Customs and Border Patrol has murdered a law-abiding American citizen exercising his First and Second Amendment rights. News and video of the cold-blooded street execution of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis on Saturday, Jan. 24 spread rapidly. The blatant criminality of the federal agents was obvious. The regime is trying very hard to provoke a resister to open fire on a federal agent. Resisters are resisting the temptation to jettison public sympathy by a foolish act of violence.
In a country of 340 million people, odds are it won't happen to you. Right around here, we have no large concentration of targets for ICE and CBP. People with empathy and a broader world view are speaking up and demonstrating, much to the amusement of the more conservative individuals who believe that if it isn't happening right in front of them it's someone else's problem. The Puritan heritage adds, aloud or silently, that those people probably brought it on themselves in some way, too. In any case, no point getting all het up over something that probably will never affect you directly.
Won't it, though?
In our business, we cater to a lot of visitors who come to play around the lake when it's thawed, and on the snow in our legendary winters. We also serve the locals. This winter, the customers we've seen have been very normal. They exhibit a normal level of cheerfulness, engage in only normal amounts of chiseling for discounts, and buy at the price levels we commonly expect. However, we wait hours, or even days, between them. Something is suppressing demand.
The business presents a scrupulously apolitical front, although upper management is lifelong Republican. Their more politically connected relatives opposed the current occupant of the Oval Office in his first bid for it in 2016. I don't know if they had rolled over by 2020. One of them told me that they did not vote for the current occupant in his 2024 bid, when the state of New Hampshire as a whole went for Kamala Harris.
Down here in the labor pool, I have opposed the conservatives for decades. I don't know where my colleague stands, because I don't want to complicate our working relationship. I don't get the sense that he's a fan of the regime. Even just for practical purposes, the destructive rampage of DOGE and the continued smash and grab that has followed have made life more difficult for everyone, by hobbling useful agencies like the National Weather Service. The people I spend time with the most are not the kind to protest, ever. Bitch and grumble, yes. The founders of the shop used to growl all the time about chiseling rich people, but always voted with the rich people's political candidates. I don't see that changing.
As I travel through the semi-rural, heavily wooded suburbia that this once genuinely rural area has become, I see a few shrines to the authoritarian, racist regime, a smaller number of outright public displays of opposition, and mile after mile of noncommittal anonymity.
It's been mostly lousy weather for winter recreation, as the drought makes even downhill ski areas have to worry about having enough water. I don't know how their attendance numbers have been, but I do know that I have seen very little weekend traffic on Route 16. It was a little heavy southbound on Martin Luther King Day, as whoever had accumulated at the ski areas up north all drained south at more or less the same time. In "normal" years, they would have surged in together in more of a cohesive parade. That did not happen this year.
It's hard to watch the news of what's happening in Minnesota, and what happened in Portland, OR, and Los Angeles over the summer as well as the Blackhawk raid on the apartment building in Chicago. The goons have arrived in Portland, Maine, now, where they are faring no better than they have in any other city they've tried to victimize. They may be doing worse. I read one post from a local describing how the immigrant and minority residents are not clustered into contiguous neighborhoods, forcing the goons "federal agents" to have to hunt around for them individually. And resistance groups had already organized many of the mitigation tactics that evolved in Minneapolis, sheltering and supporting targeted groups from having to travel around on daily errands that would expose them to abduction.
If it isn't happening right around you, it can be very hard to imagine it being real. That's no excuse for letting heroic resisters get gunned down, but the isolation from the hot zones of confrontation also limits what a person can do to help. We can send money, hold vigils, contact our elected officials, write op-ed pieces, join bridge brigades that try to raise awareness of the problem. That creates its own problem, as people unaffected by the brutality grow weary of the constant calls to do something, when "something" remains pretty nebulous.
What would a general strike look like around here where employment is dispersed over a wide area dotted with genuinely small businesses, mostly oriented in winter toward meeting tangible needs of the locals? Maybe a few people from around the general area believed strongly enough in the cult to go to DC for Jan. 6, 2021, but even if their fervor has reversed, and they have turned against their god-king, the kinds of event opportunities offered to them don't appeal to their "storm the fortress" and "hang Mike Pence" sensibilities.
I don't have the kind of snappy answer that appeals to the general public. I don't even have a succinct, policy-nerd answer. I'm not really that great a policy nerd, being rather like the pitchfork and torch crowd when it comes to direct action. So I hang back and wait for cooler heads to lay out the more effective long-term strategy and tactics.
No comments:
Post a Comment