organizing against a Blackhawk helicopter

 From Friday's Chicago Sun-Times: 

Amid the smoke bombs and screams that ricocheted throughout a South Shore building last month during a massive military-style immigration raid, one man heard a knock on his door.

On the other side was a mom and her 7-year-old daughter, pleading for his help.

“I wasn’t planning on letting her stay, but I didn’t know what the hell was going on,” the man said of his Venezuelan migrant neighbors. But he quickly relented. The little girl was inconsolable and hid under his bed.

“I didn’t want them to take her,” said the man, who didn’t want to be named because he fears he’ll be targeted by federal authorities for his actions.

“I gave her my bedroom, and I just told her, ‘Just stay there. Don’t open, don’t, shh, just stay quiet,’” he recalled telling the mom and daughter as he choked back tears.

From a report from CNN of the same October 2 raid: 

Adults and children alike were pulled from their Chicago apartments, crying and screaming, during a large overnight raid that has left tenants and neighbors shaken.

“I’ve been on military bases for a good portion of my life,” said Darrell Ballard, who lives in the building next door. “And the activity I saw – it was an invasion.”

Ballard recalled seeing residents detained outside the building for hours, after seeing a Black Hawk helicopter flying over the five-story building in the city’s South Shore neighborhood and military-sized vehicles and agents filling the parking lot early Tuesday morning.

 From a report from Leominster late last month: 

Leominster family says ICE agents held their daughter outside their home so they would turn themselves over

Agents ask the parents to come out of their house multiple times as their 5-year-old sits in the driveway surrounded by federal immigration officers, video shows

Posted just this afternoon by the Boston Globe: 

A 13-year-old boy was arrested by ICE in Everett after an interaction with members of the Everett Police Department and sent to a juvenile detention facility in Virginia, according to his mother and immigration lawyer Andrew Lattarulo.

The boy’s mother, Josiele Berto, was called to pick her son up from the Everett Police Department on Thursday, the day he was arrested. After waiting for about an hour and a half, she was told her son was taken by ICE, Berto told the Globe in a phone interview.

I could go on and on and on...the horror of what our federal government is continuing to do to families, to do to CHILDREN has no end of monstrousness. This is terror being done in our name as Americans.

The longer I have been a parent, the more I have come to realize that one of the starkest dividing lines among us is if we can see ourselves in another person's position. I shudder at the position we put parents in, at the horrific way we are treating families and children. 

We know that one of the ways that genocide are successfully (which is a terrible adverb to use) executed is through making it common not to see those against whom it is being perpetrated as not human, as other, as less than. One recounting of the Chicago raid includes:

One of them literally laughed. He was standing right here. He said, ‘fuck them kids.’ 

The New York Times today covers the ways in which some New York schools are doing what they can; we have seen efforts in Chicago, LA, DC, and I'm sure there are others. 

I do not know of a metaphor that gets more stark than organizing against a Blackhawk helicopter. 

I appreciate the Bluesky Shakespeare poster who brought this speech on immigrants of Shakespeare's to my attention (delivered here by the great Ian McKellen):