I am troubled by what Spanish writer George Santayana, said. “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Santayana enjoins us to recognize the echoes of painful history and do what we can to prevent its recurrence. History is cyclical, but we can never anticipate how recurrence will manifest. It’s never identical. And therein lies our dilemma. I don’t think Santayana got it quite right. History doesn’t so much repeat, as mutate, not unlike a flu virus, and so we are unprepared.

Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015) Uruguayan journalist, writer and novelist observed, “History never really says, ‘Goodbye.’ History says, ‘See you later…’”

Researching my two books about the Nazi years in Europe was a deep dive into the fragility of Germany’s Weimar democracy and the rise of the Nazis. A significant portion of blame for the Third Reich rests with the passivity of German people and institutions, such as the press and the church, and extreme polarization of Germany’s parliament, the Reichstag, until it was too late to stop Hitler and his minions.

Many of us are concerned about the next four years. Health care, public health, climate threats, wars and instability, economic distress, threatening marginalized and LGBTQ+ people, demonizing the free press, and perhaps most important of all, threats to our fragile democracy. Here in Vermont, we are concerned for the safety and well-being of migrant farmworkers who are the backbone of our dairy industry.

We have been down this road before, and it ended badly. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.” —Edmund Burke, (1729 – 1797; Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher)

Several of us recently met to form a Middlebury-area chapter of INDIVISIBLE, a nationwide organization of more than 8,000 groups, 18 in Vermont, to be the loyal opposition. If you’d like to be part of this effort, see the INDIVISIBLE website: indivisible.org/resource/guide

Our next meeting will be in January. We are in the process of registering our group and will communicate about our next meeting. Anyone interested can contact us at [email protected].

Please join us.

Jack Mayer, MD, MPH

Middlebury