Make Some Noise
Continuing the Tradition of Dissent
I was all set to write about dissent. The other day, I watched a Save Our Democracy conference of politically active Buddhists on youtube that included a person who spoke eloquently about the potential loss of first amendment rights that would accompany a Trump victory. He spoke of freedom of speech, the press and assembly as the central concern facing us, indicating that a time could come when it would be illegal and dangerous to participate in such a conference. We used to understand this threat. I witnessed the reality of it in the silencing of dissent seventy years ago when I was in third grade sitting in front of the Dumont while my parents were transfixed by the Army-McCarthy hearings. The fathers of kids I went to school with were blacklisted. We were there as young people when anti-war demonstrators were photographed and subjected to FBI investigations in the sixties. But for the most part, at least officially in this country, we have been smug about our willingness to tolerate a range of opinions. We point to Putin’s execution of Alexei Navalny and we think, this sort of thing doesn’t happen in America. Still, there are events that get our attention, events that caused me in this instance to reconsider what I had planned to write this week and amp it up. I do not shrug my shoulders when a lone gunman takes a shot at the Republican nominee even though the candidate is repugnant to me. I try to steel myself against the swirling conspiracy theories. The piece I was planning to write about dissent had to be reconsidered to take the events in Pennsylvania into account. The last time this happened was when I had prepared an entire d’var Torah for Rosh Hashanah in September 2001 that had to be shredded. Here we are again.
Prior to the shooting at the Trump rally, I had been focused on the ripple of pleasure that ran through me when I saw the words “I dissent” in the official Supreme Court statement issued by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a Latina from the Bronx, when she countered the majority opinion in the Presidential immunity case. Those words are infinitely precious. They refer back to the assertion in the Declaration of Independence that “Governments are instituted among Men [sic], deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” All citizens have a right, indeed an obligation, to give informed consent to the activities of government if they agree and dissenting opinions when they do not. Dissent should ideally be expressed in an atmosphere that is free from fear of reprisal, from both official quarters and from other private citizens who may not agree. But sometimes it is not so easy. Dissent is a muscle that needs to be exercised. When it lies dormant, it atrophies, leading to a duped and degraded population that does what it’s told and/or lashes out as Thomas Crooks did the other night in Butler, Pennsylvania. Dissent is or should be an ordinary everyday artifact of citizenship, not an expression of extreme frustration and rage. In our hyper-polarized political climate, we have more people who are disaffected from public life on the one end and more people who are violently reactive to it on the other. We have fewer people who are carefully studying the issues, forming opinions and dissenting when they feel they should. When they do protest, these people are demonized because we have lost the idea that dissent is a normal function of the democratic process. Witness the actions taken against student demonstrators opposed to the war in Gaza just recently on campuses across the country.
Dissent is now a dirty word. Politics itself is now a dirty word. It no longer conveys the back and forth of ideas and competing interests. It comes into the room trailing the scent of organic matter decaying, of bodies that have been left to rot. Every day the garbage rises a little higher because there is no ventilation in our system, no public square where people are encouraged to express their opinions.
We find ourselves alone, with or without guns. Conspiracy theories proliferate. They are an attempt to mitigate our sense of isolation and helplessness, giving meaning to an otherwise meaningless life. If only we could reinvigorate a tradition of robust dissent, we would not be forced to choose between days of despairing silence or acts of desperate violence.
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I understand your concerns. Our discussions are an example of dissent at its best. We listen to one another!
When I lived in S. Africa, in 1964, the year I got married, I moved to Johannesburg, but was still registered as a voter in Germiston, where I grew up. There were elections that year, and one of the Nationalist party (the Pro-Apartheid party) was standing against the Liberal in my city. I thought "what does one vote count?" But I drove back to my old city to vote anyway. The Liberals (anti-Apartheid) won, by one vote!