Extremely mad again
This morning, I woke up to news that Trump had threatened, essentially, genocide in Iran while I was asleep. Of course, the possibility that he might want to nuke a country is at the front of everyone's mind.
The very first protest I went to in LA was an anti-war-in-Iran protest years ago, during the first Trump administration, the first time he started talking about wanting to do these things. I went after work and there were very few people there. Most of them were from one of those "communist" student organizations with vaguely cultic behavior. It was extraordinarily disappointing. The second protest I went to that weekend was a lot better. I felt invigorated. But I was surprised that the protest wasn't bigger - most people at the protest were self-acknowledged leftists. There was a broad public anti-war position lacking here.
In the last year, a lot of people who haven't ordinarily protested before have started attending protests for the first time in their lives. Every time I go to an anti-ICE protest, I see people there remarking that this is the first time they've ever protested. It's anecdotal, and we live in Los Angeles, but I'm sure that willingness to protest is changing for a lot of people.
I think the big thing that keeps most people in the US from engaging in protest is a sense that things cannot change. If you are working age in the US today, you haven't seen much change at all happen in your lifetime. While other countries revolutionized their standards of living, ours somewhat declined, often in ways that are imperceptible or difficult for the average person to articulate. We haven't seen major changes to the way our government works, or to the way our healthcare works. Things here simply don't change. The idea that anything might change - that anything drastic might happen - is inconceivable to a lot of people. The idea that anything might change to the left is doubly inconceivable. Even most of our politicians get to office with a complete misunderstanding of what political will even is, and no real experience effecting change locally.
I think the right has a better sense of the possibility of change than the left. Trump's first year was full of stabs at horrific change. The right has a taste for the drastic that the left here does not.
I don't think most Angelenos realized that the protests downtown the week before the war were pro-war protests organized by Persian Americans in LA. I remember standing outside Grand Central Market with my husband and seeing dozens of millenials walking by, carrying the flag with the lion on it. I realized, after some googling, that these people were literally walking to a pro-war protest, and that nobody around us noticed or cared.
The next week, I did not post here about the invasion immediately because I spent that entire first day of the war forced to argue, exhaustingly, with a Persian person I knew in real life, who characterized anti-war protests as "anti-Iran" and told me it wasn't right for me to "tell the story" of the Iranian people without their permission, or someething. It was deniably pro-war propaganda rewritten in the language that leftist millennials would recognize, and was taken from, they admitted, an Instagram reel they'd seen. They then told me they'd been at the pro-war protest downtown the week before. I was losing my mind. I reminded this person as sharply as I could that despite their ethnicity, they were in the US, and were not at risk of being bombed, and not in a position to cheer for bombs either. I found the whole thing completely baffling. I think the inability to imagine change at home also comes with the inability to understand the real consequences of horrific, violent change abroad. When you wrap the entire world in cotton, you lose the ability to really understand or connect with anything that happens to you or to anyone else.
I think there are a lot of people abroad who are confused about why our government isn't doing what happened in South Korea a few years ago, when politicians stopped a coup. But that is fundamentally not the social role that our politicians in the US have been trained to occupy. They do not think of it as their role. I think it's a huge moral failing that they do not, but most voters do not think of it as their role, either.
I have hope for the future - stagnation is the one thing that can't last forever. But I am a doomer about our current crop of politicians. They simply don't think of effecting big changes as their role. They may even be ossifying into the kind of people who see their job as preventing big change - a twisted reaction to Trump's clear desire to throw the world into chaos and bury the country with him.
The taste for change and for overthrow and a different flavor of chaos has to come from regular people. From personal experience over the last year - meeting a lot of people who started attending protests for the first time, and working alongside some of them - I think Americans are developing that taste very rapidly, but very late.
If I want to get something done, I have to stop myself from spiraling on how very, very late it was.