What Now?
Today’s the 78th anniversary of my dad’s escape from Berlin on Kristallnacht and yesterday America elected Donald Trump to be the next President of the United States.
By peddling fear, bigotry, xenophobia, homophobia, and misogyny, Donald Trump has activated a swath of America that’s been left behind by the social progressivism that’s marked the last 40 years of social and political change in this country.
My biggest concern now is that he makes it socially acceptable for people who believe, like him, that men have rights over women’s bodies, that people born on foreign soil, that people of color, in fact people who are different in any way from the white male alpha culture, are deviant, insignificant, criminal or worse — that Donald Trump has made it socially acceptable for these people to actively, openly share their heinous beliefs without shame, and worse, take action on them.
I am the daughter of a refugee. My father was born in Berlin in 1936 and escaped in his mother’s arms on Kristallnacht. He was raised by nuns under an assumed identity in a Catholic girls orphanage in Brussels. After the War, he and his single, pregnant mother arrived in the U.S., penniless and without a word of English. They waited three days in Grand Central Terminal for their sponsors to arrive and meet them, but the sponsors never came. They’d been killed in a car wreck while my father and grandmother were in passage.
My grandmother finally flagged down a passing rabbi in the station and spoke to him in Yiddish. He brought them to refugee housing at NYANA, in the building that now houses the Public Theater. Eventually, they moved into a tenement on the Lower East Side, my father went to high school, learned English — in large part thanks to movies and the teenaged daughters of the Italian bookmaker who lived in his building. At 18, he joined the Army and eventually went to Brooklyn College where he met my mom, who’d grown up in another kind of hiding right here in the U.S. Her parents, who were relatively affluent small business owners, were active in the Communist Party during the McCarthy years.
I grew up in a conventional, affluent New Jersey suburb, where my parents’ childhoods felt like distant fairy tales from days of yore. Now, I worry how much closer we are to their reality — I worry for my children, my friends and colleagues who are every color, religion, gender, sexual orientation and I worry for my family members who live and work abroad.
How do we wake up today (the 78th anniversary of Kristallnacht) and:
1) Make compassion a priority — in our personal lives and in our culture?
2) Support candidates in the midterms — especially in states that went red this election cycle?
3) Identify and nurture potential challengers to Trump for 2020 who have enough personal charisma and media savvy to defeat the man who is clearly the master.
Finally, I must ask my friends and colleagues — many of whom work in media and technology — what you are doing in your professional life that supports progress and doesn’t fan the flames of divisiveness, bigotry and hate? Last night I couldn’t stop thinking about my former boss, Jeff Zucker who essentially created Trump by giving him a platform on NBC and later gave him endless free airtime for his campaign on CNN as his outrageousness in speaking against core American values was ratings gold.
As media creators and consumers, our words, images and social shares matter. We live in a bubble. How do we reach out to those who are economically disenfranchised in less urban parts of the country? How do we heal those who blame progressive social policies for their woes? How do we come together and salvage our beautiful American experiment?
