Over the last few weeks, the word fascism has entered the public conscience. In part, this is thanks to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In the midst of the horrific caging of immigrant children, public officials, and ordinary people found themselves comparing the detention centers to Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. Sessions took to Fox News to defend the policy saying the comparison was “a real exaggeration.” His reasoning for this claim was chilling. He argued that Nazis “were keeping Jews from leaving the country” and he is trying to keep people from coming in. Then he said, “Fundamentally, we’re enforcing the law.”

The policy of separating children from their parents and giving them only the barest of things needed to survive was defended not by looking at its effects on the lives of people, but from an irrational, legalistic perspective. It was classic Eichmann, Goebbels, or Goring. It was the “banality of evil” on full display. And the starkness of it has forced a new awareness into this political moment.

This awareness is emerging with the recognition that all of us have important choices to make. Philosopher-activist Grace Lee Boggs reminds us that we do not choose the times in which we live, but we do choose how to respond to them.

Over the course of this last year more and more people are choosing to stand in opposition to the divided, hate-filled, inhuman, and destructive policies of the Trump administration. Within the Environmental Protection Agency, hundreds of people resigned in protest of policies, many with clear public statements challenging the administration.

Now, in the face of draconian policies that cannot be denied, people within the immigration services are beginning to quit in protest. Rachel Maddow highlighted a former employee at a New York detention center who explained her decision saying, "We're not allowed to hug the kids. We're not allowed to touch them at all. I decided not to follow that rule this week. This week I hugged them. I don't care anymore."  She went on to say she was speaking out because "I feel like it's important to make a difference. I feel that it's time for everybody to stand up and stop being afraid and actually help these children being separated from their parents."

Knowing our actions make a difference is critical to advancing a different future. All of us face choices to go along or to defy what is happening. But some of us are on the front lines of complying with growing fascism. Some of us are prison guards, some of us policemen, some of us ICE officials, some of us provide food in jails and detention centers, some of us build buildings, provide financing, and help expand prisons and places of pain. These are the ones among us who have the most immediate power to stop the tide of fascism rising now.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow wrote of his recent arrest while blocking the headquarters of ICE in Philadelphia. When police came to arrest them he said, “We know you need to arrest us. For some of us, that is an act of our own freedom. All of us want to say to you, “You are citizens as well as police officers. We lift up the truth that there are worse lawbreakers by far in the White House – ordering nursing babies yanked from a mother’s breast – far worse a crime.” And one of the police, a woman, teared up as I said it. Keep always in mind: The police are human. The more we see them as human, the more they will act that way. Not always, but more.”

In a country moving toward fascism, people will be controlled by small numbers of others, holding guns and weapons. The hands holding the guns will be our brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters. If we are to create a different future, we will need to find ways to encourage them to lay their guns down. This evil cannot continue if those who enable it step away and join us creating a different future.