This is the epic battle part

Love always wins in the end

Once when I was in tenth grade, my friend John overslept and missed our morning English class. He caught up with me after and asked if he could borrow my notebook — we had a test the next day and he wanted to copy my notes so he’d know what to study. I gave it to him without hesitation and said he could have it until the end of the day, but I did need to leave right after the bell so I wouldn’t be late for my dance class. I told him I’d meet him outside the boys’ locker room after school. We passed each other in the hallways a few times as the day wore on. He high-fived me at one point.

We weren’t extremely close, but had a lot of friends in common. We’d been at school together a few years by then. We’d been at the same parties, laughed together at school assemblies, sat next to each other on the bus heading to field trips here and there. He could be snarky, and though I hadn’t discovered my own snark yet, I appreciated it in other people as long as it wasn’t mean-spirited.

When the bell rang at the end of the day, I ran to my locker and swapped out the books I needed to lug home, leaving the rest behind. I liked to walk across the park, and those textbooks added a lot of weight. I grabbed my coat, spun my lock a few times, and headed to the boys’ locker room. I stood in Room Zero, right outside the locker room exit — the only classroom on the basement level. The gymnasium was through the boys’ locker room, the coaches’ offices were located in there, too. Once in a while you’d have to walk through while boys were changing to get to the gym.

A design flaw, no doubt. No one wanted to walk through at the wrong time. After a few minutes when it felt like most of the boys in school had emptied out — I called in. “John! Are you almost out? I really have to go!”

Photo by Christopher Ryan on Unsplash

John yelled back that he was coming. He sounded aggravated. One of my good friends was in Room Zero with his girlfriend. We all kind of laughed because John sounded so annoyed. Several minutes went by, and I started to worry about making it to my ballet class. Couldn’t he just run my notebook out? I could almost hear my mother saying, “No good deed goes unpunished.” She had a lot of sayings like that. They seemed so negative to me, and I hated when she was proven right. I called in again, “Hey, John, I really have to go or I’m going to be late!”

John came barreling through the doorway, pushing past me into Room Zero. I exchanged glances with my other friends. He slammed his bag down on a desk and yanked my notebook out. Then he flung it at me. Before I could respond, he was moving toward me, and in one motion he grabbed me and lifted me off my feet. It was awkward and all wrong. I could not understand what was happening. Was he joking? He spun around in a weird circle, gaining momentum.

If we had been kids playing in a park, it might have been fun at first, the kind of thing where someone has you by both wrists and you spin until you’re dizzy and then land on the grass and watch the world fly by — but this was not that. My brain couldn’t make sense of it, the blur of desks, the shocked faces of my friends standing there, mouths agape, the recessed lights in the ceiling flashing overhead.

Then he let go of me, and I went flying into a desk and hit the floor hard. I stared at the burgundy rug until things stopped spinning, and then up at him, shocked. My friends stared at him, too. The room was totally silent except for a ringing in my ears. Then one of my wrists started throbbing and I looked at it and saw it was already swelling. My knee hurt, my hip, too, and somehow, the back of my head. It was tender when I touched it. I must’ve hit the desk on the way down. Tears were spilling, but a lot of the pain was the brutality of what had happened without warning.

He left without a word, without looking at me — just took off and left me there on the industrial carpet. My friends came over right away and asked if I was okay. They helped me up, said they could not believe it, and asked if I wanted them to go to the main office and get help. I shook my head. I was having a whole nervous system response. My hands were shaking, my whole body was shaking.

I sat down at one of the desks and replayed the last ten minutes in my mind. I wasn’t making it to my dance class, anyway. I couldn’t understand. Had I sounded really upset when I’d called into the locker room? Both of my friends assured me I had not, I just sounded like someone who needed to go.

After a few minutes I felt the need to be outside. Room Zero had no windows and I was light-headed. I wanted to be alone because I felt like crying and didn’t want to do that in front of anyone. My mom would get violent with me physically for no reason sometimes when she drank, but to have a friend do that with no warning was something that caught me completely off guard.

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That’s how I feel all the time these days. It’s not that I’m surprised, it’s that I’d forgotten how cruel people could be, casually — with glee, even, or satisfaction. It’s Emmett Till. It’s Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Elijah McClain. It’s Eric Garner, Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. It’s George Floyd. It’s Sonya Massey. And that’s off the top of my head. American citizens —sometimes kids — being shot dead by angry men in uniform is not a new thing.

I knew we were in trouble when we all watched Derek Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd’s neck, and people started talking about a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill and fentanyl use. As if the punishment for having a counterfeit twenty-dollar bill is death, or you need anything more than a knee on your neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds to put an end to your life.

We’ve had moments when I thought we were moving in a better direction. I remember when white people started to understand that Black families were having “The Talk” with their kids, and I thought we might finally have our own talk, as a country.

But no. Instead, 77 million people decided to put the insurrectionist felon back in office.

I knew we were in trouble for sure a few months ago when a friend I’ve known for twenty years brought up fentanyl when I mentioned George Floyd. I stared at him for a long time and my heart broke because I knew our friendship was over. He told me he likes the president because he “tells it like it is.” I like friends who respect women and Black people and the LGBTQ community and immigrants and the Constitution.

Now we have terror on our streets, and the folks who voted for this are unrepentant about it. Remorseless. My heart is broken for Minnesota. If this was about immigration, ICE wouldn’t be in Minnesota. There are 80,000 undocumented immigrants there, versus well over 2.5 million in CA and 2 million in Texas, almost a million in New York, and 700K+ in Florida. The president is sending his armed, masked militia to the blue states he hates the most. They’ll leave if the governor will give up the voter rolls. The goalposts change all the time, but the lawlessness does not.

He said he was going to deport “the worst of the worst” but only 5% of people who’ve been kidnapped off the streets have criminal convictions.

Liam Ramos is sleeping all day in Dilley Detention Center because he’s depressed and malnourished. A five-year-old is depressed. Renee Nicole Good’s children are undoubtedly still trying to understand how their mother can be gone. Alex Pretti’s family is reeling from the loss of him.

The conditions in these detention centers are inhumane. The food is inedible, they don’t turn on the heat, people are denied medical attention, these centers proclaim they aren’t responsible if detainees are sexually assaulted by guards. Is this who people want to be? My used-to-be-friend likes this president?

I tried a few times after that coffee to send some links, but I realized quickly it was pointless. He is gone. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers. If I saw pods that had absorbed people’s empathy that would make more sense than what I do see. The laughing emojis when American citizens are murdered in cold blood. The lack of compassion when families are ripped apart. I can’t tell you what it does to me, but I probably don’t have to because I’m sure it does the same to you. It is so gut-wrenching to witness people lose their humanity.

There was a woman interviewed on 60 Minutes. An ICE vehicle side-swiped her car and forced her into the parked cars on her other side. She thought it was a normal fender bender, but then ICE agents got out of the car that hit her with guns drawn. She thought a regular person was going to get out and they’d exchange insurance information, but no, masked, armed men, pointing guns at her, screaming for her to get out of the car.

She asked what was happening and why, and they yanked her out, threw her to the ground, handcuffed her, and took her to a detention center. She’d had kidney surgery a few weeks prior. She’s a citizen. She started urinating blood a few hours after they assaulted her. I commented underneath a clip of her interview. Just said how brave she was for speaking out about what happened to her — and some man told me she should have stayed home and that wouldn’t have happened.

I asked him if he realized she was just driving. Just a woman, out driving, living her life, and they side-swiped her because she was brown. Brown while driving, that was her crime. He said she should have listened and gotten out of the car. So I said okay, so I should stay home and not drive anywhere, but if I do, and I am hit by a car, and men get out with guns drawn — your advice is that I calmly exchange insurance information with them? Or do I never leave my house?

“Comply or die.” Photo by Liz Sanchez-Vegas on Unsplash

I saw someone comment under a post today that she “liked it better when everyone wasn’t so political.” I liked it better when we lived in a democracy, even if it was imperfect and we had work to do. I liked it better when the president and his cohorts at least pretended to care about the Constitution, the three branches of government, the checks and balances.

I liked it better when I didn’t know how many of my friends would go about their business like everything is okay because they think this won’t affect them. Do they not care about their constitutional rights? Do they not care about the rights of our immigrant community? I understand it does no one any good if we’re all in puddles of despair and angst, but there’s a middle ground somewhere between that — and checking out.

When the kindest people you know are all enraged, that’s your cue to realize they’re upset because they’re kind. It’s not that they’ve suddenly become militant and angry, they’re in pain. They’re grieving for this country, for the friends they’ve lost, for the people who are being harmed, for the lack of compassion, decency and basic humanity.

But for every person with a laughing emoji when tragedy strikes, there are ten to twenty more who feel gutted and refuse to accept the heartlessness. Not everyone has been body-snatched, or empathy-drained. I feel leveled when I see people who have become hardened. It really is like watching a huge and terrifying percentage of the population succumb to a virus. There are so many more of us who do not want it to be like this, and never did.

The DHS bill was separated from the other funding bills early this morning, in an effort by Senate Democrats to keep the government running (to continue funding FEMA and The Coast Guard, for example), while giving them more time to negotiate on ways to “rein ICE in.” This means they have not approved further funding of ICE, which will not make as much of an impact as it should because they already have tens of billions of dollars to fund this insanity thanks to the Big Ugly Bill.

Maybe we can get some kind of Code of Conduct going, an end to the masks which would undoubtedly help, and a serious uptick in investigations and transparency over violations. I hope they will fight for arrests in Renee Good’s and Alex Pretti’s murders as well. Am I hopeful about “reining ICE in”? No, I can’t say that I am. Those men out on the streets look like they are enjoying themselves. They look satisfied when they spray a woman directly in the face with a chemical agent.

Is there a chance Democrats could have fought to abolish ICE when they are in the minority? I don’t think so, sadly. Which brings us to the midterms, the FBI raid on Georgia, and a thousand other ways they’re trying to cheat, but let’s save that for next time. We have to be reasonable with ourselves.

I went to a breathing workshop the other night, and the guy leading it kept saying you are not delicate and it felt good to hear that and to assert it for myself. I’m not delicate. I’m sensitive and I feel things deeply and I am devastated by people who do not care about their neighbors, but I’m not delicate and I won’t “tone it down” to make anyone comfortable. This isn’t the time to tone it down, it’s the time to light it up. It’s the time to stand for whatever you believe in and fight for it, even if it’s hard and you aren’t sure what to do.

There will always be cruel people — there always have been. There will be people you think are friends and they will let you down, and sometimes you’ll be the friend who lets someone else down. You don’t have to be perfect to help. You don’t have to get everything right. You just have to try. Today is a general strike. The idea is not to buy anything at all, and to stay home from work and school if you can. You may not be able to stay home, but you can do something, right? There are so many ways to pitch in right now, and they all matter.

This week was one of my hardest yet. Watching what’s happening to our country is like watching someone you love as they suffer from a painful disease. It’s like being in the ICU doing everything you can to advocate, but nothing feels like enough. I genuinely do not think the people who are in support of this administration recognize democracy is on life support. The lies and hypocrisy are toxic and this president and his appointees are giving us an overdose every day, but there’s an antidote.

Check on your friends, and be gentle with yourself. Reach out if you need encouragement. Don’t give up and don’t stop fighting back, even if you do one small thing each day. Taking action will help so you don’t feel powerless. Make one phone call to your representatives. Write one email to the CEO of a company you won’t support because they’re complicit.* Check on your neighbors, see if they need anything, even if it’s just someone to care. If you’re in an area that is likely to be targeted by our government, start making plans. Get organized, get whistles (but don’t buy them today ;)).

Lastly, make your art, whatever it may be. We have to lift each other up however we can. Remember this is not forever, it won’t always be like this. We’re just in a very tough part of the story. The story isn’t over. Love always wins in the end, but sometimes there’s an epic battle first. Everyone knows that. This is the epic battle part. We can do it. We are doing it.

Love you. Thank you for being here, truly.

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*If you want to pop off an email:

ecr@hilton.com

ted_decker@homedepot.com

keith.rozolis@abcsupply.com

And once again: 5calls.org

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