It was just a suitcase. Well-used, medium size, dun-colored, nondescript. Sitting upright on the porch, not far from the low railing, out of sight of the sidewalk.

Why was it so unnerving? And what’s it got to do with America 2025?

We’ll get to 2025 presently. First, consider the location: 1315 Lapsley Street on the corner of Academy St., in Selma Alabama. A Black middle class enclave, single family houses. Respectable, not lavish, some tall trees. Mostly quiet, not much traffic.

Then add the season: late summer. Southern hot, humid, clear.

Nobody was home. The owner, Mrs. Amelia Boynton was out of town. The other residents were myself, and my wife, Tish. We were returning from a meeting. I was twenty-two.

Don’t forget the year, which was likely determinative: 1965. The historic voting rights campaign and march from Selma to the state capitol in Montgomery was five months past. Tish and I had been working there since near the beginning. The Voting Rights Act the campaign produced had been signed into law just days ago in early August. Black citizens long excluded from voting were now registering quietly, in large numbers, in Selma and many other places.

But the hazy calm was not complete, or secure. Selma may have passed its moment in the spotlight, but was still in the deep South, and the region’s demons, at the moment in retreat, were not banished.

Despite the Voting law’s enactment, August had been a tough month: from 2000 miles away, echoes still ricocheted from the fiery and destructive Watts riots which had erupted in Los Angeles on August 11. Tens of millions worth of businesses and homes were lost to arson, and “Burn, baby burn” was seared into the American vocabulary.

Thirty-four people were killed (23 Black), several thousand were arrested, and more than 10,000 police and national guard troops deployed. Public support for the black movement was shaken as by a week-long major earthquake.

In Selma, the segregationist county sheriff, Jim Clark, felt sure the city’s Blacks were gearing up to launch a parallel uprising.

And as he feared, there was violence on August 20, though not from where he expected. A small group of civil rights protesters, jailed in nearby Lowndes County a week earlier were released from jail in Hayneville.

Several walked across the dusty courthouse square toward a small store, to get cold drinks. Most were Black, but two were white: Jonathan Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian from New Hampshire, and Richard Morrisroe, a Catholic priest from Chicago.

Tom Coleman, a white sometime deputy sheriff, confronted them as they came near the store. He shouted at them to leave, then lifted a shotgun and fired.

Daniels was walking behind a teenager, Ruby Sales; he pulled her down and took the blast at almost point blank range. He died almost instantly.; Ruby Sales was unhurt.

Morrisroe turned to run, but Coleman’s second shot tore into his back. Morrisroe tumbled and lay bleeding and moaning in the dirt for nearly an hour until help arrived from outside the county. He was hospitalized for weeks after extensive surgery, but survived.

(“Justice” was swift. Coleman was soon brought to trial in the same Hayneville courthouse. He told an all-white jury the two victims had been armed and were attacking him. Both were blatant lies; but he was quickly acquitted, and walked free.)

Sheriff Jim Clark had rushed to the shooting scene, and the scene deepened his conviction that Selma’s blacks would soon mount a retaliatory assault. He summoned his volunteer posse, and told them he would deploy machine guns on downtown rooftops, ready to mow down the imminent invaders.

This was all his paranoid delusion; there was grief and anger, but no impulse for outward unrest in Black Selma. A planned vigil for Daniels and Morrisroe was diverted into a prayer meeting indoors – not for fear of what Black marchers might do, but to keep them out of range of Jim Clark’s trigger-happy blood fantasies.

All this and more swirled in my mind standing paralyzed on the steps to Mrs. Boynton’s front porch, eyeing that solitary suitcase.

Jonathan Daniels’ death was the fifth civil rights-related murder of that year in the Selma area. Four of the victims were white. I had met Daniels and hoped to know him better. But he worked mostly in Lowndes County, riding its rutted back roads in a little Volkswagen, visiting and talking with people.

Behind that local body count, there stretched a long succession of violent racial incidents in that part of the Deep South. The year prior to the Selma voting rights campaign, fifteen Black churches in next door Mississippi were burned down during the Freedom Summer Project. (Not to mention the murder of three project workers there, and the discovery of several more unknown Black homicide victims during the long search for the three.

Plus in Birminham, two hours to Selma’s north, there had been 50 unsolved racial bombings, over a decade and a half. That’s why we often referred to it as “Bombingham.”

(For that matter, Dr. King’s house in Montgomery was bombed in 1956; he was not injured.)

One bombing, in September 1963, had killed four young girls (and wounded twenty-plus others) at Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church. That explosion came less than three weeks after the triumphant, completely peaceful March on Washington. It  shocked everyone hoping for peaceful change out of their post-march euphoria.

And there was more in this seemingly endless catalog: between 1877 and 1950 there were almost 2000 verified racial lynchings, in Alabama and the adjoining states of Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee and Florida.  In addition, there was a multitude of non-fatal assaults. Almost all the perpetrators escaped legal punishment.

In Congress, more than 200 anti-lynching bills were introduced during this 83-year period; none passed.

These deadly spectacles, and the de facto public impunity granted the many responsible, sustained a backdrop of continuing dread for generations of Black citizens — and the few open white dissenters — which was still in place in August 1965.

If I had been given a written test then, would I have remembered all this thick catalogue of attacks and murders? (There’s much more to it besides.) Not all, but many; enough.

In Selma that day, we were not expecting any visitors. As yet there had been no bombings in the town, even though Mrs. Boynton had been a visible local advocate for decades, living in this house on Lapsley St. But we had received a few phone calls with no one on the other end, just the sound of breathing.

Selma hadn’t been famous for most of those brutal years. But it was now a movement Mecca.

So why not a bomb here?  A suitcase was near-ideal camouflage; and came with a convenient carry handle for quick delivery.

The threat hung in the history-laden air, taken in with each breath. Like some invasive pest, it was fodder for dark impulses and sustained an atmosphere of dread.

Dread is the best word I know for it. Dread can be a condition, lingering like a lowering gray overcast; it can spawn fear, and is a precursor to panic. It’s also like a circling vulture, usually hovering unseen, but able to fall on you, talons out, seemingly from nowhere.

Which it did when I peered at that suitcase again.

Within a couple of minutes, I went from dread to full-blown panic mode. I warned Tish to stay clear, and debated what to do. We couldn’t go into the house without finding out what was in that suitcase. But what if it was set to a ticking fuse? Or wired to go off when opened?

I paced back and forth in the small yard.

Finally I felt I had to chance it.

Stepping to the side of the low porch railing, I found that if I jumped with all my strength, I could stretch an arm over the rail in midair and touch the suitcase. After several leaps, I hooked a finger under one of the top latches. It snapped up, and I fell back on the grass, rolling away, covering my head.

Silence.

I tiptoed back, made another few jumps, finally snagged the other latch, and rolled away again, head covered.

Still nothing.

Halfway back up the steps, the suitcase reappeared: open now, spilling a women’s clothes.

We clicked it shut and went inside.

It turned out to belong to an old friend of Mrs. Boynton, who had come to town unexpectedly.

Recalling the neatly folded women’s things, I felt foolish about my dread-filled reaction.

But not too foolish. After all, Mrs. Boynton was a longtime and prominent challenger of local Jim Crow. Only a few months back, club-swinging troopers and deputies had  knocked her unconscious beside the Pettus Bridge. The Bloody Sunday images of her being dragged limply away went round the world.

And she was known to be sheltering two paid “outside agitators.” Us: open, white collaborators like four of the five already dead in area racist violence. And Bombingham was more than a nickname.

Anyway, we finished our time in Selma safely, but took away with us other tense moments and many vivid memories. That abrupt August experience of dread was one, and has recurred for me periodically ever since. I still get twinges around unaccompanied pieces of luggage.

With this as background let’s turn to Dread’s pending return in 2025. It is my view that the current outlaw U.S. administration is bent, among other things, on reducing the public to such a chronic state of dread with its own ongoing series of shocks,. And from my perspective, it has made considerable progress. as this is written on the cusp of spring.

For me, atop a long public roster which includes January 6, are such targets as Shaye Moss and her mother Rubye Freeman. Once anonymous temporary election workers in Atlanta, 2020, they were falsely accused of stealing votes, driven from their home by mob harassment, sickened and nearly driven insane by months of unnerving online, media and in-person threats.

Almost in second place though, is Mitt Romney. I don’t think much of Romney’s politics, but he did finally stand up against Trump. And he paid a heavy price.

One part of that was the end of his political career. The cynical could shrug:public careers always end eventually. But his price also had another tag, with a very big number on it: $5000 a day, by credible reports, is what he was paying for personal/family security by the last months of his Senate term. That’s $150,000+ per month, nearly $2 million a year.

It’s easy enough to scoff at this too: Romney’s personal fortune is (or was) in the $200-250 million range; he can afford it. And if his street address gets doxxed, he has options — after all, he reportedly owns half a dozen family homes scattered across the continent. But he also has twenty-five grandchildren in his direct and fruitful Mormon family, who did not choose this fate.

Very few of us are like the Romneys; most are much closer to Moss and Freeman. Our situation is more like another one, from another time:

“What happened was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to be governed by surprise, to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believe that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security. . . .

Believe me this is true. Each act, each occasion is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join you in resisting somehow. . . .

Suddenly it all comes down, all at once. You see what you are, what you have done, or, more accurately, what you haven’t done (for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing).”

The last comment bears repeating: “for that was all that was required of most of us: that we did nothing.”

This passage is from They Thought They Were Free, the 1955 classic book by the late Milton Mayer, (a Jewish Quaker) in which he explored calmly but in chilling depth how ordinary, reasonably virtuous Germans, in a provincial town became acclimated and obedient to Nazi totalitarian government, before and through the ravages of World War Two.

As Mayer also put it: the rest of the seventy million Germans, apart from the million or so who operated the whole machinery of Nazism, really had nothing to do except not to interfere.  

Among those Germans who Mayer interviewed and profiled, many had initial doubts about, or even opposed the Nazis. But in their circles, after 1933 those who continued to dissent either left the country (if they could) or faced arrest; a number simply disappeared.

The rest observed, and complied. For them, the complicity of “doing nothing” did not mean cowering in a corner, but rather, focusing fixedly on a blinkered daily life: family, job, religion, approved entertainments and sports: wresting snatches of “normality,” and faking the rest. If careful, there were even some moments for quiet political hand-wringing (in safe, deniable, under-the-radar spaces). All as they were “forgetting” much, while being careful not to interfere. (And behind and above all, was the long shadow of unpredictable dread, regularly reinforced by the authorities’ “surprises”.)

A similar covering of dread, customized for our continental limits like eastern Europe’s onetime “Iron Curtain,” is being hung for us, as the backdrop for the subservient, non-administrative, reluctantly complicit role being carved out for the rest of us today, or a near tomorrow, including those currently “resisting.”

And we need not belabor the German analogies for this; U. S. history has included plenty of examples and models of such arrangements. They long flourished especially in the South — though no region is innocent, as the latest elections show.

For one sharp-tongued observer-resister, fatigue and repression are key enabling , as is true of so many in Congress.factors. Ralph Nader blogged:

Everyone is fatigued. I was talking online with a Canadian last night who asked me why no one was doing anything and I didn’t have an answer. . . .

There are reasons why influential or knowledgeable Americans are staying silent as the worsening fascist dictatorship of the Trumpsters and Musketeers gets more entrenched by the day. Most of these reasons are simple cover for cowardice. . . .”

Nader also lashed out at former presidents Obama, Clinton and Bush, noting they had made “not a peep” against the new insurgency.

“What are these politicians afraid of as they watch the overthrow of our government and the oncoming police state?” Nader asked. “Trump, after all, was not elected to become a dictator. . . .

Do they fear being discomforted by Trump/Musk unleashing hate and threats against them, and getting tarred by Trump’s tirades and violent incitations? No excuses. . . .

This phenomenon of going dark is widespread. Regulators and prosecutors who were either fired or quit in advance have not risen to defend their own agencies and departments, if only to elevate the morale of those civil servants remaining behind and under siege. . . .”

On March 6, 2025, the Washington Bureau Chief of the New York Times, Elisabeth Bumiller, put her rare byline on an urgent report titled, “‘People Are Going Silent’: Fearing Retribution, Trump Critics Muzzle Themselves.” she wrote:

”The silence grows louder every day. Fired federal workers who are worried about losing their homes ask not to be quoted by name. University presidents [one exception is Wesleyan University President Michael Roth] fearing that millions of dollars in federal funding could disappear are holding their fire. Chief executives alarmed by tariffs that could hurt their businesses are on mute.”

Nader acknowledged that:

“To be sure, government employees and other unions are speaking out and suing in federal court. So are national citizen groups like Public Citizen and the Center for Constitutional Rights, though hampered in alerting large audiences by newspapers like the Times rarely reporting their initiatives. . . .

Don’t self-censoring people know that they are helping the Trumpian dread, threat and fear machine get worse? Study Germany and Italy in the nineteen thirties.

The Trump/Musk lawless, cruel, arrogant, dictatorial regime is in our White House. Their police state infrastructure is in place. Silence is complicity!”

No one is immune: two respected federal judges spoke out last week about increasing attempts to intimidate the judiciary:

After an assembly of the Federal Judges Association:

. . Judges (Richard Sullivan and Jeffrey Sutton) stressed that threats have been rising for years . . . . Chief Justice John Roberts also devoted his year-end report to efforts to undermine judicial independence through intimidation, disinformation and the prospect of public officials defying court orders.

Congress is not giving judges as much as they say they need for security, the judges said. Funding has been ‘’flat’’ for the past two years . . . .”

On their desks lawsuits are stacking up. While many judges have ruled against numerous chainsaw blows to agencies and mass firings; yet they continue. Open DOGE/White House defiance of court orders is increasing.

Meantime, public protests against the DOGE/Project 2025 coup are raucous and spreading. Even the financial markets are disturbed.

I hope they all do more. But will it be enough? Part of the curtain’s function is to keep us in suspense because we don’t yet know.

And the “dread, threat and fear machine” continues its rumbling thunder day and night.

Writer Ron Rosenbaum has described one outcome of such an operation in 1933 Germany, for a newspaper which had been printing often stinging exposés of the rising Nazi movement for a decade. As Wikipedia summarized it:

In 1933, as part of the Nazi elimination of media opposition, they ordered the closure of certain news outlets across Germany . . . . The [Munich Post’s] offices were ransacked by the [Nazi] SA on 9 March 1933, ending publication of the Post, and the paper’s staff went into hiding. They were eventually arrested and put in Munich jails. The journalists were banned from practicing their profession, struggled to find other work and deprived of their pensions. Julius Zerfaß spent six months at the Dachau concentration camp.

Could that happen here?

I agree with Bumiller: it’s already happening, right now by more stealthy means, but with the dread shadow of SA-like ransacking gathering in the wings.

What’s the remedy?

I have no recipe, but I think some key ingredients can be identified: heroism, wit, strategic imagination, coordination, determination and stamina, among others. Plus courage enough to act –– if only to make a few perilous leaps, over the wall of dread.

In short, a counter-counterinsurgency. Much of it can start inconspicuously, like a nondescript suitcase left on a porch.

Except: more than one suitcase, on more than one porch.