Sometimes a view of the bigger picture is born in small moments. The other day, I and my little pug, Lily, were at a friend’s house visiting her and her pug, Olive. The two dogs were crawling all over us on the couch, when Olive abruptly jumped off, ran to a corner of the room and hit a bell. Surprised, I asked my friend what that was about. She said: “It’s 4 o’clock. It’s her dinner time. She’s ringing the bell to tell me.” Since my friend did not immediately jump up to prepare the food, Olive stood glaring at her, turned around, went back to the corner and hit the bell again. Harder the second time.
As Lily and I walked home, I thought about all the bells that are being rung in America right now, and all the people who feel like no one is listening. Whether it’s the economy or violent clashes with immigration authorities in Minneapolis and beyond, people are, metaphorically speaking, frantically ringing bells, hoping that someone in leadership — maybe like Congress — will respond and do something to address the anger, desperation and pain roiling this country. Those emotions are transforming America into a place where fear drifts through cities like winter winds, and then turns into anger, because that’s the trajectory of fear. Anger doesn’t erupt out of nothing; it’s almost always propelled by fear.
Protests, demonstrations, even riots also do not spring up from nothing. In 1967, two years after the Watts riots, Martin Luther King Jr. gave a speech titled “The Other America.” He said: “Riots are socially destructive and self-defeating. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard.” If there is systemic injustice, prejudice, sanctioned violence, you have two choices: silent surrender or raising your voice to try to get the attention of someone, anyone who can help bring about change. The protests that are going on in Minnesota right now, and the protests that have happened across the country in the past year, could all be looked at as a cri de coeur, a scream from the heart.
On a recent Sunday, protesters entered Cities Church in St. Paul, Minn., and disrupted the service, because they thought an acting field director of the city’s ICE office was a pastor at that church. This particular act followed days of violent clashes in once-peaceful neighborhoods, as well as the fatal shooting of Renee Good by a federal agent.
Government officials have claimed that the protesters were trained, as if there were some militia school for people who want to protest what they are witnessing and what they feel is unjust. There is no training for anger. Anger arises when you’re scared for your way of life, for your neighborhood. When you’re scared every time someone knocks on your door. It’s primal.
I’m going to guess that months ago, none of the people who stormed that church saw themselves doing something like that.
I would also suggest that Good, who had an apparently peaceful life with her partner and her 6-year-old child, never imagined feeling called to document masked, armed agents who had taken over the streets where she walked her dog, played with her son. Her last words to an ICE agent were, “I’m not mad at you.” But she was undoubtedly mad at what was happening in the place she called home. So, she did what she could on behalf of people who were being targeted, by showing up to record the actions of officers so the government could be held accountable.
Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, devoted himself to helping veterans recover from their injuries. I doubt that he envisioned himself standing on an icy street, filming immigration agents as they burst into people’s homes. His last instinct, before he was pinned face down and fatally shot in the back, was to help a woman who had been hurled to the ground and tear-gassed. Being in that place at that time, with phone in hand to record, was his way of ringing a bell, of saying, “Look what’s happening here in these American streets.” Now, in mourning, thousands of people have picked up bells to protest his killing by Border Patrol agents. Maybe this time someone will listen.
We are starved for leadership in this country. We have a Congress of elected officials who were put there to listen to us, to address our concerns, our fears, our objections, and they are uncomfortably silent now. That reality has nothing to do with Democrat or Republican; it’s about absence. We want someone to step forward and say they know why we’re angry. To say they are ready to talk about what we’re afraid of. We want to know that the country the founders envisioned, even with its problems and downfalls, is solid beneath our feet and isn’t turning into something unrecognizable. But so far, there is just the sound of a lonely bell and the sinking feeling of waiting for someone to lead us back to who we know we’re supposed to be.
Patti Davis is the author of “Dear Mom and Dad: A Letter About Family, Memory and the America We Once Knew.”
