About fifteen months ago I wrote “Where is David?” It spoke about what I’ve been doing and why I haven’t been writing a lot here, on this blog. One of the paragraphs is about research I’ve been doing around an idea I had about writing a book. At this point most of the research is done and it’s time to go back to writing. I’ve read and taken notes from around 120 books in the past year plus. The books range from the history of race (hint: it’s not what we’ve been taught, in fact, as a physical manifestation? It doesn’t exist at all). Some were about contemporary problems in our country. Others were about how we think and develop things like bias. And as of yesterday, the work moved to a new phase: production.
I’ll be writing a lot for both for the book as well as here on my blog. Upcoming pieces will be about the lies we’re taught (hint: Lincoln did NOT free the slaves) and thoughts on that word.
A few more thoughts for today. I started watching a PBS series call “Résistance”. It’s about the resistance in Nazi occupied France. I wondered if I would have had the courage to act had I lived there at at time. Then I realized that, while I’ll never know the answer to that question, I do know that I need to continue to act now. We all do. The threats here are real, we saw them last year on January 6. The revisions to history, the lies being told, the efforts to undermine our democratic institutions are not that different than what Hitler and Mussolini told. As Liz Cheney said, this revisionism, these lies, “that’s how democracies die.”
At 8:00PM on November 8, 2016 I was scared. The polls had just closed here in Massachusetts. I’ve voted in presidential elections since 1980. This was the first time I was scared. In 1980, 1984, and 1988, when the polls closed I knew it was unlikely that the candidate I was supporting would win. I was disappointed, but never had been scared before. While I differ with so much of what Reagan and Bush I believed, I knew that at the core we supported the same basic values of what democracy meant. The candidate in 2016 did not and he still does not. It lead to my first act of resistance and my return to writing. My first blog piece spoke that: “Why Did I March?” It seemed that in 2020 when Joe Biden won that we had beaten Donald Trump. It’s now clear that the real fight was just beginning. To close, I have two things to ask of you. First, ask yourself what you are willing to do. Second, please help me spread the word. I’m assuming that all of you who subscribe to my blog do it because you want to hear what I say. So please share the message. Send it to a friend, a colleague, anyone that needs to listen. Ask them to subscribe. If you (or they) are on Twitter, please follow me there at @DavidAValade. And be the pebble. Together we can make a wave.
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
– Edmund Burke
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”
– Martin Niemöller