Americans are waking up. A grand reckoning awaits us |
About a year ago, at the start of the Trump 2.0 regime, a woman was about to pass me on the sidewalk and then stopped, turned toward me and almost shouted: “It’s a fucking nightmare!”
It has been a “fucking nightmare”.
But sometimes a nation needs a nightmare before it can fully awaken to long-simmering crises.
Martin Luther King Jr mobilized the nation against racial injustice by making sure almost everyone in the United States saw its horrors – on the nightly news, watching peaceful Black people getting clubbed and arrested for exercising their rights.
Were it not for that painful national exposure to racist brutality, we wouldn’t have gotten the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act.
Something similar happened in the first years of the 20th century when muckraking journalists revealed the monopolies, corruption and public-be-damned arrogance of the robber barons.
Were it not for that painful national exposure, we wouldn’t have gotten the reforms of the progressive era.
A similar dynamic is playing out as Americans witness the nightmare of Trump’s neofascism – its mindless cruelty, blatant........