A thought about the future, and safety

I don't know who needs to read this but back during the first Bush administration I was riding the Blue Line train in DC, commuting, during the war in Kuwait, and I noticed a couple of high-ranking military officers in uniform (there were always military on the train; it was the line to the Pentagon). And one was wearing a Joint Chiefs emblem on his lapel -- on the public train, during rush hour.

Joint Chiefs? Even I knew that the higher ranks populating the Pentagon are supposed to leave their Pentagon pass-emblems at the exits when they depart, not bring them home. And I felt very uneasy, because this was a crowded train, we were at war, and if someone sympathetic to one or the other side in that war decided to take pot shots at one of those officers, the rest of us were also in danger.

When I got home I contacted a friend of a friend, who at the time worked in internal security at the Pentagon, and told him I'd seen an officer wearing a Joint Chiefs emblem on the train. He nearly went into shock, thanked me very much for telling him, agreed that that should never happen, and passed this up the line to the chief of security, who apparently took measures to make sure it did not happen again.

I am talking about this, which happened more than 30 years ago, because I don't know how it's going to be in the next four years.

Trump wants to crack down on protesters who are foreign students by deporting them, just as he wants to deport illegal aliens. He’s just put a white supremacist in as his choice for secretary of defense, one who was removed from active duty at least once when he was in the military because of his tattoos, which evoke the Crusades in a white-supremacist way. (Not what you want if he’s supposed to be a neutral military guard at Biden’s inauguration.). And Trump has been threatening to use the military — illegally — against American citizens. He hates protests that aren’t ones he instigates. And there are a lot of people out there who make a hobby of hating those who aren’t like them, and he’s their president.

Maybe it will be safe to be obvious with any membership insignia any of us wants to wear, at a protest or in ordinary life. Maybe not. I don't know. I’m not saying not to wear it. But if there's a chance that being too obvious would endanger anyone else, maybe think twice? And I'm not saying go back in a closet or anything like that -- but you and I both know there are less obvious and more obvious ways of indicating your affiliations and interests, and sometimes the less obvious ones may be safer. You have every right to protest, and every right to wear whatever you want, wherever you want, but the only person who should be affected by your actions is yourself.

And maybe none of this will be relevant in a week or a month or a year. Maybe all of Trump’s hand-chosen cabinet and assistants will be upright, ethical people who uphold the rule of law, but from what I’m seeing I seriously doubt most of them could define ‘ethical’, let alone spell it.

This is entirely up to your judgment of time and place and situation, of course. There are a lot more weapons out there now than there were 30+ years ago, which makes me a bit nervous anyway.

(I know. You think I’m going overboard here. Maybe I am. It’s a gut feeling that I’m not, though, and I follow my gut feelings, though I could be misinterpreting it.). Feel free to tell me, in six months or a year, or more, that I’m reacting to nothing, and I’ll be glad to hear it from you. Keep your eyes open and read the room, wherever you are.

Just stay safe out there, okay? I don’t want to lose you.