“I Do Not Lend Myself to the Wrong which I Condemn”
Today I wanted to write about the informal boycott that followed the effort to cancel Jimmy Kimmel. Apparently, Disney’s stock took a serious hit as people canceled their subscriptions. I wanted to use the moment to illustrate the power of ordinary folk to respond to what MAGA and the oligarchs are doing. Greed drives much of our current troubles. In that light, our consuming power matters. Trump and the billionaires might not care about justice or democracy, but they damn sure care about their bottom line.
What if we were motivated not so much by the canceling of a late-night television host, but by the ongoing dismantling of democracy itself? This organic response to Kimmel (like the boycott of Target) offers, I believe, a glimpse into what is possible. So, I was going to use this moment to think about a more expansive call for massive noncooperation with this government. Something akin to “rolling blackouts,” where ordinary people made their rejection of the current order of things known by withholding their dollars and participation in random ways—a guerrilla approach to noncooperation.
This sent me to Henry David Thoreau’s classic 1849 essay, “Civil Disobedience.” I wanted to mine the essay for resources, but returning to Thoreau after all these years stopped me in my tracks. Of course, I can write about Thoreau’s connection to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I could mention the context of his protest against slavery (on the eve of the Fugitive Slave law) and his opposition to the Mexican-American war or his insistence on the importance of individual conscience in relation to unjust laws. But it was Thoreau’s description of his fellows that struck me.
Over the last forty years or so, and I have said this repeatedly on this platform, we have been awash in selfishness and greed. Neoliberalism aimed to transform us from people in community with each other to people in competition with one another in pursuit of our own selfish aims and ends. That selfishness gums up any effort to respond to our troubles collectively. People may very well disagree with what Trump and his ilk are doing, but they are content to let others fight the battles while they go about living their lives.
Thoreau described a version of this disposition in 1849. He wrote:
There are thousands who are in opinion opposed to slavery and to the war, and who yet in effect do nothing to put an end to them; who, esteeming themselves children of Washington and Franklin, sit down with their hands in their pockets, and say that they know now what to do and do nothing.
He goes on to say,
They hesitate, and they regret, and sometimes they petition; but they do nothing in earnest and with effect. They will wait, well disposed, for others to remedy the evil, that they may no longer have it to regret. At most, they give only a cheap vote, and a feeble countenance and God-speed, to the right, as it goes by them. There are nine hundred and ninety-nine patrons of virtue to one virtuous man.
As I read these passages, I could not help but think of the millions of Americans who voted for Kamala Harris in the last presidential election. Contrary to Trump’s lies, he did not win by a landslide. Millions of Americans didn’t vote for this. So why is the nation being overrun by these anti-democratic forces?
Thoreau noted that “all voting is a sort of gaming, like checkers or backgammon, with a slight moral tinge to it, a playing with right and wrong, with moral questions.” We cast our votes for what we take to be right, he suggests, but we are not “vitally concerned that right should prevail.” Voting, on Thoreau’s view, even when we vote for the just and good does little to nothing for the just and good. “It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail.”
Much more is required. Voting and charity (those “who see that the almshouses are in good repair” or “collect a fund for the support of the widows and orphans that may be”) are not enough when we are drowning in the evils of men and women. We must work to live a life in such a way that it gives that evil no quarter to breathe.
Those who disagree with what Trump is doing but resign themselves to living their lives as it is become complicit in the ugliness of our days. They claim a fidelity to the country but, in doing so, as Thoreau argued, “we are made at last to pay homage to and support our meanness.”
In the end, the source of the problem doesn’t simply rest with the oligarchs, the wannabe fascists, and the white nationalists. The problem includes those who are all-too willing to turn their heads and to look away from what is happening to us. “After the first blush of sin,” Thoreau writes, “comes indifference; and from immoral it becomes, as it were, unmoral, and not quite unnecessary to that life which we have made.” Too many among us are living their lives as if what is happening doesn’t matter to them – a kind of disinterested virtue – and they live no matter the outrage that burns hot around them.
I keep rereading this formulation:
Those who, while they disapprove of the character and measures of a government, yield to it their allegiance and support are undoubtedly its most conscientious supporters, and so frequently the most serious obstacles to reform.
We must refuse to cooperate with the Trump administration. We must turn our backs on what they are doing. We must not allow ourselves to be complicit with what they are trying to destroy and the world they are trying to create.
If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go, let it go: perchance it will wear smooth—certainly the machine will wear out. If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be an agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine. What I have to do is to see, at any rate, that I do not lend myself to the wrong which I condemn.
Words to read, to remember, and to recite in these dark days.
You are 100% correct, Dr. Glaude. And I find myself breathless with anxiety as I consider my own response to this crisis. As a retired person, I cannot stay home from work as part of a general strike, but I can boycott, and I am boycotting all but one Trump aligned or clueless business I know of. I also postcard, protest on the streets, poster, vote, call and write my representatives at the Federal and State level. And I stand ready to do more, if only I knew what that more might be. Nothing like the morally alight march across the Edmund Pettis bridge suggests itself. Please, please keep us well advised about what's coming up on the horizon. My firm belief is that there are more of us than ever, that more are waking from their slumber and denial and that in the end, the sight of the sufferings of our sisters and brothers under God will bring us together to resist the agents of destruction. Keep on truth-telling, please.
Profound! Interesting how timeless the writing is for the current moment. Is it true, there really is noting new? At least not when greed and racism are concerned, which is much of what wakes me in the middle of the night these days. So much cruelty against people of color and our marginalized transgender community--I have to question my actions (or inaction) in my community. Thank you for another reminder, democracy is not a spectator sport!