REFLECTIONS ON NO KING’S DAY
At the end of the parade around town I ached from my neck on down and and ready to collapse. It was only on Sunday that I began to reflect on what had happened. The first thing that came to my mind was my memory of the long line of MAGA people a year ago waiting to hear Donald Trump lead a rally in the Asheville Civic Center that I photographed in the late summer. They were all dressed up in red, white and blue, they all had signs or shirts expressing their disgust with Kamala Harris and their fury at liberals, and they were also all giddy with excitement and having a great time even on a hot summer day. I bought a red MAGA cap on the way in to give me access to the crowd, and it certainly made me one of them as if I were a long lost brother. We joked and laughed and they posed for photographs and I and they had a great time.
But how could both crowds be so much alike?
And then I had an even more disquieting and uncomfortable image cross my mind. It was of the huge crowds that sometimes gathered when a Black person was lynched for some alleged ugly thought or action that threatened Whites. A huge crowd in a holiday spirit would attend the lynching, often having picnics on the lynching ground as a victim was being brutally murdered.
What this made me wonder about was how a roaring crowd in a Roman stadium or a roaring crowd in Hitler’s Germany or a roaring crowd at a football match or a roaring crowd at a lynching or any roaring crowd could be egged on by the crowd itself to accept and even enjoy violence. MAGA people in Asheville said awful things about Kamala, things they would never say in as they left church, and on No Kings Day we said awful things about Donald Trump which we would never say about a neighbor. This feeling of being powerful and demonizing and refusing humanity to someone who threatens us is something that makes us feel powerful and makes us willing to destroy our enemy. We see this in Gaza and see it in Ukraine and in the wars we have fought in which we righteously destroyed an enemy, in my case the enemy was the awful Krauts, one of whom I married and loved. We glorify those who are willing to kill and to sacrifice their own lives. There is some powerful bloodlust in human nature which a roaring crowd can amplify.
This doesn’t mean that I approve of Donald Trump, but it makes me see how easily I, and others, can be swept along in a vindictive way. It makes me realize that the only way we are going to end our polarization is not by wiping out those who threaten us but by listening to each other and treating each other as being fully human and worthy of respect which is, after all, at the center of the acceptance of individual rights and of democracy, itself, which we say we are defending.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 