The pictures showed a blue collar neighborhood of neat houses - triple deckers, modest one- and two-family homes. The plots are small, the houses close together. There are a couple of American flags and, although I don't see one, I'm pretty sure there's a frontyard bathtub madonna somewhere on that street.
Really, the pictures I saw could have been shot in any number of Worcester neighborhoods. But without directly recognizing anything I was looking at, my spidey sense told me Main South, more specifically Webster Square or Our Lady of the Angels. Even more specifically, I thought 'that looks like Grandview Ave.'
Well, close enough.
It was Eureka Street, one parallel block over.
I should have known. In one of the pictures, you can see a part of Clark Manor Nursing Home, which is on Main Street, directly across from the top of Eureka. (That's the light brick building shown in this picture.)
When I say this is my neighborhood, I'm not talking about the larger neighborhood, the parish.
This is exactly where I grew up.
Bernadette, my closest friend in grammar school, lived on the corner of Eureka and Main. I knew lots of kids who lived on Eureka.
I spent the first six-and-a-half years of my life in a flat in my grandmother's triple decker on Winchester Avenue, just off Main. Clark Manor Nursing Home is just next door to Nanny's house.
When we lived at Nanny's, there was no Clark Manor Nursing Home. Next to Nanny's was a large field where we played war games and everything else we could think of. And in front of Nanny's was a lot that, when we still lived there, was turned into a Sunoco gas station. I still remember how exciting it was when they put the gas tanks in. ("We" did not filler up there. For some reason, Sunoco was not considered as good a brand as Texaco, which is where my father bought his gas, at Walter Marchessault's station, just down the hill. Walter wore a snappy uniform that made him look like General Eisenhower, and at Christmas, there was always a Texaco related toy for boys to be had there.)
Across from the Sunoco, on the other corner of Main and Winchester, was Trimble Motors, a small used car lot - maybe 6 or 8 cars - that's been there since 1930.
Back to Clark Manor Nursing Home.
It went up when I was in high school.
By that point, the rest of the large field next to Nanny's had been developed into a neighborhood of modest one-families, and it's there we moved in 1956.
The bus stopped at Clark Manor, and throughout high school, I'd get off the bus, skirt the side of Clark Manor, past Nanny's, past the Ladners', through the Ciras' yard to get home from where the bus left me off. Then Clark Manor put up a fence - bastards! - that made scooting a bit more difficult. When I was in college, heading to my summer job as a Big Boy waitress down in Webster Square, I jumped the fence and ended up bruising a bone on the top of my foot, missing a few days of work. Bastards!
On the corner of Main and Eureka, opposite Bernadette's house, was - at first - Kaplan's Grocers. We didn't shop there. We shopped at Morris (Burack) Market, a block down from Kaplan's. I have no idea why. Maybe because the folks who owned and ran Burack's - Mr. and Mrs. Old School Litvak Jews - and their American daughter Sylvia and her husband Paul Bornstein (plus their sons, when they got old enough to put cans on shelves or man the cash register) were so pleasant and friendly. Whenever she visited Worcester, my German Chicago grandmother would make a beeline to Morris Market and chat up a storm with Mr. and Mrs. B in her German and the Buracks' Yiddish. I have no idea what they talked about, but my grandfather had been a butcher who owned a grocery store, so it may have been that.
Anyway, although it was about 90 seconds closer, we didn't shop at Kaplan's, which moved out before we left Nanny's decker for digs of our own. (The Kaplans had two daughters, roughly the ages of my sister Kath and me. They had long curly black hair and pierced ears. I thought they were Gypsies.)
Kaplan's was replaced by Pat's Laundromat. At one point, when the washing machine at Bernadette's house was on the fritz, she was sent over to Pat's to do the laundry. I went with. We screwed things up, forgetting to put detergent in the front loader, opening the door after the cycle had begun, and getting water all over the floor. I can't recall whether there was an attendant, or we went back to Bernadette's to get her much older brother to bail us out.
What else was in the neighborhood: Vic the barber, the Paree Beauty Salon, the Maincrest Pharmacy, and Empire Granite, which sold cemetery monuments from their front yard.
So, my neighborhood: CHECK! (Blue collar: CHECK!)
And what was going on in my little blue-collar neighborhood on a beautiful spring day last week?
An ICE raid in which all sorts of feds - ICE, ATF, Customs and Border Patrol, whoever/whatever (many, on a warm and sunny day, wearing black neck warmers pulled up to their noses to help disguise themselves) - converged on a home on Eureka Street to, warrantless, and explaining nothing to anyone, seized a woman and roughly hustled her into an unmarked van to be spirited away to wherever, for however long.
Activists had gotten a head's up on the raid and had gathered to try to protect the woman. The federales felt threatened, so they whistled in the Worcester police to protect them. (Lots of controversy about how enthusiastically WPD participated in this incident.)
Predictably, mayhem ensued, along with the predictable rough handling of the woman being arrested, and her sixteen year old daughter, who in trying to protect her mother, was thrown face down to the ground. She was arrested, as were a Worcester City Councillor and a woman running for School Committee.
Ain't nobody, including us bleeding hearts, who wants to keep hardened criminals, drug-dealers, "bad hombres," bad mujeres, and anyone else who's in the US illegally AND crime-spreeing to stay here.
But plenty of us are scared shitless of how common these unwarranted procedures are happening, often with an unwarranted degree of force and cruelty.
Whatever this woman on Eureka Street was up to - unless she was housing an arsenal, running a meth lab, or human trafficking - does the government really need such a thuggish show of force to take her in?
A few months ago, a Tufts grad student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was kidnapped off the streets and spirited away - without being told where she was going or why, without being able to contact a lawyer before she was shipped off - when it appears that her only offense was co-signing an editorial in the Tufts student newspaper, asking for better treatment of those in Gaza. (Late last week, a federal judge ordered her release, and the Trump forces of darkness surprisingly complied.)
And Goebbels think, look, and act alike Stephen Miller, is calling for suspension of the writ of habeas corpus. A writ allows people who are being detained to go before a judge to figure out whether their detention is lawful. The writ of habeas corpus doesn't just work for members of MS-13. It works for those who've been shipped off to a concentration camp in El Salvador who aren't gang members. And for the woman on Eureka Street. And, oh yes, for those of us who are US citizens. Or it should.
It's all so frightening.
There was an excellent (depressing but excellent) essay in The New York Times last week entitled "How Will We Know When We Have Lost Our Democracy?" In it, Steven LevitskyLucan Way and write:
Authoritarianism is harder to recognize than it used to be. Most 21st-century autocrats are elected. Rather than violently suppress opposition like Castro or Pinochet, today’s autocrats convert public institutions into political weapons, using law enforcement, tax and regulatory agencies to punish opponents and bully the media and civil society onto the sidelines. We call this competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but the systematic abuse of an incumbent’s power tilts the playing field against the opposition. It is how autocrats rule in contemporary Hungary, India, Serbia and Turkey and how Hugo Chávez ruled in Venezuela.
The descent into competitive authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarms. Because governments attack their rivals through nominally legal means like defamation suits, tax audits and politically targeted investigations, citizens are often slow to realize they are succumbing to authoritarian rule. More than a decade into Mr. Chávez’s rule, most Venezuelans still believed they lived in a democracy.
How, then, can we tell whether America has crossed the line into authoritarianism? We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government. In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power. They need not worry about publishing critical opinions, supporting opposition candidates or engaging in peaceful protest because they know they will not suffer retribution from the government. In fact, the idea of legitimate opposition — that all citizens have a right to criticize, organize opposition to and seek to remove the government through elections — is a foundational principle of democracy.
Under authoritarianism, by contrast, opposition comes with a price. Citizens and organizations that run afoul of the government become targets of a range of punitive measures: Politicians may be investigated and prosecuted on baseless or petty charges, media outlets may be hit with frivolous defamation suits or adverse regulatory rulings, businesses may face tax audits or be denied critical contracts or licenses, universities and other civic institutions may lose essential funding or tax-exempt status, and journalists, activists and other critics may be harassed, threatened or physically attacked by government supporters.
When citizens must think twice about criticizing or opposing the government because they could credibly face government retribution, they no longer live in a full democracy.
By that measure, America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism. The Trump administration’s weaponization of government agencies and flurry of punitive actions against critics has raised the cost of opposition for a wide range of Americans.
A few weeks ago, I went to make a donation to the legal fund for pro-Palestinian activist, and Columbia grad student, Mahmoud Khalil. As I was about to press the button, I thought, hey, this could get me on an enemy of the state list. The donation was fifty bucks. I'm a nobody. But it's not unimaginable to think that the government could start hassling people they decide are a bit too mouthy when it comes to their feelings about the current regime. They'll start with the big guys, of course: cancel their Global Entry card; hassle them at the border to see if they have a meme on their phone that depicts Trump as the rotter that he is; set up specious investigations that go nowhere but cost the victim a ton of time and money. But eventually they'll run out of the big guys and start coming after the little folks, too.
I'm a nobody.
And I honestly don't know what I'll do if and when the stakes get higher. If and when they start hassling, arresting, brutalizing the nobodies.
For now, I'm shooting my mouth off, sending small donations where needed, supporting democracy, and heading out with my 12" x 16" whiteboard to the demonstrations that are occurring with not enough frequency to my liking. (I got a whiteboard so I could keep up with the outrages in real time.)
Democracy is under attack! What do we do? Stand up, fight back!
They say that if you wonder what you would have been doing in the early stages of Hitler's regime, it's what you're doing now.
I'm not going to flatter myself for being some big, brave super hero. I have a lot more time on my hands than others to do a little standing up, a little fighting back. And I actually don't believe that we're going to get to Hitlerian Holocaust levels here. But Argentina in the 1970's? Orban's Hungary? Yeah, I can see it.
And if it actually came to putting my life on the line, I'd probably sit down, shut up.
Hopefully it never comes to that...
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Image Source: This week in Worcester.
1 comment:
Terrifying and heartbreaking
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