I have moments where I think I can withstand what’s going to come next on this ride of horrors known as the current administration. But I’ve realized it’s just that I’ve mostly processed the previous horror, so I’m level set. I’m not actually ready for the next disgusting, inhuman, how-is-this-happening-in-our-time atrocity. It’s more like I’ve stopped feeling the blow of the previous one in my gut. But they keep coming, and before I know it, I am breathless and crumpled over again.
Renee Nicole Good was murdered. Citizen, mother, and a white person. In case we were comforting ourselves that we were safe because we were white citizens, that little fantasy has been ripped from us. Another innocent person dead because ICE, aka the Brown Shirts from Nazi Germany, are well on their way to becoming the Gestapo. This is not hyperbole, this is absolutely true. White folks, whether you voted for Trump or not, agree with what’s happening or not, or just think this doesn’t apply to you, it kinda does. We all have skin in this game.
To paraphrase Bono, am I bothering you? I don’t mean to bother you, but the world has seen this shit before, and it can get really bad before it gets better and better is not guaranteed.
I would venture a guess that most, if not all, people of color are completely unsurprised by any of this. Systemic racism has already ensured these policies to reduce access to vital services like healthcare, education, housing and buying food have already been in play in Black neighborhoods. Rounding up people on flimsy evidence, check. Shooting innocent people, check. Suppressing democratic systems like voting, check.
The Orange turd and his crowd wants us to blame every single problem on brown people, but this is all on us white folks. And at long last we white people are in the crossfire, and now we get to see how it feels.
When I think that we’re only one year into this descent into dictatorship insanity, my stomach clenches and lurches. I want to cry out and scream. The utter madness of talking about taking over Greenland and Venezuela and illegally kidnapping heads of state is bad enough, but also somehow so big and unwieldy, I can kind of eye it warily and keep moving. ICE kidnapping, beating, and killing all kinds of people, not so much.
As I like to remind myself and anyone who will listen, my father and his family survived WWII in Nazi-occupied Holland. In fact, my aunt told me that during that time she said to herself, “How can this be happening in my time.” Indeed.
But there is good news. We are not a dictatorship. Yet. We are still a democracy; pummeled and bleeding, but still here. It is not yet a crime to vote, to protest, to write to your representatives. So thank you and awesome job if you have been doing what you can, while you still can. And if you haven’t yet, as my yoga teacher likes to say, participate “any amount.” My aunt and family could not openly defy the Nazis. That we still can is what is saving us, for now.
From Wikipedia: Flower Power is the title of a photograph taken by American photographer Bernie Boston for the now-defunct newspaper The Washington Evening Star. Taken on October 21, 1967, during the March on the Pentagon by the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam. The photo shows a protester placing a carnation into the barrel of an M14 rifle held by a soldier of the 503rd Military Police Battalion (Airborne).
sandradeden.com 