Looking forward to a thaw.
A ‘Protestion’ on a water tower close to my house. Projection by @secondsightvisuals and content by @vjaybombs
This isn’t really about weather, or my app’s new freeze/thaw feature…
When things you never imagined would happen, happen, a sense of unreality sets in. A huge part of my identity has been as a proud Minnesotan, and like all Minnesotans (you can imagine the accent on that 'o') I’m not quiet about it. So when the government sent a force in to occupy our city at the beginning of the year it pushed us into dual states of shock and action. We protest and donate supplies and give rides and shovel sidewalks, the everyday acts of being neighbors take on a greater meaning. But it's hard to overstate the sense of disbelief that we have violent, lawless, armed government agents roaming our neighborhoods looking for anyone who isn't white. This feeling is compounded by the fact that they are just the dumbest assholes, all the way up the chain to the president, and we are forced to listen to people twisting themselves into pretzels justifying what is so obviously wrong.
It's the small things that drive points home though. The fact that Trump's extra military force is called ICE (I'll ignore the juvenile wanna-be tough-guy acronym) and they invaded MN in the heart of winter has a certain strange coincidence to it. Not the idiocy of sending a bunch of ill equipped guys from the south to average temps barely in the double digits. But the fact that ice is normally a pretty common topic of conversation right now.
"If we have a cold night we can flood the rink and make sure the ice is ready for broomball."
"If we get some sun and warmer temps, hopefully, we can scrape the ice off the driveway."
"Don't forget your ice cleats it's slippery out there."
"Gotta warmup the car and scrape the windshield."
"Our ice-maker is broken again" (Ok that's just personal one ... but why?)
Ice is a part of life and every mention now has more gravity to it, a silence around it. The weight is inescapable, because the other ICE is the only other topic of conversation. This is of course the point, violence and terror against anyone who dares to disagree, or may be different (than what?), or even worse just happens to have skin a shade darker than white, or god forbid happened to be born somewhere else! The continual presence and the associated deaths, kidnappings, and assaults constantly hover over the community.
Funnily this post started as a quick update for my volunteer water monitor app. I shipped a small update and a handful of bug fixes. The update? recording ice in/out dates. I struggled for a couple weeks with even shipping a small but useful feature because of a word. Obviously this ranks among the smallest problems on earth, but like I said the coincidences are strange, and the heaviness is real. Anyways in the end I named the feature freeze/thaw and you can check it out in the app.
Once again (like in 2020) we hear constant helicopters, and the ICE hasn't left. But it's late February in Minnesota, temps are rising and a thaw is coming (record it on your lake page in the app). Ice will melt, we wont stop being neighbors, they will keep loosing the argument, midterms will come, and whatever karma exists in the world will get the bastards in the end. Hopefully we come out of this more conscious, stronger, and resolute as a people. But even after the thaw, it's going to take a long time to recover.
