Today:

Opinion
The resistance to Donald Trump is not what you think
There is no unified, hierarchical group on the periphery trying to overthrow the U.S. government. There are only regular people, in every city, hoping for better, and trying to rescue the America they once knew

Sarah Kendzior
Special to The Globe and Mail
Published September 28, 2018

[….]

“How do you maintain hope?” an audience member asked me at the end of the talk. This is another question I get asked everywhere I go. I told her that I don’t believe in hope and I don’t believe in hopelessness; I believe in compassion and pragmatism. Hope can be lethal when you are fighting an autocracy. Hope is inextricable from time, and as anyone who has studied the entrenchment of dictators knows, the longer they stay in, the harder it is to get them out. Every day passed is damage done.

And there is probably no one who knows that more than the migrant parents who lost their children to the Trump administration, who spend every day wondering how their child is growing and changing without them – if their child is even alive. Time has always been the enemy, and hope its cruel accomplice. Learn from the past, fight for the future, but live the present not with hope, but with rage. Rage, unlike hope, knows no timeline.

[….]

Go. Read the whole thing.

Sarah Kendzior, in The Globe and Mail:

Want to survive another 100 days of Trump? Don’t get complacent

….Americans are very tired, and exhaustion with the ongoing administrative horror show has led to two popular fantasies. The first is that Mr. Trump will magically change and become presidential, as he was briefly proclaimed to be after his address to Congress and after he bombed Syria, before a new disaster shook pundits from their delusions. The second is that the so-called deep state will oust him through the Russian interference investigation, which the administration is actively trying to impede. The first scenario is an illusion; the second – with so many administrative officials implicated – is no guarantee.

These fantasies spring from the same wishful thinking and denial that got Mr. Trump elected. For over a year, citizens refused to accept that the unthinkable was not only thinkable, but probable. His win was a lesson in the dangers of complacency. The 100 days have shown Mr. Trump’s failures to be not a natural result of incompetence, but of vigilance that citizens and officials must continue to apply if they want to keep their republic.

A new translation of Dante’s The Inferno bears the lines: “Forget your hopes. They were what brought you here.” This is good advice for those living in Mr. Trump’s special hell. The era of hope and change is over. The era of resistance and resolve is now.

Go. Read the whole thing.

#resist