"I am now an alarmist"

"When he says “I was not a Communist,” he was understating the case. He was anti-Communist. He had no sympathy for them and was inclined to excuse and minimize what he was seeing because, in his view, they brought it on themselves. They broke the law, or what he thought maybe should have been the law. They were them, not us, not me or mine. So it wasn’t alarming... 

Hitler’s “Aryan paragraph” is what finally roused Niemöller to shift from vague concern to something more like alarm. But even still he wavered and faltered. His alarm had to do with the fact that some of his fellow Lutherans might be affected by that. If “they came for the Jews,” that might include some of his fellow Christians who were of Jewish background. So even as he became alarmed and joined with others sounding the alarm, his resistance wavered with something like qualification... 

We’re still more alarmed about the possibility of alarmism than about what we’re seeing — what we are undeniably, actually seeing unfold. They are coming for the immigrants. First for the illegal immigrants, because most Americans will respond to that the same way Niemöller responded to coming for the Communists.

But they are also coming for the refugees, for those lawfully seeking asylum, for legal immigrants who have committed any misdemeanors in their lifetime, for naturalized citizens."

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2018/06/28/i-am-now-an-alarmist/

Fb: "that’s where we differ from Niemöller, and why we respect the sentiments of his poem only in the abstract. Because we are far more concerned about the potential danger and shame of speaking out too soon. We do not wish to be seen by others as alarmists. Chicken Little. The Boy Who Cried Wolf. Etc. We are hyper-vigilant about never being perceived by others as hyper-vigilant."