Apathy is Democracy's Biggest Threat
As the country watched, Jews at prayer were held hostage in their Synagogue. The hostage taker was apparently trying to swap the hostages for a convict imprisoned for her involvement with Al Quaeda.
Perhaps like many people, my first thought was this is anti-Semitism. Maybe some people dismiss the anti-Semitism factor because we don’t talk about hate among Semites. Semites are like any other demographic in the sense that we have diverse opinions, political views, and some of us are as bigoted as any other group.
Today’s America is fractured politically, along racial lines, based on religion or sexual identity and gender. Add to that the fact that there are Americans who reject the constitutional values we have held dear from America’s inception.
Without question, Americans agree that change is needed, but there is a fundamental difference on the type of change. A small following of the former president, is persuaded that they can get a white supremacist utopia with cheating in elections, and if that doesn’t work, a violent overthrow of the government.
Any sign of division excites them because that increases their chances of achieving their white supremacist utopia. So they believe.
Our best defense isn’t to hide differences. We can heal those divisions by bringing them out in the open and listening to each other. Even better if we look at things in terms of we vs. us and them. Arguably, that’s a different kind of utopian fantasy. But more importantly,. we won’t resolve it in time to address the more pressing concern. Adults learn to prioritize issues and the most important.one we face today is the struggle to save and defend our democracy.
I won’t dare to claim that I’m an expert on Martin Luther King, but I do understand one thing about his goals.
He wanted us to understand that indifference and apathy are even bigger threats to democracy than the violence of fascists and other kinds of authoritarians. Apathy played a role in the events that led to January 6th, 2020. Apathy made Donald Trump’s 2016 win possible. Apathy is a threat to democracy when its dominant foe is dictatorship. We saw it in real time. We saw the difference between the imperfect America we knew before and the one where government put children in cages and did all it could to let a pandemic spread with some hoping Covid would wipe out Democrats. We got a Supreme Court that is more politicized than it ever was in my life time. They don’t even bother with legal reasoning and precedent when the fascist majority issues its rulings.
We saw dramatic surges in hate crimes and increasing terrorist attacks on Synagogues which remind me of some of the experiences my mother shared of life as a young Jewish girl.
It all comes back to the most pressing of several crises we face together, namely our defense of democracy. For it’s under democracy that hate is sent back under the rocks from which it comes. Perhaps complete elimination of it is not foreseeable today. But we can contain it, as we saw. The first step is passing federal Voting Rights laws. We need laws to punish those who threaten and intimidate election officials and volunteers. We must stop state election nullification bills above all else.
Senators who hid behind the filibuster then refuse even the most minor changes in it to find a path to passing voting rights are the sort of people Martin Luther King warned us about. They assure us how much they love democracy and voting rights but bless their hearts it is so much more important to hold on to a tool of obstruction that can be phoned in.
Don’t believe them. Voting for voting rights bills when you know they won’t pass is not supporting voting rights. Primary them out when the opportunity presents itself.
Image provided by Amber and Frank of Resistance United