This past weekend, I attended the Minnebar conference. A recurring theme was Operation MetroSurge, the federal immigration enforcement campaign in the Twin Cities from December through February, and the ways local technologists, artists, organizers, and neighbors responded. I very much looked forward to this. I guess I expected it to be much more of a victory lap – like how it is portrayed by the media – a David and Goliath story. Something bad happened, the scrappy rebels banded together, and sent the empire packing.
This isn’t the truth, obviously. My conscious mind knows this isn’t the truth. ICE is still here. The wheels of techno-authoritarianism still roll. Even looking around an auditorium full of like-minded people offered little relief from what we know is still happening, albeit in greater secrecy, every day.
What I was not prepared for is how reliving the events of December through February made me feel. I felt a physical, visceral reaction to what was being described. The same knots in my shoulders, the pit in my stomach, the migraine between the eyes were all back. I was safe, sitting in a comfy auditorium seat, with the entire mobile internet of distraction at my fingertips and I was on the verge of tears several times.
Eryn O’Neil, in her talk The Parts You Didn’t See: A Collective Account of Operation Metro Surge, asserted that we, as a metro area, were collectively traumatized. Certainly, many people had to step outside their ordinary lives and do things they had previously assumed only happened elsewhere, to other people. I played a part, but a small one compared with the people who put their bodies, time, reputations, and safety on the line. I knew things had been bad, but I wasn’t on the front line. There were scary moments, but I did not endure what others did. So I should be OK, right?
Apparently not. I hate to even call my reaction trauma. Part of me still believes that admitting I was affected takes something away from people who suffered more directly. But that is not how pain works, and it is not how community works either.
The ‘T’ word feels too large, too easily stolen from people who endured worse. But maybe that hesitation is its own kind of evasion. Maybe collective trauma does not require everyone to have suffered equally. It only requires that a community learned, together, that it was not as safe as it thought.
Leah Meilander, the creative behind That’s Goodness Design, did the conference shirt design. She was the same artist that I bought several stickers from during a “Book Fair for Grown-Ups” a few weeks ago. One of those stickers has the words, “Don’t Should Yourself” written in stylized letters. I stuck it to the ‘Wunderkammer’ Sticker board that hangs above my desk.
It is probably a good reminder that any rationalization of what I “should” or “should not” feel is not the point. If we preach to our kids that “you feel what you feel”, then I need to allow myself the same grace.
O’Neil also said something I am still turning over: trauma does not leave the body until action is taken. It is action which communicates to the self that it is safe; that it doesn’t have to be on constant alert. I think I have some work to do figuring out what that action needs to be in my case.
As I pulled away from the conference, I merged onto the interstate. Over the first pedestrian overpass there was somebody standing. His homemade sign said, “Talk about Epstein”.
The body keeps the score. The internet keeps changing the subject.
