People will tell you that they always agreed with you hours after telling you that you were wrong. You can return to a conversation after taking a break to let the heat die out and find the person you were arguing with suddenly agreeing with you. It requires that they believe (or at least pretend to believe) that you two were just arguing about two nuanced positions that are ultimately aligned, but if the opposition that caused the arguement is suddenly gone, it is pretty clear that someone’s thinking or position changed. Which is what it feels like so many of us are experiencing now that the winds have shifted, the tide has changed, and suddenly it seems like everyone agrees that the various parts of the Department of Homeland Security, a troublesome organization from the first, have gone too far. There’s this phrase that I see get repeated a lot lately: “one day, everyone will have always been against this.” This is the title of a book by Omar El Akkad, itself a paraphrasing of a tweet by the author in October of 2023, and is directly about the genoicide in Gaza, but the idea is such a powerful one, and so reflective of so much of Western culture and politics (which is part of what El Akkad discusses in his book), that it’s easy to apply it widely (ow things played out with the invasion of Iraq is the one I see most often used as evidence that this statement is true). After all, as we are seeing today following the execution of a white man–a veritable angel by all accounts–by DHS agents, suddenly everyone is pushing in more or less the same direction, from those with their boots firmly planted in the ice and snow of Minnesota to those with their heads so far up their own asses that there was a popping noise as they suddenly changed realigned themselves.

This is not to say that we are all in agreement, of course. There’s still a lot of soft pedaling and attempts to draw pointless lines between “bad apples” and “the rest of the barrel” by those with the power to make budgetary or legal changes (which, in the twelve hours between writing this and it getting posted, has turned into actual bullshit legislative proposals that will do nothing but possibly undercut the momentum the public is building), but more and more of the general populace is getting onboard with the idea of abolishing ICE. There’s a lot more that should be done than merely abolishing ICE (all of DHS should go and everyone involved should be tried and held accountable for their participation in this flagrantly evil administration, including every single other administration that helped lay the groundwork for this moment in time, all the way back to the establishment of DHS and the introduction of the ability to violate someone’s human rights once they’re designated a “terrorist”), but that’s the catchy phrase, so I’m not going to push back on it too much. What matters the most is that, collectively, the people on the frontlines have their shit together and are pushing back in one city more than the entire collective Democratic Apparatus has since Trump took power. I wish more elected officials had been doing literally anything prior to this point, but them getting on board late is better than nothing (so far–they still have the opportunity to ruin things by doing effectively nothing well enough that a lot of people fall for it). It is telling, though, that Republican politicians have been only a day behind all but the most active and progressive Democrats–in a way that doesn’t reflect well on most of these Democrats given how close behind them all the cop-murder-apologist Republicans and conservative talking heads were. I’m writing this on the evening of Monday, the 26th of January, and we’re seeing the entire political system of the US react suddenly, as the wind has clearly changed in ways that can no longer be ignored.

It is infuriating that it took the execution of a white man to get to this point. It’s not like there was any ambiguity in the murder of Rachel Good. It’s not like there was any question of what happened or why in the murder of Keith Porter, Silvero Villegas-Gonzalez, and so goddamn many others. I mean, I know that the extrajudicial killing of a white man breaks the social contract that so many people have expected, in that the police and federal agents are only supposed to kill minorities, queer people, and the mentally ill, but that just makes me even more angry because none of this should be a surprise! None of this is new! This has been going on for decades, growing more and more obvious as the ability to take pictures and video has proliferated, and suddenly all of those deaths in custody and violence against people who were “resisting arrest” sure seems like maybe the perpetrators of sanctioned state violence have been lying to us the whole time! Too bad it took an obvious execution followed by the most blatant cover-up we’ve seen yet for most people to realize this. Too bad more people didn’t care enough or were too busy keeping their head down to care about the people around them who were already being impacted. I know that we all have so much going on, that getting through life in this day and age is a chore at the best of times, and that so many of us live so precariously that we can’t spare the energy to get invested in people who don’t know, but this was only ever going to lead to one thing and I’m so mad that it took us getting there for most of the country to realize that this was inevitable.

I don’t talk about this much, but one of the things that has probably echoed the most through my life was how many people in my life told me I was overreacting when I wanted to talk about the problem that was Trump running for president back in 2015. With exactly two exceptions, none of those people are in my life anymore and even those two people are barely a part of it these days. Sure, that wasn’t the reason I stopped talking to any of them, but I can’t help but note all the people I eventually distanced myself from includes all the people who refused to acknowledge the threat Trump posed back then. I watched all of them eventually come around to my way of thinking, to acknowledging the problems I’d seen and tried to raise, but only after it impacted them or people like them. It took the wind changing for them to come around and I don’t know if I’m ever going to entirely forget or forgive any of them, personal connections or social and political figures, when I’ve been quietly doing what I can to move toward what is right and good regardless of how windburned or worn out I got while doing it. Now, as I call my representatives, call other people’s representatives, tweak emails enough to get through spam filters, and more besides, I am glad to know that more and more people are pushing in the same direction I am but I can’t help but still feel mad that it took them this long. I am not joking when I say that I’ve seen this coming for over a decade at this point. I am not kidding when I say that I’ve been expecting this since September of 2015. I am so, so glad that people have begun to wake up and see the problems that so many people have been yelling about and trying to show to others, but I hate that it took this long.

I don’t have a really good place to land this blog post. I have no good wrap up from it. I’m mad and hurting and tired and apoplectic at the sheer injustice and wrongness of everything going on and I don’t have a good outlet for that anymore. I don’t have a healthy way to process that because still so many people in my life don’t have the energy to talk about this all as much as I want to–to process my emotions and try to come together in some kind of communal understanding. I probably need more friends, some that are more aligned with me politically and socially, that I can talk to about this stuff, that feel the same indignation I do and want to express it and figure out what to do with it rather than set it aside to focus on the incredibly important work of living one’s life. I mean, I can do both! I can go to work for my stupid ten-hour shifts, manage my anger so I am not taking it out on my coworkers, and still be fired up enough to talk it out with people. If I could actually turn my anger into energy, I bet I could boil a gallon of water with it and still have enough left to scorch the pot. But that’s not productive. Ranting and raving on my blog isn’t productive. Telling people off for being late to the party isn’t productive. So I’m going to spend my evening calling as many representatives and political figures as I can (whose literal job it was to stop this shit from happening and who absolutely deserve to be held accountable for their failings and attacks against the people who have been holding this position the entire time), sending out emails to more of them, and trying to figure out what I’m going to do if this becomes a local problem.

Abolish ICE. Defund the police. ACAB. Black Lives Matter. Trans rights are human rights. I am absolutely going to lose my shit (verbally) on anyone I meet who can’t get on board with all of the above. You (the people who aren’t on board yet) are out of excuses and I’m no longer going to extend you any grace.