Returning from vacation
I had a dream last night in which my daughter (I do not have a daughter) was in an apartment as ICE moved in. She escaped to the daycare across the street, where she was taking refuge in a piece of luggage, which is where, after a quick, panicked search, I found her. Then I had the privilege of waking up.
I suspect that the dream was a function of having seen the clip below, at some point after my family arrived home yesterday after spending a few days in Canada. It’s not entirely clear what happened in the recorded incident, but the description seems likely: a father bringing his daughter to school was stopped and detained by immigration officers. The girl was disconsolate; the community, furious — and there was nothing anyone can do about it.
I would never argue that people who aren’t parents cannot be sympathetic to pain felt by children or understand the drenching terror parents experience when thinking about being separated from their kids. But I can say that, until I had kids, I myself didn’t fully appreciate those things. Just as I can’t fully appreciate the panic felt by the father and daughter in that video, no matter how fast my heart might have been racing as my subconscious imagined a similar scenario. That particular terror is one from which my family and I are almost certainly exempt.
It was strange being in Canada this week, a week in which President Trump’s implementation of authoritarianism matured to the point that not one but two observers of history declared his efforts successful. While Trump’s Cabinet was competing to slather him with the most effusive praise, we were taking a cab to the Royal Ontario Museum and discussing with the driver his journey from India to Toronto. Vacations are meant to be escapes; this one offered a flavor of escape that would have seemed unlikely a year ago.
I was curious what would happen when we tried to reenter the country. I am not an important person, but I am someone who has been at odds with the administration and the Department of Homeland Security particularly. Depending on the extent of the government’s pettiness, some difficulty or delays didn’t seem impossible.
Here, too, I imagined a much worse scenario than would manifest. We pulled up to a checkpoint on a rural road south of Montreal and had a pleasant conversation with the agent in the booth. There was no hostility save for a comment about the Toronto Blue Jays cap on the dashboard. He gave my sons little sew-on patches identifying them as Customs and Border Protection officers. The agent welcomed us back to the U.S. and sent us on our way.
This is precisely the challenge during this phase of Trump’s revolution. Is normalcy the norm or the exception? Are exceptional events exceptions or the emerging norm? Are my dreams and fears a reflection of my own derangements or of rational consideration of what’s happening?
Or are they just a function of me? We can draw a clear line between what’s happening to me and people like me — primarily meaning White people — and what’s happening to others. I spent a full chapter of my book, an assessment of shifting power in the wake of the Baby Boom, considering the question of Hispanic identity in the U.S., recognizing that immigration and diversity are central elements of right-wing rhetoric but heavily depend on a simplistic understanding of race and ethnicity. My sons have a Mexican great-grandparent and a Native American great-grandparent; if they and I looked more like my wife’s grandmother would our return to the U.S. have been different? It seems clear that our day to day lives would be.
It seems almost certain that this era will substantially shift America’s measurement of its population. When the government that’s hyperactively rounding up Hispanic people in particular knocks on your door and asks someone their race, there will be a natural tendency for more people to self-identify as White. America had gotten better about recognizing the malleability of these designators. The second Trump era will probably reverse that trend dramatically.
For other Americans, normalcy will remain the norm, helping them maintain sense of distance from what’s happening everywhere else. Their kids will get toy CBP badges. Other people will be separated from their kids by people not wearing any badges at all. America is both of those things now, a place where the vacation is ongoing and a place where it has suddenly ended.
Photo: One of the patches given to my sons.