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How far we haven’t come

What are we supposed to do?

This is a question on the minds of many Americans these days. We can write and talk and text and worry and wonder, and maybe even hope——but does that really matter in the face of all that is happening? In this brave/brutal new world, the Department of Education, USAID, SNAP and Medicaid, and other essential programs have all been abruptly dismantled and/or eliminated.

Steep cuts to health and climate research and to the nation's leading research universities are also having a dramatic impact. Even research on (and access to) COVID vaccines has been cut, since the new Secretary of Health, believes vaccines may be harmful and cause autism. Many of these changes were folded into the president’s Big Beautiful Bill, which, it turns out, is missing two B-words, i.e., it Benefits Billionaires.

Another hallmark of the new administration has been its immigration policy. Thousands of immigrants have been arrested and deported — often picked up by armed ICE agents wearing masks. Some of the supposed criminals have turned out to be legal residents, and many others are asylum-seekers. They are not “all rapists and murderers” and few have a criminal record. According to ICE statistics, 65% of those arrested have no criminal record, and 93% had no violent or property offenses. But the policy has caused widespread fear among the immigrant community — for those who are undocumented, but also for those who aren’t.

This assault by ICE on Chicago’s immigrant community was the focus of a recent rally and march that I attended in the Loop. There have been many such events in the last year. They are a small attempt to “do” something about the political upheaval and the government-sanctioned violence directed at the immigrant community. I’m not sure how effective such rallies are. I’ve been to dozens over the years for a whole range of causes. The hope of course is to awaken our nation’s waning social conscience.

While we were chanting and marching down State Street, people waved from their cars and from store windows in solidarity. At one point, I looked up and was startled by a mural of Chicago Blues legend Muddy Waters. I’ve seen it before but never paid much attention to it. As I admired it, I thought about Muddy Waters’ music, and the Blues, and about how many Americans have fought for so long for the most basic rights — from “counting” as a full human being (rather than 3/5ths) during the slavery era, through the great migration and the Jim Crow era, to gaining the right to vote.

And I thought about how Waters and other Blues artists had made art out of centuries of immense suffering, and surviving. Waters himself worked on a cotton plantation in Mississippi for 30 years before moving to Chicago in 1943 to work full-time as a musician.

In May of 1968, a month after Martin Luther King had been killed, Muddy Waters played at the Lincoln Memorial at The Poor People’s Campaign. That day he sang “I Be's Troubled,” an old song from plantation days. “I be's troubled. I be all worried in mind,” the song goes. “Yeah and I'm never being satisfied, and I just can't keep from crying.”

Alan Lomax, the folklorist who had organized the concert, later wrote about Water’s performance: “The politicians might not be listening, but soon the whole world would be dancing to this beat and singing the blues.”

As we walked past the mural, I began to wonder if “the politicians” would ever listen. These days, politicians in both parties remind me that the word “ignorance” doesn’t simply mean a lack of intelligence, but choosing to ignore the injustice we are living in. Ignorance is simply looking the other way — while immigrants are snatched up and deported by masked men.

“No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here,” we chanted. “Immigrants' rights are under attack. Stand up, and fight back!” We kept chanting and walking, and chanting and walking. And I kept thinking about the mural, and being a part of something bigger——about our nation’s long history of public resistance to racism and bigotry. And about how far we haven’t come.

Which is why we keep marching and chanting, and looking for other kinds of “good trouble” to resist the growing ignorance and intolerance in our nation.

• Tom Montgomery Fate is a professor emeritus at the College of DuPage. His most recent book is The Long Way Home.