Release the Lions - Umberto Tosi

Umberto Tosi, New Year's Eve, 2026

"Tyranny, like Hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph, " wrote Thomas Paine to George Washington in the darkest days of the American Revolution when the British Empire seemed invincible. Mad King Donald's America needs Thomas Paine right now. 

"These are the times that try men's souls," Paine wrote. "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman." George Washington, then commander in chief of a demoralized, underfunded Continental Army promptly had Paine's The American Crisis pamphlet, read aloud to them.

Thomas Paine-Laurent Davos

By the 1990s, when my youngest daughter took her first steps, I blessed the stars that seemed to finally give her generation respite from persistant threats of world war and anhilation, and bloody, grinding, pointless regional wars. The Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War finally ended in by the end of 1991. 

My kids even could be protected by a new polio vaccine that generations of us had long awaited. They could go to summer festivals and swim parties without fear of ending up in a wheelchair or an iron lung. No more "drop and cover" beneath their school desks.

The postwar epoch was welcome, but distorted by a popular illusion that made the United States the dominating, permanent, military and economic superpower. 

One wonders what Paine would have written about the Trump regime's bloodthirsty, toothless machismo, the fearmongering and ethnic cleansing perpetrated by it's ICE gestapo, run by dung-devouring sycophants, who make ceremony out of their racism, sexism and cynicism.Would Paine have mentioned the ruling, Ellsberg class's privileged paedophelia, the crony corruption that steams like horse droppings on a cold morning?

I turn 89 this May, 250 years after the Thomas Paine screed. A pall hangs over the country where I was born and raised. It seems again, as William Butler Yeats penned in 1919 that: 

 "The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    "The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    "The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    "Are full of passionate intensity..." 

Our Own Kind by Umberto Tosi

Like the rest of the country, many of my friends and relations are in a funk. "It's like Baby Hitler time-travelled here to kill US!" Quipped a You Tube comentator.

 

A lot of us have turned off the news and rationed social media.

I can't blame them, despite that this only adds to our problems. We need shelter. We also need a sense of agency. Paralysis spreads between realms of our preception.and can be contagious. 

This is nothing new. I explored the intersection of personal lives and public crises in my 2018 memoirist story, Our Own Kind, set during the assassinations and uprisings of 1960 (published in my 2018 Sometimes Ridiculous.)

Like today, daily crises overwhelm us, but with heavier menace than the 1968 I recall. The inner effects are all too familiar nevertheless. As a former journalist and editor, I remain a news junky, despite the Trumpian pall.  We put a balloon sign that proclaimed "ROAR" over our window this past New Year's Eve. 

We hear more and more roaring in the land these days by the people if Dozy Don's fast-sinking polls show. We join in the the surge of nonviolent protest best we can, young and old, just as in times past. March, 2026 "No Kings" ("No Tyrants") demonstrations in more than 3500 cities was the largest single day protest in U.S. history. 

The tumult is frightening and heartening. It infiltrates our lives and swamps our daily attetions. It slows my writing, But one must learn to ignore Trumpista lies and provocations and soldier on. 

Every day a new trauma. But we see sparks of hope yet for the republic, but at horrifying risk. Not yet enough to re-light an ailing American democracy sputtering. 

Are we witnessing the end of Orangatan's popular grip at last? Or are these the last days of our republic?  Will these times trying our souls be the beginning of the end, or "the end of the beginning" (to quote Winston Churchill)? These times surely call for courage and ingenuity. One must be part of the solution or part of the problem. 

One young friend expressed her generation's frustration to me a few days ago just after marching in the second "No Kings" protest. "You get out there and make a lot of noise on TV, but then nothing changes," she said.

I sympathized, having joined a few marches myself over the year. Nonviolent marches are no small thing, I agreed. While marches up the ante, there are other kinds of peaceful protests that can move mountains by making things unpleasant for the ruling class. 

MLK, 1968, before being murdered at age 39

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.  said in his prophetic speech before his assassination 54 years ago in Memphis, Tennessee:

"I would like to live a long life; longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land! So I'm happy tonight, I'm not worried about anything! I'm not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!"^[1]

King led his movement beyond the anti-segregation, civil rights campaigns into the antiwar movement and the leveraging of economic and political power to benefit the poor. 

Dr. King called for civil action along with nonviolent resistance. He urged boycotting as a means of nonviolent protest. "Go out and tell your neighbors not to buy Coca-Cola and Wonder Bread.^"

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, 'I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.' You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

The late, longtime congressman John Lewis, hero of the 1960s voting rights struggle and the Edmund Pettus Bridge March in Selma, Alabama, called for constructive hell-raising as "making good trouble." 

Americans take a long time to turn around, but eventually we do the right thing, Winston Churchill commented during the Blitz. 

Take heart, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "...We are made of the same matter as the granite that will mark our graves and share our flesh with the moss that will cover them. We share with them and with each other more than atoms — we share the wild luck of having drawn from the cosmic lottery this world of birdsong and waterfalls and lichen and spring, none of which had to exist, all of which could have been and can always be otherwise."

"...To know this, to place the firm hand of the mind on this banister of reality, is to steady yourself amid the daily shocks of living. ..."

These were the voices I heard in my younger days, during dark times.

Hannah Arendt, writer, immigrant

Historian and Holocaust survivor Hannah Arendt, who coined "the banality of evil" and illuminated The Path of Mass Evil urged us not to allow fear to overwhelm reason. Instead, expand our scope by asking ourselves the unanswerable questions. 

"We blind ourselves by ignoring the metaphysical. We lose our abilities "to produce those thought-things that we call works of art... Beyond that, we lose the capacity to ask all the answerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.”  

We are made of sterner stuff than our oppressors. The mathematicion, physicist Erwin Schrödinger takes up the parallels between the discoveries of quantum physics and the core ideas of the Hindu philosophy of Vedanta.

"...The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. ...

"What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this ‘someone else’ really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father’s father… thousands of years ago? 

Marianne Williamson

"....And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference — the difference between you and someone else — when objectively what is there is the same?..." 

 These are times to try men's (and women's) souls indeed, as Paine wrote:  Spiritual philosopher Marianne Williamson puts it eloquently: 

"We're living in a time of a great dissembling. Things are crumbling. Things are falling apart that most of us never thought in our lifetime we would see fall away... You could see this as a hopeless moment, but it doesn't have to be that way, because our hope is in who we are becoming as people."

There's no choice but to continue applying the pressure nonviolent rebellion, and second Thomas Paine with a renewed America. 

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Umberto Tosi

Umberto Tosi is the author of Sometimes Ridiculous, Ophelia Rising, Milagro on 34th Street and Our Own Kind. His short stories have been published in Catamaran Literary Reader and Chicago Quarterly Review where he is a contributing editor. He was contributing writer to Forbes, covering the Silicon Valley 1995-2004. Prior to that, he was an editor and staff writer for the Los Angeles Times and its Sunday magazine, West. He was also the editor of San Francisco Magazine. He has written more than 300 articles for newspapers and magazines, online and in print.

  

He joined Authors Electric in May 2015 and has contributed to several of its anthologies, including Another Flash in the Pen and One More Flash in the Pen. He has four adult children. He resides in Chicago.

 

(He can be contacted at Umberto3000@gmail.com)

 

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