Freedom at risk

I’m fascinated and horrified by the new show on Hulu, “The Handmaid’s Tale“.  It intensified the empathy I feel for my ancestors who were slaves in this country and for the millions of people living under the tyranny of religious zealots like the Taliban or despots like in North Korean.  It reminded me that today there are many people still enduring the torment of slavery around the world, and even in our own country.  I realized as I watched the first four episodes, that falling prey to tyrannical rule is possible if we aren’t vigilant.I really want to believe that people are basically good.  I want to believe that human beings who value their own freedom wouldn’t stoop to steal the freedom of another human being.  However, reality tells me that there are people in this world today who view their place and the place of others in the world differently.  There continue to be people who believe that it is acceptable to forcefully impose their will upon others.  Some are pure evil (like sex traffickers), but some actually believe they are doing God’s work.  They believe that God has made them morally superior, physically superior, or intellectually superior to other human beings.  They believe it is their God-given right to be lord over others.

I heard such a man call into C-Spann the other morning.  He was a Trump supporter who claimed that the U.S. went wrong by putting a colored man in the White House and that it was high time that we put the coloreds and Mexicans back in their place.  I thought, how freaking crazy.  And then, one of my young sorority sisters, an AKA (Alpha Kappa Alpha)  at American University was elected student body president and soon thereafter someone hung bananas by nooses with the words, “AKA free” around campus.

In the Handmaid’s Tale, a series of fateful circumstances, pave the way for religious tyrants to seize power in the U.S..  What begins as a few seemingly reasonable concessions of personal freedoms, quickly gives way to totalitarianism.  With the government’s arsenal at their disposal, they use the brutality of torture and murder to impose their will on the unarmed population.   This is how slavery was maintained in the U.S. for nearly 250 years.  This is how Hitler seized and then maintained his power and how the Taliban and Isis rule.  This is what we are now watching in the Philippines with the dictator in power there.  This is how human traffickers operate.  Tyrants don’t announce their intentions.  They seize upon a vulnerability: poverty, ignorance, weakness, fear, greed, or prejudice and they offer the bate of a quick resolution.

Less any of us think that we are not susceptible, think about what we were willing to give up after 9/11 to remain safe.  Think of how quickly some people turned against religious minorities.  As the ethnic demographics change in our country, coupled with suppressed wages, I think about how fervently certain white people turned to someone like Trump when he managed to convince them that they were losing “their” America?  More than ever, we have to protest every time he tries to discredit the media, the judicial, congress, and scientists.  We have to speak up when minority groups are belittled, scapegoated, and attacked with impunity.  Even as a Christian, I am worried about the notion that religious freedom is under attack because Christians can’t impose their will on non-Christians, women, transgender, scientists, educators, and gays.  We have to be careful and we have to be brave.

I’m excited to read the book behind the new series, “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood.