My sister said to me recently, “Kiffer, I don’t ever wish someone ill health or worse but I wish the cholesterol intake of a certain individual would do its job.”
Many like her are revolted, infuriated, and embarrassed by the corruption, disrespect, and incompetence of this regime and wish for an easy fix. I call them “Dream Reapers,” people who want what only the Grim Reaper can provide.
Even if that certain individual were gone, there is no easy fix. Tech oligarchs control the flow of information worldwide and it floods over us faster than it can be fact-checked. Digital devices can track the behavior and movement of everyone. Health care is awash in profiteering. The needs of corporations vastly outweigh public interest policy.
In short, Dream Reapers’ wishful thinking blinds them to what’s going on.
In a different way, at a different time, I also missed the bigger picture. I started college as a clean-cut, all-American white boy in September of 1968. In October, black athletes gave the Black Power salute at the Olympics. That fall I let my hair grow long, grew a raggedy mustache, protested the Vietnam War, got stoned for the first time, listened to 60s music, and had my first lover.
When I hitchhiked home to Lexington, Massachusetts, the next spring, I arrived at dawn, April 19, the date of the first battle of the American Revolution, making Lexington the birthplace of American liberty. The regalia of American flags, a reviewing stand, and concession tents were all in readiness for the day ahead. Where Captain John Parker once awaited the oncoming British troops with his trusty musket, his statue now awaited the troops of parade-goers, bands, floats, and officials sitting in the back seat of open convertibles waving to the crowd.
I felt like I had landed on an alien planet. What were we celebrating when, on the other side of the globe in Vietnam, we were killing people? Yet only a year before as a senior in high school, I was proudly driving one of those convertibles.
The times were a changin’. Out with the old! Don’t trust anyone over 30! It was clear that a new day of equity and cooperation was coming. I assumed that once the war ended, the 60s revolution would take over the country. I ignored our nation’s history of being founded on the theft of land from those who lived here and the enslavement of Africans. I thought that once we ended the war, everything, miraculously, would be different. I didn’t see what was so obvious, how easily it could all be dismissed as a utopian fantasy.
In the ensuing decades, we had to work for increased civil, economic, and environmental rights. My career was based on creating economic opportunity. I established the nonprofit loan fund Common Capital, financing local businesses, nonprofits, and community projects. Our existence depended primarily on the largess of public and private institutions. We made an often unconscious deal to accept the foundation of profiteering in exchange for social progress. It was a bargain with the devil. Now, the time has come when the profits remaining to be made are underneath the band-aids of the social rights we have fought so hard to create. The band-aids are being ripped off, revealing the bestiality and cruelty of a system that has turned to consuming itself.
The diversity, complexity, and immediacy of multiple crises challenge us now. Within that challenge lies our opportunity. The silver lining of the Trump regime’s actions is that the attacks on our public education, food security, homeland security, health care, and vital social services are so blatant that they can no longer be ignored.
“The power of tyranny derives from the fear of resisting it.” That quote attributed to the American Revolution of 1776 applies to us today as much as it did then. While these are different times, the fundamental truth remains that we are being called upon to resist the exploitation by the few of the many.
Crisis changes people. The crisis brought on by the Trump regime offers us an opportunity to finally address the underlying assumption that it’s acceptable to take from others to have more for ourselves. This assumption relies on the illusion that life is a set of unconnected parts when, in fact, all life is interconnected.
Today, the acceptance of that illusion has created an existential crisis. Dream reaping and utopian fantasy do nothing to dispel it. The task will be winning people over to serve the common good. By turning from the fear that comes from being divided, we leverage the power of collaboration. I experienced that in my work at Common Capital. We found that people wanted to work on a project for the common good with the result that millions of dollars were invested into the region.
As Pogo, a comic strip character, once said, “We are faced with insurmountable opportunities.” Indeed, we are. We just need to act on it.
Christorpher “Kiffer” Sikes lives in Northfield. He founded and served for 30 years as the director of Common Capital, a regional nonprofit financial institution that provides financing for local businesses and nonprofit organizations. He works as a consultant to small businesses and community projects.