over the strikingly similar Hitler-esque moves that Trump is making. It's not a cliche. It's not an over-reaction. It is a viable, actual parallel that people who have done the work are screaming until they are blue in the face because they just can't imagine that we are really this many dum-dums.
But we are.
A friend in conversation the other day said that humans are unique in their capacity to adapt. We will adapt to whatever we need to in order to survive. If we are given a slow, steady pace to do that- even better. This is our double-edged sword. We may lack wisdom in our adaptation. And just for clarification: adaptation and change are not synonymous. Change is progression, evolution, growth, expansion. What we as humans do to adapt can sometimes mean that we regress, recoil, detach.
People of color and/or those historically marginalized are actually perhaps a little shocked at our white shock. Did we really think there was no possible way a person so blatantly racist, sexist, and just plain rude could be elected? Were we really this blind? Yes, yes we were. We thought the justice arc was bending for good. We didn't realize how hard it was to keep it bent or keep it going, or that the bending was as a direct result of generations of fighters. We thought it was just a natural evolution. We didn't recognize how fragile that foundation of equality really was.
As the spot-on skit on SNL with Dave Chappelle illustrated: America is really racist- this is not news to people. It is to us white people who haven't had to fight for the ground to stay still. Our ground is still. It always has been. We've been exposed to our vulnerability, our naivety. As a woman, I have some clue to that vulnerability, but not nearly enough for me to not be surprised. I'm startled and shamed by the incredibly thick skin of people who are terrified but also saying: "Yup- saw this coming."
HOW DO YOU FIGHT THAT LONG AND THAT HARD TO EXIST?! I am humbled to my CORE.
Not everything should be adapted to. We should not adapt and think: we're good people having a bad day. NO! We are flawed people having a lazy time. We have to do the work, and I think that's why I'm so shell-shocked when I hear the next apocalyptic choice by Donald Trump for someone to grace the halls of the White House. A gifted propagandist who is clearly racist and misogynistic. I can even see the media struggling to adapt to that news. Like "We're horrified, but maybe it's not as bad as we think." I don't think that we should adapt to being optimistic about what someone like that can or cannot do in power.
History has already informed us of what people like that do while in power. It generally turns out poorly for the outcast, and eventually hits the elite in the backside too.
So I'm shell-shocked because I see history unfolding (again) and I see the work ahead and I just want to bow out. I want to say, maybe if I close my eyes and sleep for a bit, when I wake up- it won't have been so bad. But we do not have the luxury to do that. And even if some of us do- it is a sin to rest in that luxury.
The hope? The lesson has been written, there are enough people to listen to it, and I genuinely believe that Germany was full of lovely people who might have made a difference if they weren't so good at adapting. So America, let's not adapt so easily. Let's not be complacent when the arc of justice feels like it may have just sprung in the opposite direction. Let's bend it back. Let's work harder. Let's open up our love to embrace more deeply. Let's give the folks who have been fighting already (despite our laziness) a hand.
Friends and I were talking about "what do we do?" DO whatever you can. Speak up. Volunteer. Call your representative. Phone a new friend who isn't like you and form human connections. Mention uncomfortable things at the dinner table. Do NOT adapt. Follow your heroes in history.
Be optimistic about the fight, but not optimistic that there is no need for a fight.
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