The Resistance Must Begin With Each of Us: A Hard Fight Looms Before Us to Defeat Tyranny

February 26th 2020

By James Rogers Bush

"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."

– Frederick Douglass, African-American abolitionist

So now, as Frederick Douglas implied in the quote above, we need to start “plowing up the ground,” let loose “thunder and lightning,” and unleash the “awful roar” of the ocean.

From here on out, those of us who cannot and will not accept a Trump autocracy need to start planning for the hard fight that looms before us. There is no other way around it, fate has ‘prepared a table before us in the presence of our enemies’ and we must eat at that table until the meal is done.

The fight begins with each one of us. Each of us must now decide what we are willing to do and how far we are willing to go to resist the agenda of the Trump administration. Each of us must decide how serious the threat to our values and rights is and how much each of us is willing to sacrifice to protect those values and rights. Each one of us must decide how far we will go to resist Donald Trump and his dangerous cohorts.

The Women’s Marches, the Muslim ban and undocumented immigrant protests, and winning back the House of Representatives were an inspiring start, and the attempt to impeach was a grand effort by our representatives in Congress, but there is much more that now needs to be done on the practical grassroots level. The hard work of continuing an ongoing and comprehensive resistance to the Trump agenda has begun and will continue for as long as Donald Trump and his cohorts are a threat to our liberal democratic values and rights.

Throughout his campaign, as Trump broke every yardstick of decent behavior, it became increasingly clear that no one was able to succeed in stopping him. Now the question is whether or not what Trump called “the deep state” is finally willing to do what is necessary to stop him from continuing his plan to take our government and break it in ways that could make its survival and recovery as the head of a constitutional republic doubtful. If the media, congress, and other government professionals are unable to do what is necessary to put the breaks on what Trump is trying to do, it will be we alone, the American People, who will finally be the ones who will have to fight ‘the good fight’ to save our democracy, by whatever means necessary, both at the ballot box and in the streets.

We, the citizens of the United States, with or without the so-called establishment, must let Donald Trump and the sycophants that surround him know, in no uncertain terms, that we will never surrender up our democratic republic to those who would cast its sacred documents into the dirt and turn us, the majority of the American People, into servants of an autocracy, of any kind. We must let the world know that our democratic republic and its people will never surrender the inalienable rights passed down to us by the founders, and that ‘government, of the people, by the people, and for the people, shall not perish from the earth.’