We Have Learned To Face Tyranny

The redemption I found in watching the response in Minneapolis

I despaired as I watched the videos from Minneapolis showing the shooting of Alex Pretti. I turned to Facebook to watch videos from the many friends and people I know in the city where I lived for 25 years. I recognized the sanctuary of Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church, where people gathered to sing protest songs. I listened to the video of a clergyman who had flown in from the East Coast to participate with the 15,000 peace vigil protestors on Friday, along with several hundred other clergy. They were there on Saturday when Pretti was shot.

The protestors have not reacted with violence or rampage. The protestors have organized. Many citizens have whistles, film ICE agents with cameras, and honk horns. The clergy have borne witness. They will tell their congregations, who will tell others. Their videos will be local and regional and shared.

I watched the PBS documentary Hannah Arendt: Facing Tyranny last night. The early Nazi-era films show Gestapo hustling people into cars or pushing, dragging them across the street. Unlike Minneapolis, no films show five or six agents pushing a man or woman to the street and using pepper spray. No videos show a man being pinned to the street and shot in the back multiple times, although that happened later, when the Nazis recorded everything.

Hannah Arendt’s writings, in the early 1960s, were controversial. She talked about the banality of evil, the “I was just following orders” excuse, the parts and roles individuals played in the bureaucratic apparatus of processing mail or killing people, and processing the bodies.

They really didn’t understand they were doing something wrong. They were just doing their jobs.

She also addressed the love of neighbor, or caritas, the obligation of speaking out. She took on the thorny question of submission to authority, by both perpetrators and victims. I think she would have found the dependence on neighbors, the rallying of a community, a caritas response in Minneapolis. She, a Jew, studied Augustine, a Catholic saint, and Augustine was one of the thinkers who informed her thoughts about moral philosophy.

I have had discussions with friends as to whether the leaders of this Administration are following a plan, are opportunistic, are idiots, or are Machiavellian. Maybe it doesn’t matter is my fallback position.

Arendt posited that most people don’t want to stand up and be activists when it is so much easier to be passive. This passivity applies to the following of orders or submitting to authority.

We have all learned from Arendt, even if we don’t know her name. We have learned from that era, and “never again,” although “never again” has not been accurate, in many situations. But some of us will not follow bureaucracy in its banal evil. You can list your own heroes in this regard. Don’t be afraid to list yourself if you have carried a “No Kings” placard or a whistle to alert your neighbors or planned resistance, handed out coffee to demonstrators.

I was an activist in most of my professional years, but not a radical. I can’t run now, if I needed to run from tear gas. I can’t stand for long hours, holding a sign.

But I can still bear witness, as do many people, more and more, and the tide, I do believe, has turned. There are so many factors to list. Greenland. Canada. The few statesmen. Standing up.

So I started in despair, but I have hope. Thanks to Minneapolis. And many everyday heroes.