Diary of a Dreamer in MAGA Country: Week 10

Validation and Vindication

Initially published on Medium

What is the next step? That is the question I am wrestling with these days. I’ve been seeking clear answers, a straight on the nail warning before it is too late. Over the last week, we have seen a lot more of the establishment come out and call it like it is: authoritarianism. 

Many countries have issued warnings regarding travel to the U.S. Many are warning us that it may be time to leave while others are already speaking to us from the safety of their new homes abroad. Many politicians have been outright with their intentions in a way that I think is sobering. Immigrants are being called terrorists and sent to concentration camps. Press tours in front of inmates are going viral. The White house is posting AI Ghibli images of migrants crying. The White House instagram left this weird comment, the context of which would not matter in a sane world:

“Simply put: WE WILL FIND YOU — AND WE WILL KILL YOU.” — instagram.com/whitehouse

We know at this point, if you are someone who cares to be rational, that legality or even logic are not at the base of how decisions are being made. Green Card holders, Visa holders, and hundreds of thousands of people on legal Asylum and Refugee paths are being outright targeted by this administration. Talk about ISIS and MS-13 is tossed around with talk of student protesters and Palestine supporters. What is terrorism these days?

I, myself, know it has never been about “the law”. I, and many other people, have been shouting at the top of our lungs for years about just how unjust and hateful the true reasoning behind this country’s laws have always been. None of this is about “illegal” immigrants — death is not a valid response to a paperwork issue. We know there isn’t a real call to justice when talking about Gaza and Ukraine. We have been calling out the scapegoating for years. The path to authoritarianism is not a mystery. We have been on this train for a long time. Validation is sweet, vindication; bitter.

Many, still, believe that our democracy has safeguards against tyranny built into it. Judges are doing their jobs. The laws are holding up. We can still fight. Protests are happening. This is a country built by democracy and liberty after all.

I feel conflicted. 

Part of me feels like there is a wave of new people just entering a new way of thinking. If I could just get enough people on our side things could turn around…right?

I could spend time explaining, as I have in the past, how immigration issues are, really at their core, a paperwork issue. Just like a person here in the states could end up with fines or even jail time because they don’t know how to file taxes or where to get permits or even when you need to do these bureucratic things that are part of our society; the same thing happens with migrants. For the vast majority of undocumented migrants the issue is that there is no legal pathway to coming here. There wasn’t an application to file that would be accepted and approved. It sounds silly and lazy. How could there not be a punishment for such insolence? 

The country that is, at this moment, destroying itself under the guise of efficiency and a wish for less bureucracy is angry at people who made a bureucratic decision for the sake of their own lives. I could talk to you about how silly and lazy it is for citizens of this country to not know their own laws and regulations and to constantly vote against ways of rectifying the issues that plague them.

but it’s not about paperwork.

I could talk about how human beings just migrate and how natural and integral the migration of humans has been to the conservation of the very land we call home. A land that was well taken care of by its indigenous populations way before it was colonized and forced into rigid bureucratic forms and permissions. 

The very people whose own families had to migrate to make a life here have so many strong opinions about Nativism and the rights they feel so strongly should be upheld because of their own birthright are calling for the removal of birthright citizenship and trying to disavow indigenous land rights.

but it’s not about migration.

I could talk about how the very pride of this nation is its fight for civil causes. What is the land of the brave and free without freedom for the brave souls who’ve fought and died for it. What freedom are veterans dying for? Black people had to fight to be free. Women had to fight to be free. Every group in this country has had to fight tooth and nail to exist and survive. 

What else is this country good for without these freedoms? Slavery, child labor, monopolies, poverty, illiteracy, inequality; are these not the run of the mill features of so-called lesser nations? Aren’t we better?

but it’s not about freedom.

This country is either the liberal haven society that the world looks to as a leader or the regressive racist loss of a short-lived democratic experiment; fought for at every turn, struggling at every decade, challenged and pained by its unquenched growth and lack of identity. 

Where do we go from here? 

If it’s time to leave, well, a lot of us are screwed because it isn’t that easy. This country has over 300 million people spread over 3 million square miles of land; a nation of true diversity. What are we supposed to do? Are 11 million undocumented migrants going to cross the border while 70 million blue voters line up behind us to leave? Are the 50 million people under the 125% of the poverty line going to scrounge up enough food to eat while they walk themselves into their new roles as refugees? 

It is easy for the blonde and blue-eyed college graduates corporate girlies living in 450K townhomes to tell us poor marginalized folk that it is time to leave. What a privilege to think about what might happen to the people who don’t leave while knowing your life will remain relatively unchanged. What a bigger privilege would it be of me to tell anyone not to leave.

I know better.

This country has been hard fought. 

While people go online and scold Timothy Snyder and other prominent and privileged leaders for leaving and not staying to fight while others are telling the rest of us that we need to get out there and fight in order to turn this tide, all I can think of is all of the fights this country has already had.

We’ve only ever been marginally gaining freedom in this country, deaths upon deaths at a time. Did it matter that we saw it coming this time? Does it matter that we know how this ends? If in the end the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, how many lives will it take to get there? How many dead Black and brown bodies are holding up the fragile threads of the flag we say represents our freedom? Should we stop waving it? Should we wave it harder? 

Which one is more brave? 

I really don’t know. I wish I wasn’t seeing any of this.

Screenshot of a comment left by the Whitehouse instagram account.