There Is a Future, and It Is Not for Cowards

Troops are in the streets now, just like we knew they would be. We’re told they are there to fight crime. But that’s just another lie to go with all of the other lies. If it were really about crime, President Trump would send troops to cities that are more violent than Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. I live in Ohio. Cleveland, Toledo, Akron and Dayton are all more dangerous. Here are some options in other states: Memphis, Tennessee, Little Rock, Arkansas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma.

But because President Trump is sending troops to bully his Democratic opposition and normalize the use of troops on domestic soil, rather than fight crime, we know that he won’t send them to those cities because those cities are in states controlled by Republicans. How do I know that President Trump is sending troops to bully his Democratic opposition and normalize the use of troops on domestic soil? That’s a great question. The answer is that I have eyes and ears and critical thinking skills that all still work despite 10 years of being told I should believe every ridiculous pretext for President Trump doing something horrible. 

The pretext for the troop deployment is fighting a nonexistent crime wave. It shares a common denominator with Trump’s pretexts for his other wrecking-ball initiatives, whether it’s killing off vaccines, whitewashing museum exhibits or rounding up peaceful delivery drivers and landscapers: fear, or more precisely, the cynical exploitation of fear. Here’s a running, non-exhaustive list of the fears driving the Trump agenda:

Fear of the future.

Fear of the past.

Fear of women.

Fear of brown people.

Fear of gay people.

Fear of cities.

Fear of technology.

Fear of science.

Fear of medicine.

Fear of artists.

Fear of journalists.

Fear of education.

Fear of teachers.

Fear of students.

It brings to mind one of my favorite Onion headlines:

Conservative Man Proudly Frightened Of Everything

FLOWER MOUND, TX—Condemning the “woke left” for what he called the “modern evisceration of masculinity,” local conservative man Hank Daniels confirmed Monday that he was never going to stop being proudly frightened of everything. “I’m proud as hell to be scared of everything, and there’s nothing you can do to silence me about that fact,” said Daniels, puffing out his chest as he spoke from behind a barricaded basement door that he had reinforced to keep out the “terrifying liberals, women, and immigrants who haunt my thoughts, at all hours of the day and night, whether I’m awake or asleep,” which he told reporters he was not ashamed to admit in the slightest. “Whether it’s gender stuff, trans people, or a small Asian toddler growing up in a household that speaks more languages than just English, I will live my life in absolute fear, proudly and without apology—that’s the conservative way. You say ‘city,’ and I’m going to piss myself, and there’s no way I’m going to hide that wet spot just to make you libs more comfortable. I’m going to tell it like it is—for instance, I’m a man, and I’m scared of my own desires, and I don’t care who knows it!” Daniels added that his fears didn’t end with cultural concepts either—he was also quite fearful of spiders and had no problem stating that openly.

The OnionThe Onion Staff

I’ve stopped trying to figure out who in MAGA World is actually afraid and who is cynically exploiting fear because the result is the same: an America in a defensive crouch, retreating from the world.

Fear was already on my mind when I learned that Ohio State has banned students from using sidewalk chalk, presumably because those pesky students might write something that’s offensive to tender Republican sensibilities.

That’s right: OSU administrators are officially scared of students with chalk. That’s an amazing thing. In fact, it’s so amazing that it’s actually hard to imagine a more complete demonstration of cowardice and abandonment of free speech. This follows OSU bending the knee in a variety of other ways and generally downplaying the threat to academic freedom and higher education.

One of the most depressing things of this first year of Trump II has been watching so many of our institutions roll over so quickly and so completely in the face of the authoritarian threat. What’s particularly striking is the apparent unwillingness to imagine a future beyond the present moment. As an OSU alum, I ask the school’s administrators: If you’re buying protection by selling out your fundamental principles, then what good is the protection? Also, do you think we’re going to forget your spinelessness? I’ve got to tell you, there is a future after this, and we will remember what you’ve done. There are millions of people in this state who have been gerrymandered into oblivion, but we do still have a choice about where our kids go to college, and our top choices probably aren’t going to be schools that are suckups to aspiring dictators.

There is a future. That's got to be on our minds every bit as much as resisting the latest atrocity. Resistance also has to include making plans to hold people accountable, to ensure what is happening now never happens again, and to make things better, not return them to a status quo that wasn't working anymore, but actually better. That's what we owe to the people who will be living in that future if we don’t want to be remembered as the generation who allowed America to fall to ruin.