Meditations in an Emergency

05/20/2025

If you’re a writer and researcher, you can, to use Donna Haraway’s resonant phrase, stay with the trouble in many ways, and the power of your voice is not limited to your locale. From Eduardo Galeano to Edward Said, writers have done important work in exile. And we are already in a time when people are getting harassed coming back into the country, having their mobile phones and computers scrutinized upon their return, being challenged because they’ve lost the ability to travel freely because they’ve dissented from the Trump Administration or belong to one of the groups they’re targeting. Milwaukee County Circuit Judge Hannah Dugan has been arrested and charged on highly questionable grounds. Even US citizens have been seized and sent to ICE gulags, along with immigrant students who spoke up about Gaza, as ICE becomes a kind of Gestapo. Newsweek started a recent story this way: “House Republicans have voted down an effort to block immigration enforcers from using federal resources to detain or deport U.S. citizens.”

Some leave authoritarian regimes because of persecution. But some leave to fight from out of reach of the regime, and examples abound including from occupied France during the Second World War and Latin American countries ruled by dictators in the 1970s and 1980s. These days I’m hearing from lots of people who have obtained or are trying to obtain citizenship in other countries – usually someplace their parents, grandparents, or great-grandparents came from. Those ancestors were sometimes fleeing persecution or genocide, as did my paternal grandparents (the pogroms were already terrible when they left the Pale of Settlement in their teens, and all the relatives who stayed behind were murdered by the Nazis as far as I know). Most of them are not planning on leaving unless they think they must for their own or their children’s safety, though I do know people who have relocated within the US to protect their trans kids.

You can leave the country and stay with the struggle or stay in the country and not participate in the struggle, and to be blunt, the majority of people in the US are not participating. Turnout for the Hands Off protests on April 5th were the biggest since Trump came back to the White House, and though it might have been more than two million, that’s well below 1% of the population.