View From Here

By David Mark Greaves
October 10, 2025

We as a people are facing so many situations all at once that each can be the number one priority only for a moment before it is displaced, lest we be overwhelmed. There is the reality of climate change, now being driven home by the ferocity of back-to-back killer hurricanes Helene and Milton wreaking havoc in the south.

There is the U.S. involvement in the Middle East, where tens of thousands have died, and millions of people, who were going about their lives as we do, have had to flee their homes in terror, finding food and water wherever they can. And it has been like this in one form or another for decades.

And then there is the war in Ukraine, which, no longer at the top of the news, remains another area where the U.S. is involved in confronting the imperial dreams of Russian president Vladimir Putin. This one will remain on hold until after the U.S. elections, which will have a defining influence on this war’s outcome.

We in the United States have at our disposal the only instrument in the world that can affect both wars and determine the response to climate change, our vote. And with the coming presidential election of Harris and Walz vs Trump and Vance, the world is waiting to see, as we all are, what kind of nation we are, authoritarian or will we remain a democracy.

As of right now, it appears to be a tossup, prompting the question, how is that possible, given the choices before us? But that’s thinking rationally; what’s happening now are the elements of racism and misogyny that continue to live in the nation’s subconscious, which Donald Trump has activated, because it’s either dictator or jail, and which others are using for even more nefarious goals, making the country into a White Christian nation.

Historian John Henrik Clarke warned us in a 1996 interview in Our Time Press, saying, “If Black people don’t unite and begin to support themselves, their communities, and their families, they might as well begin to go out of business as a people. Nobody’s going to have any mercy. And nobody’s going to have any compunction about making slaves out of them.”

The difference this time is that slavery is economic, and it includes everybody not in the White Christian elite – like the plantation owners with their overseers. And it cannot be said that they won’t do such and such. We need only look at history to see what Trump’s current rhetoric about “vermin” and “poisoning the blood” portends if the worse were to happen and Donald Trump is reelected.

If you’ve newly arrived in multicultural Brooklyn from one of the “swing states,” fill out your absentee ballot and call home to family and friends.

These are dangerous times and we’ll just have to hold on.