When I was in high school we had a movie day. I think it was in Pam Brewer’s AP Lit class. When we got to class her demeanor was more somber than her usual cheerful, light attitude. As we sat down in our desks, she quietly turned on the tv and started a movie that looked like it had been shot on a disposable camera. “This was filmed in the 80s,” she explained. We were uncharacteristically silent for the next 45 minutes.

The movie she played that day is called The Wave. It’s a depiction of a true story that happened in the late 70s when a history teacher realized his students needed a more impactful lesson about Nazi Germany. The experiment started slowly with the teacher using intentional language in class that centered around glorifying self-importance and exclusive community. Soon he was asking his students to recruit their friends – people they thought would fit in with the club well and uphold its values. Then one day he revealed that the club was actually a nationwide group and that they’d get to watch a message from their leader in the gym that afternoon. Of course, there was no leader and there was no nationwide club. Instead there was a clip of Hitler addressing his cult. Instead of being initiated into a cool, exclusive group, the students learned just how easy it can be to get swept up in cultish ideology and why just 10% of the German population was able to carry out the Holocaust. “Fascism isn’t something those other people did,” the teacher said, as the students sat in silence, “it’s right here in all of us.”

When the movie ended I sat in silence for a while. Arya was purring on my feet and Scruffy was dreaming at the other end of the couch. I looked around at our apartment – at the cozy atmosphere and at my books and at the ornaments on our Christmas tree. I thought about my family in the States and about how last year completely changed our lives and our futures. I thought about my ancestors and how they packed up their lives and braved long journeys across the ocean to start over in a new world in the name of freedom and opportunities. My heart broke when I thought about how their dreams have landed their progeny here – in an oligarchy that has divided families and communities. An oligarchy that bears stark resemblances to The Wave and to the government that murdered millions of people in the 1930s and 40s. I thought about the irony of them fleeing oppression and systematic starvation and extermination, only for many of us to be facing the same types of decisions a few generations later.

I am afraid. I’m afraid of a few men’s desire for power resulting in pain or worse for myself and the people I love. I’m afraid of losing my loved ones over decisions I may have to make in the future. I’m afraid of making those decisions only to realize I didn’t have to. Being afraid during events like these is a normal and healthy reaction. Being angry and sad when your rights and the rights of those you love are threatened is a normal and healthy reaction. Being unable to live the way you normally do because you’re coping with all of this new fear and anger and sadness is a normal and healthy reaction to those emotions.

The number one threat to a government focused on controlling its people is community amongst those people. Even when those governments are winning and nothing else is the same as before, our communities persist. That’s why our forms of community are threatened, and that’s why for years now they’ve targeted issues they know will divide families. I hope that through the next few years and beyond, we all turn to our trusted communities for support and solidarity and joy. Even more, I hope in four years I open up my laptop while lounging in my beach chair, read this post, and smile, relieved that I was wrong.

The Wave, 1981: https://youtu.be/zk_xY3ZoDwY?si=47Ev-Pz5yB0_0aKX