Hello, my name is Benjamin Gorman. I’m an author and activist who moved here to Barcelona just before Inauguration Day in January. This may be a bit backwards, but I want to start with some thank yous. Thank you to Rachel Sair, our Secretary of DA Spain-Barcelona, who has been one of the people who has made my family feel so welcomed since we moved to Barcelona back in January, inviting us to participate in Democrats Abroad and connecting us with so many wonderful people here. Can we give Rachel a big hand? And thank you to Robert Gerrard, your DA Barcelona Press Coordinator, for inviting me to speak today. Can we give Rob a hand? And thanks to all the people who volunteer for Democrats Abroad and have put this event together. Thank you, volunteers!
And now I want to thank you. Not all the Democrats back home in the US, but specifically Democrats Abroad here in Barcelona. You have a vital role to play in fighting the tyranny that’s taking over our country.
I don’t want to tell you, here, at our No Tyrants rally, about the tyrant himself. Instead, let me tell you a little story, and bear with me if you know this one.
So, one day a couple fish were swimming around their aquarium, and they passed an older fish. The older fish said, “Hey, guys, how’s the water today?”
The younger fish said, “Hey, Bob, great to see you!”
And they swam away.
And then one of the younger fish turned to his friend and said, “What the heck is water?”
You see, it’s very difficult to be aware of something when it’s all around you. But if one of those fish had dared to jump out of the aquarium, it would have become cognizant of water very quickly.
You and I have jumped out of the aquarium. But what many of us are realizing is that we aren’t gasping and suffocating. We’re breathing more freely here in Barcelona. Because maybe we weren’t in an aquarium after all. Maybe, just maybe, we were in a saucepan.
If we went back in time and I told you there would be a presidential election between two people, one of whom was among the most qualified candidates in American history, a former vice president, a Senator from the most populous state, and that candidate was running against someone who had never held political office other than the one they were running for, was a failed businessperson by any metric, had been indicted on 86 charges in four jurisdictions and found guilty on 34 counts, and had been accused of sexual assault by more than 20 victims and once found civilly liable for it, I think any reasonable person would have predicted the first candidate would win by a landslide. But we have all learned a lot about our country in the last 9 years.
The water we all swam in was a story we were told, over and over, by everyone around us, as ubiquitous as the air we breathed. I, as a cishet white guy, could afford to believe the story completely without consequence, but even the most marginalized among us, who had to learn about the lies just to stay safe, still were infected by the story. The story told us that America was the greatest, safest, freest, most moral country on Earth. And the story was so strong, it could contain within it all these asterisks. Sure, there was the genocide that provided the land itself, and the slavery that provided the labor, and the sexism that maintained the patriarchy, and the hyper-capitalism that made the stark inequality possible, but… Those were just asterisks.
And now we, not all of us, but many of us, and especially those of us who have leapt out of that saucepan as it begins to boil, are starting to see that the story was flipped. The asterisks are the truth, and the rest of the story is a hope, a dream, an aspiration.
Now, I’m biased because I’m a writer of fiction, but I still hold on to the belief that dreams are not worthless. Even when we feel betrayed upon the discovery that what we were taught in our history classes might as well have included Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy for all their veracity, the youngest here among us (and their parents!) know that the Tooth Fairy is useful. And the American Dream is useful. It informs us about what we wish were true, and that can be our guide, our lodestar. A democracy is supposed to be a system which produces a government that is the expression of the will of the majority of the people. It never has been that, but our desire for a democracy tells us we should build one. The United States is not the safest country as long as children have to do lockdown drills in school, adults have to worry about being bankrupted by medical debt, women have to look at their President and know they could be assaulted any day and their attacker might not be punished but might instead be rewarded with the highest office, and if they become pregnant, they can be forced to be human incubators in a country with the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income country. LGBTQ people have to live each day with the fear that their marriages could be annulled, their parenting rights stripped away, and people of color have to live their lives knowing the Supreme Court just decided racial profiling is not only acceptable but the proper procedure for ICE to determine who to harass, kidnap, deport, and yes, kill. Not a few bad apples. A spoiled bunch. And the US is not the most moral country when it is actively funding genocides in other countries and stuffing human beings in hastily built concentration camps back home. And if a country is not safe, not free, and not moral, then it is not great. Just rich and deadly.
And this is where I do have to talk a little bit about the tyrant. I’m going to say something controversial for this occasion: Donald Trump is not the problem. Donald Trump is a two-bit conman who has merely seized on an opportunity to inflate his own ego and line his pockets. He’s a useful idiot for a lot of very dangerous people, and a symbol for a lot of angry, frightened people, but, more than anything, he’s a symptom of a far deeper rot. And if the United States is not willing to confront that rot, one tyrant will simply be replaced by another. As bad as things seem today in the United States, they could get a whole lot worse. And most days, I think they will. And if I’m right, aw shucks, guess I have to live out my life in one of the greatest cities on Earth.
But some days I do find a sliver of hope, and I feel it now, looking at all of you. The United States could become great. And this is where you come in. Because you are seeing it from the outside, you can be the ones to say, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” And maybe, just maybe, on those days when you are feeling optimistic, you can even be the one to say, “It doesn’t have to be this way, and we can make it better.” Because we live in a place where kids don’t do lockdown drills in school. We live in a place where people don’t worry about medical debt. We live in a place where our tax dollars do not fund a genocide abroad or mass incarceration here. If greatness is having the most billionaires or the power to kill the most people, Spain is not going to compete with the United States. But if greatness of a nation is measured in the wellbeing of the populace, and the effectiveness of a government is measured by its responsiveness to its people, then we have all learned a lot here. We can take that knowledge to our party as one of the 57 delegations, to our states where we are registered voters, to our political representatives, to our friends and family via social media, and we can say, “Let’s make the United States into the country we all want it to become.”
So get active, Democrats Abroad in Barcelona. The tyrant will not last forever, and you all have incredibly valuable insight our country needs in order for it to become the place it dreams of being. Thank you for sharing what you have learned!
