As is so often the case when social justice and equity become the enemies of political plutocrats and opportunists, the burden of 2017-brand Trumpian repression will fall unequally on women and children, the sick and the aged, and on minorities and the powerless of all types.
Which is why the vast successes of last weekend’s women’s marches (see Cameron Machell and Stacey Rupolo’s “The Women’s March, from Five Corners to Washington, D.C.,” page A1), from Five Corners to Antarctica, were so important. Far from the trivialized coastal elite concerns that David Brooks (New York Times, Jan. 24, 2017) decries, Saturday’s mobilization by millions focuses attention on the actual humans threatened with commoditization and marginalization. Instead of people and threats, Brooks sees debate about the values embodied in globalism and capitalism as our rightful priorities. However important, these are moving targets, always impersonal and imperfect compromises. The threatened and the victims, the ones Brooks patronizes and dismisses — the ones without the Trumpian leverage that gets you attention in his world — collectively can give voices, and faces, to the needs we have to meet.
Giving up a day or two, and putting in some time on buses and in traffic jams, may be small sacrifices in the scheme of things, but it has helped to crystallize disaffection and fear in a way that, sadly, the presidential election itself did not. Apparently underestimated by the Trump/Breitbart/Twitter machine, the marches surprised and overwhelmed with a message of resistance and frustration.
They may have brought us in sight of a watershed. The fear of disenfranchisement brought on by Trumpism and the empty, opportunistic Republicans now preening in Washington has moved us to discover local resolve, and local resources, to protect our community and its essential virtues. Efforts to help people get involved in government at a grassroots level, such as the forum announced by the West Tisbury library and the League of Women Voters for Feb. 4, can help inform and focus, and even better, can prod those of us uncomfortable with political activism.
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