I Refuse To Fiddle While Rome Burns

As you may have heard, the DuPage County Board voted this week to strip Henry Hyde’s name off the DuPage County Courthouse. I am not here to debate the merits of that vote; I’m here to say it should never have come up for a vote in the first place.

I received a text on Friday from the board Chair saying this item would be on the agenda for a vote on Tuesday. Meanwhile I am witnessing, along with the rest of the world, a ferocious dismantling of our governmental institutions, programming and funding, with simultaneous appointments of the most ill-suited people to each new cabinet position. My only thought was, why on earth are we focusing on this now??

If you need some background on this subject, start here with a quick TV news summation. You can also watch my statement on the board floor explaining the reasons behind my vote. I don’t want to pick apart who Henry Hyde and his politics and policies were, because everyone reading this also has the ability to google and come to their own conclusions. My point is this: we have much bigger fish to fry right now. This type of performative and petty politics is one of the reasons that we lost the White House.

As I said on the board floor, I am much more concerned with certain elected officials who are *actually alive* and in office at this specific moment in time, actively doing harm to our county, our state, our country and the world with their legislation than I am about someone who passed away in 2007.

As a County, I want us to be forward thinking, not looking backwards. Leadership should show us a new path forward; it should shine a light in the darkness. This is not that.

As a violinist, I am uniquely qualified to say that I refuse to fiddle while Rome burns. We are living in a precarious moment in history. The world is watching. As elected officials, it is up to us to stand up and speak up and fight against creeping fascism. That is the job we were elected to do. Highly provocative political posturing like this does not help anyone. It does not put food on anyone’s table. It does not help anyone pay for their insulin. It does not help anyone find affordable housing. It does not protect us from a public health crisis. It most certainly won’t pull our community together.

As I said in my comments, I wish we spent our board meeting working with our health department to develop a plan for the looming threat of H5N1 now that our public health system has been gutted. Or we could’ve used that time to get answers to the many questions we have as a board about a new member initiative program whereby we can direct funds to well-deserving programs in our districts, which could have positive, real-world financial impacts on our constituents. I see those topics, to name just a few, as more urgent ways to spend our time and energy. Local government is going to have to do the big work of plugging all the gaps left by the decimations happening at the federal level: it is our time to stand up and step in.

Spending time, energy, and resources on non-issues such as this greatly underestimates the issues people are facing and minimizes the actual fear and anxiety they are experiencing over the very real threat to our democracy. People are feeling hopeless, not only for what is happening, but because of what is NOT happening. We crave decisive and compassionate leadership, and when we do not see it, it adds to the compounding heartbreak of the direction our country is heading in.

It’s easy to fall into this trap of political retaliation and retribution, but someone needs to be the adult in the room and make an effort to break this never-ending cycle. That is why I abstained from voting on this: I cannot support an initiative lifted right from the Trump playbook. That simply gets us nowhere, faster.

Instead, I urge my colleagues to focus on solutions to the very real problems we are currently facing. The facts are, we are going to need to work together at the local level in the most cohesive way possible to help all the people who will feel the brunt of Trump’s policies the most. These sorts of political maneuvers take up an awful amount of airtime, press, and media attention and serve as nothing more than a giant distraction from actions we could be taking to help people instead. Moves like this also waste our political capital: people’s attention and energy are finite, and we cannot afford to waste any of it. This is an “all hands on deck” moment in our country. It is up to us to heed the call.

I didn’t run for office and get re-elected three times to participate in empty gestures that only further divide us. I will speak up, I will buck hyper-partisan politics when necessary, and I most certainly will not fiddle while Rome burns.