An even more demanding #MeToo

In 1970, when federalized National Guard troops shot and killed students protesting the US war in Southeast Asia at Kent State University and Jackson State, pop singer and bard Holly Near offered a haunting lament and call to action: 

It could have been me, but instead it was you

So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two

I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs

A farmer of food and a righter of wrong

It could have been me, but in

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/holly-near-it-could-have-been-me-lyrics.html

It could have been me, but instead it was you

So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two

I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs

A farmer of food and a righter of wrong

It could have been me, but in

https://lyricstranslate.com/en/holly-near-it-could-have-been-me-lyrics.html

It could have been me, but instead it was you

So I’ll keep doing the work you were doing as if I were two

I’ll be a student of life, a singer of songs

A farmer of food and a righter of wrong

It could have been me, but instead it was you

And it may be me, dear sisters and brothers, before we are through.

But if you can work for freedom, freedom, freedom, freedom

 

If you can work for freedom I can too

There was so much action in that spring that hundreds of campuses and some cities were closed down.

 

Once again, we are tested. Can we too work for freedom?

In organizing people, we've learned that if we can connect our personal stories to broader (and usually disempowering) features of our lives, we can form connections which turn into collective action. 

The historian and journalist M. Gessen -- an immigrant and trans -- bravely takes this tack in the NY Times: 

... I became stateless when I was 14 and my family left the Soviet Union. In exchange for granting my parents, my brother and me exit visas, the U.S.S.R. stripped us of citizenship. For nearly a decade after we arrived in the United States, instead of a passport I carried a long rectangular booklet called a refugee travel document. Not being able to fill in the blank when asked for my nationality added a layer of complexity to some otherwise simple transactions, like opening a bank account, but I was young, white, female and, in the parlance of this country, “legal,” so the difficulties I experienced were not excessive. They were just enough to make me feel precarious.

In the decades since, life for noncitizens in the United States has grown much more difficult. Successive administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, have pushed immigrants to the margins of American society, cutting off access to public assistance programs, limiting pathways to legal status and ramping up deportations. The giant bureaucracy of “immigration courts” took shape, though it hardly resembles any court system that U.S. citizens would encounter.

Those of us who enjoy the privilege of not-yet-questioned US citizenship can be there with some of those whose status in the country is under threat. The weekend I attended a workshop by the Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity with Bay Resistance introducing "accompaniment." Accompaniment connects people trying to the navigate the immigration maze with others willing to just go along to appointments and court dates. Nobody should be alone. 

Gessen continues, describing the attack on their very being:

... The Trump administration’s barrage of attacks on trans people can seem haphazard, but as elements of a denationalization project, they fall into place. In his Inaugural Address and one of his first executive orders, President Trump asserted that only two sexes exist: male and female, established at conception and immutable. Trans people, in other words, do not exist. Executive orders aimed at banning any mention of transgender people from schools, banning trans athletes from women’s sports, ordering a stop to gender-affirming medical care for people under 19, and barring trans people from serving in the military followed. ...

The State Department stopped issuing passports with the “X” gender marker and began issuing passports consistent with the sex the applicant was assigned at birth, even if the person had legally changed gender. ...

... Living with documents that are inconsistent or at odds with your public identity is no small thing. It can keep you from opening a bank account, applying for financial aid, securing a loan, obtaining a driver’s license, and traveling freely and safely inside a country or across borders. ...

 Let's take on and take up Gessen's conclusion:

... You know how this column is supposed to end. I rehearse all the similarities between Jews in Germany in 1933 and trans people in the United States in 2025: the tiny fraction of the population; the barrage of bureaucratic measures that strip away rights; the vilifying rhetoric. The silence on the part of ostensible allies. ...

... It is undoubtedly true that the Trump administration won’t stop at denationalizing trans people, but it is also true that a majority of Americans are safe from these kinds of attacks, just as a majority of Germans were. The reason you should care about this is not that it could happen to you but that it is already happening to others. It is happening to people who, we claim, have rights just because we are human. It is happening to me, personally.

Gessen is correct. But also, if we dare to pay attention, it is happening to all of us, personally.  We mostly just don't know it yet. The regime wants us all rendered less human, less humane. Nobody should be alone.