Of Foggy Days and Restless Nights

Oh yes, I see what you mean...

Yellow-tufted Dacnis (Dacnis egregia), males, family Thraupidae, order Passeriformes, found  throughout western Colombia and Ecuador and the Magdalena and Cauca valleys

photos: Andres Vasquez Noboa, Marco Valentini, Edwin Munera

female, EAT A TASTY BERRY!!!

We're soaring, flying there's not a star in heaven that we can't be Yes, we're breaking free

he is talking about theatre. he is talking about theatre when he was younger. he says, "of course, it was AIDS then." in the pause, you ask him. clumsy and quiet and 16 and "straight," you ask him. what was it like.

to this day no other post gets sent to me so often by friends who have encountered it as a repost on some other site. the idea that more than one hundred thousand people have read these words, and know this story now, and maybe feel as i did, is tremendously humbling and unbearably beautiful to me. even by accident, even just passing on a story that is not my own, i often think that it is the best thing i have ever done.

An old comic I made in art school (14 years ago) about a papa and baby bear, as well as a neolithic human sacrifice

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

(Source: I am a professional/academic historian with several advanced degrees in history. I have read many history books and even written a few history books myself. I have taught about history books. I spend a lot of time thinking about history books. It's at least fair to say that I know a bit about history books.)

Speaking of said history books, last night I finished Anne Applebaum's excellent Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956, which describes in detail how Soviet-style totalitarianism was imposed on Eastern Europe (her focus is East Germany, Poland, and Hungary, but it is applicable to all of them) in the chaos and destruction after the end of WWII. It is an eerie and timely look at how an unstable and war-racked society can sink into the grip of absolute dictatorship on every level -- and also why those absolute dictatorships do not work. The era of extreme Stalinism was resisted even while it was taking place and after his death in 1953, the regimes were forced to adopt a more status-quo system that nonetheless never, not once, succeeded in brainwashing every single citizen, forcing public legitimacy of their rule, or destroying history books, alternate narratives, outside sources of information, awareness of reality, and everything else that eventually led to the fall of the totalitarian state and the rebuilding of society along freer and more open lines. There is a reason that the authorities desperately suggested "more ideological education!" (i.e. brainwashing) as the response to every mild act of defiance, of which there were many. No matter how massively overwhelming the propaganda was in every area of life, after a certain and limited point, it simply did not work.

America in 2025 is also not exactly comparable to Eastern Europe in 1945 for many reasons. For one thing, despite its struggles and political backsliding, it has (as I have said before) a 250-year history of participative governance and constitutional democracy that is innately and unconsciously familiar to every citizen. The Eastern European countries -- emerging from nineteenth-century repressive empires, short-lived People's Revolutions, and the comprehensive destruction of World War II -- did not have that. In some sense, they were a far easier target to become a fully brainwashed and docilely obedient totalitarian population, but it didn't work even on them, and this book is able to describe in detail what happened, drawing on sources and people who lived in that time and remembered it firsthand. The fact that I was reading a history book about it kind of proves my claim that indeed, there were history books about it. And there will be history books about this.

Donald Dumbass Trump and his evil-but-not-evil-genius Project 2025 myrmidons are not capable, in any way whatsoever, of destroying either history or books about it. In the 90s, we also had an upswing of "the end of history!" claims, this time in a positive sense, where people really thought for some reason that the end of the Cold War meant all geopolitical crises were over and everyone would only have to worry about how to increase peace and freedom for all time. That sounds risibly naive to us now, and obviously it was: history was never going to just end for the better. It's just as naive to think that history will also be forced to end for the worse. The world continued, for both good and bad. There were books about it. There will be books about this. Make sure you're around to read them.