Police State, cont’d

Yesterday David in California—he saw your Sharpie signs—wrote, “People ask, ‘What would you have done in Nazi Germany?’ Now you know.”

He’s right. That’s your problem. You’re still home doing your futile, ordinary things. You didn’t drive to D.C. for the recruitment fair. It’s a two-day thing, so they’re still at it up there, offering people hefty salaries. You’re not standing by a Dulles Expo Center doorway, without your fresh slogans, just nabbing this and that young guy going in, asking if this is the country he wants. Asking what’ll his kids say when they’re old enough to know what he did. Asking how he’ll forgive himself.

Instead you’re asking is doing up your garden stuff more important—the collards you couldn’t finish yesterday. Some phone calling with family. Getting in the next episode of Severance. Patting your dog. That stuff—all that. And how you’ll forgive your own self. And what’ll be bad enough to get you into the streets, really really, with the thousands. Not just your two lonely little signs, and will they even matter then.