Category: reflections

About ICE Raids

I have a little bit of breathing room today, after working non-stop and resolving different conference-related issues, and I want to go back to what happened a week ago.

To be honest, I am shocked by the lack of public attention to this incident. I wouldn’t expect a lot of international attention, but domestic silence alarms me. For those who haven’t heard what has happened: ICE officer stopped a car driven by a person they wanted to arrest. This person was in the US illegally (i.e., without a proper visa). He didn’t have any criminal charges on him, but he had several speeding tickets (as far as we can tell). When he was stopped and realized that he was going to be arrested, he tried to flee the scene. It’s hard to tell what exactly happened because the body cam recording was not released (and I am not sure whether it is available).

DHS claims that this person, Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, “dragged an officer a significant distance with his car.” There is no way to prove or object to this statement, but what we know for sure is that this ICE officer shot Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez dead. He shot an unarmed person with no criminal record.

If anybody wonders how the DHS reported on this incident, the link is here. I don’t know what else to add. I don’t know how we can have no respect for a person’s life. I don’t understand how anybody would dare to say “but he was here illegally…’

About Politics And Violence

I didn’t want to write anything about Charlie Kirk, but several people asked for my opinion, and I thought I should write a blog post.

On Friday morning, during my escorting shift, other escorts seemed to be overjoyed and almost celebrated the assassination. I would never do that. Yes, there is a cruel irony in the fact that Charlie Kirk mentioned at least in one of his speeches that the right to bear arms can’t be taken away from the American people, even if that means some lives will be lost. It happened to be his life, but honestly, I do not want to build anything on that.

I still maintain that nobody has a right to take other person’s life away. I was always against the death penalty, and I always will be (this does not include the time of war).

Another theme which was circulating during the first couple of days after the assassination was a conspiracy theory (like Trump had organized it all). I understand why people want to believe in this conspiracy, but I find no ground in it’s support. I do not think it’s right that the Minnesota political assassinations went pretty much unnoticed and uncommented by the White House, and at the same time, the flags ran half-staff for the Kirk’s assassination. I do not think it’s right that the killing of Villegas-Gonzalez didn’t make headlines except for the Chicago local news.

And I hope that these events won’t become an excuse for any political opression. We’ll keep watching.

Chicago Is Staying Strong!

It’s old news now, but I still want to celebrate Chicago’s victory last week. I know it sounds surreal that the city had to defend itself against the president, but that’s not the first and not the last surreal thing happening these days. However, it proves that it is possible to resist this administration, even without lengthy court battles (although the governor clearly indicated that he was ready to go to court), and also proves that when the city and the elected official are united to achieve their goals, they win.

On a more sober note, the Friday killing of Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez by an ICE officer. Still, I do not think this tragedy annuls what Chicago did last week.

ODS

Yesterday, I was going to make dinner at the ODS, but then it turned out that the current volunteer coordinator had put in their notice, and forgot or didn’t have time to purchase supplies for making dinner. I went to the shelter anyway, picked up some sweets from Vanille, and spent two hours in conversations with staff and residents. There were too many private moments in these conversations, so I am not sharing them except for one thing: I was thinking about taking a break from volunteering for the Night Ministry, but I am not going to do it.

Even though I am not there often enough, I still can do something good. And a little bit is better than nothing.

Yesterday was a very emotional and a very long day, and the whole week seems to be long and emotional. The fear of the National Guard’s appearance dominates the environment and touches my life in many different ways. Between escorting, which I did twice this week, ODS volunteering, and conference attendees coming from abroad, and all the conversations I have with people, it’s almost too much.

However, I have a hope (maybe too soon) that Chicago’s readiness to fight back stopped the worst that could happen. We’ll have to see, but I really hope…

Unfortunately, Yes

On Tuesday, I was making dinner at the ODS, and after the dinner was made, and everyone who was around ate, we sat down chatting in the common area. One of the newest residents asked me the usual “where I was from,” and then whether I ever go back, and what part of Russia I was from, and whether I had even been to Moscow. And finally, he asked: what’s the best time to visit Moscow? I paused for a moment and replied: When the war is over. And when Putin is out. To his credit, he immediately understood why I replied that way, but his questions perfectly illustrated the fact that the war in Ukraine is completely out of sight for most Americans. People do not think about Russia as one of the parties in the war. And they do not understand that when I reply, “I am from Russia,” I feel it as saying, “I am responsible for that bloodshed.”

In my mind, that’s somehow related to another story my friend told me. She was at a store, where an older Pole with very limited English was trying to communicate something to a store clerk. Later, after my friend and her daughter left the store, that person left right after them, and upon hearing them speaking Russian, he said: Well, I should have asked you for help in the store! My friend turned to him and asked him in Russian: “Oh, do you speak Russian?” He looked at her with a deep pain in his eyes and said, “Unfortunately, yes!”

My friend told me that she will never forget this person and a pain in his eyes.

About Imperial Mindset – Again

One of the topics of our conversation with my friend, who visited me on Saturday, was how we both strive to break away from the imperial mindset we had for most of our lives, and how the war in Ukraine has forced both of us to re-examine our beliefs and our “defaults.” She told me about a project she is working on with the Chicago Kyrgyz community, and how she knew virtually nothing about Kyrgyzs before that. She feels a great deal of respect and admiration for this community, and she regrets that she was once clueless, following the “younger brothers” shortcuts of Soviet propaganda. I understand her very well, because I feel the same way, and I am ashamed of the younger me looking down at the “smaller nations.”

One particular story she told me, struck me. When she was teaching a gymnastic class in a Russian-speaking daycare for pre-schoolers, she noticed a girl, sitting by herself and not coming to participate in the gymnastics activities. She encouraged the girl to join, but the teacher, who herself was a Ukrainian refugee, dismissed the move: “What would you expect from aul?” The aul is a word for a small rural village, and the whole sentence was a diminitive reference to the girl being from a “small nation.” My friend was appauled by the fact that a person who just experienced the Russian agression would say this, but she said nothing and still encouraged the girl to participted. Months later, that same teached approached my friend and said: I was thinking about that episode and our conversation, and I am sorry I said that. Now I realize how wrong I was.

I do not think there is much to comment on that, but I shared both my friend’s respect for this person who came a long way to realize that her believes needed some corrections, and also my friend’s deep regret about how deep inside each of us this sense of superiority was rooted.

***

Boris turned seventy-five on Thursday, and that was the first time ever that he allowed me to wish him a happy birthday on the social media. And from what I can tell, he liked the result 🙂

***

On Friday, Boris received his passport with the new visa. He received an email last Thursday, and mailed his passport to the embassy immediately, but a week with both US and Finnish holidays delayed the processing. By then, there were additional worries because he had to travel with the EU during the first week of June, and he couldn’t do it without his passport, which was in transit.

Yesterday, we talked for a very long time, and finally admitted that we both were trying to hide from each other the extent to which we were affected by this three-month-long ordeal. We both confessed to each other that at some point, we accepted that this could be a permanent situation, and we couldn’t worry about it anymore.

I guess it’s good that we talked it through. Boris’ optimistic estimation of recovery time is “one more week.” As for me, I am not so sure. He told me that he can see that I still haven’t recovered from my big fight, and it shows in how I function.

As always, I am optimistic, so I hope that things will get better.

***

As it is clear from my last several posts, I am on my way to “back to normal.” However, something has permanently changed; in some sense, it is a “new normal,” and I am trying to figure out how the past several months have changed me.

One thing is that I feel removed from “ordinary human feelings,” and I am unsure whether this is here to stay with me. Since October last year, I have been so focused on Prairie Postgres that everything else has become non-essential. I blame myself for not contributing to election campaign, not doing canvassing, not talking enough about the issues. I was among many who didn’t do enough. I definitely didn’t have “cycles” for that, but still.

My decision matrix, my Eisenhower quadrants, were skewed to the sole purpose of making sure the Chicago conference happens, and the Chicago community is not negatively affected. I consistently find myself at a loss responding to “how are things with you, what’s new in your life?” I mean people, who might not be my closest friends, but who know me well enough or care enough so that I can’t reply: “All good, thank you for asking.” Still, I understand that it would be the weirdest thing to start answering such questions with what is really on my mind. Because the honest answer would be something like that: “For several months, some people were trying to make my life incredibly difficult to the point I was afraid to check my email, and they were trying to stop me from doing things which were important to me and to my community. There were many times when I wanted to quit and walk out, but I did not give up, and now everything is good, and nobody is after me.” And that’s the first, second and third most important thing in my life.

I know that I didn’t talk enough with many people who care about me, and I care about them. There were several months of ignoring emails, skipping events, and telling myself that I will have time for all of that later. I can only imagine how many of my friends, especially my “remote” friends think that I forgot about them, or that their lives are not interesting to me anymore.

Looking back at the past several months, I do not know how I did it :). When i was at the PGConf.dev, and when I attended multiple meetups last week, many of those to whom I told about my not-for-profits reacted: oh, you got 501(c)?! Congratulations! Or asked me: is it your full time job? So, I guess, I did something good, and something to be proud of.

Still, I want to get back to “being human,” but Prairie Postgres would still remain not “one of the things” I am doing, but “the most important thing” I am going, and hopefully the thing that outlive me :).

This Week’s Events

I didn’t post it on Wednesday, but as usual, better late than never. Here in Chicagoland, the suburban elections demonstrated the reverse of the course in comparison with the November elections. Even being a Blue State as we are, the November election results shifted in favor of Republicans, which looked like a concerning trend. However, last Tuesday, we witnessed the opposite shift. We also saw very close margins in Florida elections, even when they were not won by Democratic candidates, so once again, things start to change.

Obviously, the highlight of the week was Susan Crawford’s election. Her victory is important not only as a victory of a democratic candidate in a swing state but also as a victory of people over money. We always knew that even though fundraising is important, votes are cast by people, not dollars. Susan Crawford’s victory proves exactly that.