Do not go quietly
I confess that I lost all of yesterday to scrolling while crying. Or crying while scrolling. With occasional bouts of raging while crying or crying while raging. Morris really wasn’t sure what to do with me, and I even got mad AT HIM for not being as demonstrably upset about the murder of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis at the hand of a group of thugs wearing face masks and badges without any numbers or names.
He was one of the helpers. An ICU nurse at the VA hospital, who was there to film what was going on. He put his body between a government rogue using pepper spray in the face of a woman, hands up to show one phone and an empty hand. He was pepper sprayed, thrown into the street, held down, pistol whipped and beaten, and then shot by two different masked agents—repeatedly, even after he was already down, including several shots in the back. And then those agents just walked away.
He was one of the helpers. His last known words were to the woman behind him. He asked “are you alright?”
He was one of the helpers. One of the people that Mr. Rogers told children to look for back in the day. One of the good guys. He did not deserve to die at the hand of disregulated individuals who paid no attention whatsoever to proper police procedures, or common decency.
The inhumanity and cruelty seems to be the point, as always.
I’ve been mad as hell about the situation for months. Before Alex Pretti was murdered. Before Renee Good was murdered. Before they used a preschooler in a bunny hat as “bait”, then sent the father and little boy to a Texas detention center, where access to the facility by attorneys, medical personnel, and even congress members has been impeded. And let’s face it, it shouldn’t take the murders of two white people in the streets to get everyone’s attention. Our fellow citizens (and legal residents/refugees) all deserve our care and attention.
I suppose, though, that if we are going to think about the poem by Martin Niemöller, we are at the “and then they came for me” phase. We must now decide if there is anyone left to say anything.
I refuse to say “this is not who we are as a country”, because it appears that enough of us are exactly this way. “Safeguards” such as the separation of powers appear not to be holding, as the courts cannot enforce their judgments even when they insist on warrants and the right of the people to observe and protest. The cruelty is the point, and the decision to smash and burn as much of our democracy as they possibly can while they can is playing out for all of us to see.
Turning once again to poetry
I misquoted Dylan Thomas for the title of this post. I was thinking of his villanelle, “Do Not Go Gently Into That Good Night”, but my fingers typed “quietly”, and perhaps that is also true. Maybe you remember Dylan Thomas’s poem, written for his dying father. The two repeated lines are “Do not go gently into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
But the poem I am thinking of today is from a different poet, writing at a different time. And it would seem to me that we are closer to being Pablo Neruda, writing from his suburb of Madrid at the start of the Spanish Civil War. His poem “I Explain a Few Things” (sometimes rendered as “I’m Explaining a Few Things”—he wrote in Spanish, and translation includes both bias and choice) is what comes to mind.
You can read an excellent translation of it here, at a blog called “A Cairn of Poems”. I don’t know who runs it, but I do know a good Neruda translation when I see it. The poem opens with questions he’s been asked from other people: where’s the pretty poetry? the stuff about lilacs and the meaning of life? And then it talks about the everyday of life in his corner of the world, which becomes disrupted by what I will call jack-booted thugs:
And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings —
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.
Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!
The poem then continues for a bit, detailing what is happening in a poetic way, but still chronicling the inaction of “the generals” (those in power), the death and destruction of society. And then the poem closes again:
And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?
Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!
I suppose the point of this post is to say plainly that I object to what the US government is doing. I object to the thugs it has hired to terrorize immigrants and everyone else. I object to the racism, misogyny, and antisemitism that it spouts. I object to any suggestion that skin color has a damn thing to do with merit or intelligence or lack thereof. I object to efforts to seize control of other countries, or to bully anyone, whether it’s a US citizen or a foreign government, into submission.
I will not spend my dollars at places that support this administration, whether it’s a Hilton or Marriott hotel chain or a Home Depot, or a small mom-and-pop store near me that has posted support for what is going on or for this administration.
If you were planning on getting a tarot reading from me or working with me by attending a workshop or signing up for coaching, you should know that (a) I’m excellent at those things but (b) I object to what this administration stands for and is doing, and I believe that a case can be made that every person in the Cabinet has broken one or more US laws and should face prosecution. If you don’t want to spend money with me because I’m a “woke liberal”, that’s fine with me. Better to be awake, eyes open, and “see the blood in the streets” than to bury your head in the sand.