German marked my first foreign-language class in sixth grade, and perhaps my first experience with social pressure.
Frau Wied assigned us the task of choosing our German names. This would become the name she would call us throughout the year during class. And, as it turned out, in the halls.
She handed out a xeroxed list of names separated into “ein Junge” and “Mädchen”. I scanned the list of names like an expectant mother 4,400 miles away in Berlin. Though, as a sixth grader on the first day of middle school, it’s hard to say whose stakes felt higher.
Many of the other kids in my class had gone to the elementary school with the advanced learning program. To this day, I am unclear of how my classmates wound up in the advanced program so early, as I had made my way into the advanced classes in sixth grade under suspicious circumstances.
A broken right wrist prevented me from filling in the Scantron bubbles on the IOWA Basic test we were required to take to measure our skills against the rest of the nation. Because of my injury, a teaching assistant sat with me to fill in the bubbles of the answers I selected.
Was it pure intelligence that allowed me to score in the 98th percentile, or the teaching assistant’s terrible poker face when I attempted to pick the incorrect answer?
The world will never know.
Regardless, it landed me in a classroom, staring at a list of German names, trying to pick the “coolest” one because my friends already had their German names from their elementary school class.
Dieter, Günther, Helmut, Wolfgang, are you kidding me?! Stefan. Stefan! That’s my best friend’s name in New York. I looked at the chalkboard, and someone had taken the name.
I chose Felix because I used to watch Felix the Cat. How inspired.
Yet, it wasn’t as cool as the names my friends had.
Their names fit them like a tailored suit. Meanwhile, I sat at my desk, tugging at my waistband and shifting in my seat, all too aware that ‘Felix’ fit me as poorly as the Eddie Bauer khakis my mom bought me for the new school year.
It was in this class that I, Felix, first learned of the Holocaust and the atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War Two.
Adults forget what it was like to learn about these things. Remembering the facts is easier than remembering the emotion and confusion stirred inside as the details piled up in front of us like bodies in mass graves. Papers, stars, hiding, trains, abuse, starvation, and death. It’s so much to absorb, even as an adult.
We forget the bump of adrenaline when the emotion enters the room, when the teacher’s solemn mood hushes the class, and we understand that now is not the time for jackassery.
The lights go out, and the faces of twelve-year-olds glow in the black-and-white footage from five lifetimes ago playing on the oversized tube TV, rolled in on an old metal cart. Soldiers on a beach, a furious man with a mustache yelling at a podium, rubble, terrified faces, shaved heads, and so many dead bodies.
When the video ends and the lights turn back on, the teacher wipes a final tear from their cheek.
What made it challenging is we had no frame of reference. These stories played like pure fiction or something that happened a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. Which makes sense given we were also taught about the heroic American effort during World War Two. We learned how the bravest generation volunteered to cross the Atlantic to defeat those evil forces and hold them accountable for their actions.
And at the end of the day, when the bell rang, we went home and fell into a peaceful slumber because we live in America. The land of the free and home of the brave. Nothing like that will ever happen here.
Too bad the history curriculum didn’t focus more on the 1930s in Germany to find out how the fuck they ended up how they did. The beginning isn’t nearly as interesting as the end. The deliberate legal plotting of Gleichschaltung turned neighbors against each other through policy and social pressure. The average person didn’t realize they were a frog in a pot of water being slowly brought to a boil.
We are plagued by people who have given up their critical thinking skills.
We have become addicted to the confirmation bias found within our chosen echo chambers, unable to face the discomfort of breaking free for a moment because doing so would make falling asleep at night a little more challenging.
Thinking of neighbors being pulled from their homes in the freezing cold isn’t conducive to the peaceful slumbers we’re used to getting in the United States of America.
In my state of Minnesota, thirty minutes from my home, a masked federal agent shot Renee Good in the face three times, in broad daylight, in front of witnesses, and filmed from more vantage points than even Oliver Stone could have conceived of.
Yet, people refuse to watch it and instead regurgitate the opinions they see on TV. Somehow, ignoring the document they claim to hold above all, the Constitution.
On Friday, January 16th—my daughter’s birthday — we went out to dinner in Maple Grove, MN.
We looked out the glass doors of our restaurant to the street as we waited for our table. We could see a restaurant and a bank across the street, along with some retail shops. A fresh coating of light snow blanketed the sidewalk. An unmarked SUV with blue and red lights flashing in the rear window sat parked in the street, unattended. I exchanged a worried glance with my wife.
We both started from a rational place. Probably just an unmarked police car or security investigating an alarm. It was 6:30 in suburbia for Christ’s sake.
The faint sound of car horns out on the street, which has quickly become the signal of the government’s abuse of power in Minnesota, began. ICE was across the street, surrounding a restaurant to detain the “criminals” who were in the middle of their shift serving people like me. Families celebrating birthdays or anniversaries.
“Tim, your table is ready.”
I tried to focus on my family, on my daughter, and not on the possibility that the state was tearing someone away from their life and family, or masked men walking through her birthday dinner en route to the kitchen. Shame bubbled up inside me.
That’s the point, though, isn’t it? You don’t need to be terrified to be terrorized. It’s the chaos and uncertainty. They are counting on people to go along to get along.
I’ve had enough. This isn’t a difference of opinion on policy, Democrat versus Republican. This is right and wrong. How can people claim these ICE agents are “just doing their job” or “this would all be over if people would just comply”?
I can’t. As a son of a veteran of Vietnam and the grandson of a veteran and Purple Heart recipient in World War II, I learned this is the exact behavior they swore to protect the country from.
There are some who didn’t anticipate the call of tyranny and oppression coming from inside the house.
I wrote an open letter to my eight-month-old son when Donald Trump was elected to his first term. I remember being nervous to share it with the world, but more so with my friends and family. It was clear to me a decade ago who he is, but did I want to risk relationships in the name of politics?
This is how Gleichschaltung works. They don’t need me to be on board; they just need me to be quiet.
Maybe you voted for the people who are ignoring our Constitution, and that’s okay.
Now, however, we must all wake up and say, “No,” because if we accept this unconstitutional abuse of power, who will be targeted next?
We are seeing the good people of Minnesota on the streets of Minneapolis saying, “No.” We are seeing people who recognize the pot of water as the trap it is.
Wake up. Pay attention. Watch the videos and ask yourself: Do these people look like dangerous criminals?
As the country prepares for a historic cold front of ice and snow, it is the hand of tyranny grasping for control.
Dress appropriately, Minnesotans will.
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