Amy Biehl at work. Photo: Orange County Register.
These are not welcome words to the many friends and relatives still smarting from the nomination of Mr. Trump. I am only less bedeviled because I believed all along that this would be the unfortunate outcome. I realized after Hillary Clinton’s defeat, that this country will not accept a woman at the top; the Trump campaign revealed this unsavory truth, it did not create it.
So how do we move forward?
We haven’t yet had to deal with political murders, and please God, we never will, but the rough handling of student protesters over Gaza at our most prestigious universities is a warning. Peaceful protests are no longer tolerated in the U.S. and with the level of rage and disappointment in the country now, there may be more protests and they may not be peaceful.
Monday morning I remembered a long-forgotten protester, Amy Biehl. A graduate of Stanford University and a Fulbright Scholar studying at the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa in 1993. An anti-Apartheid activist, she was murdered on August 25, 1993, when a black mob pulled her from her car and stoned and stabbed her to death. She was twenty-six.
Four men were convicted of her killing but all were pardoned in 1998 by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission when they stated that their actions had been politically motivated.
Amy Biehl’s family supported the pardon. Her father shook the men’s hands and said, “The most important vehicle of reconciliation is open and honest dialogue. We are here to reconcile a human life that was taken without an opportunity for dialogue. When we are finished with this process, we must move forward with linked arms.”
In his speech accepting the Congressional Gold Medal in 1998, Nelson Mandela remembered Amy Biehl:” She made our aspirations her own and lost her life in the turmoil of our transition… Through her, our people have also shared the pain of confronting a terrible past as we take the path toward the reconciliation and healing of our nation.”
It’s an extreme example of what we may be facing in the next four years but if we are to navigate it with some degree of success, the dialogue must begin, first with the voters who supported Mr. Trump and are divided from us privileged people by our money, our security, our status, and perhaps our pride.
This country formed Mr. Trump as it formed his many followers. We are all to some slight degree responsible. Our violent words, our sinister projections stop all possibility of dialogue with the people with whom we so fiercely disagree; we may not even know who they are.
The first thing we can do is to calm our rhetoric.
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