Saturday, I went down to the emergency demonstration here in San Francisco called to respond to the murder in Minneapolis of Alex Pretti, a V.A. nurse, by Border Patrol agents who swarmed him, wrestled him to the ground, beat him and then shot him multiple times. Our rally began just as a right to life march ended, and there was some awkward commingling of the two groups, with little or no overlap, although if ever there was a true right to life issue, it would be the right to life of Alex Pretti, Renee Good, Keith Porter, Silverio Viego González, Marimar Martinez, Geraldo Campos, the others shot by ICE and Border Patrol, those whose names we don’t know, and the immigrants who have died in ice custody. It would be the right to a life free from the terror and fear that the government might suddenly come and take you away, or take your parents or your children or your neighbors, even if you and they had done everything legally. If ever there was an issue of protecting children, then who deserves protection more than Liam Ramos, the five-year-old used as bait by ICE, than Chloe Echeverria, the two-year-old detained, the other children taken into ICE custody, the six-month-old tear-gassed into unconsciousness, Renee Good’s children, all those who have lost their parents to detention or deportation, all those afraid to go to school for fear of being taken certainly deserve protection. Yet few, if any, of the earlier crowd stayed on.
As the rally ended, we marched down Market Street. A giant statue of a naked woman loomed up behind us—Burning Man art by Marco Cochrane. Her title is “Evolution”. To me, she represents the Goddess, and the strength and power of all the values traditionally assigned to women: caring, nurturing, compassion, but also the will to fight like a mother bear to protect the generations to come.
I do not believe those values are unique to those born in female bodies—I know many caring and nurturing men. Alex Pretti was one: a nurse who cared for veterans. But those are the values patriarchy allots to women and therefore disparages, while assigning force and aggression to men. So the insecure men of the MAGA movement and the unfeeling techno-billionaires mistake brute force for strength, despise empathy as weakness, and pursue power unfettered by any moral or compassionate constraints. And, if we needed proof that this is not a genital issue but a values one, we have Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi to remind us that there are always women who will perform the toxic masculine values to the extremes, in hopes of accruing some of that power for themselves.
So it seems fitting that the Goddess had our backs. Because this is, above all, a struggle of core values, one side proclaiming that might makes right, fighting for the entitlement of billionaires and racists and their enablers to hoard wealth and power for themselves, reducing all others to non-player characters, NPCs who have no agency and don’t count.
And the other side, our side, standing for connection, community, for mutual aid and basic human decency.
It is vital that we understand those qualities as forms of strength. Empathy is intelligence: the ability to see the world through another’s eyes, to shift perspectives, to imagine how our actions might impact others. Responsibility is the mark of maturity, to be accountable for our actions, to take up our obligations to provide for and care for others. A big gun does not confer strength—it’s a substitute for the inner strength to stand up and speak truth to power. Shooting an immobilized man, firing a bullet into the head of an unarmed woman, using a toddler as bait to abduct a parent, choking a prisoner to death: these are the acts of cowards, not of strong men, who can only defend them with lies.
And so the battle is joined—one side employing murder, torture, abductions, lies and the systematic violation of human rights, all in the service of a warped version of strength, and the other activating the inner strength of courage, caring, truth and love.
If I have faith in anything, it’s this—that She is with us when we choose caring over fear, that the more violent and cruel the enforcers become, the stronger our courage grows and the more firm grow the ties of community. The universe is infused with great forces of compassion and creativity, and they are with us, buoying us up like a great wind at our backs. If we choose courage, love will prevail.
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