Immigration and Travel
Last week, I tried and failed to get our little city’s little Democratic City Committee to take a stand, however feeble, against mass deportation.
It’s possible that Trump will be stopped elsewhere, that this struggle it won’t come to our doorstep. Residents of our town cheered pretty much the same notion about slavery in 1830: “liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable.” It didn’t work then, and (like pretty much every Massachusetts town) we have an elaborate Civil War monument to remind us what that cost.
Like all those other Massachusetts memorials, it recalls the men who loosed the fatal lightning of his terrible swift sword. Few plaques recall the generations of enslaved black people whose lives fell in the gap between our town’s knowledge that we were wrong and its willingness to take a stand for what was right.
Once we were willing to bear any burden and pay any price. I expect we shall be willing once more. For the moment, it appears that people need to be more thoroughly frightened. I don’t doubt that the Republican Party will, in a short space of time, do exactly that.