To What End?
Another day here in Chicago, another video of people who think they’re above the law and at war with the American people. Here they are, these proud, masked fascists, rushing into a daycare, to chase after a woman whose employers avow has legal status in the US and was awaiting asylum, which is a legal avenue toward immigration.
To be clear, I don’t care if someone has legal status or not. There are legal avenues with which to approach deportation (even if I am morally against it), and these people who are sucking up taxpaying dollars to play soldier on our peaceful streets are not following those legal avenues. They’ve had to be barred from courthouses in Illinois because they keep snatching people who are trying to attend their immigration hearings. They’ve detained citizens and people with legal status because they are out to cause fear, not corral criminals. 2.5% of those swept up in raids in Chicago had a criminal record.
They’ve made it clear they don’t care about the law at all, as they continuously break the law to snatch people who are at work, who are not criminals, who are US citizens. They lie when judges confront them, they lie to the media, continuously saying that they feel threatened. They shot at a woman claiming she rammed their car when video evidence proved they initiated the contact, and then further evidence showed the officer who shot bragged about it. Charges against the woman involved have been dropped.
Every video you see of these sadistic cosplayers on the streets shows them decked out in military gear while teachers in vests blow whistles and cars honk their horns. They respond by pointing weapons, breaking windows, dragging people out of cars, tear gassing children, and generally acting as if they’re badasses. As if tough guys need to lie about getting rocks thrown at them, or as if they need to repeatedly punch a 60 year old who’s on the ground, as if anyone decked out in military gear with legal impunity and the full force of a corrupt federal government is in any way tough.
They’re dressed like they’re going to war, they cover their faces to hide who they are, and I don’t for a second believe they care about their own safety. They do it because they want to get away with what they’re doing. Because, until something changes, until all of this is over, they will get away with whatever they want to do. Whatever laws they want to break. Whatever atrocities they want to commit. They do it not to make anyone safer but because they are bringing camera crews with them and will edit it all to look like badasses instead of the feckless cowards they are, hiding behind power and a centralized federal government that I imagine most of them have spent their lives ranting against.
They are breaking windows to haul people out of their cars without warrants, then sending them into a blackbox of a detention center where people who make it out testify about the inhumane conditions.
All of this…to what end? This phrase keeps bouncing around my skull, growing in volume and despair with every repetition. To what end? How has anyone at all been convinced that this is going to create a better country? Is that even a claim that people are making anymore?
Every time they comment on some travesty caught on camera, DHS asserts that they’re getting rid of dangerous criminals, but without a warrant, without due process of law, how are we supposed to believe them. How do they even know? They have already been caught lying, and every quote from them feels like another lie, of course using dehumanizing language referring to people as nothing other than “illegal aliens.”
The motivations for that choice are easy to suss out from anyone familiar with how fascism operates, or anyone who’s cracked open a history book (or at the very least read a book where the bad guys are modeled on real world dictators and autocrats): the more people see a perceived enemy as other or less than human, the easier it is to turn away when cruelties are unleashed on these people.
Tearing teachers away from kids in front of them, disappearing their parents, throwing them in cages meant for ten people but packed with eighty, not providing adequate food or water, keeping pregnant women locked up resulting in miscarriages…if your base sees the people these tragedies are happening to as, well, not quite people, then it’s so much easier to get away with doing it.
But again. To what end? Is it because they want to keep escalating the cruelty? Is it because Broadview and Alligator Alcatraz and whatever other “detention facilities” are going to be places where the atrocities are ratcheted up?
Is the goal to…what, deport every single undocumented immigrant? To pull taxpayer money from every other function of government in order to pretend every left-leaning American city is a warzone in need of saving? Is it to establish a militaristic presence ahead of elections in order to secure a continuing regime?
The detention facitlies already resemble concentration camps, though I guess they aren’t yet murdering detainees en masse. Is that the end goal? What problems, exactly, will this cruelty solve? The only argument that is often thrown out to justify this is that it’s ridding the country of violent criminals. Which is largely false, unless you’re the kind of sadist who is okay with catching a few criminals in a wide net that includes mostly innocent people. Likely because you don’t care about those innocent people in the first place, thanks to the aforementioned dehuminization, the severe lack of empathy for anyone that isn’t within arm’s length.
My hope is that most of these people are not smart enough to be that nefarious. They’re evil and shitty and if others don’t stand in their way, they might very well reach some of the worst case scenarios I’ve laid out above. I hope it’s just ranting though, and there are still some safeguards in the threadbare remains of American democracy and decency to keep us from reaching that point. All of these people though, the men in the masks and the fascists sending them out onto American streets, they suffer from the same impulse that I accused thirteen-year-olds who kicked my butt playing video games online and then hurled slurs at me. The only way they know how to make themselves feel big is to make others feel small.