Originally published, October 2018
My grandfather Jack and I spent a lot of time fishing when I was growing up. He was a refugee from the Jew-rousting pogroms in Russia before and during the Russian Revolution in 1917. When he was handed a rifle to fight and didn’t know what side he was on, so he immigrated to Chicago and started a family, supporting it by delivering bread to homes.
Jack shared a story with me that has resonance today and has never left me. He delivered to a German immigrant in the late 1930s, and in a conversation, Jack shared his glee to be safe from persecution in America. His customer responded, “That is what we thought in Germany, and then suddenly it wasn’t safe anymore, and my family had to flee.” She said to my grandfather, “Never let your guard down.”
The massacre of eleven Jewish worshipers in Pittsburgh, the carnage in Gaza, the unprecedented spike in antisemitic violence in the US and internationally, and the vile hatemongering of MAGA Trump 2.0 – topped off by the complicit silence by Republican party leaders… has my guard up.
Fighting Back
I will not use this space to rant about what appears to be the rapid decline of civil society but rather to thank the forces fighting back. We should all be thankful that many of these forces, for good, representing all of us and our many stripes, are nonprofit stakeholder organizations.
Organizations, including the Southern Poverty Law Center, American Civil Liberties Union, Anti-Defamation League, Lambda Legal, Democracy Docket, houses of worship across the nation, and so many others, need our support now more than ever. We cannot count on our representative government to adjust quickly enough through elections to stem the hatred from within. So, we must rely on agile, focused, and energetic public service organizations and their volunteer and executive leaders to sound the alarm and use the levers available to them to be a bulwark against hate and division.
Heartbroken
We are heartbroken over the prospect of fear-mongering mass deportations and a retribution-based justice department. And much, much more.
To be sure, hatefulness, fear, and self-supremacy have been part of our body politic for generations. However, it is only recently that advocates for and embodiment of these unfortunate mindsets have been embraced, for a second time, at the highest levels of government.
We must continue our work – to make real the important missions our organizations represent – and never let our guard down!
