Silence in the face of Trump's catastrophe is complicity

This is a national emergency. Donald Trump is off the rails. His ICE and Border Patrol goons are loose on America. The havoc in Minneapolis will worsen and will occur elsewhere. Yesterday, someone else was shot there.

His military is loose on the world. Now Venezuela and the Caribbean, at any moment Iran or Cuba or Greenland. (European nations are at this moment sending troops to Greenland, presumably to defend it from Trump’s America.)

You may feel helpless — a powerless observer of this hurricane of violence and stupidity.

You may be experiencing the kind of despair that immobilizes the brain and numbs the senses.

You may want to scream but can’t find your voice because you’re so shocked and frightened.

Please do not succumb to helplessness, despair, or fear.

You are needed. Desperately.

What more can you do beyond protesting, calling your members of Congress, and (if you can afford to) writing checks to candidates who can flip seats?

Stay politically engaged, but don’t wait for the Democratic Party to get a spine or hope that the Republican Party discovers integrity. We are moving beyond party politics.

Here’s what you can also do: Mobilize your employers, your organizations, and your congregations — anywhere you work, any group of which you’re a member — and get them to use their influence to end this barbarity.

Organize your fellow employees, retirees, alumni, and congregants. Get them to help you pressure trustees, directors and heads of every major university, professional association, charity, and foundation. Every corporate CEO or managing director. Every religious leader.

Push everyone with any formal authority in this nation to speak with clarity and conviction against what is happening, and to commit themselves and their organizations to ending this scourge.

Help them understand that silence in the face of this catastrophe is complicity. That there is no longer any excuse for them to be “prudently cautious,” no longer any justification for them to wait until “others take the lead.”

The emergency is now.

Help them see that as America slides further into this authoritarian nightmare, their own organizations are on the line. No group is secure. No corporation is immune. There is no place to hide.

You can be a leader by getting the formal leaders of America to exercise their formal leadership and power.

The heads of American corporations and financial institutions need to issue strong rebukes of this regime. Corporations and banks that pride themselves on their responsibilities to the American public have a special role — Patagonia, TOMS, Ben & Jerry's, Salesforce, Adidas, Microsoft, Google, JPMorgan Chase.

We also need to hear from leaders of America’s great foundations which, after all, are organized to pursue the public interest — Ford, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Bill and Melinda Gates, J. Paul Getty, Robert Wood Johnson, Kellogg.

We need America’s religious leaders to condemn this brutality — bishops of the Catholic Church, the United Methodist Church, and the General Convention of the Episcopal Church; pastors of the Southern Baptist Convention and National Baptist Convention; president and counselors of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; rabbis in the Central Conference of American Rabbis, Union of Reform Judaism, and the Orthodox Union; imams in the Islamic Society of North America.

We need America’s great nonprofits to repudiate what’s occurring — League of Women Voters, Salvation Army, Common Cause, National Urban League, Public Citizen, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Hispanic Federation.

Also the American Bar Association, American Medical Association, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, American Association of University Professors, National Library Association — all must loudly condemn Trump’s lawless reign of terror.

We need every labor union in America and its leadership to denounce what is happening and organize against it.

All must use their voices and their influence in this fight, because no other fight is as crucial at this point in the history of America and the world.

Make them see this. Deliver this message to them: If these organizations and these leaders stand up against what is occurring and use their considerable influence to stop it, history will praise their leadership and courage.

If they fail to do so, history will condemn their cowardice and complicity.

• Robert Reich is a emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
• Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org