If you are reading this website, it’s probably because you asked, “What can I do?”
We are in the middle of the Trump administration’s shock and awe campaign. The daily deluge of headlines seems designed to inspire despondency. Thousands of federal workers fired over the course of two weeks. Government funds for programs frozen despite court orders. A UN security council vote where the US sides with Russia, Hungary, and North Korea in refusing to blame Russia for its invasion of Ukraine.
It’s all too easy to lose ourselves in the doomscroll, succumb to the overwhelming assault on our way of life. Ask “What can I do?” and find no ready answer, nothing that seems like enough in the face of everything.
The lessons of history books and pop culture spotlight the biggest acts as models for heroism. Could I be a conductor on the Underground Railroad? Am I the next Oskar Schindler? Am I destined to join a confederation of students and die atop the barricade, like the characters in Les Miserables, fighting for a new world that would rise up like the sun?
Or is the answer much simpler than that?
Resistance in Context
Indulge me for a moment while I tell you about my grandparents’ friend Barbara. Barbara Ledermann Rodbell lived in Chevy Chase, MD for many years, while her husband was a researcher at NIH. Before that, she was one of the thousands of European Jews who survived the Holocaust and made her way to America. She was generous enough to tell her story to historians who have collected the personal narratives that detail the atrocities of World War II
Barbara was 8 years old when she emigrated from Germany to the Netherlands with her parents and sister in 1933. By 1940, the Nazis had occupied the Netherlands putting the Ledermann family and their community in peril. Barbara fell in with a group of young people tied to the Resistance and procured false paper to pass as a non-Jew. She found herself in a position not only to hide from the Nazis, but to help others throughout Amsterdam.
She described the Resistance in an interview many years later, saying, “[The Resistance] wasn’t a great big organization where people all knew each other. It was one person knew another knew another knew another.”
The work of the Resistance wasn’t dramatic or glamorous in Barbara’s telling. It was simply the work of keeping people alive at the worst moment in history. It was bread lines in the cold.
“At 19, they felt I was getting old enough to do some other things, also,” she recalled. “I had to be good for something. Besides, standing in line for food was hard in the winter, in the rain and the cold, I can tell you. We took care of a lot of other people who were underground who could not come out. I didn’t particularly see these people, but I had to get food for them.”
Your Journey Begins With One Step
The internet is littered with memes that say, “Ever wondered what you would have done during the rise of fascism? You’re doing it right now.”
That sounds like a paralyzing challenge until you remember 19-year-old Barbara standing in line for food in the cold. Food for people she would never see but people who needed to eat.
It’s so simple really. The thing to do in unprecedented times is to figure out who needs help. Then help them.
In a country where the leadership tries to divide us, simple acts of community building are a form of resistance. A donation to a food bank. Taking on mutual aid tasks. Volunteering at a public library. Driving a neighbor to a medical appointment. Sharing information and resources. Clearing the snow from around a fire hydrant.
The moment to start fighting fascism is now. One way to fight is by building solidarity and community even when the powers that be demand division and isolation.
Legal, Advocacy, and Media Organizations
Image Credit: By Amanda Hirsch from Brooklyn, NY, USA – Changing the things I cannot accept, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=55221255
Civic Action Hub of Maryland 