I'll Remember the Silence

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

There's an old saying, often credited to Edmund Burke, that the only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing.

In my last post, I wrote about Cornell University, where a group of fraternity men gang-raped a woman. The school did nothing until the victim and others cried foul and the story reached the media. The university tried to cover it up. They tried to sweep it under the rug. They tried to protect men who had done something so horrific that in some countries they would have been hanged for it.

Note: Also see my previous post about misogyny/sexual violence against women(all women) titled the geometry of hate

In many ways, that mirrors our current moment under the Trump presidency. We have a president and an administration who think it's okay to be terrible. Through their behavior, their actions, and their indifference, they are setting the tone and the example for everyone else. We are living in Idiocracy.

Here's one example. The president has sent federal forces into cities he sees as being against him. These are ICE agents in paramilitary gear, which as far as I can tell serves no purpose except to spread terror. They wear masks. Many are poorly trained. They have been recorded on camera again and again doing terrible things to U.S. citizens, including murdering them. The president, the vice president, and the rest of the administration either say nothing or insist the agents were acting within their rights. It's insanity.

Then there's social media. Platforms like Facebook have largely stopped moderating content, so almost anything goes, including bot farms pumping content into comment threads. These trolls and bot farms are likely run by right-wing Christian nationalists and even foreign governments, and they exist to provoke anger and deepen division.

Scroll through the comments and you'll see people saying things like, "Well, she earned her FAFO patch."

When I see that, I think it's one of two things. Either it's a bot, or it's someone who doesn't stop to think about other people: about the complexity and value of a human life, about the Constitution, about the freedom of speech and the right to protest. And no public servant who murders someone is immune from justice.

So what does any of this have to do with remembering the silence of our friends? Good question.

As a transgender woman, I've seen it all. I've seen family members who stay quiet. I've seen family members who quietly distance themselves. And I've seen family who cut me off completely, either because they think they get a say in my gender identity or because it goes against their religious beliefs. In their minds, there is only one religion, and it's Christianity. That's insane in a country built as a melting pot and founded on diversity. Anyone with an education knows the world is full of different ideas, ideologies, religions, and non-religions.

As a transgender woman, I'm living in a country where powerful, wealthy people want to take my rights away. They are writing laws designed to erase me, laws meant to make it so that people like me simply don't exist. Instead of addressing real crimes, real criminals, and real problems, they make it about transgender people, who already have enough to struggle with. They choose to pick on us.

So when people stay silent, when they don't speak up and won't stand for right over wrong, they are part of the problem. They might as well be wearing a T-shirt that says "I'm part of the problem."

It's a lot like the ultra-rich. They don't say anything. They let the people who are struggling keep struggling and do all the fighting, while they quietly build their "I got mine" lives.

I'm done with people like that. As the title of this post says, I'll remember who stayed silent, and who actually did something.