Is that all there is?

This evening I attended a special meeting held by the Boulder County Commissioners regarding federal impacts to latino people here in our part of Colorado. The meeting was intended to bring together various leaders working to support Colorado latinos– non-profit organizers, legal experts, community advocates, etc.– to discuss the issues of deportation targeting and broader immiseration that their communities are facing, and to bring possible solutions to the county's top elected officials. I attended as an interested member of the public hoping to learn what the county and its most involved constituents are trying to do at the local level to mitigate the extraordinary damage currently being done by the federal regime.

The panelists introduced themselves one by one then briefly went into a prompted discussion, answering questions about what they saw as most immediately pressing. Each speaker was clear-eyed in diagnosing the issues at hand and spoke with urgency and passion. They were experts in their respective fields and clearly had a wealth of knowledge and experience between them, most having some sort of extensive background in non-profit and advocacy work. It seemed Boulder County had summoned a group of people who ostensibly could provide better feedback than anyone on how to address the federal government's cruelty towards latino Coloradans at the county level.

But before I knew it, the meeting ended having provided little in the way of concrete, actionable strategies for protecting county residents from federal abuse.

It felt abrupt in a way; like the conversation was only getting started, the respective panelists having each provided their prognosis with respect to their area of focus and expertise, but without engaging each other directly in anything resembling a discussion. The lack of a real dialogue was mostly due to the structure and limited time of the meeting, but still– was that really it? Had the county commissioners really gone to the trouble of assembling some of the state's top latino advocates just to come to a glaringly uncertain and unresolved conclusion? Sure there were broad stroke suggestions to "focus on housing" or "focus on hunger/poverty"– both important issues, but here somewhat lacking in specificity– and try appealing to Republicans to help stop this on the supposedly pragmatic basis of <reign of terror = bad for economy>, but nothing that was offered up felt equipped to meet the dire immediacy of this political moment.

Now I don't want to spend too much time complaining about this county commissioners' meeting and I don't want to come across as too critical of the panelists themselves; again, I think well of them and their experience, and I actually enjoyed hearing a bit about what some of them do in their political advocacy work. They are good people and we do need them for a variety of other vital functions.

I mostly bring this meeting up because it felt like a microcosm of something I have seen a lot lately: a lack of fight and political creativity among leaders who are acting through traditional professionalized apparatuses of political action and advocacy. The panel's proposed solutions, if we can call them that, felt too... conventional frankly. That is to say that the responses to the question "what are we to do" felt like ones you would expect to hear during much stabler– some would say "normal"– political times, the sort of answers that point more towards a direction for further discourse and brainstorming than towards an immediate action, and assume a less hurried timeframe. I know the panelists understand the gravity and time-sensitive nature of people literally being pulled from their homes, their jobs, and their families, but their position within non-profit, diplomatic, and other organizations clearly limits how they are able to approach such overwhelming and unprecedented threats.

As the situation for vulnerable groups– especially immigrants, homeless people, and trans people– around the US rapidly becomes increasingly dire, I find myself wondering more and more what can be done regionally and locally to quell some of the pain, to fight back. National Democrats and journalists have chosen to cede ground wholesale with their indifference, neglect, and platitudes, allowing themselves to drift rightward out of fear and laziness, and latently normalize dangerous political strategies by the right that are rapidly taking us deeper into un-freedom.

This means that it is critical that other levels of leadership step up on the ground, but honestly I'm just not seeing it that much, or at least not nearly enough. Non-profits have stalled or lost funding while county and municipal politicians are practically deer in headlights as people are kidnapped in their streets. On the latter point I honestly could not believe what I was reading when I saw Mayor Bowser of DC implicitly validate some of the blatantly false premises that Trump had used as pretense for his brutal and likely illegal transformation of DC into a quasi- police state, namely that there was any sort of "crisis" that warranted a law enforcement crackdown in the city.

So what are we left with then? Honestly I don't entirely know at this point what the best strategies are, but I really want to keep thinking more about this and listening to what people are trying on the ground level. There are of course the grassroots actions people are collectively taking to create information networks to keep each other somewhat protected from ICE arrests, and I HIGHLY advise all of you to look into how you can help with that because information about ICE activities really does prevent more arrests from happening. There are also the protests and acts of disobedience that people have gotten involved in, and while I question the broader effectiveness of a lot of it, I still commend anyone who is willing to take those risks to do the right thing– all levels of resistance are worthwhile in times like these. Either way, short of hoping those in power who are opposed to the cruelty magically grow spines, I think a lot of the best forms of resistance right now involve grassroots strategies and informal citizen networks acting collectively in flexible and creative ways, despite the limitations therein.

But maybe most importantly is that doing so puts us in more and more contact with others who share our hopes, our pains, and our desires for a better world. It teaches us how to better act as one in ways that tap into the plurality of our backgrounds and experience to create a whole greater than its summary parts. Our leaders and institutions are not equipped, and in some cases unwilling, to come to our rescue. We're going to have learn fast how to help each other by less conventional means, and while we might not be fully ready to do that yet, I hold out hope that it will continue to grow in that direction rapidly if we allow ourselves the willingness and grace to take bolder and more creative approaches to grassroots organizing and political action right now. Let's allow ourselves to radicalize in constructive ways, in struggle deepening our mutual commitments to each other as citizens who desire a better world.

My hopes are not high for what the future holds, but the hell if they're extinguished yet.

Editorial note: This essay was written without the use of "AI" or any other software that devalues our basic humanity. All words are my own.