No Heroes Here

12 Oct, 2025

I’ve tried and failed over the past week to put together anything remotely insightful, helpful, etc., etc., about living in a metropolitan area in which unmarked vans suddenly stop and emit men in combat gear, face masks, and nothing to identify them, men who at best demand to see (mostly) brown people’s own identification, but more usually, just grab said people, shove them in the vans, and take off. I have nothing new or useful to offer about the unnerving feeling of seeing two of these vehicles driving slowly through my own section of town, grown alarmingly silent over the past few weeks, much less one of said vehicles parking across from my house along a yellow no-parking section of the street. I’ve also not discovered a way to describe the acknowledged absurdity and rage involved in having my passport in my pocket now every time I go out for a goddamn walk around the neighborhood—knowing the inanity of said gesture is due only in part to the fact that the parking lot bullies who’ve been hired to live out the dominating desires they’d otherwise have to keep tamped down would just grab and/or destroy said document if they wanted to, and, as with everything else they’ve been doing, do it with total impunity. And I’ve been trying to keep my cool and not go into jeremiads about how the supporters of all this ugliness really need to pause and look at how such things have worked out in just the twentieth century alone—i.e.., not stopping with the group that’s purportedly the root of all the nation’s problems, but then moving on and on until a guy in a balaclava is knocking at their door, and brushing aside their protestations with a well-aimed fist or worse.

The maddening dismay includes, of course, a sense of total helplessness. My letters to representatives are letters to the ineffectual choir; the whole country could come out and protest and nothing would change; any demand all 125 pounds of me might make to these brown shirts about what they think they’re doing would result in my either being knocked to the curb or included in the round-up without their breaking a sweat, no change made and not even a sliver of uncertainty lodging itself in their unconscious as a result. And that helplessness then combines with something like guilt; what, for example, was I doing this week in a career panel in a private room at an upscale pub, munching hors d’oeuvres when people were being kidnapped, and right around the corner to boot? One of the speakers, after all, admitted to being frazzled, having, on her way in, happened to turn around to see a team of militarized thugs dragging a man at a bus stop into their vehicle. We all dutifully took down the number to call if we saw such things; I’m guessing I wasn’t the only one who wondered what good it would really do.

And then, of course, there’s the irony of my having studied for most of my life the doings and actions of various partisans and prisoners of World War II, Cold War dissidents, Argentine mothers and grandmothers patiently walking in circles, Arab Spring protesters. It’s all so obviously easy to cheer on, to lionize, from a safe distance. And then it’s at no distance at all, and you wish you could be thinking about anything else, and you realize you’re far less brave or noble than you’d always pictured yourself being had you found yourself in, say, Vichy France.¹ You wonder, too, whether in all those past situations, those not immediately affected yet not supportive of the goings-on were sitting around hoping it would end soon, feeling generally safe, and justifying keeping to their routines as best they could.

I’ll come to a screeching halt here, though, because that’s about all I’ve got to offer: no original thoughts or frustrations or fears, just a furious dejection that needs out, and a search for a way to do something that would actually help.

^{1. Nathan Englander’s “What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank” explored this “what would you have done?” speculating—but not having to hand the book in which it appeared, and my New Yorker subscription having lapsed, I can only offer you a link in hopes you’re able to get past the the magazine’s paywall: The New Yorker, December 4, 2011, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/12/12/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-anne-frank.↩}

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