I really need you guys to understand something.
On my Facebook feed right now, there are multiple posts and notifications that my home town in Florida has been getting raided by ICE over the last few days. Multiple people I grew up with are making posts wishing that everyone comes out safe.
My hometown has a very large migrant farm worker population, almost 70% of my high school was Hispanic. The neighboring town was widely known as "Little Mexico", and was pretty much entirely populated by Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. I am 33 years old. This town has been this way since before my mother was born. It is nothing new.
I am, however, white as the driven snow. According to 23&Me, I am purer than Walter White's methamphetamine. That does not change the fact that basically all of my neighbors, every kid on my school bus, half of my teachers, most of the people I worked with over the years, people I considered mentors, and one or two of my past boyfriends were Hispanic.
Half of the people on my Facebook page right now are scared fucking shitless. A few have even deleted their Facebook accounts. I can't say for certain the number, but a significant portion of the kids I grew up with were brought over here as babies. Many are likely undocumented. They've been here for 30 years, for as long as they can remember. But that likely won't make a difference for them. It hasn't seemed to make a difference anywhere else.
And what is the other half of my Facebook up to?
Sharing memes about them getting eaten by alligators. They're reposting the images of Trump and Desantis in that fucking concentration camp. Some, I assume, are even buying the merchandise. These are the people in my fucking family. Aunts, uncles, cousins. Friends of the family. Commenting on public posts that "Trump needs to get them all", "those gators need to eat", "god bless the men and women of ICE for protecting us from invaders". The public posts celebrating the grand opening of Alligator Auschwitz have a comment section that reads like radio signals coming out of Rwanda. I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
Can you imagine freely expressing this type of abject hatred and disgust for your neighbors? The people you see and work alongside every single day? Can you imagine taking this much joy in the suffering of those who you've shared a community with for 50+ years?
The fucking insanity of people I grew up with joking about the other people I grew up with getting stuck in a dog kennel in the Everglades and eaten by alligators is going to give me a stroke. I'm sick to my goddamn stomach.
Over the years, my sister and I have tried to fight the good fight and make them see reason. I've tried to argue the merits of the individual issues. I've tried to add nuance. Since Trump 1, I've slowly been distancing myself. I want to say they've morphed into this, or they've been brainwashed, that my parents and all the adults who raised me as a child weren't always like this.
But I don't think that's true. That would be an easy way to absolve them of their responsibility. I think, deep down, they've always wanted this.
I am here today to tell you that I am officially giving up on reaching them. There might be a way to do it, but in my 33 years of trying I have never once succeeded. It took people about 10-15 years to try and erase their support for what we did to the people of Iraq and Afghanistan, so I suspect that in about 10 years these fascist fucks will try to erase the memory of their support for gulags and ethnic cleansing out of shame. I will not fucking let them. They will own this and carry it for the rest of their lives.
I hope my old friends are safe, wherever they are right now.
ellievsbear
amandla
gamechangershow
stormborns
theartofmadeline
titsay
