It was nearing the end of the Harvard school’s academic year, and I taught at the Graduate School of Education. Students are preparing for the final exam and completing the peak program. An award ceremony was held, and formal and informal celebrations had begun. Cambridge finally warms the weather, and the outdoor tables at restaurants and coffee shops are crowded. The women’s tennis team won the Ivy League championship.
Everything feels normal. None of this is dissonant, however, like a scene in the M. Night Shyamalan film, which injects Quotidian with a sense of almost undetectable fear.
Of course, this discord is especially powerful at Harvard, a fierce and invasive current center for higher education that could make Viktor Orbán blush. But this is not what Harvard is unique. At universities across the country, classes continue, club gatherings, even when the government passes revocation, recovery of fear and confusion, it is abandoning the vegetables, and then warning it may revoke visa status for more than 1,800 international students again.
Attorneys continue to do what lawyers do, and large corporations are actually signing into the tools of government, while individuals aim for it because the U.S. president is skeptical and court orders are ignored.
Doctors continue to treat patients, while billions of dollars of funding and experimental trials for medical research were detained, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services declared that autism is preventable and that the measles vaccine may be possible.
We get on a car or bicycle and when the government initiates a debate in the court, it will allow it to allow anyone, citizen or non-citizen to send a debate in a foreign prison without reason or required by law.
When many of us consider autocratic takeover, we imagine declarations of military coups and martial law. But the truth is, the most powerful tool among aspiring authoritarians is not shock, but normal people. How bad would it be if we could still shop at Costco or take our family to eat Italian food? If we can still download Maya Angelou to our Kindles or watch Jimmy Kimmel live broadcast!? How bad would it be to criticize the federal government if I could still publish such works?
Not only is it looking around campus, but it seems to be the same in the streets, bars and hardware stores of any city or town in the United States as it was last year and the year before. The NBA playoffs have begun, with a new film starring Michael B. Jordan. Ordinary.
Except that we are not, we are vaguely aware but cannot or are reluctant to trust them completely.
For most people, those who are not stuffed in the streets by men, men wearing masks or are removed from work by the federal government, or are forced to stop research due to losses from losing national health funding – the way in which life feels more or less that we are a soundly democratic nation. That’s how it works: Keep 99% of the lifespan of 99% of the undisturbed people for as long as possible to keep them unaware or indifferent to what’s going on at the profit margin. When they realize that the edge of normal is getting closer, it is too late because the guardrail will be destroyed.
Start with the most sympathetic goal. Who will shed tears for the fate of Venezuelan gang members (real or imagined)? Does anyone really like Dafa? Government employees are the problem, not the solution. Harvard, with its huge donation and the arrogance of the Ivy League, is rarely anyone’s idea of the loser. Why should we follow ourselves on our way to McDonald’s or Starbucks? I Work At Harvard, for the most part, I find it difficult to take seriously the reality of the federal government trying to destroy a private university, just to prove it can prove it can, and because it doesn’t seem to have a limit on the appetite for control and confusion.
Make sure to quote rules and regulations that few people want to understand. What is the 501(c)(3) status? “Indirect costs” seem a bit like a scam. “Alien Enemy Act” sounds like something the latest Marvel Movie draws on. Then hide it all for reasons that seem difficult to object to-fight anti-Semitism, because the parties of Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Green and the proud boys are the first things that come to mind when people consider protecting Jews. Or, perhaps national security, given the collective threat of international students to campus newspapers.
The most important thing is lying. Continuously, ruthlessly, shamelessly lie. Since most people don’t spend most of their time lying on most things, it seems difficult for them to recognize when others do it. It is difficult to question the time-tested strategy.
Fighting with our current level of inertia is very difficult because of the normal charm, desire to believe that things are good, is so powerful. Tanks on the street are hard to ignore. The stable erosion of law and ethics is easily missed outside the scope of our everyday vision.
Our greatest hope may be the trend of authoritarians and those without moral compass. If they can change 1% of their lives without much resistance, why not five, 10 or 20? If they can release hundreds of convicted felons through administrative actions and deprive environmental protection, why not impose arbitrary and irrational tariffs? What makes the response to tariffs unique, at least for now, has slowed down their progress because they tore up normal fantasies. Declined retirement accounts and concerns about grocery costs will undermine normalcy by canceling student visas or refunding Harvard. It’s a mistake that they will cause more out of arrogance and stupidity.
For example, a group of demands sent to Harvard University refused to comply, resulting in global headlines, was clearly wrong. You can make up for this, but no one will trust you.
Meanwhile, I wonder if we have the ability to wait. Is it enough to hope that they can make things abnormal enough to make enough people provoke resistance, or is it a tough job we have to do from somehow getting out of the familiar routine comfort comfort? David Brooks has few radicals calling for a “full national citizen uprising” to fight the wars that have been launched in our country’s citizens. Can people, organizations and institutions in the United States be sure of the permanence of their democracy, even with energy or will? That would happen here or something that happens in Seoul or Istanbul and shows on CNN?
At the same time, I want to do laundry and teach classes this week. Maybe I’ll find something on Netflix. Very ordinary thing.
