Don’t Despair: This Land is Still Our Land

As a Bellingham teenager, I witnessed a Peter Paul & Mary college concert up at Western U, concluding with Woody Guthrie’s classic “This Land Is Your Land,” written as counter to the Irving Berlin “God Bless America.” 

It features the rousing final line, “This land is made for you and me,” to which Mary Travers added the footnote, “It still is.” After a post-performance autograph scrum I found myself at the Pastime Cafe hearing Peter Yarrow talking about the Freedom Riders and other foot soldiers risking all in the Civil Rights movement.

Mary Travers never knew Donald Trump, and Yarrow died earlier this year. Alas, our land is being given over to oligarchs, billionaires of a new Gilded Age. Trump is their authoritarian enabler, signing a succession of executive orders.

It was enlightened change when I was growing up, and John F. Kennedy was in the White House.  Today, by jarring contrast, defense of democracy is from the bottom up, and the blowback has begun against all the awful stuff.

We start where Robert F. Kennedy, Sr., once sat. The corruption of the Justice Department is the most chilling aspect of Trumpism. It has been accompanied by intimidation. “Enjoy what may be your last Merry Christmas,” was just one insult our bully President wrote in his Christmas message.

Not so fast. Growing opposition comes from the grass roots. The effort to conceal Trump’s ties (and those of other plutocrats) to the predator Epstein has met with blowback coming not just from progressive Democrats but disillusioned MAGA foot soldiers. Public pressure has propelled the partial release of Epstein files.

With terms like “garbage” and “scum,” Trump has slandered immigrants. They are depicted as criminals and rapists, by a misogynist accused of sexual misconduct. He is also trying to end birthright citizenship and even strip away naturalized citizenship. Only white South Africans are welcome here.

I’ve had health problems this year, and immigrants have been my caregivers. My keepers are gentle, considerate folk, drawn here by the rights Trump would deny. They represent the vast majority who perform tasks that “real Americans” refuse to perform. Opponents of ICE raids have been slandered but are undeterred.  They are almost all committed to non-violence even when face-to-face with brutal enforcers. 

I woke up Christmas morning to a video of an Episcopal bishop in Massachusetts leading a Christmas Eve service outside an ICE detention center. Similarly, a bishop in Minnesota, pushing back on Trump’s demonizing all 83,000 Somali immigrants and refugees in the North Star state.

What’s happening here — 50,000 at a No Kings! Rally and several million nationally — is also seen across the Pond. Hundreds of thousands have taken to the streets in Israel to protest manipulative brutality of the Netanyahu regime and killing of 60,000 Palestinians.

When a targeted air strike killed an Al Jazerra journalist and others, D.C. and NYC media were largely silent. Here, a media protest keyed by Real Change scribe Guy Oron called out the killing of media folk who were trying to witness and accurately report the war.

The Trump regime has sought to shake down and intimidate law firms that dare represent its opponents. Big, white-shoe NYC and D.C. law firms caved. Seattle-based Perkins Coie refused to be cowed.

Such are the times that a Boeing/Puget Power/Seahawks law firm has had to stand for the rule of law, and against the government. Similarly, I watched with pride as my alma mater Notre Dame staged a Mass for immigrants on this month’s Feast of Guadalupe.

While violence has spread across the country, so too has non-violent protest and witness. Dissent from Trumpism, in this Washington, has reached from senior residents holding signs at 9th and Madison in Seattle all the way to Curlew in Ferry County.  During the first Trump regime, the murder of George Floyd evoked in Seattle a peaceful march whose turnout was in the five figures.

Trump and the far right disinformation machine have sought to exploit wretched behavior of the violent few. “Minnesota is being raped by Somali fraudsters. Pass it on,” Jonathan Choe posts on “X.” The President has taken out after Portland and threatened to pull World Cup matches out of Seattle.

We have, of course, committed the sin of electing a democratic socialist mayor. I am reminded of words spoken by ex-British Columbia Premier (and Seattle U. grad) Dave Barrett: “We social democrats know all about the communists: we’re the poor bastards they shoot first.”

The voters, increasingly, are seeing through Trump and are not scared, albeit in liberal bastions of Seattle and New York. More indicative, voters in Virginia and New Jersey just elected moderate Democratic governors by substantial margins. 

Young, Latino and African American voters are coming home. Miami has just elected its first Democratic mayor in 30 years. Elon Musk blew $20 million on a Wisconsin Supreme Court race. His candidate lost and Musk slunk back.

Long ago, late at night at the Pastime, Peter Yarrow wowed us with talk of the March on Washington, at which PPM had performed. He seemed overly optimistic about the cause of civil rights, but the Civil Rights movement was changing America.

I am convinced the American public will repossess our Republic. It sure won’t be easy: The oligarchs have lots of money, They’re buying up the media companies. The Supreme Court is tarnished by corruption. Capitol Hill is living up to the nickname bestowed by columnist Mary McGrory, “Patsy Congress.”

We do react to excess.  Eric Trump recently said of his father that he “literally saved Christianity” by restoring the phrase Merry Christmas. If that is their attitude, Republicans may not have a prayer of keeping the U.S. House of Representatives this coming November.

This column also appears in The Cascadia Advocate.