I considered posting this on “Community”, but that would be an admission that I would be afraid some lurking troll might read it if I put it here instead. Screw the bastards. I just watched a show on TV about the Holocaust, and it made me realize you can’t let yourself be intimidated by these fascist cunts. Its what makes them possible. I need to grow the balls and let them know where I stand. Truly, evil will prosper if good men do nothing. This is the least I can do.

I quit posting when I did because after the mid-term election I realized America was on a cusp–balanced on the knife-edge between the nightmare of Trumpism and perhaps some other alternative–and not necessarily a better one.
Declaring a political position is risky these days. And I fear it is going to get physically dangerous soon enough. The forces of reaction are desperate, and they are ruthless. I fear the midnight knock at the door, and it won’t necessarily be the authorities. We live in a land of self-righteous redneck Quislings, and they are all armed to the teeth.

But now is not the time to hide and wait and see how things turn out, to indulge in academic abstraction, to go all Toynbee on us, as my Bolshie Cousin Robert likes to put it. Now is the time to do something. Or at least, stand up and be counted.

No, I’m not about to go to the barricades, Occupy someplace, join the Resistance, or indulge in some other militant expression of my progressive antifa zeal. I’m too old for that shit. But I can’t just fade away and hide, either. I haven’t got a hair on my ass if I don’t at least declare myself in a forum open to the world, even if it is a tiny, diminishing, obscure and anonymous one like the Habitable Zone.

No, I don’t think Trump and his cryptonazi henchmen and his knuckledragging constituency will necessarily lead America down a road similar to Hitler’s Germany or Castro’s Cuba. Things may yet turn around for the better, and even if they don’t, we won’t necessarily wind up with death camps, an invasion of Poland or our own Cultural Revolution. We may not yet have Killing Fields, but we’ve already got a Gig Economy and run-for-profit taxpayer-subsidized corporate prisons. American fascism, if it does come, need not necessarily be as bad as the German or Soviet varieties turned out, but I have no great optimism or enthusiasm for our future either, or even for the future of Liberal Democracy on this planet. The best I can say is that even though I don’t necessarily expect a Third Reich in our future, neither can I rule one out altogether. In my half-century as a thinking, cognizant adult, I have never felt that fear before, not even during the late 1960s or the worst years of Nixon and Reagan. But I certainly feel it now. We stand at the edge of the abyss. It would be sheer futility and cowardice to try and step back from the precipice now. Its too late for a declaration of neutrality or protestations of false equivalence.

I haven’t got much more to say, the last few years have pretty much drained me. I’ve shot my wad, but I do feel I have helped accomplish something here and I think I have encouraged my spiritual comrades and confounded my ideological enemies. So I think I’ll stick around in case I’m needed again. Perhaps not as vocal, but wide awake.

As David Crosby once put it, “I guess I feel, like I owe it, to someone.”