✢ k i x

You don’t blink when you hear a slur, whether directed to a black or queer person, is spoken. You don’t blink when your neighbor is shot on the street by a federal agent. You don’t blink when you realize the terrible tone leaking from your friend’s voice is merely misogyny in disguise. You don’t blink when the remarks and violence is pointed to anyone but you.

But the issue is, where do we draw the line? Is it to be drawn with a pencil so that it can be easily erased and moved, or is it to be drawn with a sharpie? Will we highlight the line or will we smudge it—blurring ourselves from the good and mixing ourselves with the evil. Do you really have morals if you’re willing to bend them?

But life is so intertwined with politics that you cannot have one without the other. To deny one, is to deny both. It is an intricate dance that no one seems to know the dance moves to and are making up their own moves. A wrong twist there—and now you have another person killed for merely existing in the same space as an agent.

Trailing on top of the thin line is to choose the side of which is spewing their hateful rhetoric—“well they both have issues—” but which one is actively working against us? Which one is currently in my state and murdering my fellow Minnesotans?

People do not understand the emotional connection I have to this mixture of politics and life. I live in Minnesota. I live not even 3 hours from the cities, in which ICE has also begun to plague my town. I watch the ICEwatch page for any news, I witness my Guatemalan friend lose her family via deportation without anyway to go back with them—and her eventual wish to move with them. I read the news and I fear for the day in which they’ll come for more than just to take. I fear for the day I hear that shot and the silence that follows. I fear for the day I hear the echoing scream. I fear for the lives in my community and yet people believe politics and daily life do not play hand and hand together.