In 1935 Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel: It Can’t Happen Here, detailing the horrors of a totalitarian dictatorship. In the novel the ‘corpo’ government takes control, restrictions on personal freedoms emerge and the press becomes the voice of the state, dissidents are rounded up and imprisoned or executed and minorities become scapegoats. Young men are conscripted into the quasi-militaristic “Minute Men’ whose task is to seek out and arrest anyone suspected of subversive activities. As people began to realize their loss of freedoms mass demonstrations formed and were brutally put down by the oppressive regime

In America today we see militaristic ICE agents assaulting immigrants deporting them without legal recourse to interminable prison time in Venezuela. We see attempts to suppress free speech in the racist intentions to cancel Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs in colleges and universities. We see ICE agents removing books from public libraries which can only be seen as an attack on education.

This totalitarian wave we’re experiencing is intended to overwhelm us; resistance is necessary; silence is acquiescence.