Editorial: To Save Your Neighbors, Do Not Comply!
Dear reader, the US is in a bad way. This is not shocking to hear. The constant onslaught of bad news from the Federal government, both the White House and the legally dubious DOGE, is designed not just to wear you down, but also pillage the public coffers. Elon Musk stands to make fortunes from illegally obtaining our data, getting a leg up on his competitors, and acting as a de facto president to the weak willed, easily distracted, and ever childish Donald Trump. If America were a Venn diagram we would be sitting in the intersections of Jim Crow and Al Capone.
Despite this it is vital, now more than ever, to remain strong, hold the line, and for the love of all things holy—not comply. In particularly government agencies, non-profit groups, and social services need to remember the old saying—if you come for one of us, you have to come through all of us.
I understand the fear. There are threats of budget cuts. There are threats of firings. There are threats to ending our livelihoods. In many cases, this has already occurred. But the key thing to keep in mind in these dark days is that fascism does not rest on its laurels. Yesterday it was anti-DEI laws, today it is removing language from sites that promote public health, anti-racism, and LGBTQ inclusiveness. Tomorrow it will be much worse.
If you think this is alarmist, I want you to imagine yourself back in 2010. Would calls of concern of the overturning of Roe v. Wade seem alarmist? Would concerns of mangling the 14th Amendment seem outlandish? Would worries that a white South African nazi having access to your social security seem ridiculous?
The answer is, probably, “yes.” Many would have seen it that way. But in just a decade and a half we are there. From the Tea Party to this. The fascists in their Project 2025 have laid out very clearly where they want to steer the nation and then the world.
By not complying, by fighting back on every line of a public website, by suing every time they overreach and try to change a government form, we in the present, are clogging them and keeping them from moving forward. There is nothing illegal or immoral in this. We are not a nation that rules via executive orders from the mouth of a mad kings. We have checks and balances, and now that the government has swung so dangerously to the extreme right, it is time for us, in civil society, to rise to the occasion and fight back.
Every time we force this administration, this supreme court, and this congress to dedicate resources to our checks and balances we are slowing them for their eventual plan to bodily harm the marginalized.
This is not a drill, America. This is the scenario we spent years learning could come to pass in Holocaust remembrance events, in history classes, in civic lessons.
By not complying you are saving lives because you are dismantling the machine as they try to assemble it. Think to the subterfuge waged by the right in the Obama years. Think to the ways the right has long opposed the pursuit of justice while constantly in the minority. This is our time to record, report, and resist.
I promise you this— if we stand together there will a better day that comes from these years. And by recording who among us trampled on our civil liberties, who threatened our neighbors, and who illegally benefitted from the era of Trump crimes, when regaining power we will be able to identify how to permanently marginalize the members of the right so that this situation does not repeat itself.
Resist, resist, resist, a thousand times over in the most mundane and extraordinary ways possible. You need not boast about this on social media, the act of resistance can be quiet and still be profound.
Save your neighbor, save yourself, and save a future worth believing in.
This is the work we are now called to do.
Wesley R. Bishop
Editor, North Meridian Press
Jacksonville, Alabama
February 2025