When you listen to the song you can hear below you might doubt me – but it is not a topical song written about recent events. It was written by Parlando alternative voice Dave Moore in 2014. Dave’s the keyboard player and the better singer in the LYL Band, and that same year I recorded us playing it with him singing and pounding the piano, and me squawking in with some backing vocals and skidding guitar. Dave tells me today he was writing the song while caring for his father in the times surrounding his dad’s final illness, and he was thinking of the work of someone that goes even farther back than 2014: the 19^th century American Abolitionist and speaker Wendell Phillips. Dave’s father was a preacher and a man of strong principles, but Phillips would take a backseat to no one on standing and speaking for his convictions.

As to Phillips’ convictions (as I’ll do once more before this post is done) I’ll try to be brief – but in considering the refrain in “I’m On Fire”  it’s important to note that people, even ones who somewhat agreed with Phillips, noted he was a little off the scale in his fervency whenever talking about injustice. And Phillips’ stand on slavery was not the popular, acceptable opinion when he began to express it. Phillips started his Abolitionist calling knowing full well that another prominent Abolitionist speaker had just escaped being lynched by a mob. Dave’s energy with the piano in today’s piece rightfully reflects how Phillips expressed himself.

The Boston Public Garden memorial to Wendell Phillips. Ice or ICE not visible in this picture.

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And so it was that Phillips was once asked, “Why are you so fiery all the time Wendell?” Phillips replied “Yes, I’m on fire – because I have mountains of ice before me to melt!” More than a hundred years later, a man who became a U S Senator from Minnesota, Paul Wellstone, liked to remember that Wendell Phillips quote. And Dave Moore, our singer and songwriter remembers Phillips too – he has a long-running cartoon in a neighborhood paper where he often brings out Wendell Phillips quotes to assay our analysis and actions regarding current injustice.

Phillips’ ice metaphor, that cry against intransigent injustice will make it seem like Dave was freshly writing about Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis today. Once more I’ll be brief, but I have foreign readers here, and they might not know what’s been keeping me from working on this Project much in this new year. The following section has been written and rewritten a half-a-dozen times in the past week, and I’m largely going to surrender to highlights, because those that know and see what I’ve seen this past week are already saturated with the things I might try to describe, and those that have certain other judgements that benefit, comfort, or blind them, likely require more vision correction than I can prescribe.

Our home state of Minnesota is currently suffering an intentionally vindictive armed incursion by secretive forces sent by our mad and ill-tempered ruler, who says, right out, this is his retribution. Yes, this is also ostensibly about immigration regulation enforcement, but this is largely a pretext, as the rules for immigrants are being changed week to week, and the enforcement seems capricious and sloppy. If this was some laudable reform targeting people they tag with rote-repeated epithets of being murders, rapists, and gangsters, you’d expect constant published detail of accomplishment, with hundreds of chapter and verse rap sheets to show their work – yet to a significant degree, no one knows completely who is being taken out of their homes, cars, schools, or workplaces. The point, or the result, is to make a great many feel they could be next, particularly if they object to this, since that’s being a “violent agitator.” These so-called agitators are often standing on sidewalks and street corners in their own neighborhoods, on their own blocks, even on their own doorsteps – or they are at their own shopping sites, schools, or workplaces, armed with but cell phone cameras and whistles to call others similarly “armed” to protect them (somewhat) from the masked squads. Some step forward to try to get the names of those who are being detained (since the secretive authorities do not reliably release those names) and getting near enough to hear that risks their own detention. Their cameras minimize, but do not eliminate the street beat-downs and such that would otherwise occur. “Less lethal” bullets, chemical sprays and grenades also get used. They call some of these actions “targeted,” but the targets seem out of focus. US citizens with accents or too much skin color get grabbed, and if you squint a First Nations citizen can look like one of those foreigners. Gotta be hard to deport a Lakota – where’s the plane to fly too? Maybe they put them on a plane, draw all the window shades, make zoom-zoom engine noises, and then let them off?

Given the poorly trained, ineptly led, error-prone outside troops, and all their quick with the ordinance reflexes, these encounters with cruelty-is-the-point apprehensions aren’t prayer circles. Many locals observing this in their neighborhoods are angry and disgusted and they are shouting out shames and curses.

If you’ve seen reports this past week you’re horribly aware that one of these neighborhood observers was shot at close range in the face and killed in front of their spouse, or you might have seen another raid during which a woman driving on one of the busiest avenues in Minneapolis comes upon a half dozen ICE vehicles blocking the street. Some of the agents wave her to turn off to a side street, then others decide she must be a protestor and break a couple of her car windows and drag her out the vehicle still caught in her seat belt as she wails “I was just trying to get to my doctor’s appointment.”

Well, I live between those two avenues. When urbanists talk of walkable neighborhoods they’re likely not thinking of walk-up atrocities, but this is where I, and my little family, live. I’ may have written too much or too little of these things, and just as with other attempts to write about this experience this week I’m not sure I did an adequate job of it – but no gentle poetry sung today though I have this old song that sounds right. Click the audio player below and let poet/cartoonist/pianist Dave sing his song. No player? It hasn’t been detained, it’s just that some ways of viewing this blog don’t show the player, and this highlighted link will open a new tab so you can hear it.

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