Justice and Liberty Die Quietly. Will We Let Them?
I am dreading the hell about to be released by Donald Trump in the opening days of his second administration. Besides the promised deportations of millions of people and prosecutions of his “enemies”, he will be pardoning over 1,000 people convicted of the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol on 6 January 2021.
Many of the most violent and least remorseful of these convicts have connections with violent anti-government militias including the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the American Patriot III Percenters (AP3) and others as well as various law enforcement agencies and the U.S. military. According to a report in ProPublica today, a mole deep inside the AP3 Percenters, who served as the head of a state chapter noted how its members included active and retired law enforcement officers, military personnel, doctors and government lawyers. https://www.propublica.org/article/ap3-oath-keepers-militia-mole
This situation should be very concerning.
Arizona Militia patrolling the border with Mexico
AP3 Militia conducting weapons training
I have previously written that I believe that these “militia” groups will be deputized by Tom Homan, Trump’s “Border Czar” in order to assist the Border Patrol and INS with the deportations and camps needed to hold those arrested. In effect they will serve a role much like the Nazi SA Brownshirts did in 1933-34, and they will have free rein to brutalize other Americans, particularly racial and religious minorities.
I am wondering if we will stand by and allow such injustices to happen. Admittedly, the answer is not violence, or in massive demonstrations, but peaceful civil disobedience and using what remains to the law to resist and survive until Trump, MAGA, and their billionaire buddies overreach, and maybe fracture in their own civil war. But in the face of tyranny we cannot be apathetic and just sit by as things happen. Hannah Arendt said, “Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.”
Charles Morgan
My thought for the title of this short article comes from the late Charles Morgan Jr. Morgan was a young lawyer and rising star in Birmingham Alabama in the early 1960s. He was a well off young Southern gentleman and a lawyer, but he was also a man of conscience. He defended the civil liberties of many people during his life, and most of his actions were incredibly unpopular and dangerous when he made his stand.
The turning point for Morgan was the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham Alabama some 61 years ago which killed four little girls going to Sunday school, and injured many others. It was an act of terrorism, though many even today will not call it that, but too often we hide the truth.
But Morgan was one of the few people to speak the truth about responsibly and liberty following that act of White Supremacist terrorism.
In an age where people, including his peers, colleagues, friends, and neighbors washed their hands of the responsibility, Morgan spoke the truth in clear and uncompromising language:
“And who is really guilty? Each of us. Each citizen who has not consciously attempted to bring about peaceful compliance with the decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, every citizen who has ever said “they ought to kill that nigger,” every citizen who votes for the candidate with the bloody flag, every citizen and every school board member and schoolteacher and principal and businessman and judge and lawyer who has corrupted the minds of our youth; every person in this community who has in any way contributed during the past several years to the popularity of hatred, is at least as guilty, or more so, than the demented fool who threw that bomb.”
Morgan made a comment that really stuck in my brain because it is so true. He said,
“It is not by great acts but by small failures that freedom dies. . . . Justice and liberty die quietly, because men first learn to ignore injustice and then no longer recognize it.”
The truth is that by our small failures; first to turn our backs on justice and then to ignore it, finally result in our inability recognize when justice is being trampled. That is how freedom dies. Sadly, those who most often trample freedoms, usually in the name of God or religion are the last to recognize their complicity in that loss of freedom. Judge Learned Hand spoke these words; “If we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: Thou shalt not ration justice.”
Sadly, there are too many people who will all too often ignore justice as an act of loyalty to a leader or in the name of their God, or their religion. There are others who will do it for such banal reasons as job security and advancement.
We cannot ration justice so that only a few; the oligarchs, the rich, and those with the protection powerful people can afford it. By rationing justice we allow injustice to become the norm. If we do that, we will be as guilty as those who set the stage for and then whitewashed the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, and the deaths of those four precious little girls.
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Thank you so much for reading and I hope that we can grow together in the looming peril of the new year.