Millennial Life: The Charge of Democracy
As I was being charged by name with genocide and cowardice by the protesters yelling in council chambers, I thought about my great-grandfather. His crime had been speaking out and warning about cowardice.
The Nazi officers had wanted to kill someone in front of him. He told the officer with the gun not to be a coward, that if the officer wanted to shoot the man, to at least shoot him in the front and not in the back like a coward. Later that evening, the knock on the door came, and they took my great-grandfather away, and my 10-year-old grandmother never saw her father again.
There are a few things I take away from that story: the power of your voice, the consequences of speaking up, the nature of mundane evil, and intergenerational trauma.
I saw a display of that trauma as the resolution on our City Council agenda, calling for a ceasefire in Palestine, became public. Over 100 emails and several phone calls were sent in about five days. One would think that a call for peace would be easy, but it was not.
As the resolution was written by a student-led, pro-Palestine group, the Jewish community in our town felt fear. Some email writers couldn't see beyond their anger and fear; some tried to be constructive, their hearts seeing the pain of others thousands of miles away because when it comes down to it, we're all human.
Many emails to me also speculated what this had to do with our town. I could rattle off that the money used for bombs could be used for bike paths, but that would go unseen. As a local governing body, we felt a need to respond to both the 300 who signed the petition for ceasefire and those who had deep concerns with the resolution. Both of those are our constituencies.
The mayor moved to remove the resolution from the agenda, which is allowed for any item on an agenda as long as there are enough votes to support the removal. It passed, 5-2.
Rage erupted. The protesters got up to yell at the back of the chambers; those who had been sitting in chairs got up to turn around and yell back. The mayor tried to restore order.
Would it have been productive to make almost line-by-line amendments to a resolution that might have inched us toward an agreement that, at its best, would be: We do not condone the killing of innocent people?
But we can't even agree on who those are.
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