Thinking about Complacency: Part 2 of Understanding My Post-Election Response

Continued from Part 1.

When I walked into school that Wednesday, I learned that many of my friends here didn’t know I’m Muslim.

Faith has always been integral to my social currency–oh, there’s the girl that doesn’t drink or eat pork, fasts at inconsistent times of the year, sends spammy emails about Muslim-American comedy shows–but in medical school, that reputation hasn’t had time to proliferate. In part, I didn’t want it to: blessed with a new setting, I subconsciously engaged in a social experiment to see what happened if I didn’t verbal vomit up an explanation for every faith-motivated life choice I made.

Turns out people don’t demand explanations for my life choices, but now: their absence meant I didn’t know how to begin explaining my grief to my “it will be okay”-er peers. The “everybody is blowing this out of proportion; life won’t change that much”-ers. The same people who then say, “I need to do more research before I speak up against XYZ.”

In Part 1, I attributed part of my negative reaction to this election to the basest of human emotions: a desire for my own wellbeing, and a fear of anything that threatens that. When well-meaning acquaintances tried to assure me that Trump’s worst promises could not come to fruition, I discovered the second, more pressing reason: I starting thinking about how easy it is for unaffected persons to be complacent with injustice, and what that could mean under a Trump presidency.   

There is enough suffering in the world right now that I could easily write for hours here–on Syria, on child labor in global supply chains, on the targeting of racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities locally and globally, on slave labor in American prisons-but I will restrict myself to one example.

As I write this now, Thanksgiving weekend of 2016, the Standing Rock Sioux tribe and allies are protesting the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline, citing its destruction of ancestral graveyards, prayer sites, and culturally significant artifacts, as well as the threat it poses to their water supply and the environment. Police have subjected protesters to rubber bullets, tear gas, and icy water; in response, doctors and tribal healers with the Standing Rock Medic and Healer Council released a statement requesting “immediate cessation of use of water cannons on people who are outdoors in 28F ambient weather,” due to fear of hypothermia ¹.

But for those of us who aren’t directly affected by this or any other plights, we have the liberty to sift through questions like: are the protesters’ concerns valid? Is there enough evidence that I should support their cause? Even if I support their cause, should I act on it? This privilege–the privilege of theorizing, of deciding when one wants to engage with information and how much information they need to make a decision–allows self-imagined good people to say things like, “I haven’t done enough research to make up my mind,” and use this as an excuse to do nothing.

As my friend summarized, “inertia is a powerful force.”

Today, we face a White House home to people unafraid to broadcast their prejudices. Nominated for Attorney General is unabashed nativist Jeff Sessions, a man who voted against banning “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment” for American detainees, has a long history of making anti-Black statements, tried persistently to abolish the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals Scheme, and expressed skepticism of H1-B visas companies use to recruit skilled foreign workers ² . Stephen Bannon, slated for chief White House strategist, spent his last four years as chairman of Breitbart News–where he presided over the publication of a slew of misogynistic, anti-Semitic, race-baiting, transphobic, and homophobic articles ³. His own words are no less abhorrent: according to a former colleague, Bannon expressed interest in restricting the right to vote to just property-owners, saying “maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” when it was pointed out that would exclude many African-Americans; his ex-wife reports that he didn’t want their daughters to attend school with Jewish students. ⁴ Michael Flynn, our next national security adviser, tweeted “Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL;” ⁵ in a speech three months ago, he declared Islam a “vicious cancer inside the body of 1.7 billion people” that must be “excised.” ⁶

To say that this doesn’t bode well for civil liberties in America is an understatement. 

When contemplating what the next four years for America might look like, it is useless to comfort ourselves with platitudes like “the worst cannot happen.” People have allowed and continue to allow atrocities to happen every day; unless we, the general public, donate our money, voices, or actions  in protest of those atrocities, we remain complacent. And whether it is apathy, ignorance, or the “I haven’t made up my mind yet” inertia: no excuse can absolve us.