Often, it’s the small stuff
Inspired by my friend JT
I had coffee with a friend and fellow activist today. My friend was upset, and was surprised by how upset, over Trump renaming the Kennedy Center. She was not so disturbed about the illegality of it, though that certainly bothered her. As we talked, we realized it is the sheer insolence and vulgarity of Trump associating himself with a slain President who, whatever his imperfections, was worthy of the office.
Monuments and memorials like the Kennedy Center honor what a person at his or her or their best stood for. There is nothing admirable or worthy in what Trump represents or aspires to. He puts his name on buildings to aggrandize himself, even though there is nothing about him worth aggrandizing. When he smears his name on sites that stand for ideals of culture or ethics or warranted patriotism, Trump taints those sites with his own venality, bigotry, and misogyny.
People with any sort of ethical sensibility recoil from actions that so clearly evince Trump’s ethical void. They also recoil from the lackeys mindlessly doing his bidding, whether that is installing lettering with his name on the Kennedy Center or ending a diversity green card lottery on a pretext or murdering people on boats in the Pacific and the Caribbean.
It is not surprising that a relatively less important ethically unacceptable act —Trump attaching his name to the Kennedy Center — clawed at my friend. It can be difficult to relate to Trump’s large-scale indecent, illegal, immoral, and unethical acts. They are so large, the mind boggles. Yet any of us can comprehend the honor of having one’s name attached to a national memorial or monument. Any of us can see why that honor is not bestowed casually and certainly not to gratify the yearnings of an infantile would-be dictator.
When we are galled or saddened or angered or disgusted by a smaller-scale unethical, immoral, disrespectful, illegal act by Trump, it reverberates with our sense of what is so awful about the larger-scale ones. We recognize the feeling Trump constantly evokes in anybody with a shred of decency.
Trump, his minions, and his followers have us in a perpetual, fractal state of ethical, moral, and civil repugnance. This jars and disorients.
We must have coffee with friends and fellow activists and share our horror and anger at the smaller-scale dreadful acts. Together, we calibrate and articulate the nuances of wrongdoing. That is a deeply ethical enterprise. Unlike Trump and his acolytes, we use reason and sensitivity to understand ourselves, others, and our reactions to others. Reflection and appraisal, done in collaboration: living that way opposes all that Trump is.