“Tyranny Requires Your Fear… Democracy Requires Your Courage”

At a full Board of Alders meeting on Monday evening, Fair Haven Alder Sarah Miller made the case for courage in the face of a constitutional crisis, by way of some ​“divine guidance” from Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. 

Miller read aloud an excerpt of Pritzker’s recent State of the State speech as part of the Divine Guidance portion of the Board of Alders agenda.

The governor’s message — that hiding dissent in order to avoid being singled out for punishment only ends up helping controlling leaders cement their power — echoes the City of New Haven’s response to Trump thus far. The city is right now standing alone among East Coast cities in one lawsuit defending its Welcoming City policy, which prevents city employees from asking for or reporting anyone’s immigration status, except in a few extraordinary circumstances.

Miller prefaced Pritzker’s words with an introduction of her own, calling on her colleagues to more directly call out President Donald Trump’s actions in their official capacity.

“Over the last 43 days we have all witnessed a bully dismantling our federal government with obscene cruelty,” she said. ​“We have also witnessed around the country, and even here in these chambers, basically silence in response.”

“The explanation for this silence, from some, is to avoid putting a target on our backs, beneath the gaze of a petty and vindictive tyrant,” Miller continued. ​“The problem with this approach is that it is enabling. Silence implies consent. Silence is also the luxury of people who aren’t personally impacted — yet. But the impacts of the new administration are already here for me, for many in our city, and they are coming for all of us.”

She then read the following excerpt from Pritzker’s speech:

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too ​“female” and ​“nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations. 

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. When the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2,000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the ​“rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was ordinary people who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, and do not let the ​“tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.