My neighbor asked if I had heard of the end times. You know about the end times? Asked as if I really didn't know since I didn't appear to be a believer. She's standing in my apartment with books that aren't the Bible and that aren't by authors approved of by the Thought Police. I say, yes, and leave it at that. She is the keeper of the truth! Yes?
Maybe the Christian nationalists might find in the lies of Trump and Vance validation of what they perceive in the activism of progressive Americans. In front of gaudy gold decorations, several American flags, and official-looking podiums or on Truth Social or X, or at mouthpieces like Fox News, the evangelical Christians are warned: Antifa is coming! Left fanatics will go into the streets on Oct 18th, to loot and burn down your city, home. Attack you!
Its a gathering of people, who hate America!
But no one will show up!
On Friday, the day before the No Kings protest, the woman below me, who, along with her ghost of a 20-something son who really doesn't live with his mother in a senior complex, has been waging a campaign to get me evicted or to get me to vacate my apartment, offered me brownies. I was waiting for someone in the lobby of the office building, and she approaches offering brownies.
I'm old enough to remember laced brownies, and I have been vocal, to the annoyance of a management that would rather all remain silent about tenant drug users, about the smell of skunk marijuana in the hallways. Before I could visualize the brownies, she gets too the point: Do I want a Bible? Someone in her family died. Not recently. Some time ago. But she has all these bibles now. Do I want one?
No, I tell her, and that prompts her to ask. And she does. But, oh, she wasn't prying!
The neighbor across from me told me about a tenant she won't speak to because he's not a Christian. A week later, she asked, without offering Bibles, if I was a Christian
Two thousand and seven hundred No Kings protests were scheduled for October 18th. I attended the first protest here in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I did sign up, but decided not to attend, as I wrote in an article about that protests, when so few blacks or other people of color would be present. I didn't want to see the looks in this town of white Americans looking at me as if I were foreign or alien. Someone from Mars! In 2025! When my ancestors built this country!
And what ally could I count on if my dreads should attract the attention of ICE?
The religious right, professor of African American Studies Imani Perry, writes in South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, makes a virtue of White Supremacy. Non-evangelical folks, queer and trans are deemed sinful. But all ways of knowing in this country, not just articles of faith, are shaped by the histories of race and racism.
I can imagine the neighbors, most Trumpers and/or evangelical Christians in this town filled with images of anti-fascists hating, left-wing fanatics like me, black and educated, a proponent, no doubt of diversity, equity, and inclusion! Someone who taught those lies, living among us. And there will be these white, anti-fascists, left-wing fanatics who stole from us to give to her and folks like her!
I can imagine the fear of what materializes when Americans, believing themselves victims of affirmative action and DEI and black and immigrant black and latina, are told by the US Speaker of the House that Americans who will protest are supporters of Hamas!
I think it was my first or second semester away at college. My friend was away too at another university. I remember standing near my desk reading the letter she sent me. We sent letters in those days, 1972, before email and cellphones. It was the standard affair of updates on professors and classes. At least a page and a half. Then, near the end, she died!
I saw the name and didn't see the name. I went back a few words to stare at the name. This was the sister I knew. This was the sister, an older sister to my friend, who would take us to Operation Breadbasket meetings and pick us up. This was the sister who served, at least for me, as a role model. Intelligent, quiet rather than loud. Even tempered. Dependable.
A car hit hers.
And that was it. It felt as if I had been hit by a car!
The day before the No Kings protest, just before the prying neighbor and her Bible offer, I called my sister in Chicago to ask if she was okay. She's the only sibling in our hometown where the Trump regime sent ICE to the city, and the event was scheduled for the next day. She's sixty-seven. Five years younger.
My sister became agitated. Yes, everything was okay. I dared to ask about ICE.
She doesn't know or care. She stays at home. I said, but these people can barge in. There's security in the building, she snapped back. Clearly, she hasn't seen the video coverage of ICE arrests anywhere, let alone Chicago.
She doesn't get involved!
I want to say, there's an end coming if we don't get involved. But I stay silent.
There was silence for a few seconds. I heard what she heard about people like me: t he evil enemy! I felt as if I had been thrown to the ground and woke up knowing what I suspected all along but I dared to think it or say it out loud. This is the end. The wall is now solid!
I wonder, with Trump's right-wing religious regime giving America the go-ahead to openly express racism, replacing common sense and human decency with the violence of innocence, if some black Americans forget, to use Perry's words, that the God of the masters and the God of the slaves, were never met to shake hands!
In Chicago, on October 18th, 250,000 packed Grant Park. I'm sure Trump was disappointed, not just at that turn out. No violence! No arrests!
Maybe I could chalk it up to what long-time activist Ralph Nader calls apathy. He uses words such as self-respect or phrases such as the disregard for the power of civic actions or betterment. Betterment of self and neighbors. Of the community. Of the country.
In Civic Self-respect, Nader mentions Frederick Douglass and how he stood up to be a leader against the scourge of human slavery. Nader goes on to explain that most individuals want to count. I am a human being wanting to help other human beings in whatever capacity I can.
This would require, I might add, an acknowledging a worthy humanity! A worthy Earth, populated by worthy individuals, populations. What if the individual doesn't think much of humanity? Thinks, as one neighbor told me years ago, that Earth is evil. Other humans are evil! As Trump tells MAGA, we have to beat the hell out of the radical left!
Not only are there Americans who are anti-American and Antifa, as if Antifa doesn't stand for anti-fascists, and isn't an organization. It's an ideology. And not a good one!
There are Americans waiting for the return of Jesus. I've heard this repeatedly. Only recently did a neighbor slip in a question: I have heard of the end of the world coming soon?
So if the end times is near, why bother protesting the destruction of democracy?
This isn't to suggest that there aren't Americans who, as Nader writes, just stay within their private lives and barely venture into the civic square except to cast a vote. It's not necessarily an evangelical Christian nationalist thing!
We the People, writes Nader, have shown up for marches, rallies, demonstrations, picketing, legislative and agency hearings, and court houses and all this activism has led to the creation of new political parties, unions, farmers organizations, consumer protections, healthier environments, constitutional amendments abolishing slavery, women's suffrage, the end of the Vietnam War, veteran protests, nuclear arms, agreements, and on and on.
I look at this list of what has been accomplished against the odds, against the backlash of Southern Dixie Democrats and the KKK, against, patriarchal structures, unconscionable chemical corporations, and pro-war profiteers to name a few anti-democracy efforts.
But the pro-corporate capitalists didn't stay down, if they were ever down! They continued to be motivated if even by hate.
Where I live, seniors receive a food box once a month. They register and then, come the day, theres a little more food to fill the kitchen cabinets. If I were to suggest, just suggest, among a few seniors, that we organize some activity to call attention to the fact that seniors have to receive charity, after working, most, their whole adult lives, I would be reported to management, also anti-black, anti-black women who happen to think. charity, writes Nader, relieves immediate needs. However, justice is more about prevention.
I asks: What if seniors received a livable monthly amount from Social Security every month?
A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity. That makes sense. Too much sense. I want to say, but Mr. Nader, as you know, this is America! No one would tolerate me suggesting anything to them about that dangerous, possibly, Antifa thing, of organizing to get justice and not charity!
Most here, voted for Trump and still expect he is working for them!
Then there is Jesus
How do you respond to the image of a Jesus, dropping down from the heavens, and doing away with all the evil people? And Earth too? A John Wayne of a Jesus! *
Seven million Americans attended the No Kings protests across this country. Most waved American flags too. There were a majority of white Americans (and kudos to them!). But the event saw people of color in attendance. Democrats and Republicans, Christians, Muslims, and atheists!
According to US News, based on voter-eligibility population, that is not registered voters, 90 million Americans didn't vote in the president election, November 2024. One hundred and 55 million ballots were cast; however, 89 million, that is, 36% of the voters eligible to vote didn't vote. I wonder about this 36%. Does this percentage of Americans include the evangelical Christians nationalists who believe God absorbs them from civic responsibility? Do they see themselves as free thinking because, as a few have bragged to me, they don't read books? That is, books written by humans!
They don't keep up with the news!
What happens to taking civic responsibility for being a human on this Earth?
What's the truth about End Times?
*Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. (2020) Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted A Faith and Fractured a Nation. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton and Company, Inc.
