If you don’t like what’s been happening in America over the last year, but haven’t spoken up for whatever reason, I would say that now is a good time to reconsider.
I’ve heard people with a lot of reach and influence say that the best way to handle Trump’s second term is to just wait him out. I’ve heard people who were more outspoken in his first term say that it didn’t make a huge difference then, so why take the risk now? Politics in the last year has somehow become even more horrifying and exhausting and depressing. If you can live your life without paying too much attention to the insanity that hasn’t really affected you yet, why bother?
I understand this. I really do. Trump is a lame duck president who most Americans – around 60% of us – don’t support. And he keeps getting less popular. His party is currently on track for a poor midterm performance which would make him less powerful, less relevant, and unable to ever pass another law again – which makes it tempting to just keep your head down, wait until November, and hope for the best. In the meantime, maybe you donate to some candidates or causes or relief funds. Maybe that feels more effective and certainly more comfortable than pissing off certain friends and family and colleagues and followers by getting all political.
I get it.
But here’s the thing…
We’ve only finished the first quarter of Trump’s presidency. We have three more years of this – at least. The midterms are still nine months away. And things are moving very fast – faster than I think most people realize.
In just one year, America has become a place where paramilitary squads rampage through the streets of cities that didn’t vote for the president – a president who has given these federal agents, heavily armed and often masked, free reign to do whatever they want to whoever they want without any legal consequences.
If you’re not yet a citizen of this country, they can take you away from your family at gunpoint; grab you off the street and throw you in the back of a van; break down your door and raid your home without even getting a judge to sign a warrant first.
Having the right papers will not necessarily protect you. Being in this country legally will not necessarily protect you. You may not get to make a phone call or meet with a lawyer. You may be held for days or weeks in a crowded detention center a thousand miles from home where people are sick and dying from rampant disease and rotten food and lack of medical care; where people are routinely beaten and abused.
If you *are *an American citizen, these paramilitary squads can still arrest you based on your accent or your skin color or just a hunch that you might be someone they’re looking for. They can arrest you if you’re at a peaceful protest, or even if you just happen to be walking by one or driving through.
They can tackle you to the ground; put you in a chokehold; beat you until you’re bloody and bruised. They can hit you with tear gas or a pepper ball or – as we saw with Renee Good – real bullets. And they can brutalize you like this even if you’re not resisting in any way. Even if you offer to show proof that you’re a citizen, it can take hours or even days for the federal agents to set you free – usually with no charges, no explanation, and no fear they’ll be held accountable for what they did to you.
This is happening. In Minnesota this has happened to a Purple Heart combat veteran whose head they smashed on the ground and then denied a lawyer for hours. A city snow plow driver who is legally authorized to work here and has no criminal record but is now rotting in a barbaric detention camp in El Paso where the guards just killed a man and his wife is desperately trying to get him his medication.
This has happened to an off-duty police officer whose car they boxed into a corner before pointing their guns at her, demanding to see her papers, and then knocking her phone out of her hand before she could show them her badge.
This has happened to a disabled woman who they dragged from her car while she was just trying to see her doctor; to four Native Americans who they kidnapped off tribal lands, three of whom are still missing; to an elderly citizen who was marched out of his home in his underwear into the freezing cold; to a pregnant woman who they pulled across the street by her arm while she screamed.
This is happening to children in Minnesota right now. The paramilitary squads are showing up in high school parking lots. Teenagers are being taken without their parents. There’s a 5-year-old little boy who was in a Minneapolis classroom with his friends just last week. Now he and his father – who came here legally – are in a detention camp in Texas, while his mother tries to explain to his middle school brother why their family is missing. And the response we get from the Vice President is, “what were we supposed to do – leave the kid out in the cold?” Which was like the response we got from the Secretary of Homeland Security when she couldn’t express a hint of remorse toward the family of eight who was driving home from a basketball game when agents exploded tear gas under their car that caused their six-month-old to stop breathing. Not a hint of regret.
This is happening. Those are all stories just from this last week. From one state. But those stories are everywhere. The videos are everywhere. And each week there are more, not less. They’ve been multiplying since last spring, really, when the government’s deportation machine kicked into high gear. I remember the fear here in LA. But then DC was worse than LA. And Chicago was worse than DC. And Minneapolis is worse than Chicago. And now they’ve arrived in Maine. And they have yet to spend most of their gigantic new budget that’s the size of the Israeli military’s.
Which is why we could really use more people speaking up right now. The government and its paramilitary squads are powerful. But they are not popular…
