“Dissidence is not revolution; it is not even political opposition. It’s something much more elemental. It emerges in environments where power—usually government power—tramples on the basic conditions of life as people know and value them. We know what this means in Minneapolis: People do not like to see their neighbors terrified and rounded up. They do not like to see masked men with guns acting with impunity. They do not like their children being too afraid to go to school. ”
This is not difficult to understand. We’re seeing the reaction of regular people in freezing Minneapolis winter defending what any reasonable American would call “normal”—the expectation of a life without the threat of violence from our government.
The current assault by federal agents is an attack on givens that people, in normal times, take for granted.
You should be able to assume that parents, immigrant or not, won’t be ripped away from children.
You should assume that people don’t have to hide in their house because their skin is brown or black.
You should assume that filming an interaction with the police won’t end in your death.
These are all assumptions that we hold not as Democrats or Republicans, but as individuals who just want to live freely. As we were raised to as Americans.
That is why there is dissent in the streets of Minneapolis and across the nation. It is not a politically-driven resistance. It is a plea for return to normalcy.
The Trump administration is hell-bent on tearing down all our norms. One by one. They are ignoring we the people in the quest for what exactly? Total power over everyone and everything? What does that vision ultimately consist of?
So far it consists of most anything they want. With the not-so-secret goal of taking away our vote. It’s becoming more obvious every day the trajectory they are working on.
Civil distress from draconian assaults against our daily lives. Assaults that lead to escalating violence. Escalating violence used to federalize an even more extreme effort to quell dissent. And using this ruse of trying to calm the waters by force as an excuse to fiddle around with either cancelling elections, or impeding them so effectively by corrupting voter rolls or seizing voting machine under false pretenses, that our whole democratic system of choosing leadership is fatally tainted.
We’ve gone far past the point of believing that, just because we’re America, such a thing can’t happen here. That has always been a hopeful but deluded fallacy.
It can happen anywhere. All it takes are enough people with power to be complicit in the effort.
That is all it takes. And that is what has happened. Here. In America.
Do you still believe in the normal assumptions of life in America?
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