Donald J. Trump giving “Loser” sign
[From Opinion Columnist M. Geesen in the “New York Times” (5/28/2025)]:
Columnist Geesen first sketched his background and experiences watching Russia become an autocratic state: “
“Living in and reporting on Russia when Vladimir Putin took and consolidated power, I was shocked many times. I couldn’t sleep in September 2004, after tanks shelled a school in which terrorists were holding hundreds of children hostage, and I was shocked when Putin used this terrorist attack as a pretext to eliminate elected governorships.” Geesen added: “I was shaken when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008. My world changed when three very young women were sentenced to jail time for a protest performance in a church in 2012, the first time Russian citizens were imprisoned for peaceful action. I couldn’t breathe when Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. And when the opposition leader Aleksei Navalny was poisoned in 2020, arrested in 2021 and almost certainly killed in prison in 2024. And when Russia again invaded Ukraine in 2022.
Along the way there were many smaller, yet also catastrophic, milestones: the state takeovers of universities and media outlets, the series of legislative steps that outlawed L.G.B.T.Q. people, the branding of many journalists and activists as “foreign agents.” The state of shock would last a day or a week or a month, but time went on and the shocking event became a fact of our lives.”
Geesen, at one point, noted that most Americans (or Russians) did not stay on top of the carnage being wrought. Daily life took over and the need for stability overtook the need to remain informed about such outrageous acts.
That theme was further reinforced for me by a documentary I viewed at Sundance entitled “Mr. Nobody Against Putin.” The young Russian teacher, Pavel “Pasha” Talenkin, who gave up his entire life and family in Russia to show the world what is going on in Russian schools—the brainwashing, the indoctrination. Pasha has fled the country, leaving behind his only family (his mother) and is awaiting word on his request for asylum elsewhere.
Pasha cannot go back, as he will be imprisoned for merely taking film of what goes on in the Russian schools today, sort of a throwback to the Youth movements of the Nazis. I also have viewed the Oscar-winning films of this year and last year, “20 Days in Mariupol” and “No Other Land” (about the Gaza Strip).
HASTE MAKES WASTE
Elon Musk.
It is true that the breakneck pace of these catastrophic events make it hard to stay on top of what is really going on. After a while—even though Masha in the “Mr. Nobody Against Putin” documentary loses her brother to the Russian invasion of Ukraine Masha says, “I could care less about the war as long as it doesn’t impact me personally.” This seems to be the main opinion of the town.
And that, my friends, is sort of the message of a second editorial in today’s “New York Times,” excerpts of which will follow these final words from Geesen:
“The United States in the last four months has felt like an unremitting series of shocks: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; a man with a chain saw trying to gut the federal government; deliberately brutal deportations; people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars; legal attacks on universities and law firms.
Unlike the Russian autocratic breakthrough (or, for that matter, the Hungarian one, which has apparently provided some of Donald Trump’s playbook), the transformation of American government and society hasn’t been spread out over decades or even years. It’s been everything everywhere all at once.
And now that has become familiar. I’ve reported on many wars, and I’ve seen how they come to feel routine — to the people living through them, the people reporting on them and the people reading about them. Wars have a limited repertoire: bombings, shellings, offensives, counteroffensives, body counts. After the initial shock, few people keep track of the shifting front line.”
Says Gleeson: “In this country, too, fewer and fewer things can surprise us. Once you’ve absorbed the shock of deportations to El Salvador, plans to deport people to South Sudan aren’t that remarkable. Once you’ve wrapped your mind around the Trump administration’s revoking the legal status of individual international students, a blanket ban on international enrollment at Harvard isn’t entirely unexpected.
Once you’ve realized that the administration is intent on driving thousands of trans people out of the U.S. military, a ban on Medicaid coverage for gender-affirming care, which could have devastating effects for hundreds of thousands, just becomes more of the same. As in a country at war, reports of human tragedy and extreme cruelty have become routine — not news.”
FORMER HARVARD PRESIDENT/AUTHOR SPEAKS OUT
January 6th.
Drew Gilpin Faust, the author of “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War” and a former President of Harvard University also wrote an opinion piece for the NYT, entitled, “We Are Not Being Asked to Run Into Cannon Fire. We Just Need to Speak Up.”
“At a moment of national crisis that is frequently compared to the divisiveness and destructiveness of the Civil War era, we should look anew at the responses of Frederick Douglass and Lincoln handed down to us. Between 1861 and 1865, some 2.7 million men, almost all volunteers, took up arms to preserve the Union as a beacon of democracy at a time when representative government seemed to be fading from the earth. Today democracy is once again under worldwide threat, assailed as disorderly and inefficient by autocratic leaders from Budapest to Moscow to Beijing, leaders our own president openly admires. Yet in 1861, ordinary men from even the remotest corners of the Union risked their lives because they believed, as Lincoln articulated for us all, that “government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth.”
“They died for their country. … They died for their country,” Frederick Douglass repeated in helping establish what is now known as Memorial Day. “They had fought against the “hell-black system of human bondage” and for a nation that embodied “the hope of freedom and self-government throughout the world.” Americans must not forget that this was why the dead had laid down their lives in numbers no one had anticipated or could even have imagined.”
I, for one, shall continue to speak up.
I have taken to gifting people with a copy of “BEE GONE,” my book warning about DJT, and saying, “Now you’re a member of the Resistance,”
How about you?
