The vigil at the New Mexico State Capitol went off extremely well last night, thanks to our own Felix O. Culpa.
Sorry for delay. For some reason, GMail decided, for the first time, to send all Balloon Juice mail to my spam folder. But commenter Noncarborundum asked where his email had gone this morning, encouraging me to check. After my checking a number of emails as not-spam, GMail seems to have gone back to sending B-J mail to my inbox. If you’ve got photos you want posted, send them to me via the “Contact Us” in the upper right-hand corner.
FelonyGovt was at the Manhattan Beach, California, vigil. They had about 200 people.
From Noncarborundum: Here are a few shots I took outside the Hancock Church in Lexington MA last night. There was a brief meeting inside the church with readings, songs and information about ways to help, then we all went outside for the candlelight vigil. Not everyone got a candle; they said they’d been expecting about 50 people, but by my estimate there were at least 150 there.
From Gus diZerega in Taos, New Mexico (Hi, neighbor!):
More to come. I am posting as I receive them.
Michael Bersin
In Kansas City at Washington Square Park, last night. Over 500 attended.
Lights for Liberty immigration rally – Washington Square Park, Kansas City, Missouri – July 12, 2019
noncarborundum
Did I really write “buy my estimate”? Shame on me.
Plato
Cheryl Rofer
@noncarborundum: Yes, I just cut and pasted. Lazy me! Now corrected.
Redshift
Light for Liberty, Alexandria, VA
About 60-70 attended, I suspect because anyone who could make a slightly longer trek was down at Lafayette Park across from the White House. Mayor Wilson spoke about how we have committed to protect our friends and neighbors since 2016, and several other local officials spoke as well.
germy
Redshift
Also, I didn’t see any way to attach photos in the “Contact a Front Pager” form. Am I missing something?
germy
Steve in the ATL
@noncarborundum:
I make you very good price!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@germy: that’s hilarious, I assume all good twitter elves are bringing that to her attention
Cheryl Rofer
@Redshift: Shoot me a note via the contact form and I’ll send you my email.
germy
germy
Gin & Tonic
@germy: You can’t fix stupid.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@germy: that’s a very weird op-ed, as in… what’s the point? why was it written, much less published? Who’s the audience?
for those of you who don’t want to click, it has a happy ending for the white lady, she got her passport, and…
Omnes Omnibus
Cheryl, I just tried sending photos. Let me know if I fucked it up. Thanks.
mrmoshpotato
@noncarborundum: How much do you estimate your estimate would go for?
Estimate.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Blame it on autocorrect. And the bossa nova.
mrmoshpotato
@germy: And she spends the entire movie yelling at confused people that she’s “John McCain’s daughter!”
“Who’s John McCain, dear?” asked the elderly woman with a walker who Meghan had spent the last fifteen minutes trying to convince with shouting.
Geoduck
I attended the vigil at the State Capitol in Olympia, WA. Maybe 500 people, some singing, talks from local activists. The governor and attorney general sent representatives to speak. An expert talked about the Japanese Internment Camps of WWII. No candles allowed on the Capitol grounds, so lots of LEDs and phone apps. One solitary Tangerine Shiatgibbon supporter drove his car around the traffic circle nearby with a sign saying all Mexicans are animals.
noncarborundum
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Actually I’m sure it’s entirely my fault. I find that as I get older I make more homophone errors during rapid typing than I used to. Usually I review what I’ve typed and find and fix the typos, but clearly not always.
FelonyGovt
@noncarborundum: I do too. Never used to have trouble with those before.
Ruckus
@noncarborundum:
Yep. I find that I mistype similar words, say than instead of that or an when I mean and. My fingers have no mind of their own, they’ve just flown the coup and decided what I want to type all on their own. If they had a life of their own, they would hopefully make better sense. That’s my excuse and I sticking to it. Older has nothing to do with it, disease has nothing to do with it, it’s just the fingers giving me the finger. So to speak.
JaySinWA
@noncarborundum: @noncarborundum:
She could have sic’d you.
James E Powell
@Cheryl Rofer:
I uploaded photos from San Ysidro to the “submit pictures for on the road” link.
Does that work?
Chip Daniels
I was at the Lights For Liberty event here in downtown Los Angeles, where there was about a thousand people.
The federal facility here is a massive edifice, some 10 stories tall, the facades entirely blank except for narrow slit windows, no more than a foot wide. The facility has the air of some medieval fortress designed by Terry Gilliam of the Pythons, with no obvious entry, just a hostile and indifferent series of vehicular entrances, and all ground level surfaces in impermeable stone, and the levels above topped by razor wire. The design of facilities like this is deliberately meant to thwart and frustrate any direct access or protest, and to be as opaque and camouflaged as possible.
As the leaders spoke, everyone shone flashlights and cell phone lights at the facility.
We saw the people inside silhouetted against the windows, some flashing the lights of their room on and off to signal they saw us, others had smaller lights they shone back. It was heartbreaking to know they could see us, but not hear since the windows were all fixed thick glass.
They knew people were there who cared about them, but are cut off from any other contact and they live in some Kafkaesque limbo, not knowing if or when they will ever be released, and held like dangerous prisoners for no other crime than fleeing desperate poverty to find a better life. And yet every day,, all the ordinary people whiz by on the streets and freeways going about our ordinary lives, the existence of these awful crimes deliberately concealed from our vision by a government that knows what it is doing is shameful.
Baud
@noncarborundum:
Me two!
James E Powell
@noncarborundum:
What I get from books on the neuroscience of reading is that language in our brains are all about the sounds. I have a thing with sounds & typing. I’m a touch typist, learned on manuals. I have to tell my students not to talk to me when I’m typing or I will type the first few words they say. It just happens.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@noncarborundum: their, there and they’re have become the Scylla and Charybdis and Some Third Thing of typing for me, and I’ve found my spelling has deteriorated in general since some point in my thirties.
germy
@Chip Daniels: That’s one thing about car-centric community design (and modern, brutalist buildings): they make street protest very inconvenient and sometimes impossible.
An old fashioned town square is perfect for a protest.
Michael Bersin
@germy:
I stopped reading and caring after I read the first sentence of the article.
Cheryl Rofer
@James E Powell: No. Shoot me an email via “Contact a Front-Pager”, and I’ll give you an email address.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I think I hear someone screaming
(and it’s still going on )
mrmoshpotato
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I’m sure @infinite_scream has it covered.
ruemara
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Which is why my first response was fuck her.
JaySinWA
@Michael Bersin: That is quoting the last sentence of the editorial and she is an idiot. But she is only one of many people referenced in the article. ICE mistakes are frequent and harrowing. It would be a small matter to “mistakenly” disappear some citizen who was seen as a problem. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/12/opinion/ice-raids.html
JaySinWA
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think the point of the op-ed is it can and has happened to anybody, even a Trumpster. Focusing on the one ironic idiot kind of misses the point.
ETA frankly I find it terrifying that this is happening, and you have very little recourse if it happens to you.
Redshift
@Cheryl Rofer: I went ahead and posted a link to the photos in this thread. (In retrospect I could have sent the same link via the form, too, but thanks for the info.)
Chip Daniels
@JaySinWA:
I’ve knew a guy who lived in Argentina in the 70s during the Dirty War, and when I asked him about it he shrugged and said he had no idea it was happening.
I’ve since discovered that in every awful dystopian tyranny, there is a large class of people who are like that, blissfully unaware of the atrocities and screams of the powerless who simply disappear, fall in between the cracks and are never heard from.
Like the people of Ferguson who suffered under predatory fines and fees, the prisoners who got taken for a “rough ride” by the Detroit police, to the countless others whose deaths are given cursory explanations of “resisting arrest” or “mentally ill”.
For the rest of us, how would we even know if we were living in a tyranny, if the boot never steps on our neck? If we go about our daily lives untroubled and unmolested, and the cops smile and nod politely as we pass?
Mnemosyne
I couldn’t go to our local vigil because I had to prep for my sleep study and CPAP titration, but I appreciate everyone who was able to go. ❤️
germy
@Chip Daniels: Many decades ago I dated a young lady from Alpine, NJ. We were so young, she lived with her parents there.
One thing I noticed was how POLITE the police were. I mean, really polite, like waiters. I’d never seen anything like it before.
Sister Golden Bear
@germy: You just can’t fix stupid…
JaySinWA
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: They buried the conclusion of the op-ed in the middle:
Elie
A poem read by a lovely young lady at our vigil in Ferndale, WA yesterday….
“Home” by Warsan Shire
No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark.
You only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well.
Your neighbors running faster than you, breath bloody in their throats.
The boy you went to school with who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body.
You only leave home when home won’t let you stay.
No one leaves home unless home chases you, fire under feet, hot blood in your belly.
It’s not something you ever thought of doing, until the blade burnt threats into your neck,
and even then you carried the anthem under your breath,
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilet,
sobbing as each mouthful of paper made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.
You have to understand, that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.
No one burns their palms under trains, beneath carriages.
No one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck, feeding on newspaper, unless the miles travelled means something more than journey.
No one crawls under fences, no one wants to be beaten, pitied.
No one chooses refugee camps or strip searches, where your body is left aching or prison, because prison is safer han a city of fire.
And one prison guard, in the night, is better than a truckload of men who look like your father.
No one could take it; no one could stomach it; no one skin would be tough enough.
The “Go home blacks, refugees, dirty immigrants, asylum seekers, sucking our country dry, niggers with their hands out, they smell strange,
savage, messed up their country, and now they want to mess ours up”.
How do the words, the dirty looks, roll off your backs?
Maybe because the blow is softer than a limb torn off.
Or the words are more tender than fourteen men between your legs.
Or the insults are easier to swallow than rubble, than bone, than your child body in pieces.
I want to go home, but home is the mouth of a shark; home is the barrel of the gun,
and no one would leave home, unless home chased you to the shore,
unless home told you to quicken your legs,
leave your clothes behind, crawl through the desert,
wade through the oceans, drown, save, be hunger, beg.
Forget pride, your survival is more important.
No one leaves home, until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying leave, run away from me now.
I don’t know what I’ve become, but I know that anywhere is safer than here.
Warsan Shire was born in Kenya to Somali parents and lives in London. She is a poet, writer, editor and teacher. In 2013-2014, she was the Young Poet Laureate for London. Shire wrote “Conversations about home (at a deportation centre)” in 2009, a piece inspired by a visit she made to the abandoned Somali Embassy in Rome which some young refugees had turned into their home. In an interview, she told the reporter that “The night before she visited, a young Somali had jumped to his death off the roof.” The encounter, she says, opened her eyes to the harsh reality of living as an undocumented refugee in Europe: “I wrote the poem for them, for my family and for anyone who has experienced or lived around grief and trauma in that way.”
germy
https://clarissasblog.com/2019/07/13/clueless-about-central-america/
This blogger always has a … contrarian? … view.
Steve in the ATL
@germy: is this real, or is she ripping off Cheech and Chong’s “Born in East L.A.”?
germy
@Steve in the ATL: True Love Will Never Die
prostratedragon
<Reveal reports on some insidiousness:
JoeyJoeJoe
@Redshift: I was there as well. I guess I might be revealing who I am, but I was #11 on the list of name callers. I took a couple of photos, and hopefully I can figure out how to send them to BJ. By the way, could anyone hear what that one heckler was saying?
Another Scott
@germy: Twitter is evil.
“This media may contain sensitive material” – for a cat face? Really?
Similarly, there’s a warning for Cole’s page.
They actually want to drive normal people away, don’t they?
I continue to be glad that I’ve never gotten an account there.
Cheers,
Scott.
Omnes Omnibus
@germy: Contrarians can be interesting, but this person is an asshole.
ETA: I really regret giving her the click.
SenyorDave
I went LFL in Columbia, MD. I’d say about 400 people, it was sponsored by a Catholic Church that has a significant Hispanic presence and held in a local interfaith center. Very moving, got my blood boiling all over again.
Columbia, MD is a planned suburban community, very liberal.
Redshift
@JoeyJoeJoe: When I heard him, he was just shouting “Trump 2020” and wandering off. I suppose we should be grateful he wasn’t more creative.
MoxieM
@noncarborundum: Hey–are you a Lexingtonian? I was LHS class of ’76 (yeah, Bicentennial. Bite me.) My kid was LHS class of 2010. I don’t live there anymore–too rich, too full of rich people… but hey! are you one of them? A hometown is a hometown. (I’m a 1st Parish/Follen product)
schrodingers_cat
@Mnemosyne: How have you been? Long time no see. I haven’t been on Balloon Juice much the past few weeks.