Why I Can't Be Silent
Throughout my adult life I have voted regularly, and have paid more than cursory, if less than exhaustive attention to candidates and issues. I have occasionally been elated, more often disappointed. But for the most part I have not attached too much importance to the outcome of elections. I’ve never felt—correctly or not—that the results significantly impacted my day-to-day concerns. My life has been mostly about my work and my family, and politics has seemed not to affect either one very directly.
This year has been different. I have found myself truly fearful at the prospect of a Trump presidency.
Both my parents lived through the Holocaust. Like many survivors, they rarely talked of what they had experienced. I did know from an early age that my mother spent months in the Ravensbruck concentration camp, and that her only brother and her fiancé both died in work lagers; that my father survived work lagers in Poland, but lost both his parents, three sisters and his only brother in Auschwitz. But it wasn’t till I was sixteen that my mother let slip one day that she was my father’s second wife, and that his first wife and three children were murdered in Auschwitz. And it wasn’t till I was fifty that I managed to finally get my father to speak of that first family.
Many years before that though, soon after I started to learn of my family’s history, I vowed never to allow what happened to my parents and their loved ones happen to me and mine. I swore to myself that I would keep a sharp eye out for the fires of vicious intolerance that engulfed my parents’ families; that if I saw the embers of those hatreds begin to glow again—for I knew they’d not been totally extinguished in Europe, our country, or anywhere else—I would not wait for them to burst into flames again before I acted. Early on in his candidacy, Trump tripped alarms to which I long ago vowed to listen.
The night after the third presidential debate, I went to see a production of Macbeth. No, I didn’t go because I wanted to see another power-crazed, deeply deluded, would-be tyrant strut about on a stage. Actually, I went because my daughter was in that production. But once there, I found it remarkable how often lines from the play spoke to my fears about the current campaign. How could I hear, “What’s the newest grief?” without thinking of the latest Trumpian outrage? And when I heard, “I think our country sinks beneath the yoke,/It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash/Is added to her wounds,” I thought not of Macbeth’s ancient Scotland, but of our own nation, today. And when Malcolm says this of Macbeth? (The words in parentheses define the words they follow, what they meant in Shakespeare’s time.) “I grant him bloody,/Luxurious, (lecherous)/avaricious, false, deceitful,/Sudden, (violent) malicious, smacking of every sin /That has a name.” I didn’t hear Macbeth described, I heard slight hyperbole for Trump. OK, I grant him not bloody.
In the play, Macbeth and his henchmen murder Macduff’s wife and three children. In this production my daughter played the role of one of those children. Given that, and given my family’s history, it’s not surprising that the scene in Macbeth that affected me the most was Macduff grieving after he learns what happened. I thought of my father, after enduring four years in a work lager, returning home to find his wife and three children gone forever.
Early in the play, soon after he murders Duncan, Macbeth, pretending to speak only of the recent stormy weather, says, “’Twas a rough night.” I couldn’t help but hear that as a reference to the previous night, the night of the third debate—which was rough. But, it’s been months of rough nights, and days. And “Present fears/Are less than horrible imaginings.”
There were many other resonances in Macbeth to current events, but perhaps the one most apt was this, “If such a one be fit to govern, speak.” No, I don’t think our country—despite Trump and some of his followers—is now anywhere near where Germany was in 1933. And no, I can’t bring myself to believe, even should the unthinkable happen—Trump elected—that it would inevitably lead to an American Holocaust. But I do know that Trump, whose speeches are laced with distortions, wild exaggerations and outright lies, with racist, xenophobic, misogynist, and anti-Semitic innuendos, dog whistles, code words, and winks and nods, and who, despite all that—or sadly, in some cases because of all that—manages to inspire loyalty among millions, is a very dangerous man and one who needs to be soundly rejected. “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.” Because it’s worth noting that it took Hitler less than eight years—the length of two American presidential terms—to transform significant parts of the German population into perhaps the most brutally efficient mass murder machine the world has yet known. And that he somehow simultaneously managed to mute and muzzle much of the rest of Germany, and even the world, and prevent them from acting from their better, more human instincts. “Bleed, bleed poor country!/Great tyranny, lay thou thy basis sure,/For goodness dare not check thee.” It’s also worth noting that our country’s track record is not encouraging when it comes to the history of our treatment of Native Americans, African Americans, and many groups of new immigrants.
It-can’t-happen-here style complacency is not an option in this election. If you’re thinking of not voting, or planning to vote for a hopeless third party candidate, please think again. It’s the monstrous Lady Macbeth who says, “Things without all remedy/Should be without regard. What’s done is done.” There is a remedy, and no, it is not done.
Whether Trump is elected or not, there has been enormous damage done. “You have displaced the mirth, broke the good meeting/With most admired disorder.” Yes, I know, it was not by any means all “mirth” and “good meeting” before Trump. In fact, one can argue that too little “good meeting” is part of what led to Trump. After the election there will need to be a significant period of reflection and healing for our country. “Alas, poor country,/Almost afraid to know itself.” We will need to find ways of listening to and talking with each other to learn why and how it was that so many felt so unheard that they were willing to support such a candidate.
“Things at the worst will cease, or else climb upward/To what they were before.” I echo that. At the very least we need to “climb upward” to where we were before Trump and, I fervently hope, well past that.
