The Rage and the Hope

I’m a writer and I should be eloquent. I should have eloquence, ready at hand, for things like this. I should have poetry paired with clarity and I should find a way to turn what I’m feeling into something, into anything beyond what it already is, like taking ingredients and making them into a plate of food, but all I have are these raw ingredients of rage and confusion and uncertainty. And I know it’s the same ingredients you all have, and I know we’re all just staring at them in front of us like we want to turn them into something, but we don’t know what and we don’t know how. I have names like Keith Porter and Renee Good and Alex Pretti and in some cases I’ve seen how they die, burned into my brain, more raw ingredients I can’t quite process, for which I can’t find eloquence. And I keep thinking I should find that eloquence here but I guess I’m well-past that point and I’m saying it anyway, that we are under the heel of a fascist federal government. I’m saying fuck ICE, abolish ICE, prosecute ICE, and I’m saying that these things are the moderate position, this is the centrist, milquetoast view at this point, and they should be thankful it is, because the longer people go under the boot, the longer they go without justice, the more the moderate position drifts to the immoderate, to the extreme, to people finding a way to get justice in ways that won’t be granted to them by the government above them. Justice taken if not given. Justice born of rage. Rage, rage, what we have is rage, fuck ICE, fuck Trump, fuck it all — but another ingredient is there, too, one I didn’t expect, one whose flavor is strange but perfect and necessary: there’s the reagent of hope, too, because we see people, people just regular people out there in Minnesota, and Chicago before that, and Los Angeles and Portland before that, finding their voices, their connections, their communities, their hearts, and standing tall before the small men in their masks and their fucking Nazi coats, and they stand and they film and they blow the whistles and they harangue and cast the necessary invective like magic fucking spells, and they do this even through clouds of chemical poison, they do this against advancing armed vehicles, they do this even when others amongst them are shot. The fear hasn’t taken them. That’s an ingredient not present: the fear. They have rage, but they have hope. They show rage. They give hope. They stand tall and give us all that hope, communicative, collective, contagious hope. Our government, our politicians, better smell what’s on the wind, better taste that blood in the water, better see the rage and those on our side better match that rage, and those against us must wither against it. Fuck ICE. Abolish ICE. Persecute ICE. And those who cannot agree on these plain and obvious things need to get out of the way and let the people work. I Stand With Minnesota dot com. Give money. Call your reps. Show up. Find the rage. But fuel it with hope. Love to you all, except the Nazi fuckers who are keeping this nightmare going.