Grumpy for good cause

So I’ve become that grumpy old man. Not funny like Walter Matthau. Just grumpy. Curmudgeonly, somebody said. Shrill. I wake up PO’d.

It’s hard to stay in good humor when dawn breaks to a police state.

The ICE man with the gun and the badge would just as soon shoot you as take any lip off you. Right in the head. Over a dozen shootings have gone involving the masked men.

Two thousand of them roam the Twin Cities. They are going door-to-door asking for your papers. Ultimate perversity: Immigration agents are arresting and detaining Native Americans. The Oglala Tribe reports at least four of its members have been detained, and they cannot be found.

This is it. We have arrived at full authoritarian. Don’t block traffic or they shoot you in the head.

Jesse The Body Ventura, former governor of Minnesota, said he had given up on the United States. He called President Trump a draft-dodging coward. And then of course he said he might run for governor again, reminding me why I didn’t like him in the days before Trump. Enough circus.

Trump pardons the disgraced former president of Honduras from drug convictions, and weeks later invades Venezuela and snatches its strongman, Nicolas Maduro, on charges of peddling cocaine to the US. We also snatched the country’s oil while leaving a bunch of banana republic criminals in charge.

It makes you owly.

Don’t be glum that the Epstein files remain veiled. Drink up, live your bliss. The lies are part of the white noise in the background that helps you to sleep. The vice president declaring the ICE gunman immune. Kristi Noem in her cowboy hat calling Renee Good a domestic terrorist. Trump wearing a peace medallion.

Fraud is the predicate. Ironic, comic were it not tragic, that a president convicted on 34 counts of fraud would send in the thugs because some Somalis defrauded government welfare programs. He called all Somalis garbage. He said they are not wanted here. Ninety-five percent are citizens. Trump wants to arrest them. His trigger-happy goons are itching to shoot them.

How can any Black person feel safe, much less free when the militia scopes your forehead on the off-chance you might be Somali? That’s a grumpy old White guy just beginning to appreciate what it has always been like for Black people, or Native people, or Japanese people in concentration camps. Now it’s coming around for White people, just four blocks from where the police suffocated George Floyd. We are not that racist. We shoot White people, too. She was 37 when ICE took her out for illegal parking. She was “hit,” Noem said, as if the mother of three were a target on the shooting range.

You better clock in on time and keep your head down or they could come gunning for you.

That’s the message for everybody.

We will take your oil. We will take your children away from you. We will deport you to Libya, even if you are in the United States legally. ICE is arresting citizens. They just shot one in the head.

In Iowa, we passed a law stating that trans people do not have civil rights protection. We banned curriculum that teaches about slavery and Native American genocide. Top state officials proclaim their hostility for Latinos. I repeat myself because I can still barely believe what we are becoming. Don’t mind me, I must just be locked in my woke echo chamber.

Just ignore it. Laugh it off. It’s not right, but what are you going to do about it? People agree with Trump that the ICE man had every right to shoot that woman in the head. He passed the marksman test. He had all the training he needed to take her out. The vice president said she was part of the left-wing conspiracy. Remember when Vance said that Haitians in Ohio were feeding on pet cats? He is not joking. She was an enemy of the state.

Cameras read your license plates. ICE feeds on it live from Storm Lake. They know where you are and what you are thinking, if they need to. Elon Musk can see you from StarLink up there high in the sky. He also can see your Social Security and medical data. No kidding, class clown! It is actually happening. They will find a reason if you become a bother. No hearings needed. No Constitution required. That seized oil tanker could carry a lot of people to Libya. It has happened in civilized society. Jesse Ventura said so. He learned about Hitler at Minneapolis Roosevelt High School where ICE terrorized students shortly after shooting that woman dead. Ventura said he wanted to stand with the students and remind them to read their history, because we are living it.

He looked old. He is a 1969 grad, with a bushy gray beard and a Navy Seal stocking cap. I feel old. Got a bit of a stubble going and don’t care. It’s the dark of winter. Serotonin deprivation, must be. Just have to make it to November. We must find our freedom before it is lost forever. No joke.

Art Cullen is the editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Northwest Iowa, where this column appeared. His latest book, Dear Marty, We Crapped In Our Nest: Notes from the Edge of the World, is available from Ice Cube Press. For more columns and editorials, please consider a subscription to the Times Pilot. Or, if you wish, you can make a tax-deductible gift to the Western Iowa Journalism Foundation to support independent community journalism in rural Iowa. Thanks.

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