Page 184 - Dark Matter Issue5 Part II

MIRIAM GREENSPAN

Trump Nightmares and the Medicine of Resistance

The morning Donald Trump was elected President, I shook like a leaf. My whole body

trembled with fear. I had to sit down. It was as though I’d just heard that someone I love

had been attacked or killed.

This was no irrational anxiety—it was a profound bodily intelligence, registering the

enormity of the threat Trump poses to our democracy and to the world. It wasn’t shock

that shook me. I wasn’t surprised by Trump’s win. I’d predicted it many months before

when most people were treating him like a bad joke. In a moment of electric intuition I felt

it in the air—that the United States was ripe for a demagogue. I could feel this in my

body in the same way that a victim of assault can feel a predator close by. She can

sense the presence even if it’s not visible.

My sensitive antennae have been fine-tuned by my history as the daughter of Holocaust

survivors. My parents survived two different fascisms, one from the Right and one from

the Left. Newly married just before the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939, they

honeymooned on the run, landing in the Soviet-occupied sector of the country, where

they were greeted by Communist fascists who put them on cattle cars and imprisoned

them in a Siberian gulag for the sin of being “suspicious persons” (i.e. Jews on the run

from Hitler).

When they returned to Poland five years later, their world had disappeared, their families

turned to smoke in Auschwitz and Treblinka. I was born in a refugee camp, my first

home for the first four years of my life. I came to this country, a scrawny kid with big

eyes, knowing in my bones that the world can steal your life in a heartbeat.

The fear that I felt as a child in the Displaced Persons camp, and growing up in the south

Bronx, was not only a response to the dangers of my immediate environment. It was an

energy I carried transpersonally, transmitted to me by parents traumatized by genocide.