Samain Thanksgiving Moon
Darkness has begun to settle on Shadow Mountain. Black Mountain takes out the sun at around 4 pm now and at 5 pm, the current time, evening is ready to shift over to night.
The cultural earthquakes from Tuesday’s election results have only registered as tremors so far, but the big one is not far off. When will it come? I don’t know. I suspect after the inauguration. A police shooting here. A gay bashing there. A couple of rapes. Perhaps targeted violence against African-Americans. Maybe the National Guard sweeping aside the protesters at Standing Rock.
Those happenings will crystallize out of the solution of public anger and fear a rock hard resistance. And it will be the state against its most vulnerable citizens. Unfortunately, not a new problem. As Saul Alinsky said, the action is in the reaction. How far the call and response of bigotry will spread, how large will be the congregation that ultimately says amen is not yet known. These times are perilous, more perilous than any I have known.
When Reagan came to power, I traveled to Washington, D.C. with the Minnesota AFL-CIO. We went by bus, playing poker and drinking beer (not me, but everyone else), singing labor songs. When we got to D.C., we marched. Reagan, Reagan he’s no good, send him back to Hollywood. Reagan broke PATCO, the union of air traffic controllers and ushered in an anti-union environment that even after Bill Clinton and Barack Obama remains a national disgrace.
It was a combination of union busting, international trade deals and robots that created the rust belt and the dismal future of non-college educated folks in general and whites in particular. We have just felt the first profound shock of those choices. When people lose faith in the structures of power, they do what they can to create new ones, hopefully, they believe, better than the old one. The abandonment of the former working class by liberals and conservatives alike makes our time bereft of powerful allies for them. They’ve hoped, and voted for that hope, that somehow a billionaire who resides on the Upper East Side of New York City will do for them what others haven’t. From within their world it may have seemed like a bet worth making.
(Someone should make a map of the cultural fault lines in the U.S.)
This fault line within American culture has only begun to shift. It has not yet slipped, not yet allowed its full constrained force loose on our common life. Trump’s election is not that earthquake. It will follow in his wake as he takes pussy-grabbing and race-baiting to the home of the country’s first African-American president. Ironically, his predecessor.
That fault will slip. It may not come when the insults to the poor and people of color and the LGBT community mount, but it will surely come when the left behind in the white working class realize that Trump is not their friend, but an archetype of their oppressor. When that awareness dawns, head for the bunkers.
