Postcard from Chicago

It's a beautiful, sunny day in Wicker Park. Unseasonably warm, the day beckons and I look forward to strolling Division Street and Milwaukee Avenue, where cafes and shops line the street and residents and visitors smile and look around at the sweetness that defines this neighborhood of Chicago. 

Only a short way away, others are having a different experience as they put their lives and their homes back together after a late night raid by federal agents who rapelled from a Black Hawk helicopter as if they'd found themselves in a bad Hollywood action movie. 

I'm aware of the contrast of experience as I visit the city.

Most of us know the story. People dragged from their beds, some naked, harassed and terrorized by masked agents of the Trump administration. I'd normally use the language "masked agents of the state," but the truth is the state (of Illinois), and most of the nation, abhors an action that does not represent the state at all. Children were ziptied together after being awakened from sleep, separated from their parents and led outside into the night. To wait. A witness reports that she challenged one the agents, who replied, "Fuck them kids." 

I have a hard time imagining what it must feel like to have experienced this kind of violence from those sworn to serve and protect. Everyone now wonders if abusive power will escalate with a military invasion of the city. Simply because it can. 

In the absence of any legitimate reason for such action, illegal on its face, it becomes an absurd kind of theatre.

Not sure how I feel about things. There's the happiness my privilege allows me. There's the disruption that my awareness invites. I'm not one to move through life unconsciously and, while I don't think about the experience of others constantly, there are times when the evil perpetrated by the current administration violates what might otherwise be my own sense of peace, calm, and security. 

All of us are violated by these goings on, even if we don't experience the physical violence first hand. The spiritual violence slaps us all. Sometimes it even knocks us on our asses. We live with the contrast. It becomes normalized. And there's the danger.

Fall-ing in Love: 40 Days of Noticing is a daily writing practice that opens a landscape of discovery into my own human experience.

Katherine Cartwright has been blogging since 2012 and each year brings new wonders. She asks big questions of the small things in life. 

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