The phrase “once more into the fray” is a powerful line often associated with William Shakespeare’s play Henry V. It is not a standalone poem, but rather a key part of King Henry’s speech in Act III, Scene I, urging his troops to attack. The line “Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more” is a call to action, inspiring his soldiers to face the challenges of battle. The phrase “into the fray” is a modern interpretation, emphasizing the spirit of entering a difficult fight. 

This, now, is our personal and societal call to action. This is our “difficult fight”

And suddenly, just like that, here we are once again, gathering our outrage like a cape, our moxie like a battle cry, and taking to the streets. It is certainly not unfamiliar territory for this child of the sixties and seventies. I have ingested more tear gas, mustard gas, and heavy-handed police actions than most any other young person alive today. Back then I was wildly antiwar, anti-Nixon, and anti all the antis that told us as young people what we should do, and what we could not think.

Just as now, our “enemy combatants” were within. They were our own governments, some state, some local, but mostly Federal, who were promoting a dictate of hate and positioning us, the thinking, feeling, public, as the actual enemy. Remember Nixon’s “Enemies List”? They were sending us into a ginned-up war in a far-flung country under the false guise of “stopping the spread of communism”. False equivalencies do not a philosophy make but they do lead to mass extinctions of both human beings (on all sides) and civil liberties right here at home. What they were doing was slaughtering a generation of young men for no apparent purpose other than the bolstering of a certain political ideology and propping up a would-be dictator in the White house.

Sound familiar?

Throughout my long life I have had to go once more into the breech so many times it takes me more than a casual contemplation to remember each of those battles, how I felt and reacted in the moment, and what were the ultimate resolutions, if there actually were any.

As Vietnam was winding down, Watergate snagged our attention. It was an offshoot of the war, a sideshow if you will. But despite the Keystone Kop ham-handedness of the execution, it was tailor made for we liberals, already on high alert after Kent State and daily protests on all our campuses. We leapt at the opportunity to foment more anger at our fearless leaders and drive them from office and subsequently, power.

I should say here that I was born and raised in Washington, D.C. and its immediate suburbs. As a teen I was wandering the streets and monuments and environs of a city designed to impress. It is a unique and humbling plot of ground, conceived to evoke a palpable sense of awe and wonder and to project solidity, permanence, and power. It not just for the rest of the world to see how our upstart nation was modeling itself on civilizations of the past that held great glory and are revered throughout history, but to project the balanced and nuanced thoughtfulness that being a functioning republic requires of its own people. The population at the time of our founding was even then divided and fractious; royalists, pioneers, merchants, slave traders, land-grabbers, all fighting for their piece of this yet to be explored, no less divvied up, fresh baked pie of possibilities. Our founders knew this. 

The Roman Empire was not built in a day or a decade. It lasted about 1,000 years. We are not even 300 years into our own experiment in self-governance and yet, now, this moment, feels so tenuous as to shake not just our own personal interior spaces and thoughts but to rattle the gates of government. We have had political assassinations before, horrific acts of violence within our own country and yet, now, we are seeing politicians being gunned down in their own homes, in front of their families, and for what? These actions are exclamation points on a violent, subversive, and planned assault on our own government, our own people. And where do we lay the responsibility for this home-grown violent upsurge in aggression? 

This time it truly is the enemy within.

It is hard to say chicken or egg here. In the end, though, we must look to our “fearless” leader who, for no other reason except greed, has chosen himself over every one of us. 

Frank Herbert, author of the Dune series, once said, 

 “All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible”

While we have continued to dismiss our current pathology as a vapid, megalomaniacal, wannabe; “he’s just a reality TV guy”, we do so at our own peril. He had told us who he is from the beginning. Every day. And he has subtly raised the stakes, and the offensive over years now in such a manner that we appear willingly distracted by his baited fishhooks which he continues to cast on our troubled waters.

The mire that now reflects our culture and our society is growing so quicksandishly dense that we all appear to be stunned senseless like fish in lake who get fire-bombed by explosives and die, all at once, their belly white undersides floating en mass to the surface ready for harvest. Just look at the facts:

Our utterly unqualified leadership in Congress was chosen, by him.

Our courts have been largely selected and promoted, by him.

Our media is losing its most qualified people though intimidation and money threats, by him.

Our universities have been gutted of money, professors, students, and silenced, by him.

Our largest corporations are now paying for access and acceding to pressure in the private sector, for him.

I have been protesting for almost sixty years of my life. This time, it feels radically different and stunningly more serious. There are machinations of global economics at work that we may never know the extent of. A war in Iran? Israel? Corruption in Africa? Grabbing Greenland for the resources it has that he wants? Distractions, all. Pay attention. It is so easy to check out, I have been doing it myself for a while now. But the subtext of the plot that he promotes, what he wants us to see, is quickly bubbling to the surface. It’s all around us. People are being disappeared right in front of us!  Pay Attention.

It was 115 degrees out yesterday for the No Kings march here in the desert. In the three or four small cities that comprise our valley we had upwards of 10,000 people out on the street showing our friends and neighbors that we still care; about the people, the policies, and the utter injustice our country is heaping upon us all. I walked up and down the streets surveying the crowds. There were Latino families with their kids in tow singing Spanish chants, farm workers and construction folks, elderly neighbors who can barely walk their dogs but now brought them out on the streets to raise their voices to be heard, pastors, principals, and patriots. I shed a tear today, something I have not been able to do in years. We have been numbed by crassness, Covid, and corruption. But I learned something I needed reminding of.

There is more that unites us all than what they want us to believe divided us.

Pay Attention