The I Behind the Eye

I’m in a weird space so this is probably going to be a weird essay, but these are weird times so we’ll just go with it. I’ll cut to the chase and tell you my son is one hundred percent fine, but his car is totaled and it’s been a crazy few days with very little sleep. He called me from the side of the road early Tuesday morning, and as soon as he said hi I knew something was wrong.

No one was hurt, it was a three-car pile up — my son’s was the third car. The other two cars are fine, his is the only one that is going to be sold for parts. I could tell you a lot of things, but the only real thing that matters is that my son is okay. The rest of it is details. Expensive details, and something about insurance companies not being your friend — even if they thank you for your twenty years of loyalty every time you call.

I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you they don’t care and they aren’t grateful. The people answering the phones were just taught to say that during training. I can almost see the manual. It isn’t their fault and they probably aren’t paid enough. It’s a wonder you even get human beings on the phone these days, at least a robot didn’t tell me they weren’t going to help with the claim. I guess that’s something.

Here’s a thing that occurred to me right away, though. There are parents who got calls on Tuesday and their kids were not okay. So basically, I won the lottery this week and I’m fucking grateful. I drove up to check on him Wednesday. We went to see the car, RIP. I just got back from NorCal. I ended up sleeping on my son’s girlfriend’s couch, because we all spent most of the night in the ER.

But that’s another story. His girlfriend hit a speed-bump in the dark on an e-bike last night and went flying. She is tiny and smart and funny and precious and I adore her in every imaginable way. She is now concussed and very banged up, but thankfully she is also okay. I would like everyone I love to stop crashing into things, or having things crash into them, but if things have to crash and be crashed, at least I still get to tell a story with a happy ending, which makes me lucky.

I was driving back today, bleary-eyed, blasting this playlist and singing along to pretty much everything in an effort to stay awake and alert, when I remembered the video I saw of Jaykie Funez being arrested by ICE agents in front of her sixteen-year-old daughter as they were driving to school Monday morning.

Then I was sobbing, and I mean full-on sobbing, just overcome. I can’t decide if I want you to watch the video because it is traumatizing, and I don’t use the word lightly. If you are not feeling strong right now, do not watch it, but if you voted for this (I doubt you read my stuff, but even if there is one person) you should definitely watch it.

I have a sixteen-year-old daughter and the thought of her being there in an absolute panic as people treat me that way while she has no recourse to help? I’m writing through tears. Then they left her daughter on the side of the road. I can feel us getting greater by the second, all these hardened mothers off the streets.

I saw the video Tuesday I think, the days are confused for me. It’s one of the worst ICE arrests yet, I think they are getting more violent all the time, and they don’t care if the person’s child is right there. Neither do the supporters of this administration. Someone in the comments underneath said, “...wasn’t this the lady without documents? There’s another video with full info.”

First of all, no. She has her legal documents to be here. Second, even if she didn’t, no one deserves to be treated that way.

Her daughter is making the sounds any of us would make if something unthinkable and violent was happening to someone we love and we couldn’t stop it. It broke me, and it continues to break me, thus my breakdown in the car. The fact that anyone could watch this video and feel anything but horror and contempt for not just these ICE agents, but the administration setting them loose on good human beings is beyond comprehension, but I have the kind of personality where I want to understand. I went to this person’s profile and of course what I find is this bio:

“For I am not ashamed of the Gospel of Christ” — and then there’s a website and yes, I went, and the homepage of the website says, “For all have sinned, and come short of the Glory of God.”

Romans 3:23-24

I don’t know what to say. I don’t understand how a person can convince themselves they are Christian, whilst simultaneously in support of ANYONE being treated that way. It would be as if a person asked whether this woman had her documents, and then you went to their profile to find they are a child psychologist or a trauma therapist.

Sometimes I can’t help myself, so I wrote back and said, Wow. Just went to your profile. What a “Christ-like” question you’ve asked. Just like Christ, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these AS LONG AS THEY HAVE THEIR DOCUMENTS IN ORDER.” You need help, all is not well with your soul if that is your response after watching this video. You should really change your bio until you get your shit together.

It will not help. He/she did not answer. I thought about sending the video to my friend who has gone to the dark side but wants to “agree to disagree” and says he still loves me. I started to send it with a message, saying I have been silent since I saw him because I have not known what to say. That if we cannot agree this is unacceptable and unconscionable, I can’t be friends because our ideas about what is okay and not okay are wildly different.

How can you trust a person who is okay with some people being brutalized? Are you supposed to compartmentalize that somehow and act like everything is okay? I can’t and I don’t want to, but I shouldn’t have to say that, so I didn’t send the message. Not sending a message is also a message.

I want our kids to be safe and fed and cared for. If something scary happens, I want to live in a world where the grownups are comforting. I am not naive. We’ve never had a world where all grownups are comforting, or even safe, but now? Now there are at least 77 million people in this country who have decided soulless and heartless is a good way to go. They DGAF, they voted for this, they “want their country back” and I don’t know what country they mean.

We’ve never had a president who cancels SNAP benefits. The pro-life party wants to deny 1 in 5 kids the ability to have food security as of Saturday? It’s all so painful and ridiculous and I’m tired of the bs and blame game when this is their government. It’s theirs — the House, the Senate, the Executive Branch — all Republican. It’s their Big Ugly Budget and their guy Mike Johnson telling their senators to stay home.

People are not stupid, so anyone buying the “Democrat shutdown” narrative is buying it because they want to — I guess that’s easier than asking themselves how they can continue to support people who are okay with starving kids for political leverage.

Of course Democrats could give Republicans another clean CR, just like they did in March. Then the government would reopen, or so they say, and SNAP benefits would continue — maybe … at this point I see they are willing to use anything to try to push their demands through, so I put nothing past them — but no one will have affordable healthcare in January.

Why do we have an administration making us choose between feeding the most vulnerable members of our country, or having affordable healthcare, and why is anyone okay with that?

When you drive for many hours, or when I do, you start to have strange thoughts. I like to drive. I don’t mind a long drive, especially if it’s scenic, and the drive from SoCal to NorCal and back is hard to beat. There are so many places where I wish I could pull over to take pictures, but there isn’t enough shoulder. Places that still look untouched, where there are rolling green hills with black cows dotting the landscape, and a barn in the distance behind them.

There are lavender fields and olive trees in rows and mountains in the not-so-distance. I started to ponder the absolute arrogance of people who think they know how anyone else should live. How does anyone look at a mountain, or the night sky, or rolling hills, and think they have anything meaningful to offer about how someone should spend their time here? It’s embarrassing to be that full of yourself, that’s what I was thinking.

I was thinking, from the sky this president is a tiny speck of a man in a suit, a bloated orange parasitic flea with a bunch of orange fleas jumping after him, but it’s meaningless from out in space. It’s a joke. He’ll be dead soon, and so will all the fleas around him. Fleas are parasites and so are mites, but ants are not. The world as we know it would not survive without ants, did you know that? The food chain would collapse, and the ecological balance would be severely impacted. It wouldn’t happen overnight, but without ants we’d be in a lot of trouble.

I started thinking about some little ant, just minding her own business munching on a green leaf somewhere, thinking the breeze feels nice before she climbs down from lunch to go help all her friends carry some huge piece of Swiss cheese back to the Queen.

After the cheese delivery. Photo by Prabir Kashyap on Unsplash

It got me thinking about ants and how they’re willing to pitch in and work together, and fleas, and how they suck blood and make people miserable and offer nothing in return. I started thinking about liars and cheats and the fact that one of our three branches of government is being hollowed out in broad daylight, and it isn’t the top story. It isn’t even a story.

The government is going on its 31st day of this shutdown. The president has knocked down the East Wing, accepted unprecedented private donations from huge corporations to fund his Golden Ballroom/Bunker Project, private donations to pay the military — unheard of and one hundred percent illegal — we use federal funds to avoid foreign interference, bribes, pay-to-play politics…how is this hard to understand?

Also, if our democracy is to function properly, we need our all of our senators to negotiate to reopen the government. This is why we vote for representatives — so they can go and represent our interests. If the president is going to pay for the projects he wants to support through private donations, but defund the programs he doesn’t like, or use that as his own leverage (hello SNAP benefits, seeing the problem here?) there’s no reason for Republicans to negotiate in good faith. And they are not.

He’s decided we need to start nuclear testing again, and he’s screaming at Republicans to end the filibuster while he posts more racist memes on social media. Unserious, petty people, undignified and unqualified and unbefitting the Office. Same old, same old.

But hungry kids? Elderly people? People who can’t get to the local food bank? It’s a new low. Abusing mothers in front of their children and calling it justifiable?

I was thinking about the Anaïs Nin quote, “We see things not as they are, but as we are. Because it is the ‘I’ behind the ‘eye’ that does the seeing.” The idea that so much of what we’re seeing has to do with our perception, or that we’re going to find what we’re looking for. Confirmation bias if you’re a scientifically-oriented person.

It brought me back to my friend again, and how he’s decided the things that happen to people are based on their karma. Not that this is a new thought for him, but he’s taken it to such an extreme degree. Any suffering, no matter how intense, makes sense because this person did something in a past life and their soul needs the suffering in this lifetime in order to evolve. I bet if I had sent the video of Jaykie Nunez’s daughter sobbing and screaming for her mother, he’d tell himself she needed that experience. I guess we can convince ourselves of anything if we try hard enough.

I’m glad I feel no need to pretend things that are wrong are somehow okay. I’m relieved I can look at a terrified, heartbroken teenager and understand there is never any justification for that, and people inflicting harm on innocent people have lost it. People who want to point fingers rather than solve problems, or call themselves Christian while supporting the starvation of the most vulnerable people in our communities. Good luck to them all.

Meanwhile there are people like Josh White, the owner of Heretic Coffee — in that war-torn hellhole otherwise known as Portland — who has raised over $200k for people losing SNAP benefits just by asking the community to support. There are local food banks across the country trying to make sure people in their communities do not go hungry, and many states are releasing additional funds to bridge the gap.

Companies like GoPuff and Doordash are offering free food and deliveries to people who are losing SNAP benefits, and apps like Too Good to Go may also help people who are worried about how they are going to feed their families.

Your phone can ring any morning of the week, and that call can change everything, just like one moment behind the wheel, or one speed-bump in the dark. A single moment can shift the trajectory of all you hold near and dear.

“For there isn’t any time to waste, and cruelty is for the weak and ignorant.”

Obvious 1:2-3

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