When I was a kid, the greatest impact newspapers and TV news had on me was during the civil rights protests in the South. Those photos: young, well-dressed African-Americans sitting at a diner counter, quietly waiting for the service they knew they were never to get. Those composed faces, and the hate-warped faces of white people, screaming at them.
Screaming at Black children going to school. Screaming at Black people — who were not screaming back. The water hoses and police clubs and snarling dogs used against Black people who were engaged in being human.
And the murder of three young men, one of them Black, who were intending to register people for the vote, a peaceful engagement. One of those young men was the son of my very much loved biology teacher.
It was a time of a particular sort of agonizing chiaroscuro: most of the newspaper pictures were black, gray and white, as were the moving pictures on TV.
This was no epiphany for me, since my family, minus a god, did not raise their kids to be closet racists. What it was, though, was a whack on the head. Eventually, when my head cleared enough to think, I found I’d learned about a counterintuitive method by which human beings could get impossible things done, even under threat.
Passive resistance.
It was the genius of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the group of remarkable Southern clergymen to grasp how powerful was the visual contrast between non-violent people (who had centuries of reasons to be violently enraged) and violent people (who had millennia of privilege not to be).
And before Dr. King, there was Gandhi, whose passive resistance nudged the mighty British Empire out of India.
Now, I’ve been on protest marches and felt good about them and myself. But the only profound effect I saw from them was to give millions of us the sense that we were doing something.
That isn’t nothing, to be sure. But in our current circumstances, I think we need more than a temporal something. It’s happening, too: two towns (not coincidentally in Ohio), have entered active/passive engagement with neo-Nazis, a/k/a Trump’s brownshirts.
One town, Springfield, Ohio, where Haitian immigrants were assailed by neo-Nazis, have sued the assailents. And citizens of Evendale, Ohio walked onto a highway overpass to nudge a group of neo-Nazis back into the van whence they had come.
We’re living in times that even I feel are potentially parlous. The rampant chaos of the White House, the laughably surreal and law-defying executive orders, the bizarre question of who is president, are tangled up together with fear and hate, and underlying hate is the potential for violence. Trump probably thinks his pardoned criminal gang will form an armed militia at his orders (somehow I don’t think he’s going to co-opt the US military) and he might order attacks on D.C. protesters.
In fact, I sense it’s what Trump wants, a provocation to command armed forces to shoot protesters. It’s what he didn’t get the Army to do in his first term and I’ll bet he’s panting for the excuse to do it now.
So I think it behooves us to challenge the violence implicit in Trump’s admininstration with nonviolent actions. Motionless groups with impassive faces who disperse and disappear on a signal. Flash mobs, maybe. Sit-ins. Can you envision Trump’s face as masses of people defy him by evading his engendered mob violence?
I hope activist protest groups like Indivisible are developing strategies to combat Trumpism with a power far greater than guns: passive resistance, in all its earth-moving glory.