Fighting Fascism Isn’t Fun

The curse of living in historic times.

When I was young, and romantic, I used to be dazzled by stories about people who had faced vast challenges and overcome them. Not just heroes, but even the mass of ordinary people who simply lived through epic, Earth-shaking periods of history, whether it was the Second World War, the McCarthy era, the Civil Rights Movement, or going back further, the Civil War, the westward expansion of the United States, the founding of this country, and so on. Times that try men’s souls, as Mr. Paine once wrote. Times of danger, and high stakes, and life-and-death drama.

It all seemed very exciting.

At my age, I am of a generation that has seen a few bold-faced moments of our own: Vietnam, the AIDS crisis, 9/11 and the ensuing wars, the 2016 election and all that followed, the COVID-19 pandemic, and January 6th all come to mind.

We are in another such historic moment right now, bigger perhaps that any of those, or any that our generation has lived through before, maybe even rivaling some in that first paragraph. It’s a time of an unprecedented test of America democracy, with no guarantee that the republic will survive. Stakes don’t get much higher or scarier than that.

And I gotta tell ya: it ain’t as much fun as I imagined.