Notes on Becoming an Activist

On October 14, 2017, I moderated an event called “Duty to Warn” in New York City. The event was one of several held nationally on that day. The topic was on the psychological fitness of Donald Trump to hold the office of president of the United States. The proximate reason for my being the organizer of this symposium and subsequent march to City Hall was that I went to high school with Dr. John Gartner, whose petition on change.org, urging the removal of the president under the 25^th Amendment, went viral. When John asked me if I would host the Duty to Warn event, I said, simply and without thinking, “Sure.”

Another force driving my personal connection to this movement was that, while I'm not a mental health professional, I am the daughter of two New York City-based Freudian psychoanalysts, Louise and Donald Kaplan. My uncle and one of my aunts are also therapists. In addition to being psychoanalysts, my parents were political activists. In 1961, when my younger brother was born, my mother was so distressed at the state of the nation that she wanted to leave the country and take us with her to a safe haven outside the United States.

Instead, we stayed. My parents resisted in part by creating, along with their poet friend, Armand Schwerner, a book titled The Domesday Dictionary1. Here are two entries:

“The migration was toward California, a land lush with the green of farms and fruit orchards. On the way, the families of the American Dust Bowl found themselves dissolving in the larger migratory confusion of families unhoused by the economic upheavals of the farmlands of Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi.

Californians became aware of the increasing influx into their state of these shiftless aliens, filthy eyesores who glutted the labor market, who were prey to “red” agitation, whose hopeless laziness sponged the wealth that Californians had toiled to create. Roadblocks at the California bo