by Mark Harvey

If the ruler is upright, all will go well even though he gives no orders; but if he is not upright, even though he gives orders they will not be obeyed.    —Confucious— Analects 13:6

Pluck a squirming chicken feather by feather; it won’t become obvious until it’s too late. —Attributed to Benito Mussolini

In a recent interview, when asked if she was still proud of her American citizenship with all that’s happening in the US today, the Chilean author Isabel Allende, was vehement: “I am disgusted with a lot of stuff that is happening today, and I am willing to stand and work to make this country what it should be. I want this country to be compassionate and open and generous and happy as it has always been.”

Given that Allende lived much of her life in exile from her native Chile after the military coup in 1973, I was not surprised to hear her passion for a better America and her willingness to stand up and fight for it. In the same interview, Allende describes the heartbreak of leaving everything behind to escape Chile’s dictatorship. Narrating the flight from Santiago to her new home in Venezuela in the 1970s, she said, “I do remember the moment when I crossed the Andes in the plane. I cried in the plane, because I knew somehow instinctively that this was a threshold, that everything had changed.”

But perhaps the paramount statement Allende makes in the interview given the chaos and cruelty wrought on America by this administration is this:

Although things happened very quickly in Chile, we got to know the consequences slowly, because they don’t affect you personally immediately. Of course, there were people who were persecuted and affected immediately, but most of the population wasn’t. So you think: Well, I can live with this. Well, it can’t be that bad. So you are in denial for a long time, because you don’t want things to change so much. And then one day it hits you personally.

What I’ve noticed in recent reading is that some of the people most alarmed by the undisguised fascism of President Trump and his minions are immigrants who have witnessed the speed with which authoritarian movements can seize a nation by its throat: immigrants who fled tyrants for the promised freedom of the United States. The corollary is how lethargic and oblivious many native-born Americans are to the recent violations of our institutions, our morals, and our image in the world. Aesop is fairly shouting through the ages for us to quit being stupid lambs trusting the hungry wolves—to quit being the lazy grasshoppers with winter coming. Read more »