Everyone knows I love history. Here’s what I’d like to share with you, regarding what is happening.
I don’t like to follow politics. I find it performative, deceitful, and generally depressing. But I do, because hiding from what is happening isn’t a solution, but rather a deflection.
Last night, I watched live as Donald Trump gave his inauguration speech in the United States Capitol. One sentence after another kept hitting me in the face. I kept watching, listening for what I knew was about to come. When it did, I wasn’t shocked. Quiet understanding fell over me.
Our world is at existential risk from climate change.
Yet, he wants to “drill, baby, drill.”
Trump says the US government fails to protect “our magnificent, law-abiding American citizens.”
Yet, he is plunging millions of Americans into uncertainty.
Trump says “our liberties [...] will no longer be denied.”
Yet, he has taken it upon himself to deny them.
Trump wants to take the Panama Canal back. Trump wants to rename the Gulf of Mexico. Trump left the World Health Organization and the Paris Climate Agreement. Trump wants to take away birthright citizenship, central to the US Constitution’s 14th Amendment. Trump removed legal recognition for transgender people. Trump brought back federal private prisons. Trump gutted foreign aid programs. Trump pardoned almost 1,600 rioters who attempted to overthrow democracy. Trump threw millions of asylum seekers, refugees, and immigrants into precarious instability.
For the next four years, we will be hearing a hell of a lot about what Trump wants and who he is.
We cannot forget what we want and who we are.
Here’s where history comes in. People will say that if we’ve learnt one thing from history, it’s that we don’t. But let’s try.
Our world has moved forward leaps and bounds within the last hundreds of years–indeed within the last 75- and 50- years. I’ve never known a racially segregated school. But only seventy years ago, American students did. I’ve never known a world in which women couldn’t vote. But just over fifty years ago, Swiss women couldn’t. Until under five years ago, it was legal for the US government to fire you for being gay–or, as happened to Gerald Bostock, for expressing interest in a gay softball league. Bostock was fired, but is also the namesake of Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), a landmark Supreme Court ruling holding that what happened to him would never again.
Sometimes I can’t imagine a country in which not everyone has the right to marry. Then I remember that this was the case for a little under half of my life in the United States and the far majority of it in Switzerland. Today, I read over an Executive Order Trump signed on his first day in office. He ranted about gender ideology and public schools and erased the legal existence of transgender people.
There it was.
I was once told that we young people should be grateful to our elders for the fight for equality they waged on our behalf. We should be, but complacency is not an option. That fight is ongoing, and it has fallen to our generation to pick up the baton. Not all of us are queer. We aren’t all immigrants or refugees or public school teachers or civil servants or Americans. We are one of the most diverse groups of people and represent the world– differing in nationality, home language, political opinions, and hopes and dreams for our future.
But throughout history, strangers have found common ground in the hope for a common good, and society pushes itself up the steep mountain that is equality–and we’ve climbed real, real high. Sometimes an avalanche of hatred and division thunders down and threatens to blow it all away– but look behind us. It’s a line you’d never hear if you were climbing somewhere in real life, but: if you’re scared, just take a look down. We’ve managed to dig ourselves out, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do this time.
This is Governor George Wallace of Alabama in 1963, standing in front of the University of Alabama to block the way of Vivian Malone and James Hood, two African American students attempting to register for the upcoming school year. Wallace wanted “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”
He was moved.
This is an anti-Suffragette poster from the early 1900s. Persons insistent upon maintaining the unequal status quo were no match for the women from all walks of life who fought, wrote, and protested their way to a better future. They proved them wrong, united.
This poster was all around Geneva only four years ago. Fear was no match for the 1,858,065 men and women who went to the polls on a Sunday to choose love–not necessarily for themselves, but for others–over hate.
It’s often the loudest, most obnoxious voices we hear, over the calm rumble of striving for equality. Sometimes, we disrupt. Sometimes, we just have to live, true to ourselves and to our values. Most of the time, we have to do both.
Small men and women have stood in the way of progress before. Nineteen women, barely a hundred years ago, stood against suffrage, stating they “speak for 90% of their sex” in their opposition to voting rights – no, they didn’t.
Donald Trump and his cronies are only the loudest, latest iteration of what we’ve seen time and time again.
Yet, time and time again, we have surmounted those obstacles. Where we are now is proof of that. It is by no means perfect, but it’s better. Mind you, better isn’t enough–it’s just that. Better. And we’ll keep pushing for it to get even better. But sometimes, you have to take a step back before you can take two forward. And that’s exactly what we will do.
A final note–you might not care. I’d say that’s fine, but, due to another quirk of history, what happens in the United States impacts the far majority of the world. Trump isn’t only restricting Americans’ liberties, he is cutting foreign aid and will vastly impact the international organizations that moderate and support our world. So don’t hide from the news, but keep informed and keep involved–there’s no weapon stronger than information on a large scale.
We will get a lot of devastating headlines in the next few years–but that will always be the case. I, for one, will admit to having hoped our fight was over. But it isn’t, and it never was, and we must continue to stand guard and be keepers of the flame.
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