Words fail me – but they’re all I have, or so it seems as I sit here at a table in my new apartment. They ain’t enough! Not as I read the news and feel . . . something . . . rise, politically and socially, and presume to be the American future.

Is this the rise of fascism? I use this word with uncertainty. I have never lived within its brutal purview and do not live within it now, as I write about the increasingly bizarre – and terrifying – presidency of Donald Trump. I feel no constraint as I write, no need to be cautious with my words. I feel no eyes on me, ever-assessing the loyalty of the opinions I express. I feel no fear, only outrage, as the snarky and bumbling “supreme leader” wannabe tells us who our enemies are. Can’t someone shut this fool up?

But then I read the news and, often enough, learn there’s a further Trump transgression today, a further grab for authoritarian dominance. And I have to look deeply at this freedom I think I have and acknowledge that it’s vulnerable. If others – other Americans, other human beings – can lose it, so can I. I can become the enemy.

America is an armed and frightened country. We believe – at least at the level of political leadership – far more in force, military or otherwise, than in understanding. We’ve waged hellish wars throughout my lifetime, killed or enabled the killing and suppression of millions of people. Why shouldn’t this come home?

Let me grab a single news story that I read this morning – no big deal, no complex analysis, just a brief NBC News account of a meeting convened recently by Pete Hegseth – secretary of the Department of War – summoning some 800 of the country’s highest ranking military officers to Quantico, Virginia, from posts all across the planet.

Hegseth talked about how the officers needed to “lead with an eye on more lethality and less on wokeness.” America’s military must toughen up. That apparently was the essential message, and anyone who disagreed had only one option: Get the hell out of here.

After Hegseth, Trump himself spoke, and NBC reports his talk was substantially “boasting about the new America he’s creating. He told the generals and admirals about the successes he believes he’s had in sending the military into American cities, and a potential preview of more to come.”

Reading this sentence in the article is when I first felt that stab of vulnerability. My God, Trump is simply accessing the power at his disposal. He isn’t inventing something new. Rule by force is already fully present in the American infrastructure. But apparently it’s now being turned on a larger segment of the American population, i.e., everybody.

I can feel Nazism emerging from the social margins. Suddenly the word isn’t merely a metaphor. This is reality, at least in an early stage, manifested by federal troops and masked ICE agents. There’s an ever-expanding list of enemies from whom America has to be protected. Not just immigrants, not just brown-skinned Americans, but “the left” itself, problematically pulsating in all those blue cities: New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Portland. Where is this headed?

Trump said: “I told Pete, we should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military, National Guard but military, because we’re going into Chicago very soon.”

He also noted: “Last month, I signed an executive order to provide training for quick reaction force that can help quell civil disturbances. This is going to be a big thing for the people in this room, because it’s the enemy from within, and we have to handle it before it gets out of control.”

You know, before it votes Trump out of office. I have no doubt that I am part of Trump’s “enemy from within.” So are you, in all likelihood. How far could this go? Asking this question opens my soul. This planet’s human occupants have not transcended their addiction to rule by force. Kill thine enemy and all will be better. This goes beyond Trump. This goes beyond politics.

And I find myself back where I started: Words fail me. But I will write them anyway, because I have the freedom to do so . . . for now and, by God, forever. No matter who’s watching me.

 

Robert Koehler (koehlercw@gmail.com), syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Chicago award-winning journalist and editor. He is the author of Courage Grows Strong at the Wound, and his album of recorded poetry and art work, Soul Fragments.

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