Hate courses, pulses through their actual brown shirts as they tread the hallowed ground of our community, their casual violence and armed menace arriving as if from a portal opened to late 1930s Germany. If you do not see the parallels, it is only out of willful, or actual, ignorance. The gang mentality, the imperious air of assumed impunity, the abject lack of qualifications other than a willingness to follow any order and an erotic desire to murder other humans recalls not yet the SS, but Hitler’s thugs that were their progenitor. Just as we would never allow Nazi goon squads to walk Bridge Street, nor should we tolerate the presence of extrajudicial killers.
I watched slayings in cold blood with my own eyes, listened to the lies with my own ears, guffawed ironically at the duplicity that threatened to unmoor my own sanity. There is no nuance here, any attempt to create such is simple gaslighting, a rapist telling his victim that she consented. Justifications about border security are obviously pretextual – among the slain were citizens and legal residents. Any excuse is not only hollow, but rooted in evil.
There is voluminous room for principled debate around immigration policy. There is zero room for demonizing a subset of people due to the specific moment in time in which we find ourselves, the practice of which is clearly racist hypocrisy. After all, in senses both large and small, we are all immigrants to this land. In this specific place, built on the labor of generational waves of those from elsewhere (including very, very white Europe), the story is even more complex, the answers more elusive. The only thing that we know for sure is that all of valley’s residents, regarding of technical status, are in this mountain life together.
Outrage fuels the work that is ahead of us. We may be currently impotent to stem the tide of filth, grift, and greed that subsumes our national government, at least until the next election, but we hold the power over our own, smaller, more manageable geography. Sadly, there are locals, official and otherwise, that not only condone and allow the intrusion, but have actively abetted it, contrary to both the law and common decency. They must be called to account, shunned, shamed. Blood is on their hands, in ways that we do not yet even fully comprehend.
Protecting the framework of our community and of our country, insulating it against fascism (look it up – there can be no other definition) transcends the gaping political divide. Holding a very specific set of viewpoints, I respect those that disagree on matters that truck opposing views, welcome discussion on such. However, allowing a lawless invading force to run roughshod over our local sovereignty in violation of any applicable law, state or federal, local or constitutional, is not supportable in any form or fashion. I cannot and do not respect anyone who watches a murder and then agrees with the cover-up, with the victim blaming, with what can only be classified as abject insanity.
There is no violence in passive resistance, no justification for meeting protest with deadly force. Similarly, the labeling of protestors as domestic terrorists, a moniker with serious consequences, is an affront to the Bill of Rights. It is a violation made all the more odious by the pardoning and championing of the January 6 mobs that LITERALLY STORMED THE CAPITOL ARMED TO THE TEETH AND WHO ACTUALLY KILLED PEOPLE. Maddeningly, the same cohort is attempting to erase the history of such event, along with the centuries of ignominies – slavery and Jim Crow and the like – that are our collective disgrace. This divorce from reality, from any semblance of humanity or rationality, is only a respite before the final judgment of the Christian deity to which these same hypocrites give lip service. Our entire community should denounce such blatantly illegal and inhumane and frankly absurd actions, and yet there has not been a united pushback. It is time.
Intimidation and threats are an unfortunately effective tactic, one that a brutal government levies upon its citizens to keep them quiet and compliant. There is no more terrifying example than a group of heavily armored and armed men pumping ten bullets into a defenseless man in broad daylight…and then immediately lying about it, giving the perpetrators cover, making the rest of us wonder if there will be any justice and yet despondent at already knowing the answer to that question.
We can keep ICE out of our towns if we exert a collective will to so effectuate. We are scared of retribution, we are scared of active-duty soldiers arriving on our soil, we are scared of being killed without consequence. I am scared to even write this article. But I am more terrified of what comes next if these affronts are allowed to stand. Just as the loosely-organized brownshirts evolved into the highly-efficient paramilitary units of the Schutzstaffel and of the SS-Totenkopfverbände “Death’s Head Units,” can ICE become even more entrenched and institutionalized.
If you do not believe that concentration camps are a logical next step, you did not pay enough attention in history class. Nobody believes that evil can spread so pervasively until the iron fist closes around one’s throat. We all deserve to breathe the air of the free.