By Rachel Gartner and David Ebenbach
To all the people who voted for Trump who say they are not racist, misogynistic, xenophobic, homophobic, Islamophobic, or anti-Semitic:
With his selection of people like Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Ken Blackwell, and Michael Flynn to lead this country, the president-elect has given you a great opportunity to back up your claim. In appointing white supremacists, homophobes, and Islamophobes, the president-elect has shown us all who he really is. Will you join those who did not vote for your candidate in showing the president-elect who the American people are?
Because here's the thing: Democracy doesn't happen every four years. It happens every day. Every day is a test of our citizenship. And we hope those who put the president-elect in office will see that they have a special responsibility to exercise their citizenship right now. Because maybe you voted for change, or for economic reasons, or against a government you saw as immovable, or against ISIS—maybe you had many noble reasons—but regardless, you are part of the coalition that is putting racists and other spreaders of hate in power. And so, like it or not, each of their actions left unchecked by you is a stain on your good name. How you respond to them will say as much about you as their actions say about them.
There's one thing we can all be sure of: if we do not come together to actively fight bigotry, we will not be able to hide behind a claim of innocence; our silence will be—and will be understood by all to be—nothing less than complicity. Because we all know what history teaches: the erosion of all good things (and bad things, too) happens drop by drop. Every time we fail to fight the accumulating power of enmity, the foundations of what we stand for increasingly waste away. Are we going to let that happen?
In the words of George Washington in 1790, ours is meant to be a country "that gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance." Make no mistake: silence is sanction and apathy is assistance. Instead, all good citizens must all reach out and speak up—to our representatives, to news outlets, on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, to anyone with a platform and an ear—to protest hate, each and every time it arises. We must all expend our energy, use our words, make the time, open our hearts and use our minds, invest our resources to bravely beat back the unconscionable forces, organizations, and policies that fly in the face of our core American values, the common good, and our basic humanity. And that begins by preventing the appointment of hate-mongers like Steve Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Ken Blackwell, and Michael Flynn.
How? Here are some simple concrete actions we all can take:
1) Publicly call out local and national media when they report these appointments as straight news stories or refer to them as a "controversial" or as "provocateurs," but don't call them what they are: white supremacists, homophobes, Islamophobes. Haters. Don't let the media normalize this.
2) Call your Representatives and Senators and tell them you do not want bigots appointed to your country's highest offices, and that you expect them to represent you in protest.
http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/
http://www.senate.gov/.../contact_information/senators_cfm.cfm
2) Call Speaker Ryan in his office at (202) 225-3031 and Majority Leader McConnell at (202) 224-2541 and tell them that you do not approve of having these men in his cabinet.
Trump voters of good conscience, more and more of your fellow Americans are standing against these appointments. Will you join us? If so, we will support you every step of the way. And if we take this journey together, then the only "us" vs. "them" will be those few bad actors who disseminate hate vs. those many good people who defy it. And then we will all pass the test of our times, and be remembered well both by history and by one another.
Rabbi Rachel Gartner is a Co-Chair of T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights.
David Ebenbach is the author of three books of short stories, including, most recently, Into the Wilderness, plus a novel, two books of poetry and a non-fiction guide to creativity. With a PhD in Psychology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts, Ebenbach teaches literature and creative writing at Georgetown University. Find out more at www.davidebenbach.com/guy.