I am not-sick again, for however long this lasts. I had nearly forgotten how good it feels to not be ill. This isn’t terribly surprising, but before my past several months of back to back sicknesses I had stopped consciously appreciating how good being well felt.
In very similar ways I had failed to appreciate how good it was…
Continue readingI was going to write about Frieren, which is a wonderfully chill and cozy anime all about the bittersweet mixture of love, regret, grief, and joy found in coming to terms with the mortality of those who mean so much to us.
Instead, this week I’m going to tell you about ICE disappearing a Tufts student off the street in a neighborhood near me. If you haven’t seen the video, suffice to say it’s both chilling and infuriating. A group of masked figures approach a lone woman, lay hands on her, rob her of her backpack and phone, and herd her away to an unmarked car.
Her name is Rumeysa Ozturk. She’s a graduate student at Tufts, here on a student visa. She has been disappeared.
These masked figures briefly claim to be police. A few of them pull out hidden badges. At no point do any of them identify themselves—nearly all of them remain masked, they do not give their names or their badge numbers, they actively resist taking steps that might allow them to be held accountable for their actions. They show up, grab someone off the street, and then roll away.
This is a fucking disgrace.
I am not surprised by this. These scare tactics seem like the natural outgrowth of the abductions performed in Portland, Oregon, during the summer of 2020 (fine, if you want me to mince words, call them “sudden detentions with unmarked vehicles and personnel”). They’re designed to intimidate, to instill fear, and to prevent anyone from holding the (ostensible) law enforcement agents involved responsible for any action they might take.
This is antithetical to our American democracy. I’ve been furious about so many other things going on in our country, but this one hits especially close to home (literally). Someone has been pulled from my community and dragged over 2000 miles to Louisiana in what looks like a clear attempt by the authorities involved to avoid the consequences of their actions: if they can just do the thing they know the judge won’t allow fast enough, before the judge can rule on it, then they can (probably) get away with it. If this is not criminal, it should be.
There is no way to have an open and free society when people are pulled off the streets by masked figures and disappeared into unmarked cars. There is no way to have an open and free society when those we charge with protecting us cannot be held accountable by us. There is no way to have an open and free society when you can abduct someone by wearing a mask, waving a shiny prop badge, and moving fast enough that no one can prove you aren’t a cop.
It doesn’t matter that Rumeysa Ozturk is not an American citizen. If you think our laws and our ideals are only for American citizens when on American soil, you have already lost the ideal of America. If you think that the government should only avoid impinging on free speech when you agree with that speech, you’ve already lost the dream of America. If you think someone writing that they “affirm the equal dignity and humanity of all people” while talking about Palestinians, and that they urge their university president to “embrace efforts by students to evaluate ‘diverse and sometimes contradictory ideas and opinions’” should cause them to lose their visa and be deported, then you are the narrowest, most selfish and short-sighted fool and you are embracing your own destruction.
All of my other thoughts and words here are fury and disgust and bile. I am angry. You should be angry too.
Act. Let your congress people know your thoughts. And show up.
I’m sure plenty of other people are writing similar things. I haven’t been able to focus since I was told to look at the news yesterday afternoon. An angry mob pushing their way into the halls of Capitol Hill, handled with kid gloves by the same law enforcement that beat so many over the summer, attempting to disrupt and undo the peaceful transfer of power that our democracy is built on…
Side note: I don’t want more people shot by law enforcement. I do not think more of yesterday’s mob should have been shot or beaten or anything else. I just want the phenomenally more peaceful protestors of color, those arguing for less police violence who have been treated so much worse over the last summer in the same city, to be handled with more generous restraint.
Resignations of Trump’s Cabinet members at this point are fervently clutched fig leafs, unless they come with something like the following statement: “I was unable to convince a majority of fellow cabinet members to invoke the 25th amendment. As such, I am resigning instead of continuing to support President Trump. I recommend that the President be removed from office immediately, by impeachment since none of the remaining cabinet will speak out.”
Society is a collective agreement about reality. Our democratic republic relies on that consensus reality being broadly shared by a sufficient mass of citizens. Without that shared reality, democracy fails.
Trump and his abettors have been working for years (decades in the case of Fox, conservative talk radio, and now their more radical news network and podcast heirs) to carve away enough people from that consensus to cover their own autocratic impulses. In many cases, this means working hand in hand with fascists and racists. The preponderance of Proud Boys and neo-nazi affiliated groups in the mob yesterday have been there all along (in case no one remembers Richard Spencer yelling “Heil Trump” after the 2016 election). They aren’t a majority, as our elections have amply demonstrated, but they sure can make a lot of violent noise.
Speaking of which, it seems strange that there’s so little coverage of the makeshift bombs found at DNC and RNC headquarters in DC yesterday.
Regardless, there must be consequences of some sort for these actions. Inciting violence and insurrection is bad. And letting people (Trump in particular) get away with it is worse. He’s reopened a wound in American society, or perhaps simply pulled off the pus-laden bandage and gleefully rubbed shit in it until it became gangrenous.
Ignoring gangrene in hopes that “time will heal all wounds” is an excellent way to die.
Fistful of Wits 