OPINION | Resistance in the Age of Zombies

Fascism. It's a big, dramatic word, one that my instincts, particularly in relation to the U.S. government, would prefer to shrug off. All my life I have been told that, despite our problems, we have it so good in the United States. We are so free compared to anyone else. Maybe so.

But the day after November's election, I felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. I walked my neighborhood, turning over the results, trying to make sense of them like so many others, and wondering what kind of resistance might emerge over time in response to what could only seem like a mad choice in leadership. I'm an old woman now. I am not brave. What could I do in response to an apparently growing acceptance of corruption and fascist leanings at the highest levels of government?

I have found myself thinking a lot about my mother in the past few weeks. If she were still alive, she would be 97 now. The daughter of Slovenian immigrants, she grew up in WWII-era France. My grandparents had left Slovenia when Italy annexed their homeland, insisting that the locals change their last names to an Italianate form. My grandfather refused and, as a result, he was blacklisted, unable to find work to support his family. So off they went, blown by the vagaries of politics and fascism, to settle in Forbach, a small Alsatian coal-mining town in the north of France.

At the age of 12, my mother went to visit an aunt then living in Italy and became stuck when Mussolini allied with Hitler and the borders were closed. For three years, she lived there, assisting her aunt who worked as a seamstress, trying to adjust to life without her parents and sister.

Three years later, when Hitler dissolved the free zone in the south and occupied all of France, she was once again able to cross the border and rejoin her parents, who had fled their small town in Alsace as the German army advanced, to settle in Metz. Much had changed and was changing. Her family had been tipped off by a neighborthat their home in Alsace would be one of the first to be looted by those who resented them for being immigrant outsiders. They buried what food they could in their backyard before they left, hoping to return to collect what they could when things were calmer.

My mother was no stranger to anti-immigrant sentiment or fascism. She was no stranger to resistance. She talked of a Slovenian cousin who, at the age of 17, ran messages for the local partisans and how she had breathlessly once described her first kiss to my mother, just a kid talking to another kid. When the Germans killed her, they held her body in the open for three days, believing that the partisans always claimed their dead. They didn't.

My mother left Italy at the age of 15, returning to now-occupied France and her parents. That was the year her father shored up the ceiling of their basement in case they could not make it to an air-raid shelter in time. His neighbors thought he was nuts, but when an American bomber dropped its load on their house before going down itself, at least they showed up to dig her family out of the rubble. The ceiling had held.

Her father had been a coal miner in Alsace and probably knew a few things about shoring up dark, underground spaces. But perhaps it was that same coal that weakened his lungs so that, a year later, he died from pneumonia, leaving his wife and daughters to fend for themselves.

My mother's experience as a seamstress was in demand by the Nazis who had taken over the local shirt factory and needed workers to make army uniforms for them. At the age of 16, she was basically conscripted into service. How could she do that? Did she really have to? Make shirts for the Nazis? Every once in a while, she said, they would sew a sleeve shut.

Oops. Just like that.

So why, after our elections, am I filled with dread? Why do I hear a voice in my head saying that if it happened to my mother, it could happen anywhere after all. I listen to Trump's public relations team responding to every outcry about the actions of the incoming government with platitudes about their plan to "Make America Great Again." It seems to be the answer to everything, no matter the question or accusation. The MAGA mantra has reduced the nation to zombie politics, a deadening response from the smiling lips of the walking dead.

When I worked in college administration, I had several meetings with the CFO, laying out my budget, going over contact hours, hiring, and supply needs. I kept the mission of the college and of my department in mind as I argued for my proposed budget, providing evidence for the necessity of certain costs. Too often, the CFO appeared to not have heard anything I was saying and would respond with a non sequitur, basically making his opposition clear, but nothing else. Was he an idiot? I expected my presentation to be met with reasoned discussion, if not agreement, rather than this kind of deflection.

I later learned that responding with the same line over and over was a strategy, one designed to wear the listener down until the futility of the pitch was evident.

I was the idiot. I was being stonewalled.

Why are so many of Trump's cabinet nominees clearly unqualified for the position assigned? We are making America great again. Isn't it a conflict of interest to appoint someone whose corporate and stock profits could benefit from their being placed in charge of regulatory agencies whose mission is to protect the consumer? We are making America great again. What will happen to the CDC and the NIH if a person with no scientific training and a clear political agenda is given the reins? We will make America great again.

How does one resist these zombie politics and not give in to despair? How do we know if we are slipping into fascism or if it has already slipped in through our back door while we were just going on with our lives? It would certainly take a different form, but could my mother's history, a history so alien from my own, repeat itself here on American soil? Could I ever demonstrate the kind of courage and resilience that my mother needed to survive that history? How might I resist?

I come from a family whose resistance ended in death or being blacklisted and essentially deported. Do you think I feel brave right now? Do you think that this old, arthritic woman is ready to take on fascism when I see it?

I honestly don't know. I doubt myself. But what I find myself thinking as I walk the dog and greet my neighbors, what I think about when I read of the legal and legislative forces marshaling for what may come next, what I think about is my mother. I find myself thinking that there must be a thousand different ways to sew a few sleeves shut.

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Chris Kellett has over 30 years of professional work experience in higher education, involving instruction, advising, faculty hiring and mentoring, program development, curriculum design, and diversity work. She received her doctorate in English from the University of Washington and spent most of her career working at Antioch University and Cornish College of the Arts. She also taught for the University of Washington, Central Washington University, Bellevue College, and the College of Creative Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.