1-10-26
Post By Lee Goodman
It doesn't look like much is changing, even after a woman was shot in the face and killed by ICE. The vigil that evening in Evanston, Illinois, was inspiring. A couple of hundred people filled the plaza. But they didn't spill into the street. There have been larger vigils there in the past.
This morning, the usual group of protesters, including clergy from many faiths, stood vigil outside the ICE detention center in Broadview, Illinois. It was a good crowd, but no larger than the ones that have been gathering for months.
All across the country – vigils and protests, signs and chants. And in response – the usual lies and insinuations by the regime, blaming the victim, disparaging the protesters, glorifying the bravery of the shooter who should have been trained not to do what he did.
The ICE and Border Patrol brutalization goes on, undiminished by the videos showing agents continuing to toss innocent people to the ground and spray them in the face at close distance with chemicals. The thugs don't care that people are seeing what they are doing, because too many people don't care about police violence as much as they care about the price of gasoline.
The people in Nazi Germany in the 1930s didn't care either. They wanted lower grocery prices. They longed for the restoration of their national dignity. They never cared, right up to the end. They let it happen. Outside armies had to overrun the country to stop the slaughter.
We like to think that a moment will come when people will realize they have been following a ruthless dictator. But that moment still isn't here, even after we all saw the pictures of the car with stuffed animals in the glove box and blood on the air bag. After we saw the cross and flowers at a roadside memorial near the scene of the shooting. After we learned that a six-year-old girl has lost her mother.
Some polls suggest we are building towards the moment of change. Recent election defeats for the Republicans give us hope. But unlike what we have seen in other countries at various times, in our country the people are not in the streets in such massive numbers that the buses cannot get through. The phones in D.C. are not jammed with calls coming in from outraged citizens. Today's radio news is talking more about the upcoming Bears v. Packers game than about anything else. We, as a country, are still not stopping the violence against ordinary people and the assault on our laws and Constitution, and there is a frightening possibility that we never will.
When Hitler's regime fell, many claimed that they hadn't known what had been going on. Many didn't believe that it had been as bad as it really had been. We will hear these things again, if we ever succeed in stopping today's abominations.
In response to the shooting in Minneapolis, ICE didn't call a moratorium while it investigated what had gone so wrong that an innocent observer was killed. Instead, it sent more storm troopers into the city, which just a few years ago got national attention because of the response to police killing George Floyd on the street.
Today, we stood in Broadview singing a song with the refrain, “All you fascists bound to lose.” I suppose that if Kristi Noem heard us singing, she would say we had become radicalized. But it's an old song, recorded by Woody Guthrie in 1944, while the U.S. was fighting against Hitler and the fascists of that era. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwcKwGS7OSQ Today we were singing about our own fascists.