Normal Human Female

Have you ever had a moment of being knocked off balance? That affects you like throwing the windows open to a cold wintry blast of air in a cozy house? 

About this time last year I was planning out what to do with our backyard garden beds. The hydrangeas were out of control. Very woody after 5 years of no maintenance, having fallen to the bottom of an extensive to-do list. We were also planning out a new bathroom install in our downstairs spare room. I had started a new job at a startup with some great people and energizing work, Nils was kicking off his first DnD campaign as a DM, and our future was looking bright in our little corner.  

Of all that it could be, it took the circumstances of one innocent man to yank me out of this idyllic lull and capture my attention. Kilmar Abrego Garcia was that man. Sent to a 24 hour windowless dystopian prison (à la TV show Andor) in El Salvador by administrative mistake, rather than admitting to this mistake and follow a judge order to return him to the US, the correct and straightforward thing to do, the federal government appealed it to the Supreme Court, and then ignored the Supreme Court ruling for months. Meanwhile, someone in the President’s camp seemingly used Microsoft Paint (Photoshop is too strong of a word) to type “MS 13”, the gang he was accused of being in, on a photo of Garcia’s hand, and the President sat straight-faced in an interview insisting that this was real text tattooed on his knuckles, all while the DOJ leadership threatened its own lawyers to lie in order to frame Garcia, which has since been disclosed by a respected whistle-blower who was forced out. 

Okay, yeah, jesus, it sounds crazy to type out. It was crazy to read about too as it was happening. And not because I am so naïve that I am rattled about the government doing something bad. But there was something uniquely disquieting about the absolute pettiness and sociopathy to condemn someone to indefinite detention in a hellish prison rather than admit a simple mistake, rectify, and move on to more important things. In between the clean up of our wild hydrangeas, planning summer trips, and managing home life, I was reading trickles of news bits, ever more shocking. The cold wintry blast was the chill-in-my-bones seeping realization that there was no functional restoring force of justice remaining. There were scores of people – bureaucrats, politicians, the president himself – with too much power who would not answer to the law, to conscience, to their god, to the truth, or to a sense of common good and shared humanity. Only to power and what they could do to keep it. In a way, this one man was the harbinger of a deluge that has not stopped, and is nearly absent of justice or accountability.  

The hardest pill to swallow is that the shameless repetition of lies, about Garcia and all who have followed in his wake, is ultimately a devaluation in the currency of truth. It is the people who hold power declaring, “We are not accountable to reality.” When the photos of the My Lai massacre were released in late 1969, it presented a real problem to Kissinger and Nixon who had to deal with the truth and public perception. If a modern day My Lai occurred today, would the truth of it even be a problem to handle? If you want to know if your society is still based on law and justice, you need only ask one question: Is there accountability to the truth? Wording it differently, do lies have consequences? Does the truth feel heavy and immovable? Grounded to your senses, eyes and ears, and as real and certain as the beat of your heart? Or is it paper thin, flimsy, moldable and changeable based on the needs of those who wield it? When lies are accepted and integrity is lost, it is the decay of justice and the beginning of the end of democracy.  

The case of this one man was not the first bad thing, or even the 10th or the 100th. But it was maybe, for me, the final straw where I couldn’t delude myself. Worse things have happened since and it truly feels as though there is no bottom, no level too low or too sacred that can’t be trespassed. Once you’ve arrived at the bottom and built a home there, it’s a long way to climb out. One year later I’m reminded of all of this as we sort through our belongings and pack, nervous and excited about this bright new opportunity that awaits. At the time of reading about Garcia’s case, deep down I knew that eventually we would do exactly this. I thought it would have taken much longer to reach that point. I wish it had.