Sarah Roarke a contributing editor of refusefascism.org. On February 15, as news broke that Trump would declare a “national emergency” to build the wall, she was interviewed by Michael Slate on radio station KPFK in Los Angeles, about the implications of Trump’s plans, why so many people are willfully ignoring the danger it represents and why we need to take a stand for humanity. Listen to the twenty-minute interview here:
From the interview:
Michael Slate: Even as Trump makes his moves regarding the wall many people Democratic politicians and progressive people at large still don’t get what’s actually happening because there is an element of how much people are actually able to see what’s happening and to join in on things and stand up to do what’s necessary depends a lot on what they understand about what’s happening so what is it that you would tell people is actually happening and where are things going and what’s it going to mean?
Sarah Roark: Well I think you just hit the nail on the head. We live in a narrative driven age. I mean all reality has always been very complex since humans come up with narratives to make sense of it and the more complex the world becomes the more we simplify in a way our narrative to understand it and then it becomes sort of the dual of the narratives, becomes less about facts and truth and more about who can tell her story the best. So one of the problems we have right now is that there is a narrative out there: “We’re winning, the good people are winning, the good guys are winning, the Democrats are winning. Trump is losing. He’s desperate, he’s going to fall apart any second now, you know. It’s the desperate lashing out of a trapped animal and he’s done for.”
Which doesn’t comport with the facts.
If you step back from the narrative that you want to believe and look at what actually happened just now you will see that it’s not winning for the good guys. We just moved our needle so far we’ve moved our bar so low that losing less now looks like winning. But if we can try to keep our consciousness of who we were before 2016, you know and look at this through our normal eyes that we had before all of this you know disorientation and chaos came that we very rapidly see that this is insane by those standards. It’s insane to say that this was a victory for the good guys. I think that the Dems in Congress did fight, not enough but they did fight to try and mitigate harm but that’s not the same as winning.
And time is not on our side. There’s an erosive problem of the democracy’s ground is crumbling out from under us as we fight. So you know just backfilling is not ultimately going to be enough. And that’s all that’s going on and telling a narrative otherwise is I think putting us into a dangerous complacency. I understand why they’re doing it and it’s not completely evil why they’re doing it but it is absolutely the wrong course. And we’ve been here in this history before. Weimar Germany went through a lot of the same processes and we are repeating a lot of the mistakes.
Listen to the entire interview: