You've seen this movie before; make sure you remember all the beats

Getting things off my chest a few days ago was the right call. I've had some realizations (that I don't need to share here, at least not right now...), and I'm now able to think on Things more clearly.

I'm looking for what might be called Comfort Wisdom. I want to find people who have lived through some variation of this reality before. For a couple of reasons, I've found Studs Terkel's archives invaluable, especially this weekend. 

His show ran for decades--amazing to hear the same interview Lorraine Hansberry before her untimely death, as well as Carl Sagan decades later. My heart fluttered when I heard Edward Said this weekend, and I shook my head and sighed when he interviewed someone about Gorbachev. Actual good times.

I haven't listened to even one percent of his archives, but I'm picking up on at least one theme. He talks about the violence in the United States at the time, and you can practically see him pointing at Vietnam and then nuclear weapons. It's the same point Donna Leon made in her latest Commissario Brunetti installment; for all of the complaints about baby gangs, do people really not notice that they're trying to be little militias? Where would they have gotten that idea?

It's a sociological insight that is, of course, pretty obvious, but which I really do need someone to point to. It's so obvious, actually,  that I wonder why I have to go back through archives almost sixty years old to find it. (I had heard some inklings of it before, but it was dismissed as so much handwaving.) But here we are, and find it I did. Now I'll have an extended think on it.

What I don't need any kind of review of is actual known and discussed history, but am I the only one? No, I'm very grateful for the Gaslit Nation community, because they got the memo--excuse me, history book--and actually read it. They seem to be the only ones though. 

I've been horrified for over a decade as I've seen similar scenes from the 1930s play out and people proceed as if they don't know what they need to not do if they want to avoid similar consequences. If Syria wasn't a full-on repeat of Spain, it was a close enough rhyme that we should have known that abandoning the Syrians wasn't going to help anyone. And wow, how difficult was it to predict that if Syrians had to flee their country, other countries gutted by austerity programs were going to lose their minds and lean full-on native? (It wasn't hard at all unless you were Obama and Jake Sullivan, but those were evidently the only ones who mattered.) Almost as difficult as it is to predict how trustworthy Putin would be about ending the war in Ukraine if we, you know, appeased him. Ask Neville Chamberlain how well that worked out.

I feel similarly about the consequences of voting in someone who has made fascist promises, as well as people who are calling for political violence as a counter measure. I see people talking about that, and I feel like I am in an alternate dimension. Just...are you out of your minds? That kind of violence will accomplish nothing. (I can go back to the late 19th century for that lesson.) Somebody, somewhere, might get to vent their anger, but it won't stop the much more organized violence of fascists. I will say that coming in strong numbers when there is a threat is a good strategy, but thinking you can shoot your way out of this is not the right move. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't choose passive resistance out of cowardice, but strategy. He was leading a "minority" movement, and his accomplishments were amazing. Imagine what a majority using the same strategy can accomplish?

Deb in the City