when war games are played on your streets
there is nothing make-believe about it. the leafy lanes and brick streets of the little village where i live have been invaded this week. not by distant armies, but by thugs of our country’s own making. men—yes, always men—dressed in combat suits, their faces covered in balaclavas, wearing boots made for stomping and crushing, roaming the streets in vans with darkened windows. traveling in patrols of two vans or three, they cruise slowly, surveilling, and when they come to a stop, when they burst out of the vans, i’m told you can smell the testosterone in the air. they are armed for conflict. they are on the hunt and ready to snatch.
they’ve cruised down our alleys, parked near our grade schools, stopped across from the library, and set chase across the manicured lawns where my mama and some 300 of her fellow nonagenarian, octogenarian, septuagenarian compatriots live out their days in what’s meant to be peaceful harmony. how many they’ve “caught” is unknown (these are not folk who disclose, whose m.o. is secrecy and surprise), but tallying anecdotal reports, the number is somewhere between five and seven, and, mind you, that’s merely the count from these quiet little streets where violent crime is nearly unheard of, and the only gangs you might see are the preteens and their too-many motorized scooters clogging the lanes.
whom might you ask is the target of all this slo-mo patrolling?
it’s the gentle brown-skinned folk who change our children’s diapers, who warm their lunches, and tuck them in for naps, who rock them in their arms, singing lullabies in spanish, and who rinse off the scrapes and the cuts on their knees, and smother them with kisses. or they’re the gentle-souled men who cut back our hydrangeas at the end of the summer, or trim our lawns to manicured perfection. or the ones tacking shingles to roofs, to keep the rains out. they might be the women who shlep into homes lugging vacuums and pails spilling with bottles of cleaning supplies. the women who scrub the toilets, and change the sheets, and fold the laundry in crisp four-corner stacks, so meticulously they rival the stacks in the boutiques at the mall.
thug is not a word i use loosely, and for a peace-making girl it hurts to write it. but i cannot think of another word to put to souls who sign up for a job of cops-and-robbers gone rogue. when i was little i watched my brothers move little green plastic soldiers around the basement floor. they made guttural sounds and knocked over the men with their green plastic rifles and hand grenades. i’d wander away with one of my dolls clutched under my arms. when it wasn’t “war” on the basement floor, they took to the yards and the street where we lived. they’d hide in bushes, leap out, and “capture.” the same guttural sounds, only this time with humans as soldiers. the boys on the stingray bicycles versus the boys on the run.
we are a nation obsessed with our war games. from what i read, basements and rec rooms these days are filled with big loud screens and folks with their headsets and clickers, controllers and keyboards, killing and maiming with automatic rat-a-tat-tats and bombs exploding in cauliflower clouds. i imagine the guttural sounds now come from the screens, in digitized amplitudes. obliteration, i’m told, is the aim.
and we are now a nation that’s bringing its war games to our own backyards. especially if you happen to live in a city deemed blue, with a president who’s never been keen on the city that didn’t embrace his big shiny skyscraper with his name in football-field-sized letters slapped on the side.
i know full well that this is albino-pale compared to gaza or kyiv, but a “federalized military presence” complete with long guns and tear gas is not why we pledge allegiance to the flag. it’s a war of terror. parents afraid to take children with fevers to the ER, children watching their parents handcuffed and hauled away at school drop-off or pick-up. taquerias that now lock their doors. street vendors who’ve locked up their pushcarts and turned off the lights in their kitchens. a people on lockdown is inhumane, unconscionable, and unsustainable.
all because their skin is brown? these are not the criminals, rapists, drug dealers, human traffickers once upon a time purported to be the sole target of this racist campaign. there’s no reading of rights, no miranda anywhere in the vicinity. if you’re brown, and you’re out on the streets, you’re a target. and being a target often means being thrown to the ground, hands tied behind your back. doesn’t matter if toddlers are watching in horror, screaming for their mama, or their nanny. doesn’t matter if you have a u.s. passport back home in the top drawer of your bureau.
but that’s not even the worst of it. the worst is that the folks they snatch are then “disappeared,” a word that means precisely what it says. where you land is a wild-eyed guess, and the people who love you will need to pony up cash to track where you are, and to get you the heck out of the hellscape of a jail, where toilets are few and lights buzz 24/7. too bad if you need pills for your heart, or inhalers so you can breathe.
but here’s a faint glimmer of light: the ones of us whose skin happens not to be brown, we are not having it. and we are leaping out of our complacencies, and in the company of others finding something akin to solidarity, to resilience, to compassion that compounds through the magnification of the many.
chicago, hog butcher to the world, is a fighting-back town. you don’t send your thugs to our streets and expect that we’re going to hide behind the couches. we are whistling our lungs out at the first sighting of a slow-rolling, dark-windowed van. towns that aren’t usually in the news pushing back against men in camo suits, towns with names like naperville, mt. prospect, wilmette, they’re in the resistance.
1939 berlin isn’t too distant for too many of us. i sat next to a woman at an organizing meeting the other day whose hands were quaking as she said she can’t stop thinking of her grandfather and wondering at what point he realized he needed to send his wife and children out of the country, to that faraway place named america, where the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free were welcomed, were harbored, were the name of the game.
where did that america go?
that question has been haunting me for months now. but what’s happening here on the streets of chicago is giving me hope. we are many, and we are not about to surrender to thugs. we are bursting out of our cloistered existences, and doing what we can to be our brothers’ keeper.
when crews are harbored in your garage for hours, hiding, awaiting the nightfall retreat of the thugs, when you are ferrying out water and oranges, when you’re dashing down the alley to tell the construction crew that ICE is nearby and you see the sheer paralyzing terror on the face of one of the workers, you do not forget. you see the humanity that is all of us. you feel the horror, sense the gentle kindness, get sick at the thought of these men who got out of bed expecting nothing but another day’s hard work now wondering if they’ll ever get home.
you cannot for the life of you figure out why no one in charge can stop this. but then you look over your shoulder and see that there are those around us who are not waiting for help from beyond. the people who live down your very own block, and just across the way, they are showing their muscle, their hearts, their humanity. and for the first time in a long time, you think maybe there’s hope. maybe, just maybe, the good guys can win.
and that’s a war game i’ll play. though i play by pacifist rules.
here, my beautiful friends, is something i truly hope you will read. it’s a little bit long, but i don’t think you will find it in your scrolling around the internet, and it is just what we need in this moment.
it’s a view from the front row of the horrors russia is visiting on ukraine, and the profile in courage that is ukrainians and their unwillingness to surrender to evil. this comes from the Peace Prize acceptance speech of german author Karl Schlögel, and is “a powerful summons to relinquish naivety and wishful thinking, to think hard and to act bravely.” the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade is a major literary award “for authors who have contributed to peace through their writing.” recent recipients include historian Anne Applebaum (2024) for her work on autocracy, author Salman Rushdie (2023) for his defense of free expression, and historian Karl Schlögel (2025) for his work on Eastern Europe and warnings about Russian expansionism. these are Schlögel’s words, and i found them soul-stirring to the highest order. if ukrainians can push back against evil, so too can those of us here on our leafy little streets, and our concrete corridors….
Learning from Ukraine. Lessons of Resistance.
No one is more interested in peace than the Ukrainians. They know that an aggressor with limitless determination cannot be stopped with words. They are realists who can afford no illusions. Their refusal to be victims drives them to fight back. They are prepared for anything. They fight for their children, for their families, for their state – they are prepared even to die for their country. What amounts to television footage for others is firsthand experience for them. Ukraine’s defence at the front would be nothing without the army of volunteers behind it. They have survived the winters and braved the nightly terror of drones and missiles for weeks, even months on end. The IT experts of yesterday are the drone pilots of today. The festive dress women don for the theatre or a concert betrays an attitude that holds firm even in a state of emergency – the club is where young people draw strength to continue the resistance. They are heroes in a post-heroic world, without making a fuss about it. They keep their transport system running, and with it their country remains whole. The howl of sirens is background noise for their everyday lives, not just a fire drill. They have learnt how drone strikes differ from ballistic missile attacks. They are helping us prepare for the time after this historical turning point. They are teaching us that national defence has nothing to do with militarism. Soldiers, and above all women soldiers, are respected because everyone knows that they are performing their duty and doing that for which they are prepared. The citizens of Ukraine are teaching us that what is happening is not the ›Ukraine conflict‹, but war. They are helping us understand whom we are dealing with: a regime that hates Europe and that seeks to destroy Ukraine as an independent state. They are showing us that accommodating the aggressor only increases its appetite for more, and that appeasement does not lead to peace – it paves the way to war. Because they are on the front line, they know more than we in our still-safe confines of the hinterland. Because they are at the mercy of a superior enemy, they must be faster and more intelligent than their foe. Ukrainians, who are generally suspected of nationalism, are showing us that patriotism has not become obsolete in the 21st century. They are ahead of us in terms of military technology, as they were forced to fight at a time when we could still allow ourselves to ponder questions of eternal peace. They took it on themselves to develop weapons that were withheld from them out of hesitation or fear. They are the mirror into which we peer, reminding us what Europe once stood for and why it is still worth defending. They are calling out to us: do not be afraid – not because they are not afraid, but because they have overcome their fear. Ukraine’s writers do their utmost to express what those farther away lack the words for. They have taken the Ukrainian language out into the world and performed a literary miracle. Their poets speak with deadly seriousness, while some have even paid for it with their lives. Their president is a man who expects the truth from his compatriots, no matter how bitter he knows it may be. They are well versed in the behavioural tenets of resistance and are teaching the Europeans what to expect if they continue to fail to prepare for the worst-case scenario. They have learnt from experience that when threat levels are high, decisions are made overnight, while in quieter times they are put off until the day after tomorrow, if even then. Stoic aplomb is a luxury they can only afford once the war is over. To endure, to persevere, despite unspeakable exhaustion – this is the revolution of dignity in permanence. They are the ones to whom we owe our peace, while they pay a price both incalculable and unfathomable.
—Karl Schlögel
how will you stand up for justice, give voice to the voiceless, be home to the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free?
*thank you to the dear friend who sent the photo above. best close-up i’ve seen.
pull up a chair 