I don’t know how to cope with it other than to write it out. Feel free to skip if you need to for your own sake. It’s been so much.

I was not going to watch the video. Which quickly became videos, because so many Minnesotans have turned out in the bitterest cold to bear witness with their friends and their phones.

But my friends are there and they are experiencing this madness in person, and so in the end I did.

A woman found herself somehow a little too far away from others and the ICE predators went after her. They sprayed her in the face and as she bent over in agony, they pounced, pulling her downwards to beat her.

The white tall male ICU nurse from the VA had been recording but that quickly became not enough for him and he went to her aid, moving as if to first tend to her stricken face and then trying to pull them off her.

The last decision in his life was to defend the innocent from harm no matter what they might do to him for it.

ICE pulled them apart and pushed him to his knees, they bashed his head with tear gas canisters, then spotted what he had a permit for. One reached down into the scrum and walked away with it–how ’bout them jack-booted government thugs some claim their 2A rights are all about–and then, with him disarmed and on the ground and never having threatened them in any way other than with the truth-telling of his phone, they shot him in the back. And again. And again. And again. And again.

All this started with electing a man who rapes children who resurrected the South’s pre-Civil War Slave Patrols against all non-whites.

Now the dementors he’s let loose are fighting anyone who won’t surrender their every right as an American, especially against anyone who by showing compassion shows them who *they* are so they respond with murderous fury.

The state sued to have the scene be preserved for investigation. ICE defied them.

First they came for… goes the poem.

Maybe, said my sweet husband a few days ago, trying hard to find any way to make any sense of the ongoing horror of all this, maybe all this will be what finally gets America to turn away from her racism for good.