Revenge

Minnesotans are an oddly quiet people in day to day life. They'll get rowdy for sports just like everyone else, but I can go days, living on a major bus line, without registering the sound of a car horn or people shouting. In the summer there's loud music, sure, but even that's oddly demure; I've heard people get shouted down for blasting whatever shit the kids love these days at 11PM. On a Friday! If you do a redneck WOOOO at a graduation or ward convention, you might get sidelong looks, which, all right, not everyone thinks whooping it up at a political event is appropriate, but I've also gotten looks doing a WOOOO at, literally, a concert. A concert where they want you to cheer. It's like they're conserving all their lung capacity for a shoveling emergency. Something about living in the dark for so much of the year makes you repressed, I guess.

This reticence of course extends to daily life. Emojis can't capture how a Minnesotan greets a person they're awkwardly dancing around on the sidewalk, only emoticons can do that. A Minnesotan passer-by, if they look at you at all, will hit you with a little " :] ". And yes, they do often look pretty mad about it. If you don't :] right on back, you might get :[ or even >:[ —but rarely will someone actually say something. The social contract, doncha know.

It's tempting to frame this in terms of before and after they killed Renee, but that would be dishonest. Before they killed Renee, they were already here, and even if you didn't see or hear them, if you were paying attention, you could tell. We came home from seeing my relatives over the holiday break to find our block silent and the street's parking full. No one was leaving for work at 6AM and the little kid who loved to scream his way on and off the school bus wasn't doing that either. Signs were up on light poles and in windows, a few of them, Defend 612 and Know Your Rights. It was like having a carpenter ant infestation: you won't see them unless and until you do, but if you know what to look for, you'll know they're there.

Silence. The kind that comes when you're really hoping it won't, because there's a guy following you and it's 3AM, or because the ice storm caught you unawares and all the gas stations are closed.

Did the people who filmed Renee's murder know they'd filled the city's lungs? I don't know. I know that when I walked to and from the site of her murder, when I walked to and from the protest, when I walked to and from the hardware store, everywhere I went those first few days—newly recovered from the flu, dealing with PTSD totally unrelated to ICE, going crazy, in other words—I told everyone who looked at me sideways what had happened and what I was doing. Sometimes they'd asked and seemed glad for the information, and sometimes they thought I was insane, and probably the people who'd asked walked away thinking I was insane. But I talked anyway, because all I could think in that first 72 or so hours that the people saying this might be another George Floyd had to be right. Had to be, because I hadn't seen some of my neighbors in the week since we'd returned, and I'd had the fucking flu, I'd been staring out the big picture window facing the apartments across the street all day, every day. Either we screamed together or I screamed alone, but there was going to be screaming.

Does Minneapolis contain the most successful propagandists per capita? Sometimes it feels like we might. Everyone I met who already knew what was happening seemed to have an instinctual understanding that we needed to capture the world's attention again. At the noise demonstration that Friday, I brought a big fuckoff flashlight, and mine was the biggest (I'm a lesbian, after all), but without consultation I joined in with other flashlight-bearers to light up Texas Nazi faces peering out at us from Hilton stairwells. We were loud as fuck that night. I only found out the next day that the guy who made a face at me when I wouldn't stop hollering Kristi Noem's a dog killer and Greg Bovino's 5'2" was from Fox News.

At first, media covered all of this as a curiosity. I remember coming home from that weekend's protest at Powderhorn to see people marveling at how cold it had been, and yet, wow! So many people. True, it was cold, but what I'd been paying attention to was who was actually at the protest. The organizers pretty obviously hadn't planned for as many people as came, and that mix of people included a few obvious feds, old people with American flags, and college students who weren't wearing gloves. That was the first time I remember thinking that we'd turned must into might. It might be another George Floyd. We might be able to force the silence to break.

Of course, we did. That part's history and I don't need to go over it in greater detail.

The President never stopped threatening us, our neighbors, our duly elected Congressional representative. What happened after they raided Ilhan's house? The media, of course, covered it, in the sense that they published DHS's statements and noted the "unusual" timing. A few of her coworkers, of course, tepidly condemned it. But silence is its own ideology. The President is actively trying to denaturalize and deport my Congresswoman, an historically unprecedented abrogation of her rights, and the Fourth Estate shrugs and turns away.

What did you think when Chris van Hollen went to CECOT? What did you think when DHS kidnapped Rümeysa Öztürk and Mahmoud Khalil? Did you know that LA pioneered the tactics mobile observers used to track ICE? Did you know Chicago perfected the use of the whistles? Did you know Memphis has been perennially occupied for over a year? What about DC? What happened to Homan's cash in a Cava bag or Renee's Honda? When you listen to a White House press pool, what do you hear between the bloviating? Despite Trump's complaints, in my opinion, they're a well-behaved crowd.

We ended up watching Telemundo on election night because we just couldn't take it anymore, the bobbleheads with their rictus grins pretending Texas was flipping entirely because of gas prices. Cable news is loud as hell but all I could hear was the silence where acknowledgement of reality should be. Within 30 seconds of tuning in to Telemundo, of course, we heard it: en Tejas, la inmigración. What a society we've built for ourselves, where information is available only to those who already know where to find it. The censorship of violent authoritarianism really can't compete with the quiescent silence of corporate capture.

Peggy Flanagan ran on a platform that included avenging Minnesota and ripping ICE apart. This sits uneasily with some journalists, apparently, even indie ones.

Many people were very worried that the President would try to steal the midterms—and he did, of course. This sits uneasily with some publications, apparently, even legacy ones.

What do you do when you stub your toe? I'm told it helps with pain management to cuss but I'm a "hop around silently longing for death" type, myself. I don't extend this stoicism to other areas of my life, so please excuse me while I break the thoughtful bloggy register to say: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME WITH THIS SHIT.

If we scream loud enough, will you hear us? There are neighbors who are gone from us now because DHS murdered them, and there are neighbors who are gone from us now because they fled and we helped them do it, and there are neighbors gone from us now because they were stolen from us, abused, tortured, and then sent to random countries all over the world to be abused and tortured there, too. That's called a "third country removal", by the way, and we've done it to 25,000 people. Twenty-five thousand human fucking beings who came to the United States of America for the better life we claim to promise everyone have instead had their lives destroyed and in some cases ended by our cowardice and perfidy. I had to leap out of the way of ICE going 60mph down residential roads in January. I watched them smirk at children while they lurked outside an elementary school hoping to take someone's parents away. The President of the United States, that bloviating bag of shit, may be soon die humiliatingly, in pain, and on live TV, told us "FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!", and then posted pictures of stores a 10 minute walk from my fucking house. He repeatedly threatened genocide against Iran, including on Easter Sunday. He is a civilly liable and criminally accused rapist of women and young girls. This country is run by fascists, inhuman monsters for whom a properly adjudicated trial and death sentence is kinder than they deserve, and yet almost everyone who gets within sniffing distance of a newsroom looks away from the depth of depravity they're supposedly there to cover. They're terrified the fascists might be mean to them or, worse, impact their careers, and they're begging the rest of us to help put up another layer of baffling in the nice, quiet room where they make their fucking podcasts.

I have only one answer: no. We're not going to live like this anymore. If you want me not to seek revenge, you're going to have to start being honest about what I want revenge for.

A noise demonstration outside a hotel is an incredibly obnoxious activity to be part of. It's also confusing: you'll be wearing ear plugs, so you aren't ever sure how loud you're yelling, whistling, pot-banging, or cussing, until your throat starts to hurt or your wrists get tired. In some ways it's fun, but I also found it frustrating, since of course your targets are staying locked up in their little rooms, and realistically most of them probably have ear plugs of their own. It's the sort of protest you put on when you need to do whatever direct action you can to fuck up the adversary's plans, but you also know you need the other people you're inconveniencing to at least wonder why you're down there. It's an exercise not in futility, but in the refusal of futility. We come together to say: fuck you, you don't get to sleep comfortably tonight.

Can the media, decentralized and cowardly entity that it is, be subjected to a noise demonstration? I'm not sure. But in the wake of this year's great, big, historic blue wave, when so much has changed and so many quislings are lining up to beg us not to get too rowdy about it, I think we might need to figure something out.

When I went to Nicollet Hardware that first day after they killed Renee, it was because I needed tape. When I brought my tape the kid at the register asked me if I was moving, and I said no, I need to hang some flyers this weekend. He said, oh, and I said, yeah, you heard ICE killed a woman? He shook his head and said yep, it's awful isn't it, stay safe. I said thanks, you too, and we parted ways. Nicollet Hardware had sold out of whistles, masks, and goggles by the time I returned for YakTrax two days later, and I saw dozens of brand new ICE OUT signs on my way there and back.