What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal. We all need to get on “The Same Page” of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s maladjusted / “I am proud to be maladjusted and wish all men of goodwill would be maladjusted until the good society is realized.”
David Brooks
What’s Happening Is Not Normal. America Needs an Uprising That Is Not Normal.
April 17, 2025
In the beginning there was agony. Under the empires of old, the strong did what they willed and the weak suffered what they must.
But over the centuries, people built the sinews of civilization: Constitutions to restrain power, international alliances to promote peace, legal systems to peacefully settle disputes, scientific institutions to cure disease, news outlets to advance public understanding, charitable organizations to ease suffering, businesses to build wealth and spread prosperity, and universities to preserve, transmit and advance the glories of our way of life. These institutions make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short.
Trumpism is threatening all of that. It is primarily about the acquisition of power — power for its own sake. It is a multifront assault to make the earth a playground for ruthless men, so of course any institutions that might restrain power must be weakened or destroyed. Trumpism is about ego, appetite and acquisitiveness and is driven by a primal aversion to the higher elements of the human spirit — learning, compassion, scientific wonder, the pursuit of justice.
So far, we have treated the various assaults of President Trump and the acolytes in his administration as a series of different attacks. In one lane they are going after law firms. In another they savaged U.S.A.I.D. In another they’re attacking our universities. On yet another front they’re undermining NATO and on another they’re upending global trade.
But that’s the wrong way to think about it. These are not separate battles. This is a single effort to undo the parts of the civilizational order that might restrain Trump’s acquisition of power. And it will take a concerted response to beat it back.
So far, each sector Trump has assaulted has responded independently — the law firms seek to protect themselves, the universities, separately, try to do the same. Yes, a group of firms banded together in support of the firm Perkins Coie, but in other cases it’s individual law firms trying to secure their separate peace with Trump. Yes, Harvard eventually drew a line in the sand, but Columbia cut a deal. This is a disastrous strategy that ensures that Trump will trample on one victim after another. He divides and conquers.
Slowly, many of us are realizing that we need to band together. But even these efforts are insular and fragmented. Several members of the Big Ten conference are working on forming an alliance to defend academic freedom. Good. But that would be 18 schools out of roughly 4,000 degree-granting American colleges and universities.
continues: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/17/opinion/trump-harvard-law-firms.html
We need to make a conscious effort, painful conscious effort, to come together in democracy.
“thirdly, of course, there is the individual who rises above these and becomes the conscious choice maker. Less you think this kind of person has a wonderful time all the time… let me assure you that it is a very difficult path. Why?” “And to be conscious hurts, it hurts like heck, I might even say it hurts like Hell.” - Dr. Stephan A Hoeller … https://youtu.be/08R1kPdfrHA?t=4265
Counterpoint, we need to embrace a diversity of tactics.
Being “on the same page” with 300,000,000 people is impossible. We don’t only need MLKjr’s we need Malcolm Xs as well.
We don’t only need MLKjr’s we need Malcolm Xs as well.
All we have been doing is breeding Twitter-think reactionaries and gun loving violence cheering video game players. We need humanization, goodness, not pro-violence Middle East and Russia desires.
Violence is relative.
To the privileged, equality is violence.
No matter how peaceful we are, our opposition will declare our every action to be violent. Peaceful protests at Tesla dealerships are now considered terrorism on par with 9/11.
If the state has decided that we can be shipped off to a gulag without due process, then the penalty for peaceful protesting is the same as the penalty for murder and the same as the penalty for doing nothing.
The rule of law is over, it’s time to start acting like it.
A professor I had taught us that it makes sense to punish a rich man with a light sentence for the same crime one punishes a poor man with a heavy sentence, since the rich man loses more from their seat of privilege when sentenced at all, while a poor man is already miserable and won’t register a light sentence negatively by comparison.
Absolutely depraved that this was taught to all students in that school.
The rule of law is over, it’s time to start acting like it.
It’s time to stop acting like social media users are not the source of the problem. People can become serious, good, sincere and educational and stop wasting their time praising behaviors of Donald Trump and Elon Musk machine usage and machine attitudes. We have an entire public library of great leaders and educators, we don’t have to be a social media society that mimics and breeds Donald Trumpism behaviors of mass dehumanization and technology lust values.
then the penalty for peaceful protesting is the same as the penalty for murder
It’s your horrific education in morality that makes these actions equal. You need [email protected] education right here and right now along with the entire population of every age (voters and even those too young to vote) alike.
Law is not granted, goodness is not granted, compassion is not granted. Self-centered violence and greed are the default behaviors of people raised in a consumerist competitive-education society. People who only make efforts to learn murder and killing of other people as their answer to any and all problems will just create civil wars and mass dehumanization, which these social machines have already become.
If your idea of “good” is that murder and protest are the same, then the outcome will be like the Middle East where people kill each other over their favorite fiction storytelling. You don’t need prisons at all, you just get hate because people go into egomania over their meme consumption out of the Bible, Quran, Torah. That’s been gong on for thousand of years. In USA, the Spongebob fans will start killing and hating The Simpsons fans or South Park fans. Or whatever self-centered egoism of bad moral education dreams up. Probably one video game player faction vs. another video game faction. Or one social media platform or Subreddit / Lemmy community vs. another, meme pattern vs. meme pattern mass dehumanization of “the others”.
Violence and killing just keeps educating children that the best answer you could come up with was killing other people to “teach them a lesson”. That becomes the lesson. The USA has the free time and all the learning tools. Leading the world with more hate and wrecking of the Earth is the same nightmare of history that so many machine lovers adore, building machines and devices to slaughter the brains of the egomaniacs they disagree with in their own egomania.
That is why Elon Musk and Donald Trump are already running the USA, anti-thinking anti-goodness shit morality lessons, shit moral teachers, shit values learning in the first place. Social machine attitudes of silencing goodness and avoiding goodness / neglecting goodness in favor of endless competition for the worst deception signals and self-destruction “game others” values people could find. This is a society since year 2013 that flocks to bad over and over, and Donald Trump and Elon Musk are far from the worst that will come from a population that always favoring bad ideas and badness itself.
then the penalty for peaceful protesting is the same as the penalty for murder
It’s your horrific education in morality that makes these actions equal. You need [email protected] education right here and right now along with the entire population of every age (voters and even those too young to vote) alike.
You appear to have misread, there’s nothing about morality in that statement, just structural incentives.
The law is no longer following due process, therefore there is no longer any distinction between the punishment for non-crimes and the punishment for capital ones.
Therefore, keeping the rebellion peaceful no longer confers a degree of safety to the protesters.
then the penalty for peaceful protesting is the same as the penalty for murder
Murder is bad, bad is bad, regardless of any penalty. Murder could have no penalty, it could be cheered on by crowds who think murder is entertaining and action entertainment, live Hollywood films to pay people for. People could be given incentive, paid money, given land, to murder others.
Still bad.
I’m not making a moral argument, I’m describing the state of things.
According to the law as it is now enforced, murder is less bad than protesting against the genocide in Palestine, because murderers get a trial. Protesters don’t, they just get shipped straight to a foreign gulag.
