Good Morning. Hello. How are you? #1622
When ICE comes to your town.
Good morning good morning. Just back from dropping Jane off. Eventful morning. Emma came with us. It’s science fair day. Parents were allowed to enter the school with their kids to help set up their science fair projects. Jane and Emma got to go into the school early, which of course thrilled Jane. Her first time getting in before 7:30.
Update from yesterday before I “Get into it.” Credit where credit is due, barely, but a) Jeff Bezos did not go to Trump and MBS’s murder feast the other day and b) the Washington Post put out a very forceful editorial condemning the whole affair. So I guess Jeff Bezos hasn’t completely lost his soul yet. Unlike Time Cook.
You know, rationally, ICE is out there doing its goon squad thing. But it really is a whole different ballgame when ICE comes to your town. It’s pervasive. Its absolutely crazy how this one thing can completely change the tenor of a community, assault the very fabric of it. The rumors are it’s over now, here in the Triangle. That they are going back to Charlotte. The rumors are that they have a quota from Herr Miller of 3,000 people. They don’t really care about legality or crime. They have to hit their quota, make the bald Reichsführer of the Schutzstaffel happy, check out of the Sheraton and move on to another city.
So maybe it will be better today.
But it is going to take a while for people to feel normal again.
You see it everywhere if you know where to look. Jane’s gymnastic class was half full. Our landscapers didn’t show up yesterday. Indeed there wasn’t a single landscaping truck on the road yesterday, Emma pointed out. Around here, that’s normally half the traffic in the middle of a weekday. Gone. Barely any contractor trucks at all. Restaurants closed everywhere. Places all over Chapel Hill, into Chatham County, closed closed closed. No one says why on the signs, but everyone knows. Our pizza place was open, but the staff was changed, some were missing, others working different roles for some reason. The first time in ten years certain people weren’t working.
Ten years. That woman’s never been sick. She’s known Jane since she was born.
Our friends here are Chinese, Mexican, all sorts of latino, Turkish, Greek, Dutch, English. It’s a cosmopolitain area there is a prestigious university, thriving construction industry. Everyone stayed home. No one knows if its safe.
Our neighborhood email list was ablaze. It was good to see so many neighbors chatting about this, offering support, many elderly people speaking out that I had no idea what they really thought about all this. That was heartening.
A neighbor saw ICE operating just a few miles from here, in a hispanic neighborhood near a bunch of farms. He took a photo. This is about a five minute drive from our house.
But I am burying the lede here a bit, as someone in our orbit was snatched. Well, the husband of someone. Here legally. From a European country. He was ordered to appear at an immigration appointment in Charlotte. Not a hearing. Just an appointment.
He was told he could not change the date, could not cancel. He has an immigration lawyer, but they were MIA — not sure what the fuck is up with that, great job, Immigration lawyer. He was assured explicitly that he would not be snatched during this interview. He didn’t know what to do, didn’t want to “become illegal” or something, so his brother took him to the appointment.
A few hours went by, eventually someone came out and told the brother that he had been detained, that he wasn’t coming out.
After a frantic search for a new lawyer, they found one, and were told that no judge would ever approve this detention, and they were confident they could free him (again, ICE doesn’t care about what happens, they are just hitting a quota). The problem is: no one knows where he is. He may be transferred to Tennessee. He may be transferred to Georgia. They don’t know. And until they can find him, get his representation to him, and get a hearing in front of a judge, they just have to endure this.
Emma spent the day doing it-takes-a-village family-and-friend support, bringing cookies, offering to run errands. I picked up the slack at home and picked up Jane from school, took her to Gymnastics. Emma is amazing, she feels this stuff passionately, but it also shakes her to her core.
While we were at Gymnastics a neighbor told us, then we saw the email ourselves, that the school had cancelled Jane’s field trip scheduled for tomorrow. All field trips cancelled. The kids don’t feel safe. I was fairly confident Jane could take this news in stride, and we wouldn’t necessarily have to delve too deep into the “why.”
But as Emma texted with the moms, one parent said her kid had already been told that “the Mexicans were scared.” You can just see how a kid would take that away from a well-intentioned parental talk. A Chinese parent friend of ours told us her kids asked if she could be snatched, if grandma and grandpa could be snatched and she couldn’t lie so all she could say was “probably not.” And the kids were scared they could lose their mommy.
But I don’t want her to be scared.
This is not to say I am the parent who doesn’t “do the work.” When I picked her up from school, she was, of course, surprised to see me: I am the drop-off parent mommy is the pick-up parent. I explained… some. I explained that X was having some family problems and needed mommy’s support and help so mommy was off helping her because there were some problems with the bad men. The pick-up line volunteer mom heard me. You could see the alarm in her eyes. Sorry mom.
I kept it vague, but as Emma pointed out, she’s gonna find out more from kids at school anyway. That “the Mexicans are scared” and “they might take my mommy away.”
Emma believed firmly that we should tell her more than just “bad men. Emma said “this is an important moment, I want her to know we were on the right side.” I told her I had zero doubt Jane will remember our politics — we take her to protests, she has chanted anti-Trump slogans, she painted Kamala signs, got talked to in school about chanting “Kamala Kamala.” We just talked to her about fascism and fascists two days ago.
But as much as I want to shield my kid, I knew she was right.
So Emma had a longer talk with her. She did it right before bed, said it went well.
Jane was crankier than usual this morning, first time in weeks she was not in a good mood.
But then again it might have just been the poop.
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We are listening to Mono this morning, I bought this record unthinkingly, thought it was a new release. It is called Rays of Darkness and the Last Dawn and I thought it was a new album but whoops, it is actually just the Rays of Darkness LP and the The Last Dawn LP in a single combined release. I already own Rays of Darkness and The Last Dawn on LP so this was an unneeded purchase. But it is a very pretty marbled vinyl and my copy is, get this, number 11 out of 1,000, so I guess I will keep it.
This is the Japanese Mono, by the way. The one styled as Mono(7) in Discogs. Not the English one, that I always think was produced by Peter Hook. Except it was not. Huh.
In, mmm, gonna say 1998 or so, I took a trip to Richmond, Virginia to meet a girl in real life with whom I had become very good friends on the internet. It was terrifying, I’d never done anything like this before. Was it gonna be platonic? Romantic? No idea.
But the trip turned out great, we became lifelong friends. We had a great hedonistic weekend, went to DC to see Plaid at Black Cat, drank at bars where her friends worked, I watched her make out with some hot girl. It was an awesome time. She rules. One of my best friends to this day.
Fast forward, mmm, gonna say five years. I am once again in Richmond, she no longer lives there. I am in town because I have joined the board of a college there, the VCU Brandcenter. One of the other board members takes me to this amazing whiskey bar he knows about.
I walk in and the bartender says “Hi Rick.”
And I’m like “Who are you?”
And he says “I’m Kellianne’s friend I met you five years ago. I am good at remembering people.”
And so it is, and so he is, and the bar is awesome and for the next, mm, gonna say eightish years I am on the board of this school before they unceremoniously decide I am too old to be fresh anymore and kick me off the board (still bitter), whenever I come down to Richmond, a couple times a year, I make a point to stop in at his bar. The years go by, he opens a bigger bar, keeps the old one, but opens a bigger one, with food. So good. We do our group dinners there. Love that place, love Mac. We’ve been Facebook friends ever since.
He has made some shirts. Boy, people are pissed about his shirts. People are saying they’ll never go to his bar again. People are threatening him. But he’s not backing down. Sticking to his principles.
And today I am wearing Mac’s shirt.
(You can buy the shirt here btw.)
Fuck ICE for scaring the kids, for scaring my wife, my neighbors, for people all over the country. We have stopped talking about LA. They’re still doing this in LA months later. The country moved on, LA is still in this hell. We’ll probably be done in a day or two. But LA is still in this hell. Other cities are in this hell. And it might come to your city soon.
ICE’s actions in North Carolina have told me that this will not just be confined to blue states. A Trumper in the orbit of the person who got abducted yesterday was stunned. She had no idea that any of this was going on. Couldn’t believe it. Our friend had to show her videos, news stories. Just completely in the dark. Fox News says nothing.
I want to say this will be the good that comes of this — that they are overplaying their hand, that they’re opening the eyes of people who are otherwise ignoring this, otherwise telling themselves it’s only criminals and “the bad ones.” I hope that’s true. I hope that this sways enough people that the Republican’s second gerrymander of NC backfires.
But that can only happen if people know what’s going on.
Goth playlist for you today. I am mostly out of my funk from the other day — thank you all for your kind words. I swear its just a coincidence this is the playlist that happens to be done. Mostly. But also. It fits.
Hopefully tomorrow brings better words.
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Thanks for reading.
And hey! Maybe buy one of my books!
Good Morning, Hello, How Are You vol 1.
Rick!! Keep us posted about your friend! Damn it.