Protest Against “Tyranny” in Santa Barbara

by Celeste Barber

I didn’t attend the local Dems’ “Emergency Town Hall Meeting” earlier this month. That Saturday afternoon, I was six blocks down the street, in a movie theatre at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival. But I sure heard about the protest at the Unitarian Society. I read about it, and read about it some more, each version increasing attendance numbers from 600 to 1,000, with the most recent at 6,000 Santa Barbarans protesting President Trump’s “tyranny.”

Three weeks into the Trump-Vance Administration, it’s Armageddon in America.

Let me be candid. I am no apologist for Mr. Trump. But the alternative given us last November was unthinkable to me. And unlike my progressive brethren, I know the United States Constitution to be rock solid strong. There’s a reason beyond rhetoric why our most famous civic writing begins: “We the People,” and why the United States remains the envy of the world.

Our nation has withstood two world wars, the second fighting on two fronts, and in both emerged as the major global power; we conquered the Great Depression and the Dust Bowl environmental disaster of the 1930s, resulting in land management and water conservation policies that continue to sustain us, and survived our then fledgling country’s greatest threat (including to this day), the Civil War. Never forget that the disgruntled Democrats who formed the Confederacy surrounded President Lincoln and his Congress in Virginia, just across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.

As a people, we endure because our Constitution has been our bulwark.

Yet, according to the press and news media reports from that abovementioned Saturday, the Constitution is suddenly under dire threat. Trump, Musk, and their “oligarch cronies” have staged “a coup” – despite that no one to date has protested the election results. Among the signs and T-shirts sported at the event: “Fascism Sucks” and “MAGA Racist.” The stand-out for me – I saw it in print and then heard it from a KEYT news report -- from Congressman Salud Carbajal, the misstatement before a packed auditorium, that “the new Trump Administration delivered on the central pledge of his campaign to be a dictator.”

Look it up, Salud really said that. That the duly elected president won on his promise to become a dictator.

Life Under a Real Tyrannical Dictatorship

Unlike our congressman, I have lived in a totalitarian country. In 1988, my late husband, Frank McConnell, was awarded a Fulbright scholarship to teach at Humboldt University, East Berlin. We were among the first Americans to be invited to live and work in the German Democratic Republic under Gorbachev’s Glasnost and Perestroika “openness” policies of the period preceding the fall of the Soviet Empire. Neither the Republican Party nor Trump and his “cronies” resemble anything like Erich Honecker and his Stasi henchmen.

No one was rounded up following Saturday’s town hall. The church doors remained wide open. Those unable to enter, were free to stand in the courtyard and down the street to listen to the speakers. There were no government agents hiding in plain sight to record and then report the event. The press was free to write what they witnessed. That rainy Saturday afternoon, no one challenged the people’s right to assemble, protected under the First and Fourth Amendments. Which, by the way, both our congressman and president swore an oath to uphold.

Such an action would have been inconceivable in the East Berlin of 1988: an assembly of elected and citizenry in a public place there to protest the nation’s Commander-in-Chief. From what I heard, the folks gathered were free to come and go – unimpeded. To hold up their handmade protest signs. To chant political slogans. To stand together without fear of retribution. Without fear.

Let’s hold that thought a bit longer….

Sundays at Church in Marzahn

How rare still for much of the world, to stand free without fear. I’d like to share two memories from Berlin to strike home the reality of totalitarianism and what it is to live in fear. It’s certainly not a political catchphrase, either. The first recollection comes from my Sundays attending mass at the Catholic Church near where we lived just outside East Berlin. We had been assigned a furnished flat in Marzahn, a suburb of sorts, and not exactly Levittown. We lived on the fourth floor of a Neue-Bau apartment building (Russian-style prefab). Across the boulevard was a Catholic Church – a remarkable discovery to me given that we were living in a communist country and in traditionally Lutheran Prussia. But there it was: a Roman Catholic parish behind the Iron Curtain.

Throughout all those Sundays, no one spoke to me. Not an acknowledgement or a smile. Yes, that included the priest. Likewise, I didn’t dare initiate conversation – beyond the exchange of “peace I give you” – because to do so would have endangered those seated around me. It has been estimated that about 20% of the East German population was on the Stasi payroll. That’s not an unrealistic statistic. I was certain, and the parishioners were certain, that within the congregants were Stasi, one or a dozen, it didn’t matter the number. In fact, by attending Mass at all, with or without the American, those parishioners already faced consequences: in their educational opportunity, job assignments, housing, everything.

I think about those Sundays in a Marzahn church and reflect on the recent hosting of a political protest inside a Unitarian church. A protest that was well publicized throughout our community.

Dictatorship? Really?

Hard Silence Imposed by Stasi

Here is my other story. On the ground floor of our high rise Neue-Bau was a Bierstube, the German equivalent to an English pub. We’d often go there for a light meal and a glass of Berliner Pilsener. We became regulars and friendly to the three bartenders: “Curly,” “Toothless,” and young “Mike.” Mikhail was fascinated by our American-ness. Our blue jeans, our laissez-faire attitude, our American-ness. And for a young East German man, the possibility to talk about Rock ‘N Roll – Frank enthusiastically holding court. Those were fun afternoons, including for our ten year old Eric.

One day, Mikhail invited us to come to his flat later that evening, the building just next to ours. The suggestion included bringing our cassettes: Steve Winwood, Dire Straits, Springsteen, and Steely Dan. Frankly, I was surprised at the invite.

I still remember the hard silence of the hallway after we had walked up the stairs to Mikhail’s floor. The quiet was unsettling even before we reached his flat. Frank knocked on the door. But I already knew in my gut, that the knock and subsequent knocks would be unanswered. After a few minutes, we returned home.

The following afternoon, we stopped in at the Bierstube. We learned sometime later that “Toothless” was an informant for the Stasi. We never saw Mike again. We never asked.

To Salud Carbajal, Jerry Roberts, Nick Welsh, Monique Limon, Gregg Hart, Laura Capps, and the Democrat Central Committee: that’s dictatorship.

A Conversation from the Other Side

A few hours after the movie had concluded, I attended another downtown event, this one presented by UCSB’s Arts & Lectures at the Granada Theatre. I had purchased a ticket to hear acclaimed British historian, Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow from the conservative Hoover Institute at Stanford University and the esteemed Belfer Center, Harvard. I knew little about Professor Ferguson and had not read any of his books, but I thought that here was a lecture I wanted very much to attend. Seated next to me (fabulous seats, lower upper balcony, center stage), was another older woman like me and also alone, prompting us to engage in pleasant pre- and post-talk chit-chat. I quickly surmised that she was liberal and further left than I on that spectrum, like the overwhelming majority of the audience as I had gauged. I had already intended to study the audience’s reception to a conservative scholar of the modern political world. I think an important part of any lecture is the energy between a speaker and his audience.

The 45-minute talk was thrilling, as I had anticipated. An articulate, polished examination of the Cold War world and the ongoing calamities globally, notably in the Middle East and Ukraine. Additionally, fascinating insights into the late Henry Kissinger, the subject of Ferguson’s most recent book. Following was an engaging 45-minute Q&A emceed by a UCSB History professor, his questions posited with a clearly liberal bent. That, too, I found intellectually engaging.

Afterwards, I asked my companion what she thought of the lecture. I wondered what a Santa Barbara liberal would have to say about a conservative historian’s talk. “While I disagreed with him on much of what he said, I found him interesting.” Then she paused a few seconds, continuing, “I’m going to buy one of his books.”

Hope. My companion gifted me what was missing from the town hall for thousands just a few hours earlier. Hope for us as a people. She listened. She learned. She questioned and held onto her beliefs of what is true, what is just, what is history. But she opened herself to another point of view. And that is what was missing from the town hall meeting of a few hours earlier. No one there was interested in listening, in having hope that we can actually work together as a people.

We will survive this moment in history because we are a nation of individuals. We are not a mob. We are not an ideology. We do not march to the instruction of Stasi overlords. We are the heirs to the Great Enlightenment Experiment.