What Must Be Done

by Jacob Richards

A couple years ago my autistic stepson fell in love with chickens. We quickly built a coop, and a box of chicks was set up in his room under a red lamp. Everyone in the family got one chicken. He named his chicken KFC. The love affair didn’t last long and now collecting eggs and feeding them has become a chore.

On election night, while a sloppy wet snow fell, the first snow of the season, we noticed that his bird wasn’t doing well. 

We brought it in and cleaned it up to find that its vent had prolapsed. It was bad.

He cried. He felt so bad. He felt like his complacency and inattention had caused the prolapse. He wailed on the couch. Of course there wasn’t anything we could do for her. 

He calmed eventually. He processed his emotions and we made the decision to cull her. 

It is never easy to slaughter a farm animal. No cowboy enjoys putting down their horse. When it is time to carry out that most dirty, but often necessary work, the goal is to make it as clean and painless as possible.

I just wanted to watch the election results. But now it was time to do the ugly work of ending KFC’s life as humanly as possible. As I stood up I felt my heart heavy with the weight of what needed to be done.

I got my saddle ax, an Estwing, double-checked if it was sharp. I set up a stump and got a headlamp, and with half-frozen sleet coming in sideways, I cut off her head. 

In the days after the election we all find ourselves somewhere in this scenario. Some of us are grieving our “complacency and inattention,” some are trying to clean up and heal a terminal wound, but a few of us have the steely resolve needed to do the ugly tedious work of building community and movements capable of resisting the worst case scenarios that many of us are ruminating on.

All of your fears are justified, but unlike the Democrats who asked you to channel all that fear into campaign donations and ballot boxes, largely symbolic acts, we must instead do the hard things ourselves. We can not write a check and then check out. We don’t have that luxury anymore. We never have. 

Many people’s first response will be to further disengage to protect their emotions by further isolating themselves in their echo chambers and safe spaces. 

Many will look at leaving the country, but that is a privilege, not a solution. Costa Rica isn’t big enough and they don’t want you. 

Another reaction will be to blame the powerless. Both candidates got less votes than their party got in 2020. It will be tempting to blame those fifteen-million Democratic voters that didn’t vote. People will seek to blame young people and Arab Americans for being ‘single-issue voters.’ 

But blame lies with the DNC, it is the party’s job to represent the will of the people. 

This election is numerical proof that moving further right is not a strategy that wins elections, it’s only a strategy that keeps the billionaire donor class giving freely.

The Dick Cheney vote never materialized, surprise. The five Heritage Foundation connected Republicans that spoke from the DNC stage brought in no votes. Zilch. 

In Alaska and Missouri, voters passed progressive minimum wage increases via direct democracy while at the same time voting overwhelmingly for Trump. Which gives numbers to Bernie Sanders’ statement.  “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”  

Expect something like a dull dystopia. 

States fail, civilizations collapse, republics fall, it happens. But they crumble much slower than you think. 

The day after Hitler took the Chancellery, Germany didn’t look any different than it did the day before. The same will be true when Trump takes office. The changes will come gradually, a new law here, a new enemy there. 

Day to day the temptation to have faith in America’s institutions of democracy and jurisprudence will be strong. You must avoid it. I’m looking at you liberals. Many will remain silent hoping that these institutions will set things right or at very least blunt the worst of Trump’s impulses. More will remain silent hoping to maintain their comfort and home equity. 

Hitler cowed the center through their silence. They were silent to each new outrage–each slightly more heinous than the outrage before–but never enough to provoke the center to stand up. By the time they realized how evil Hitler was, it was too late–blood was on their hands. 

We all know Martin Niemolle’s poem: ”First they came for the communists…” 

Well, there is safety solidarity, we must take action if our neighbors are targeted, go to jail with them if that’s what is needed. We must do more than pay lip service to intersectionality. We must act like an injustice to one is an injustice to all. Because it is. 

Then we must take that solidarity and become ungovernable!

Even divine-right kings of old, ruled only by the consent of the governed. Meaning that we have always had the power, with or without elections and the other machinations of democracy. When we sit on our hands–when we refuse to plant or harvest–refuse to spend or punch the time clock, we can bring empires to their knees. 

For obvious reasons we as a society do not get taught how to resist. Nor are we taught how effective it can be.

Communities that resist survive. The Jews who rose up in the Warsaw ghetto uprising and Sobibor concentration camp escape survived the holocaust at a higher rate than those who quietly got on trains with faith that the rumors couldn’t be true, or that the institutions of state would come to their senses and save them. 

More than just survival in worse case scenarios, resistance gets results that elections simply cannot. 

An election didn’t end the Vietnam war. It was ended by Nixon, a pro-war president if there ever was one, because the Vietnamese people had become ungovernable, and possibly more importantly our own soldiers had become ungovernable. 

During the last years of the ground war in Vietnam, fraggings (assassination attempts on officers by their own troops) had become commonplace. Officers that wanted to live learned to not send their men out on needless patrols. 

Whole brigades were refusing orders, the military prisons were overcrowded and the prisoners were rioting, escaping and joining ‘the enemy.’

Student protesters at home had also become ungovernable. In the face of massive ungovernability pro-war Nixon switched to an ineffective air war and quickly thereafter Saigon was liberated.

From the 1870s through the 1930s, American workers organized and took on many tyrants and won. Businesses are all little dictatorships, not democracies.

Workers did this by organizing unions, and by being ungovernable.  Using strikes, boycotts, sabotage, direct actions and even pitched armed battles, they broke the power of the robber-barons, won the 8 hour day, ended child labor, won the right to organize, the right to bathroom breaks, and the right to be paid in US currency instead of company monopoly money.

We didn’t win these victories via elections, neither the Republicans nor the Democrats (then or now) were on the side of workers. We won them through bravery, solidarity and organization.

Imagine the worst case scenarios of a Trump dystopia, and try to determine what you can do to resist or aid those people who are resisting. 

The French people were crucial in providing food, information, money, and shelter to Resistance fighters during World War II.  Find ways to support your local partisans, rebels, truth speakers and marginalized people. Cash will be king due to its untraceability. Be willing to take calculated risks to provide shelter, hide, cloth and protect members of our most vulnerable communities and those actively resisting.

Can your home be a safe house? Can you grow more food to share? Can you write, print or distribute anti-regime literature? Can you throw up anti-regime graffiti? Can you defend yourself? Can you spy on the regime and its paramilitaries and pass the info to the resistance? Can you defend others? Can you sabotage infrastructure? How public is your ungovernability going to be? If you can’t risk much, why? Who should take the risk instead of you?

We have to organize, make allies, and take effective actions to make a MAGA regime unworkable, and eventually overthrow it. 

Now is not the time to clutch our pearls, blame voters for not voting for a party that didn’t represent them, speak about incremental change, funnel legitimate outrage into electoral campaigns built on ‘hopes and dreams’, or condemn working outside the system. 

I know it’s scary. I know it’s going to be hard, but it is what must be done. Take some time. Process your emotions. Respond, don’t react. But don’t take too much time, for we must do what needs to be done. Now is the time for doing.

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