The Generation that Lost Democracy
Chester Nez was born on Navajo soil in the boundaries of what white ethnic cleansers named New Mexico. His family found economic security through farming. In 1930, the Cleansers decided, as white supremacists tend to do, to scapegoat the Navajo and other Indigenous peoples for creating the Dust Bowl. Arguing that it was their livestock that caused the degradation of the land, the Roosevelt Administration and the Bureau of Indian Affairs ordered the mass slaughter of Indigenous farmers’ animals.
This devastated the Navajo economy and their matriarchical structure. Women owned the vast majority of these farms. In true Trumpian fashion, while the nation starved, the meat was left to rot.
Chester was taken into an Indian Boarding School where “good” white Americans starved and beat him and other Navajo children just for speaking their language and not a foreign European language.
His parents removed him from that school, and by the time he was advancing in high school, World War II had broken out and the Marines were recruiting Navajo bodies en mass to send into the battlefield. In one moment, Chester, as a teenager, showed more wisdom, courage, and love of his people, than this entire nation has been manage to muster over the past decade. He enlisted.
This nation has shown him, his family, and his people the absolute worst that white supremacy has to offer, and he still chose to enlist and defend this country. He played a vital role in creating a battlefield code that was based in the Navajo language and could not be broken. He was discharged in 1945 but then called back into service in 1951 to serve in the Korean War. He was a hero.
In his own words, "People ask me, 'Why did you go? Look at all the mistreatment that has been done to your people.' Somebody’s got to go, somebody’s got to defend this country. Somebody’s got to defend the freedom. This is the reason why I went."
Indigenous peoples and communities understood what the Nazis would do to their land and people if they were allowed to take hold of the levers of power. They did not forget what had happened to them, and they could not escape the continued discrimination they received from those that invaded their lands and herded them like cattle into the boundaries of their barren reservations. And still they enlisted in droves.
Nearly 1/3 of male Indigenous youth enlisted in the military. 1/4 of the women worked in defense plants. They all did their part to protect each other from the governments and militaries threating their lives and lands.
Doris “Dorie” Miller joined a segregated military that openly discriminated against Black soldiers while simultaneously demanding they die for “their” country. He was serving on a segregated warship called the USS West Virginia when it was hit by a torpedo. Dorrie did not hesitate. He immediately rushed the captain’s deck and carried his wounded commanding officer out of the direct line of fire.
While Black soldiers were barred from training on weaponry, Miller manned a .50 caliber anti-aircraft machine gun and downed at least one enemy aircraft before running our of ammunition. And he wasn’t done yet. As his ship was lit ablaze and sinking, he pulled crewmen out of the burning oil slicks and saved multiple lives before his commanders ordered him to abandon ship.
Describing the experience and the act of defying the Navy’s ban on Black soldier’s use of weaponry, he said, “When the Japanese bombers attacked my shop at Pearl Harbor I forgot all about the fact that I and other Negroes can be only messmen in the Navy and are not taught how to man an anti-aircraft gun.”
His instincts to survive and protect his crewmates obliterated all other divides.
In total, approximately one million members of the Black community also stepped up to defend their families, people, and nation. After generations of slavery and Jim Crow, Black Americans joined the military out of pride for the nation they knew they built, and to prove their courage and loyalty to the homeland that White America was trying to keep for themselves.
They lived the words that W.E. DuBois had spoken during World War I, famously urged Black folks to strategically "forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens.”
Defeating fascism takes a love of one’s family and community that is so interconnected to one’s own atomic makeup that just the thought of someone trying to enter the space between you and it could alter the make up of every generation thereafter. It requires a rage so powerful that you are ravenous to exchange your dreams and your comforts for the opportunity to defend those in harms’ way and exact primal vengeance upon anyone that approaches, let alone crosses, the line. There is no price that you wouldn’t be willing to pay to protect those you love and destroy that which endangers them.
And there is no telling when the spark from the last straw breaking will set it all ablaze.
It was a tax on tea that incited the American Revolution. For the French, it was the cost of bread. In India, it was a tax on salt. These are the unforgivable acts the led their respective nation’s people to rise up and either permanently alter or overthrow their governments.
In the United States, Donald Trump tried to violently overthrow a Presidential election. He has amassed his own militia of white nationalists and given its members permission to chase us down in unmarked vehicles while wearing masks, assault us, and traffic us to concentration camps with names like “Alligator Alcatraz.” He has openly taken bribes from our adversaries, handed them our most delicate intelligence, dismantled our global alliances, made us look weak in the face of nations like Iran and China, and launched us into World War III. He uses the government to line his pockets and punish his opponents. He shits on everything we hold dear in ways that make Putin and Xi very proud – all while turning the White House into what looks like ground zero from some sort of adversarial attack. And he’s currently ensuring that a network of powerful and violent child rapist run wild across the globe. And this is just the short list.
And what has this generation done? How have we answered the call to keep the flame of Democracy lit for ourselves and the world? Absolutely fucking nothing.
Seriously, America, what is wrong with us?
The elders and ancestors we admire came together through unthinkable odds to beat Confederates, Klansmen, and Nazis back into the hell-portal they crawled out of. We have allowed Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and MBS to use our President as intercontinental fuck-up puppet and broadcast to the world that not only is Democracy dead, but it is disgusting.
We did that. We are a herculean embarrassment, and we should be ashamed of ourselves.
It took 17 years of sustained action for Ghandi and the people of India to achieve their goal of ending the salt tax and 32 years to end the British occupation. It took 10 years for the French to overthrow (and subsequently behead) their monarchs. We have spent the last 10 years competing for the most hearts and thumbs on a video game posing as a political battlefield.
Our collective generations turned the home of the free and land of the brave into a Sino-Russian couch fucking, dolphin porning, woman hating, minority hungry homunculus. That’s what we contributed to the nation our grandparents and great-grandparents and their elders built for us.
How long are we going to let this go?
We don’t even need a revolution. All we have to do is outsmart the asshole that looked at the sun during an eclipse. And there are many ways to do that.
We are better than this. And we are better than them.
When my great-grandchildren tell my great-great grandchildren the story of the year that will be marked in their history books as the most pivotal year in the history of the Re-united States, I cannot allow myself to think that my generation will be the generation that lost Democracy.
Even more nauseating is the thought that they will tell stories about how my generation’s cowardice is the cause of their trauma and pain.
I want them to be proud of what we did to stop the Trump Administration. I want us to go down in history as the generation that rose up and took the Trump Administration down. We have the opportunity to take our place next to our ancestors and elders as one of the great generations the great battle has ever seen. Let's seize it.
Visit www.strategycamp.org to learn more about how you can join the fight.
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