GLOOM
At 9 a.m. this morning Alex Pretti was shot, murdered as he was helping a woman to her feet then sprayed with tear gas and assaulted and the shot ten times.
This darkened all of the next week. It was a heavy, demoralizing weight that hung over me through the whole week. I was forced by the snow to stay in my apartment and face what I had come back to.
Already I felt immobilized by routine American culture as I am after every trip. But this time American culture did not only seem banal, it seemed malignant and unbearable. Already, two weeks earlier Renee Good had been shot in the face as she tried slowly to drive away from a confrontation with ICE agents. But Petti’s murder doubled the horror. And I confess that the difference this time was that the person being assaulted or shot wasn’t a fugitive from Venezuela or even the mother of three children, this time it was a man, it was me. It was exactly what would have happened to me if I had been videoing ICE agents at a protest, it was a white male, an innocent bystander, shoved to the ground and shot ten times in the back. I am ashamed that when it wasn’t me being shot I was less disturbed than if it was me.
After two and a half simulating and fun weeks in San Miguel I was forced to face what was happening in my own country, if it was my country, and I was appalled and ashamed.
I was appalled because of the thug like nature of the ICE agents and the way that they were gassing and shoving and assaulating citizens and non citizens, men, women and children. Shooting someone who wasn’t threatening them ten times in the back was the ultimate thuggery and was unforgiveable.
My wife Kathe, was a German citizen with a green card until she died four years ago. That green card could have now made her suspect. She grew up in Nazi Germany and lived in Bergen only five miles away from the Bergen/Belson concentration camp where Anne Frank died. In the streets of Celle, the nearby town where she was born are brass markers, called stumble stones, in front of the houses where Jews who were killed in death camps lived. The stones don’t just record where they died, they record where they were murdered and use the word, ermordet. The same word applies to Pretti. These agents were for me German gestapo killing German citizens. And in Pretti’s case it is American citizens killing American citizens. So that fact has been with me all of our married life. Kathe was too young at 7 when the war ended to know what was happening, but this is my German connection to armed men killing citizens and is has always appalled me.
For the rest of the day it was all I could think about.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 