PECKERWOOD'S WEEKLY LUNOCRACY POST! This Nightmare Will End for the Week of 10/27/25

Resistance Painting by Sylvia Solovyeva, 2020

Fascism never knocks politely and asks to be let in. It seeps under the door and through the cracks. The ideology masquerades as patriotism and nostalgia, often wearing a poorly tailored suit with an expensive flag pin or a gold cross. The steady rise always appears righteous at first. True believers claim they are protecting children, protecting borders, protecting tradition and culture. Florida bans books and black history. India muzzles journalists and opposition. Hungary calls outrageous censorship “Christian values.” America passes laws that sound like Bible verses while looting the treasury like thieves. 

Historically, what follows is the peak, the magnificent glittering rot. The leader becomes a brand with a PR team. News becomes a farce. Billionaires buy the airwaves, the content, and microphones. Law enforcement budgets swell while libraries and hospitals close. Anger becomes performance, cruelty becomes currency, and conspiracy becomes lazy entertainment. Democracies quietly die of exhaustion even when they pretend to debate. 

There is comfort in knowing that the fall is always inevitable. Fascism never fails to collapse under its own laziness. The strongman was never solving anything to begin with, but after a while, he will stop faking it. The money starts drying up. The faithful and indoctrinated start viciously fighting among themselves. Propaganda loses its rhythm and power. Constant fear turns into boredom. Empires don’t survive the moment their citizens start laughing incredulously at the nerve. 

Checks and Balances, Sheela Rose Love, 2018

After this, the heavy air is pungent with the odor of lies and broken promises. Oligarchs, grifters, technocrats, and fake reformers scramble to profit from the confusion. They will babble promises of renewal and sell whatever is left over. This phase passes as the reckoning arrives swiftly and mercilessly: leaks, trials, truth commissions, and memoirs. The dead crawl out, demand a hearing, and the ghouls pretend they weren’t even there.  Some stay buried. Some are recycled, polished, and elected again.

And yet, still, with all of this, something else rises, too. People start to remember how to look each other in the eye without suspicion. Music and art sharpen and flow again.  Journalists stop fearing the truth. Younger generations stop asking permission and stop conforming to outdated ideas. Hope grows in the cracks like bright green fauna through concrete sidewalks.

So where is America right now? When I look at the cycle, I predict it is somewhere near the middle of unraveling, struggling to decide if it is willing to learn or destined to repeat. The MAGA slogans are fading, and the red hat is starting to look like a bad joke.  The blatant, evil corruption is getting tired. It is the same daily news on a loop. I had expected apathy, but that’s not what is in the air. Beneath the cacophony, something is simmering and stirring, but it isn’t innocence. It isn’t ideology or even a violent revolution. It is the human spirit and the undeniable refusal to kneel. 

History repeats, but so does resistance.

The true history of Rosa Parks is so water downed and white washed that it is nearly a crime. She was a deliberate activist who planned her disruptive sit-in at the front of the bus. She wasn't some woman simply too tired and sassy to move. The truth is far more heroic. It is common to make minorities lesser heroes in our stories. It is another way to demoralize and make us feel helpless and small within the larger system. 

Civil rights were fought for bravely by brown people who put their lives on the line. We have never been passive in our resistance. It is another way history has tried to diminish brown people (and women) in America. Don't believe it. 

In the 90s, I met Rosa Parks with my mom at a women's event. It was teeming with all of these fabulous black women, some very well known and accomplished, others local badasses that were familiar to me. My mom has always had good taste in friends. Among them was this old woman, to me at the time, who had helped change history, and she was so gracious, yet so ordinary. 

So often through the years, I wished I could go back and ask a million questions. Back then, all I kept doing was staring at her, looking for something extraordinary, anything that would give me a clue how she did what she did. But there wasn't anything on the outside that marked her as special. 

As I grew older and more politically and socially active, I realized the mysterious thing that was special about her was her unbelievable courage, her iron strength, dignity, and her absolute refusal to stand down. That's inside a person. You can't touch it. It isn't tangible. When she died, I felt sad that the truth of her story may never be told accurately. I felt sadder that generations of little black girls would never know her as the fierce warrior queen that she was.