Commentary by Jerry Lanson

Progress toward freedom and equality came at an enormous price in the 1960s for the courageous leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. Some, like Martin Luther King, gave their lives to the struggle. Others endured jail, beatings and threats to carry on the fight.

On March 7, 1965, Alabama state police pummeled and fractured the skull of John Lewis on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on a day that became known as Bloody Sunday. Lewis went on to become a highly respected congressman from Georgia. He fought for social justice and civil rights throughout his career, using the term “Good Trouble” to describe the kind of courageous, nonviolent protest that defined his life and career.

Today, we are seeing too little “good trouble” from our leaders and, quite honestly, ourselves as the Trump Administration works to obliterate the progress of the civil rights movement and much more. Voting rights and equal rights are being dismantled. Due process, a foundational right under the Constitution forall people, is disappearing, as immigrants, documented and undocumented, are grabbed from streets and homes by masked federal agents who show no identification, produce no signed warrants, allow no due process and pay no consequences. Our free press is under assault. Judges, lawyers, state officials, business leaders and even musicians who stand up to the Trump administration are pilloried and sometimes threatened. Tens of thousands of federal workers have been fired. Medicaid and Social Security are under assault.

And yet our streets are largely quiet as people go about their lives as if little has changed.

Will anyone, I wonder, have the strength to stand tall and lead a sustained resistance? And will they get widespread support from my children’s and grandchildren’s generations in their efforts to push back against an administration that increasingly seems hellbent on replacing our democracy with a reality built on misinformation, grift, greed and fear?

Last week, I opened the homepage of The New York Times online to find the headline: “We Study Fascism, and We’re leaving the US,” a podcast by three Yale University professors.

Speaking of the self-delusion of too many US citizens today, Marci Shore, an historian specializing on totalitarianism, said, “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink… What you know as an historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.”

Or country.

Or people.

Similar podcasts and essays have sounded warnings on the pages ofThe Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, Substackand other outlets. I tip my hat to these publications, but know their freedom, too, is not assured.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger recently delivered a speech at Notre Dame’s Keough School of Global Affairs, that was reprinted in the paper. “The role of a free and independent press in a healthy democracy is under direct attack, with increasingly aggressive efforts to curtail and punish independent journalism,” he warned. “A free people need a free press.”

His speech detailed five ways in which the administration has tried to muzzle our free press, from filing lawsuits and using other forms of intimidation to attempting to end all public funding of public media.

But Sulzberger said his biggest fears -- “the signs that have troubled me most” – are centered on the retreat of “other public- and private-sector leaders too worried about the administration to stand up for their own rights and principles. …Leaders and academics who have long fiercely defended the rule of law now pull opinion pieces, less their arguments attract the administration’s attention.”

So who will lead? When and where will a new generation of heroes rise up? And will we, the people, give them enough support and enough fortitude to sustain their efforts? As I stand at local rallies most weekends, holding signs, I can’t help but wonder where the protesters of my children’s and grandchildren’s generation are. Like me, most of those at these rallies are retired. When will we as a nation realize that our Constitution is quickly heading the way of the dodo bird – toward extinction? When will those honking their horns in support get out of their cars and swell the ranks of those demanding a change of course?

Said Trump adviser Steve Bannon last week, “What happens between now and Labor Day really defines – more than even the first 100 days – not just Trump’s second term, but Trump’s legacy.”

Are we listening?

People needn’t put their lives on the line, though leaders of the civil rights movement surely did just that. But people do need to stop rationalizing – that things aren’t so bad, that they are too busy to protest, that protesting doesn’t really make a difference. 

It has changed history. It can help preserve our freedom.

In the podcast of the three Yale professors who’ve left the country, historian and author Timothy Snyder, put it this way: “People say, oh, the Democrats should be doing more, they should be fixing things. But, if you want the Democrats to do things, you have to create the platform for them. You have to create the spectacle, the pageantry, the positive energy, the physical place where they can come to you.”

That means frequent, geographically widespread and sizable rallies. It means each of us participating ourselves, not leaving it to others to do the hard work. It means not being “too busy” or “too bored.”

The Trump administration has just begun remaking this country, disregarding the norms of our democracy and ignoring the words of our Constitution. Only two other options exist to pushing back harder. One is to submit to repression. The other is to leave the country.

“The lesson of 1933,” said historian on totalitarianism Marci Shore, “is that you get out sooner rather than later.”

Or we can stay – and work harder to make our voices and beliefs heard.

Lanson’s Substack page is From the Grass Roots.