It’s apparently -3 degrees Fahrenheit in Minneapolis as I write this. Frostbite can set in for exposed skin at less than 30 minutes at that temperature. Your skin freezes, and ice crystals can form inside of the cells and suck out the water, causing cell death. The academic literature on frostbite incidence dates to antiquity: Hannibal, I learned, lost half his army crossing the Alps. “During wartime manuevres frequencies of cold injuries may be high due to the exceptional circumstances,” an International Journal of Circumpolar Health article reports. And what is an anti-ICE street protest in the dead of Minnesota winter but an exceptional circumstance?
Democracy may be on the decline here and globally, but Americans will still die to live in a free city. Renée Good and Alex Pretti, fatally shot by federal agents during protests of recent immigration raids in Minneapolis (Pretti this morning), were both U.S. citizens who were not ostensibly the targets of enforcement. But being a mouthy bystander these days is to risk something serious. We live under a culture of sinister impunity. They’re shooting poets and nurses in the streets. Yet still people leave their houses, facing the cold and increasingly something much worse.
I don’t know how this all ends. But the everyday courage of the free citizen in the free city is a place where the end can begin. From Václav Havel’s remembrance of the Prague Spring:
…Somewhere at the beginning of this drama, there were individuals who were willing to live within the truth, even when things were at their worst. These people had no access to real power, nor did they aspire to it. The sphere in which they were living the truth was not necessarily even that of political thought. They could equally have been poets, painters, musicians, or simply ordinary citizens who were able to maintain their human dignity. Today it is naturally difficult to pinpoint when and through which hidden, winding channel a certain action or attitude influenced a given milieu, and to trace the virus of truth as it slowly spread through the tissue of the life of lies, gradually causing it to disintegrate. One thing, however, seems clear: the attempt at political reform was not the cause of society’s reawakening, but rather the final outcome of that reawakening.
Well said, Matt (and Vaclav). If our society survives this (and the jury is very much still out), it will be in no small part because of the courage and tenacity of ordinary people in Minnesota.
If it is the same fascism that disproportionately takes the lives of Black Americans through police killings each year, it does not end. It is met instead with calls for “trust” between law enforcement and the communities they harm; with self-investigations by guilty parties; with more funding for agencies in the name of oversight—body cameras, data collection, reforms that promise accountability while preserving power. Then the crisis recedes from the news, as the system justifies itself to majority of Americans who see some people as fundamentally guilty and themselves as fundamentally innocent, and therefore safe. It will return—terrorizing another group, or a larger one—until we reckon with the truth that this violence is systemic, not momentary or incidental.