International Human Solidarity Day
International Human Solidarity Day arrives each December like a quiet bell rung in a crowded room, asking us to remember that humanity survives only by cooperation. Yet in the age shaped by the self-centred bravado of Donald Trump and the global echo of his politics that bell often goes unheard. The Trump administration did not invent narcissism, nor did it monopolize authoritarian temptation, but it legitimized them, wrapped them in spectacle, and sold them as strength. Solidarity, by contrast, was dismissed as weakness, empathy as naïveté, and multilateralism as a scam run by foreigners.
Trump’s political style was less a policy agenda than a performance of the self. Every crisis became a mirror, every institution a rival ego. From alliances treated as protection rackets to refugees framed as threats rather than fellow humans, the message was consistent: the world is a zero-sum stage, and only the loudest, richest or cruellest deserve to stand on it. This posture bled far beyond Washington. Strongmen elsewhere learned that cruelty could be rebranded as honesty and that contempt for the vulnerable could be marketed as patriotism.
International Human Solidarity Day therefore feels almost subversive in this climate. It insists on an unfashionable truth: that interdependence is not a moral luxury but a material reality. Pandemics do not stop at borders because a leader tweets bravado. Climate collapse does not negotiate with national slogans. Economic shocks ripple across continents regardless of who shouts “America First” or its local equivalents. Solidarity is not charity; it is self-preservation with a conscience.
The Trump era also revealed how fascist tendencies creep back into public life wearing the costume of entertainment. The erosion of truth, the demonization of the press, the casual flirting with political violence, and the constant division of society into “real people” and enemies within are not accidents. They are classic tools, updated for cable news and social media. When these tactics are exported, they normalize a politics where domination replaces dialogue and loyalty replaces law. In such a world, solidarity becomes an act of resistance.
Critics sometimes accuse solidarity of being vague or sentimental. Yet the alternative on offer has been brutally concrete: children separated from parents, minorities targeted, democratic norms hollowed out, and international cooperation sabotaged for applause at rallies. The cult of the strongman promises safety through exclusion, but it delivers perpetual conflict, because narcissism cannot coexist with peace. It must always invent an enemy to sustain itself.
What International Human Solidarity Day asks is not blind unity or the erasure of difference. It asks for a shared commitment to human dignity that outlives electoral cycles and personality cults. It asks richer nations to stop pretending that suffering elsewhere is irrelevant, and poorer nations to reject the lie that their only hope lies in copying authoritarian models. It asks citizens to recognize that freedom without responsibility curdles into cruelty.
The most damaging legacy of Trump’s influence may be psychological rather than legislative. He taught millions that empathy is weakness and that politics is a blood sport without rules. Undoing that damage requires more than policy reversals; it requires cultural repair. Solidarity begins locally, in how societies treat migrants, dissenters, and the poor, but it must scale globally to confront shared threats.
Solidarity also demands humility from those who opposed Trump but learned too little from his rise. Moral superiority without listening only fertilizes resentment. If institutions failed, it is because they stopped speaking in human terms. People crave security, meaning, and respect; demagogues exploit that hunger when democrats outsource compassion to spreadsheets. Rebuilding solidarity means rebuilding trust, showing that fairness can be felt, not just promised. It means defending democracy not as a museum piece but as a living practice that delivers dignity. Without that work, the vacuum will again be filled by louder egos, and the cycle of narcissism will repeat with new flags. History warns us that indifference, once normalized, hardens quickly into consent for abuses everywhere today.
On this day, solidarity should not be reduced to hashtags or speeches. It should be understood as a daily refusal to accept a world organized around ego and fear. In an era where self-centred leaders model narcissism as virtue and flirt with fascism as efficiency, choosing solidarity is a radical, even defiant, act. It is the decision to believe that humanity is more than a marketplace of vanities, and that our future depends not on the loudest voice, but on the quiet, stubborn work of standing together.
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