When we talk about our inability to pay attention, to concentrate, we often mean and blame our phones. It’s easy, it’s meant to be easy. One flick of our index finger transports us from disaster to disaster, from crisis to crisis, from maddening lie to maddening lie. Each new unauthorized attack and threatened invasion grabs the headlines, until something else takes its place, and meanwhile the government’s attempts to terrorize and silence the people of our country continue.
So let me break it down. There is one story: our country is on the brink of an authoritarian takeover. In Minneapolis an innocent poet and an ER nurse at a VA hospital were both killed in cold blood by federal agents. It is happening now. Toddlers are being sent to detention centers; videos of their gyms for kids recall the youth choruses that the Nazis so proudly showed off at the Terezín concentration camp. Intimidation and violence are being weaponized against the citizens of Minneapolis, some of whom are afraid to leave their houses for fear of being beaten, arrested and shackled, regardless of whether they are US citizens or asylum seekers or people from another country peacefully living and working here for decades.
That is the news we should be paying attention to. At least for the moment, everything else is a distraction. I’m glad to have been informed about the heavy snow outside my window today and the local weather-travel advisory, but frankly, it’s snowed here before – so why is it leading the news?
Donald Trump’s inability to tell Greenland from Iceland during his speech at Davos is embarrassing, awful, sort of funny – but it’s hardly the first time he’s made a mortifying mistake. I too want the Epstein files released, I want to know who is guilty, I want justice and respect for the survivors. But unless those revelations bring down the perpetrators, it’s not – for the moment – the story.
The story is what’s happening in Minneapolis. And even that requires focus. Already the killing of Alex Pretti has partly diverted our attention from the killing of Renee Good.
The story – masked agents, arrests, violence, kidnappings, deportations without due process – is happening all over the country, but in smaller increments, without as much pushback, and so far without the death of two innocent, middle-class, white bystanders. The story is about how decent and unselfish Renee Good and Alex Pretti were and about the falsehoods being told about them.
The story is not letting ourselves be distracted from the real and present threat to our democracy. That threat is the story which our print, electronic and social media should be bannering at the top of every feed and every front page, every day. To consistently run that below the weather report is, quite frankly, to betray the struggles of the people of Minneapolis.
The story is what we do now to support our fellow Americans in the midwest and to keep the violence and repression from spreading even further into our own streets and backyards. The story is avoiding the future that Stephen Miller and his minions are planning for us.
The story is how we do it: not long after the 2017 inauguration of Donald Trump, I wrote, in these pages, about our need to stage a national strike. I know now that I underestimated the difficulties – the amount of organization required, the need to strategize, the necessity to support and provide for people who will lose their livelihoods if they walk off the job. But many people are already scared to go to work or send their kids to school.
Such a shutdown would be an enormous undertaking, to say the least. But it’s been done. Gandhi and Martin Luther King achieved at least some of their goals without resorting to violence. The people of Minneapolis have stopped business as usual in the city. That energy can – and needs – to spread. Not to be alarmist, but unless we stay focused, it may soon be too late.
This morning I went off – I apologize! – on a college classmate who sent an email link to a video of birds that others might want to watch as “relief from the weather and the news”. I wasn’t saying we should stop enjoying the birds. I’m thrilled that so many robins elected to stick around this winter. I even like watching the crows and turkey vultures pick the roadkill clean.
But I don’t really want “a relief” from the loss of Renee Good and Alex Pretti or from the resistance beginning in Minneapolis. To crudely paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is a time for everything. And this may not be the time to distract ourselves with the latest scandal or diplomatic blunder or with amusing images of the creatures who don’t much care if the humans beneath the snow-covered rooftops are living under a cruel and authoritarian regime.