This is what I wrote today to fellow members of the New Haven ACLU board

Barbara and I have been handling self-isolation together extremely well, but I’m finding that depression about what is going on beyond our front door is growing and increasingly paralyzing my ability to remain in good spirits. What I’m writing here relates, among other things, to actions we in the ACLU consider in the coming months. At some level, it’s also a request for wisdom about how to manage the growing anxiety I describe here. Just how alone am I in this thinking?

I’m very worried about what’s going to happen between now and next inauguration day. I don’t know if a November election will be allowed to take place. If it does, I don’t know if the results will be rigged. If somehow Biden is elected (not my favorite choice, but tons less bad than a continuing Trump administration—and I’m even a bit encouraged by Biden’s working with Bernie on the party platform), I’m not convinced he’ll be allowed to take office.

If any or all of these scenarios happen, presumably our legal system will fall to pieces and be manipulated to purge dissent. I’m skeptical that any ACLU actions would then do any good, since the Constitution will no longer be relevant (or relevant only in distorted ways dictated by “leaders” and judges). And I hope ACLU honchos are putting plans in place just in case the worst happens.

I know that none of what I fear may occur. And if any of it does, there are many possible mitigating factors and uncertainties, including what steps military leaders and law enforcement would take. Will governors call out the national guard? Will some governors cooperate with such a coup? What about the sprinkling of right-wing extremists within the military and law enforcement? And so on and on.

The failure to deal with the gun-toting terrorists who recently invaded the Michigan capitol building is not at all reassuring. And you can bete that these right-wing terrorists are discussing future strategies that may well include coordinated assassinations of key people who would resist a ruling dictatorship.

Until recently, the concerns I’m expressing were theoretical. I never imagined I’d be living in a country that has become as dangerous as ours, thanks not to Trump alone but to his enablers and supporters who, even if a minority, have intentions of encouraging tyranny of a minority. Though I’ve read a good deal about past plagues, I never imagined I’d be in the midst of, and vulnerable to, a pandemic like the current one. While I’ve had anxiety since the current administration took power, the pandemic has significantly upped that concern.

Of course, I hope my fears are wrong, and I’ll be happy to look back at some point and have all of you ridicule me for having gone so far overboard in the midst of what for most of us (or at least most privileged white folk) is an unprecedented experience. But I’ve read enough history to see disturbing parallels between what is happening now and what has brought down other societies in the past. And the Holocaust has always presented me with the conundrum of what made some Jews and not others get out of Germany (or soon-to-be-German-occupied countries) in time.

If there is a political catastrophe, I’d like not to wake the next morning to a disastrous fait accompli and then run around in circles trying to figure out what to do. Clumsily, I am brainstorming and consulting about ways to be at least a bit prepared. Early thoughts range from having suicide pills stashed away to building a large stash of cash somewhere safe that could underwrite some kind of escape attempt and its aftermath. (In my worst fantasies, a fascistic government will freeze financial accounts of anyone it identifies as dissident.) Contemplating adjustments of a major move at our ages, a year or two either side of 80, isn’t easy, and while I would seriously consider leaving the country, Barbara won’t—and I’m going nowhere without her.

I do not believe that the country was in a wonderful place before Trump, and I do not believe in “going back” to some notion of where the country was. (Can you imagine trying to get a widely accepted definition of what that would look like?) I am very aware that as privileged (and white) people with a strong financial position, Barbara and I have been significantly buffered from most of the miseries of the COVID-19 lockdown. I am aware that people are getting sick and dying to serve our needs. I am aware that a disproportionate percentage of those people are non-white. I am aware that federal and local terrorist behavior towards people of color and immigrants has continued, presumably with even more deaths and general suffering. And I am aware that much of this was going on before the pandemic, and in many ways before Trump and his enablers took office.

That said, and no doubt because Barbara and I have NOT (so far) been personally (as operated to mentally) victimized to any serious extent by the political atrocities, I fervently do NOT want an overthrow of the country’s traditional, if often corrupted, constitutional framework (though I’m also worried about how that “tradition” will be interpreted by the growing number of Trumpian court appointees, and especially the Supreme Court for some time to come). I wish it were possible to leverage our experience with the pandemic and come out of it with much stronger social justice and environmental behavior, but I think that’s unlikely.

As it presumably troubles you, my jaw drops open at all the talk about balancing the “economy” (I’m less and less clear exactly what that is) and American deaths that result from “re-opening. I won’t even go into disregard for people in my age bracket.

While I am not (yet) fearful of anti-semitic attacks on Barbara and me personally, I am of course unhappy about the way Jews and other traditionally targeted groups have been increasingly attacked since the 2017 inauguration (indeed, I think the targeting started increasing during the 2016 campaign). My fellow-traveler parents raised their children as red-diaper Jews, and though I feel zero spiritual and little cultural connection with (but considerable alienation from) Judaism, it is the fact of the Holocaust that determined the bedrock of my progressive value system (and, at times, actions). So in some ironic way, it is my tenuous Jewish origins that have always driven my values. (I’ve started writing about that background—or perhaps more precisely, my rejection of most of it—on my blog, and if you’re curious, here’s a start on further explanation regarding this subject: http://www.richardyanowitz.com/wordpress/some-family-and-childhood-background/.)

Were it up to me, I’d be preparing to be ready to leave the country on short notice. But Barbara is not on board with that, and I’m not going anywhere without her. And there are, of course, numerous other factors we would have to consider, including leaving relatives to potentially awful fates.

If you interpret what I’m writing as the ravings of a paranoid maniac (and I hope that turns out to be the case), you’ll not want to waste time replying. But if you think you can offer me useful thoughts, please do share them.