The Cruelest Week

Care as an act of resistance

Language fails me. I wish I had more than these feathery words, wish I could instead compose a piece of music that conveys this moment in all its painful moods: chaos, dread, uncertainty, silence, confusion, betrayal, and above all, cruelty.

Department of Justice attorneys and FBI agents who investigated Trump’s crimes purged from office.

School funding to be withheld for supporting a child’s choice of they for gender pronoun.

A 25% tariff on imports from Canada and Mexico which will imperil millions of jobs.

Babies with AIDS in African countries dying because funding for medicine to keep them alive is cut off with no notice.

Executive orders to every local immigration office to arrest 75 people a day and prove those arrests were made.

Federally approved funding for housing and food for newly arrived immigrants cut off immediately.

Children told to get jobs at McDonalds to pay for their school lunches. Women, blacks,

LGBTQ people blamed for the collision of an American Airlines plane and a military helicopter in the skies over the capitol.

One million federal employees told “at this time, we cannot give you full assurance regarding the certainty of your position or agency.”

I imagine, reader, that you have your own mental list of wrongs which bring you, too, to this place of wordless horror, this place none of us imagined would happen here. After all we have the secret code to keep us safe! We have, we learned in high school, Checks and Balances! If the Executive Branch gets out of line, Congress or the Supreme Court will be ready to make things right.

That was before. Before billionaires bought off the politicians and the justices. Money and power have always been there to blind us to justice and fairness and our ideals of equality. This country was founded by two of the children of money and power: slavery and genocide, the evil siblings of our American family. In the last fifty years many of us have been examining that history and calling out the need to examine how our family history effects access to education, jobs, housing and to our bedrock values of equality, freedom and justice.

How dare we says the current Administration! We will shut down all federal funding until we purge the government of any attempt to threaten the status of white men! We dared, dared! And this is their response, a sword to the neck of equality and justice, of the truth of our history.

Resist, resist, resist.

But how?

How can I, an old white woman living in a state tucked as far North and East as you can go, in a warm and cozy house in the middle of a pine forest a mile from the ocean in a small town known both for its coastal beauty and its bouncy consumer enticements to “Be An Outsider”, resist?

There is one word that comes to mind in this moment.

Care.

In this moment so flooded with cruelty, any act of care which challenges the brutal zeitgeist pervading this political regime is an act of resistance.

Care is resistance. Care is restorative. Care is defiant. Care is the fire, in Thomas Hardy’s words, the instinctive and resistant act of man, the Promethean rebelliousness against the dark.

Sit for a moment, reader, and mentally scan the news of these two weeks and how it affects your own community. What images come to mind that stir your feelings of concern for those who are in danger? Can you feel your heart soften, your arms reaching out, your hand extending in a gesture of care?

That feeling of care is described in my profession as empathy, the capacity to feel what another person feels. There’s fascinating neuroimaging being done to explore the brain’s capacity for empathy. The research indicates empathy is the product of what’s called mirror neurons. When the person walking in front of you slips and falls and calls out in pain, your mirror neurons flash with recognition, as if that fall is yours, and you are instantly drawn to help that person up off the ground.

Narcissistic personality disorders, NPD, (here I will risk my professional license and eagerly slap that diagnose on that despot in the White House) have no capacity for empathy. Are they born that way or does their personality render their mirror neurons mute?

And what about the capacity for empathy and mirror neuron excitation exhibited by the followers of that man with the NPD? What about the Senators and the Department heads and the Representatives and the Justices who are aiding Trump’s cruel agenda? Are money and power such powerful stimulants that they override empathy, silence and quell the mirror neurons? Someone needs to do an experiment.

Or perhaps this is the experiment.

And as we can see, the results of that experiment are causing enormous suffering as the politicians and CEO’s strut piously by the people crying out, shoved to the ground by the force of the cruel orders issuing from the dark rooms of power.

Illustration by Colin Sullivan-Stevens

Like many of you, readers, I am fortunate. I am not on the ground. My hands are free to reach out. I was born a fighter, and this moment was made for me. When as a child my dear father put me across his lap and spanked me, I kicked him. He never spanked me again. I am still kicking. And I hope the ideas I have about what care looks like this week from this spot on the globe will be helpful to you and will inspire you too to fight back.

My actions this week rose from the kind of exercise I suggested above for you reader. I read my body and heart for what story ached the most. For me that ache was in the threats to our immigrant population, many of whom were sent here during the pandemic and were well received and cared for by our town and our schools.

Out of this ache, questions rose: What if ICE, whose regional office is a mere 20 miles away, shows up at our schools or our Community Center? What are the legal rights of immigrants? What is the town police and the school policy with regard to the knock on the door by an ICE officer? How is our local community services organization preparing for this possibility?

To find the answers to these questions, I asked my dear husband, an attorney with a big heart but no immigration expertise for help finding out what the laws are about ICE’s powers and what legal resources we have in town to help support the immigrant population.

The two most important takeaways: the police are not legally required to cooperate with ICE. They may not disrupt but they do not have to cooperate. And secondly, in order to enter a non-public space like a school or a church or a home, the warrant issued by the officer must be a warrant issued by a Federal District Judge or Magistrate Judge.

He also quickly located cards from the ACLU and sent the PDF to the printer who had 100 of them ready for us on Friday. We will distribute them to the local organizations and to friends and churches in town and hopefully the Town government will allow us to leave them out for anyone to pick up. You too can download these cards, reader, have some printed and distribute them in your community.

In a small town like mine, it is possible to walk into the Town Hall and find town officials and town councilors and have one-on-one conversations with them. Possible to tell them how worried you are about our immigrant neighbors and workers and ask them to review the laws on this and to do whatever is within the law to keep people safe. It is also possible to email the school superintendent and the school board and ask the same from them. Two days after I did just that, I was thrilled to learn that the superintendent issued a statement to parents explaining in detail the ways in which the administration is prepared to protect the children.

We are fortunate to have in town an amazing community organization that is both a center for community meetings of all kinds and a place where our neighbors in need of food or fuel assistance or rides to the doctor can get help. Perhaps you have an organization like this in your town, reader. Show up, make an appointment to see the director or a staff member, tell them you are concerned. Ask them what you can do.

Talk talk talk talk to your neighbors. Have them over for tea and scones, make plans for how you might care for people in your neighborhood who are in some way affected by the cruel knife of this dictator.

I fear things are going to get much worse. We must be prepared with bonds of care and connection. Ask questions. Be curious. Where are the fallen? Who has the skills to help them up?

Light that fire.

Moreover to light a fire is the instinctive and resistant act of man….It indicates a Promethean rebelliousness against the fiat that this recurrent season shall bring foul times, cold darkness, misery and death. Black chaos comes, and the fettered gods of the earth say, Let there be Light.

Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native

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