January 23 Friday roundup

In this week’s podcast episode, I talk about the ways that ICE actions are repeating concentration camp history, why we should abolish ICE, and what it would mean to do so. You can watch the episode on YouTube or listen to it via Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the linked material or the written post from Tuesday, you can read it here.

When you look at what’s happening in the U.S. and abroad right now, with extremists exercising power in ways that so many people around the globe have spent most of a century trying to prevent, it’s difficult to take in—especially given the tremendous strides made in expectations for humane treatment of minorities, refugees, and asylum-seekers.

Those expectations were often failed or even overtly rejected by various reactionary leaders and parties. But the dominant international framework was that acknowledging a common humanity remained a goal worth striving for, not only in some abstract way but in concrete policies on the ground.

Alongside the world in which that common humanity was seen as a baseline, another world has existed the whole time—one in which people are encouraged to be distrustful and resentful of anyone who doesn’t look, worship, or think just like them. Many people have been egged on to tolerate or even demand violence against vulnerable groups over those differences. In the U.S. right now, the haters are getting their wish.

The truth is that even governments that espouse democracy often embrace very undemocratic actions. Systems develop their own momentum, and a deeply authoritarian segment exists in every population—as does a subset who are especially vulnerable to propaganda. Even those who imagine themselves immune often find their views shifting under constant bombardment onscreen or in their daily lives.

The world of the authoritarian co-exists alongside another one belonging to people who reject a hierarchy of human value that disdains whole communities and peoples. There are actually countless overlapping physical and digital worlds in which we all live. Anyone, myself included, can be ignorant, blinkered, and difficult.

The ideal state of pluralistic democracy is one in which people with different mindsets seeking different ideal societies negotiate their differences. This means that at any given time, there will be tensions and complications and disagreements.

If you’re someone who has to travel between worlds that are discordant with one another, it can be hard to navigate. Maybe your parents are Fox News watchers, while your friends are out protesting ICE. Or maybe you go to church on Sunday with people who want to see your coworkers deported. Or maybe it’s your coworkers who want to see your fellow churchgoers deported.

Even those who believe in human equality in one arena might fall down badly in another and not see the way other groups are being harmed. Everyone is capable of failing others or being a mess—that, too, is part of being human.

Yet despite the multiplicity of worlds and communities, there are moments when these worlds flatten. Sometimes, for a time, only two realities are left. And they exist in such conflict that it becomes difficult to continue without some kind of resolution.

***

In August 2020, driving my mother to a locked dementia ward where I planned to leave her was one of the hardest days of my life. She was paranoid and believed assassins were coming for her, and that her (actually dead) husband had been on a secret mission for the government, which had faked his death.

She had been delusional for decades about most of the things that Trump voters are delusional about—meaning she was delusional not only before she had Alzheimer’s but also long before Trump came on the scene. Still, when he arrived, she embraced him fully in ways I’m still unsettled by and reckoning with.

I didn’t encourage her delusions at all. Nor did I fight her about them, after dementia had fully taken her. I just tried to manage our days together so that everyone in the house (including her) might suffer a minimum amount of psychic damage from her illness, and that she would not manage to slip on the stairs, terrify her own grandchildren, or burn the house down.

Eventually, living in my home was no longer safe for her. I had to fool her to get her to go to the facility with me.

She believed every day that her husband was going to show up any minute. So I leaned into that idea when she brought it up and said that we were going to a hotel to meet him instead. No one in the house breathed a word of what was actually happening.

On the way, she spoke about what would happen when she saw him, and thought she had talked to him that morning. (For those wondering what was going to happen once we got there and no husband showed up, her short-term memory was so bad that it was possible to say he would be arriving in 15 minutes, and she would forget that I had promised anything at all before those minutes had passed.)

The trip, however, was astounding. Part of her broken brain was planning to see her husband and looking forward to going to Pittsburgh with him that weekend. Another part of her mind was calculating exactly what was going on in reality. At one point during the drive, out of nowhere, she said that she had never imagined growing old and going to live in a nursing home.

She was totally divorced from the world around her. She often thought she was her own mother. She occasionally called for revenge-killing the neighbors. Yet some sliver of her had figured out where we were going.

Despite this, the rest of her brain somehow carried on with what it wanted to believe instead. She’d had a lot of practice at it from the longstanding delusions she’d cultivated about politics, religion, and America.

In the car with me, she toggled back and forth between the two destinations she was simultaneously imagining—the hotel and the husband versus the nursing home—without ever seeming to see them as being in conflict. But only one scenario could be true.

***

Many Americans (and others around the globe) have maintained a suspended reality, too, in which they simultaneously believed that they lived in a functioning democracy while also on some level realizing tremendous harm was being visited on vulnerable communities.

Those of us without Alzheimer’s don’t have the luxury of maintaining this level of delusion. The government is currently sending law enforcement to terrorize civilians across the country, highlighting some locations as retaliation against the governors and mayors who stand up to Trump and his allies. The showboating involved in this escalation is breaking down barriers that normally silo people into their own little worlds.

Those silos breaking under pressure doesn’t mean all our differences are resolved. Yet in this moment, for now, it’s possible for them to matter less.

The many worlds are collapsing into two. In one, the U.S. government is actually enforcing existing immigration policy legally and according to democratic principles. In the other, elected officials are being threatened, everyday people are being kidnapped, protesters are being charged spuriously with crimes that do not exist, and documented and undocumented immigrants, as well as U.S. citizens, are being detained and murdered.

The crisis unfolding in towns and cities nationwide is presently centered on Minneapolis. This is a pivotal moment in American history. Likely at Stephen Miller’s behest, the president is sending what are effectively his personal shock troops to suppress dissent, openly assaulting countless people they decide are a threat.

Those who show up this winter, on the frigid streets of Minneapolis and elsewhere, are joining a long line of beautiful souls who have risked themselves at key moments to protect their fellow human beings. These are the true ancestors of the world I am hoping to live in.

We face hard times, but it’s a good moment to take a stand. The illusions that too many have nursed—and made it easy for others to nurse—in the past can no longer be maintained. Each person is summoned to rise as best they can against what’s happening. History is calling.

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