It is painfully evident that the violence of hardcore racists and assorted bigots has become a daily occurrence, not only in the Pacific Northwest, but across the U.S. These groups and individuals have been slowly gathering forces and numbers for years. Yet, once Donald Trump ran his overtly racist campaign, and once he became president, the stops were pulled for the creation a hostile national climate against marginalized and vulnerable sectors of society.

Trump and a number of his cabinet members have given the green light to an array of neofacists formations to begin coalescing and recruiting previously unorganized rabid racists into a proudly violent movement, that believes that they have been given impunity to verbally harass and intimidate people on the street, at schools, at work, and at a variety of other public spaces. Even more worrisome is the engagement of individuals from these political fringes into outright physical violence, including murder, as we recently saw in Portland.

Ignoring this horrifying trend is no longer possible. Refusing to challenge their hate and their hijacking of public spaces in essence denies the right of the people they persecute to fully live their lives as any other ordinary citizen does in our cities and towns. It is unconscionable to pretend that people of color, Muslims, the LGBT community, etc., should live their lives in hiding, that for their/our safety they/we should just forfeit the space in which we all have the right to exist. There is no going back to the end of the bus.

As a community, we must organize a principled and visionary resistance to these grotesque and dangerous developments. We could do well by having as our motto, “An injury to one is an injury to all.”