Don’t Give an Inch.

We can’t trust them. They've always been out to hurt us. We can't keep letting them hurt us.

“Prominent young girls of Seneca Falls, 1923” Warriors. Agnes Lester, Marjorie Follette, Emily Knight, Elizabeth Van Sickle, Carol Lester, prominent young girls of Seneca Falls, as warriors in the Drama depicting the Progress of Woman to be given at the reception at Seneca Falls, N.Y., in July 20, in honor of the officers and members of the National Woman's party in connection with their seventy-fifth anniversary Equal Rights celebration. Library of Congress

I’ve been told many times I’m too trusting. I give money to beggars on the street. I believe the stories of people in need. A single tear can make me forget all reason. In many ways I’m still that small child who wants to believe everyone has some good in them and all we have to do is find the key to their hearts. I grew up when all movies had happy endings.

I’ve wanted so much to believe in happy endings.

Even during the Reagan years, during the Tea Party years, during the period of Sarah Palin, I believed we could change hearts and minds if only we found the right words, if we unearthed facts, if we applied logic, if we showed them how their actions would cause harm, if only we could convince them they were, deep down, good people.

I wasted a lot of time doing that. They were, deep down, waiting for Donald Trump.

In the Decade of Trump, we good-hearted people have had to do a lot of adjusting. The thing we have the most trouble adjusting to is that they’re still trying to get us to adjust to wrong being right and right being wrong. As if any of that is true.

Even after all this time the shock of that first Trump ‘win’ hasn’t worn off. The shock of the second ’win’, even after the fury and devastation of the first, is almost more than we can comprehend.

The horrors we’re seeing day by day since January 20 are such shocks to our systems we find ourselves floundering, trying to come up with reasons why goodness doesn’t prevail, reasons why the Trump regime is getting away with flagrant criminality, the deliberate destruction of our educational, our medical, our scientific communities, causing actual suffering and real deaths.

The flagrant stupidity is something else again. Buying Greenland, taking over the Panama Canal, making Canada a state—are they cleverly crafted diversions to move us away from the outright, blatant criminality, a hallmark of the Trump regime, or are they, as we suspect, Trump’s mad delusions, given the green light by an adoring or a terrified King’s court?

It does no good to list the myriad reasons why we should go against Trump and his regime. They are people who have proven themselves to be ruthless and reckless raiders looting and marauding the country they were elected to serve and protect.

We keep saying, “We’re better than this”, and we want to believe we are, but are we smarter, are we stronger, are we more committed to truth, justice, and the American way? We talk a good game, as witness the many thousands of voices protesting in one form or another, but when do we go to war against them? What will it take to get us to go to war?

There was film yesterday of a mother being handcuffed and hauled away for deportation, screaming that her children were in school and would be all alone and afraid. “Please, please," she cried, “Please don’t do this!” And then she disappeared.

She begged: “My kids are in school.” ICE took her anyway. This is what... | criminal defense | TikTok

She was just one of many thousands of immigrants begging ICE not to kidnap them. These stories force us to be witnesses to abuses we never would have tolerated before Trump.

Never.

I mean…never.

There are powers among us who could have put a stop to this on the very first day the very first person was kidnapped by ICE and made to disappear. They didn’t do it. They haven’t done it. And it looks like they won’t do it. We’re horrified by all of this. And the worst part is that we’re powerless. But we haven’t stopped trying. Yet.

We march, we write, we speak out, we try to make those citizens who are not the perpetrators but are either too angry or too placid understand what we’re up against and get them to sign on to help us. And we’ve been doing it for months now.

Every day it gets worse. The abuses are piling up. We’re losing our resources, our protections, our freedom, at an astonishing rate. More and more people are getting hurt, some of them irreparably We know this, and it haunts us—those of us who care.

We work at strategies that so far have done nothing. And when nothing works, the danger then is that we’ll give up. It’s human nature to give up when you try and try and try only to lose and lose and lose.

What if we fight and still lose? How bad would surrender be? Would they ever show mercy? We know the answer to that now. They will not show mercy. Surrender is weakness. The regime can’t survive without cowards. So now we have to decide: fight or quit?

There’s no chance surrender wouldn’t be bad. If it’s this bad while we’re attempting to fight, imagine what it would be like if we all surrendered and the regime knew they had millions more compliant servants with no obstacles to their raging destruction.

No, there is no surrender. Let’s get that out of the way.

I’m in fighter mode. I want to go on fighting, and I don’t want to stop until we’ve won. But I have no good ideas about how to fight and win. I wish I did. It kills me that I don’t.

If I think too much about how powerless I am right now, I might find myself wanting to give up, but I only have to look at our nearly 250-year history to remember that tyranny is not an option.

We’ve fought for our freedoms and our liberties for more than two centuries. We’ve built a government that works to fund social programs, environmental programs, equity, equality, education, science, and a combination of private and public resources. We haven’t always been good at any of it, but throughout those centuries we’ve work to preserve and advance, not to fall back or destroy.

Now we’re in the throes of the kind of destruction no generation of Americans could ever have imagined. We thought we had built-in safeguards. We were sure our checks and balances would keep us balanced and in check. A government of, by, and for the people.

It’s eroding fast. We’ve never been in this much danger, and the terrible reality is that the danger is coming from within. Those very public servants who each took oaths promising to preserve and protect are deliberately ignoring their vows. It’s unconscionable. It’s despicable. The Trump regime is unworthy and un-American. They don’t deserve us. We don’t deserve them.

This is the battle most of us knew would be coming if Donald Trump was elected again. And here we are. There will be no peace until the Trump regime is vanquished. They will not stop on their own.

If we know that—and we do—why on earth would we quit now?

There are no paywalls or closed comments or special gifts but becoming a paying member here at Constant Commoner gives me some oomph and helps to keep it going. You can join the paying ranks (Thank you, paying ranks!) through Substack below, or you can support my work by tipping any amount at any time at Ko-Fi or at Paypal. Thank you.