"Spit in Their Face!"
Get in good trouble. Don’t just march on No Kings Day. Speak out. Loud and proud.
The Trump regime’s goons are marauding and murdering Americans in the streets of America. Then they lie about it even when video disproves their lies. They are bashing in the doors of people’s homes without a judicial warrant. That abomination of an attorney general Pam Bondi is attempting to extort the state of Minnesota to turn over its voting rolls as part of a concerted effort to subvert this year’s midterm elections. And Kash Patel’s suborned FBI has just conducted a search of the Fulton County, Georgia election office as part of Trump’s efforts to discredit the results of the 2020 election in pursuit of his Big Lie.
The juggernaut of MAGA fascism has progressed to the point that if we do not act now, there will be no turning back. We are now at the dangerous phase of authoritarianism when the aspiring dictator goes after his enemies and consolidates power. That is why, I’ll say it again, we need another 1776 moment. Urgently. One of my all-time heroes, Revolutionary War polemicist Thomas Paine, proclaimed, “Those who expect to reap the blessings of freedom must…undergo the fatigue of supporting it.” Now is not the time, he declared, for “summer soldiers and sunshine patriots.” For his speaking out, the British Crown charged him with “seditious libel.”
We must all be Tom Paine’s now. In this digital age, it is vastly easier and more broad-ranging than in his era. We must all bellow from the rhetorical ramparts, “Enough!” You don’t need to be an accomplished writer or podcaster. Each in our own way has a duty to lend our voice and add to the volume of outcry in defense of democracy — at public demonstrations, civic meetings and on social media. And should you be charged with “seditious libel,” wear it, as Paine did, as a badge of honor.
In Cuba, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and other countries, I met with dissidents who put everything on the line to oppose dictators.
The most memorable was award-winning Vietnamese writer, Duong Thu Huong, whose novels, banned in Vietnam, portray the spiritual poverty, hypocrisy and corruption of her country’s one-party rule. For her outspokenness Duong was expelled from the communist party and imprisoned. Over lunch in Hanoi one day, she boasted to me that “I remain here so that I can spit in their face every day.” She added, “My struggle is one that is shared by many others — to gain respect for my rights as a free citizen, here in my own country. Writing is the way I free myself; the way I make myself a free woman.”
People like Duong know that freedom and democracy must be earned, sometimes fought for. Unfortunately, too many Americans take them for granted, leaving themselves vulnerable to losing them.
Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez particularly stands out in my mind. A feisty agitator, she summed up her fellow dissidents’ sentiments: “Freedom is fundamentally the possibility of standing on a street corner and shouting ‘There is no freedom here!’”
This is what the good citizens of Minneapolis are doing now at risk of their freedom and their lives. They are setting the example we all must follow.
As Winston Churchill reputedly said, “You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.” Or as our own John Lewis proclaimed, “Get in good trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.”
Don’t just march on No Kings Day. Speak out. Loud and proud!