Parenting Through It
How to explain the brutalization of innocents to an innocent
One of the first things I saw when I woke up this morning was 37-year-old registered nurse and American citizen Alex Pretti getting beaten and shot to death by federal agents on a Minneapolis sidewalk.
The federal government was already lying about what happened when a video taken by a bystander in a pink jacket was released. The video showed that immediately before being thrown to the ground, beaten, and shot dead, Pretti was defending a woman who ICE had been brutalizing. After they killed Pretti, they rounded up the witnesses and carted them off to an ICE detention facility.
Pretti worked in the ICU in a VA hospital. He was worth more than every agent who surrounded him, combined.
The human mind was not meant to witness people getting killed like this. But they pop up, unannounced on social media feeds like horrific blemishes. At least when I was a kid you had to really look for it if you wanted to see real human death– I fear that the first time today’s little kids witness the horror of the police state, it will be accidental, and it will be so early in their lives that it will damage them. It’s only a matter of time before my children see somebody executed on video.
The administration is encouraging the manufacture and distribution of these images. Multiple reports have stated that ICE fancies itself a bit of a Hype House for racist state ultraviolence; that is, agents are encouraged to film themselves on raids like they’re doing little TikTok dances, and ICE’s preening little castrato Greg Bovino often travels with a full camera crew. Kristi Noem has a glam squad with her when she shows up beneath her pile of hair extensions to pretend she’s helping terrorize immigrants herself. It’s all for show. They’re pretending they’re in a movie. They’re making a TV show for our dying applesauce-brained narcissist of a president. They’re kidnapping kids for clout. They’re murdering citizens for the likes.
Despite this emphasis on content production, I have yet to see a video where ICE agents look anything but ridiculous. In every single one they act like Make-A-Wish kids who want to pretend to be in Sicario before they start chemo. Many of them look like pudgy reenactors of a civil war that hasn’t started yet. (If the Confederates had been as visibly out of shape as some of the ICE agents that have been filmed terrorizing Minneapolis, the phrase “the south will rise again” would imply that the rise would occur very slowly, from a creaking couch, accompanied by groans.) At best, they look scared and unprofessional. At worst, they look like out-of-control lunatics enraged by their own failure to achieve anything of note, and too impatient to learn how to handle a gun without looking like a fool before they start filming.
Beyond the horror of the pain they are inflicting indiscriminately is a bumbling quality to all of them. They’re like police blooper videos. They are hardcore fascist pornography. Who would see one of them and think, you know what? I want in. What interesting guys, doing righteous and cool things.
Some of my first lessons of 20th century American history were because my dad really liked the song “American Pie” by Don McLean. Asking my dad questions about what the lyrics meant was how I learned about the Kennedy assassination. He was under the impression that the line “and as I watched him on the stage/ my hands were clenched in fists of rage” was about Lee Harvey Oswald’s ill-fated perp walk. It wasn’t until I got into an argument about what that line meant as an adult that I looked it up on Genius and found that it likely referred to a Rolling Stones concert where a member of their Hell’s Angels security detail stabbed a concertgoer to death. Don McLean really hated Mick Jagger, I guess.
My father was so distraught after Kennedy was shot that he went home early from elementary school. The story I’ve heard was that the assassination was announced over the school intercom, and that he was inconsolable. He had just turned 8.
I find it admirable that my dad never succumbed to the cynicism or nihilism that seemed to infect Americans who witnessed the 1970’s. He still wants to believe that people tell the truth, and are good, and that people he trusts would not lie to him. One of the biggest fights he and I ever got in happened when I told him I thought that it’s possible that the footage from the moon landing was faked, or that there was backup fake moon landing footage, made to cover our asses in the event of a technical failure. It was around the fire pit at my parents’ house. We’d all been drinking. Without saying anything, he got up and stormed off.
I have no idea how to navigate the violence at the center of the American decline as a parent. I barely know how to navigate this as a human being. I don’t know if it was healthy that I allowed myself to watch multiple videos of the death of Alex Pretti, knowing what was on it. I don’t know if it does me any good to see the actual death play out. My hands are clenched in fists of rage.
My four year old and I were having a loud car singalong the other day when it finally happened. Shuffle landed on a song from The Sound of Music, a movie that she has not seen.
Which meant that she’d probably ask me what the movie was about.
Which meant that somehow I’d have to figure out a way to explain Nazi Germany in a manner appropriate for a four-year-old.
I held my breath and waited for her to begin asking a series of questions that would lead to me talking about Hitler. Which, frankly, is something I find myself doing a lot these days, often to people who don’t seem particularly excited that I’m talking about Hitler at that moment.
“Mama, what’s this from?”
“It’s from a movie called The Sound of Music.”
“What’s the movie about?”
“It’s about a big family that likes to sing together.”
As her brain turned this over, through the car’s speakers Maria taught the Von Trapp children about rearranging the notes in the solfège to create melody.
My daughter had more questions. “What else happens to the family?”
“Well, some bad people came and said that they wanted the family’s daddy to work for them. And the daddy didn’t want to work for the bad people, and so the family got away. They walked through the mountains into another country.”
“Into California?”
“No, into Switzerland.”
My daughter fell silent. I knew the follow up would be about either Switzerland (about which I know very little) or the bad people (about which I know too much). I started formulating a way to tiptoe around the concept of Nazis enough to satisfy her curiosity but not enough to upset her.
So much of having a four-year-old is trying to figure out how much information they can handle. So much of having a four-year-old in a city where schools and day cares have started having parents patrol around pickup and drop off time, to make sure that ICE agents don’t try to tackle one of their friends’ parents or teachers in front of them, is figuring out how much truth you can tell them.
“But,” she said, screwing up her face in a look of confusion, “Why did they walk through the mountains? They’re cats.”
So much of having a four-year-old is accepting that sometimes instead of having to explain the concept of Nazis in the car on the way to a play date, you simply need to explain that the film The Sound of Music is not about cats.
It’s impossible that she’s not picking up on the fact that things aren’t right. I brought her with me to a small demonstration in my neighborhood the other week, the kind of protest that is 60% old hippies who are immune to caring when somebody characterizes their political earnestness as “cringe.” They are the resistance libs who turned out to be right about everything. They have NEVERTHELESS SHE PERSISTED bumper stickers on their 15-year-old Toyota Corollas. They have homemade cardboard signs with the most sincere slogans on them. “Hate Has No Home Here!” and the like. (Hate does, in fact, have a home in our neighborhood. Once as a friend and hanging up signs directing people to call a community ICE alert line, an old man with cop vibes followed us from a block and a half away, pulling them down. My friend confronted him and he immediately looked terrified and scurried away with his tiny bitch-ass dogs.) .
I had spent too long trying to figure out a clever enough thing to write on my sign. My husband and I workshopped ideas. I drew a sketch on a piece of notebook paper and tried to scale the design up so that it didn’t look too stupid. Why do I care about looking stupid? Why do I care about having a good sign? There’s no looking stupid when you’re doing the right thing. The old hippies that show up for every protest don’t care about looking stupid.
My daughter believes that Donald Trump is mean and bad. Like most people with a child’s ability to sense goodness and badness in other people, she knew this without my having to tell her. One night she emerged from her room, crying, saying that she wanted me to lie with her because she was afraid that Donald Trump was going to come. The first time I brought her to a protest– the No King’s Day protest in Pasadena– she thought that the reason everybody was getting together was to beat Donald Trump up.
She insisted on wearing her Spider-Man costume, which many other attendees found delightful. “Oh thank goodness, Spider-man is here!” “Spider-man! We’ve been waiting for you.”
My daughter looked concerned. “Do they know I’m not the real Spider-man? Should we tell them?”
Sometimes it seems like she understands a lot more than I know. Sometimes it seems like less. This morning on the way to school, she told me that when Donald Trump came to town, I would hold her and keep her safe, and Dad would fight him.
She thinks this is all leading to her father street brawling with the president.
My four-year-old daughter hasn’t seen photos of Liam Conejo Ramos, the little boy in the bunny hat, with the disembodied pink hand of an ICE agent clutching his backpack. Half of my daughter’s wardrobe is Spider-Man. There will be no explaining around what the photos show– a little boy struggling to not cry as he’s led by his Spider-Man backpack to a strange vehicle to be taken away from his pregnant mother. His pregnant mother watched from inside the house. Her husband begged her not to come out, because he was afraid that she’d be apprehended by ICE, too. The family had come here on asylum and were following the rules. There are men, empty men, sick men, loser men, who need to hurt something smaller than they are in order to feel big.
Is there any explaining that to a child?
I can’t shake how familiar Liam Ramos looks. I feel like I’ve seen that boy. A boy that looks a lot like that little boy has run up to me– a stranger– and breathlessly explained the latest exciting twist in a playground game of Marvel Heroes. He looks like half of the kids at my daughter’s preschool. The little smile in his school photo is a face that every kid makes. The crumpled up chin under his blue bunny hat as the agents are hauling him away is the face that every kid makes. He should never have had to be that brave. I’ve come to believe that our country deserves to suffer gravely for what it’s done to children, what it’s allowed to have done to children.
Honest question: do people who agree with ICE cruelty toward children believe that brown people love their children less? Does JD Vance look at his own five-year-old son, with almost an identical complexion to Liam Ramos, and think that some children deserve safety more than other children? (I feel in my bones that Liam Ramos’ parents love him more than JD Vance’s mother loved him.)
Yesterday, my dad drove to Minneapolis to join the anti-ICE general strike march. My dad is almost 70 years old. The temperature never even reached zero degrees Fahrenheit.
He sent me a few shaky videos. One of them ends with five seconds of his phone being pointed at the ground. His eyebrows are frozen. The streets are full of other people with frozen eyebrows, many of them just as old if not older than he is.
I remember the feeling of cold that intense. I grew up in it. Some of my classmates that lived in houses with long driveways had little phone booth-sized bus shelters near the mailbox where the children could take shelter in the mornings it was almost cold enough for school to be canceled. It’s strange to log onto Facebook and see some of those kids, who I know warmed themselves in shelters lovingly erected for them by their parents or grandparents, have become bitter and cruel adults indifferent to the suffering of children.
I spent a few minutes looking up footage of the execution of Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator, and his wife Elena. It’s not the first time I’ve watched the footage since the first Trump term. At first I was drawn to it by morbid curiosity. This time it was a need to have faith in the pendulum of violence swinging back.
I’m not a bloodthirsty person. I didn’t used to believe in the death penalty. I have never been in a physical fight.
After I had my first baby, I started having vivid dreams where my baby would be threatened, and I would pounce on the perpetrator like a lion ripping at the throat of a hyena. In the dreams, I would rip apart the face and body of my child’s would-be assailant with my bare hands. It was exactly like that scene at the end of Weapons when (spoiler alert) the children descend on the witch and tear her apart, except just me, turning some dream villain’s face into goulash. I told my old therapist about the dreams, and she told me that maybe my subconscious needs me to understand the awesome responsibility of motherhood.
I think my subconscious wanted me to practice, just in case.
Ceaușescu ruled Romania from the mid-1960’s until 1989. The violence and horror he inflicted on the Romanian people— especially the women and children— cannot be overstated. A few days before Christmas, amid the Romanian revolution, the couple was captured and given a speedy trial with a predetermined outcome. They were executed by firing squad on Christmas Day 1989. My parents hid this from me. I had no idea who the Ceaușescus were, or the extent of the atrocities in Romania. I was a child.
Their execution was recorded “for posterity.” It’s pretty easy to find online.
I’m glad they filmed it.
This meant a lot to me. I have a 10 year old daughter and explaining doesn’t get much easier as she gets better at imagining scenarios - I feel Iike she should know about Renee Good but the instant she knows she’ll worry about ME. I’m also married to a Romanian born in ‘79…his dad fled the country when he had the chance and my husband - younger than my daughter is now - didn’t know where he was for months. After the revolution, a year and a half later, they joined his dad in Greece and then came to Grand Rapids, MI. I pray we never get all the way there but it absolutely crushes me to feel us careening toward the kind of regime that his family fled.
I'm glad that my 13-month-old is still so young and I don't have to explain any of this to her. These are truly hard times to be a parent, trying to take care of each other and our own mental health. Thanks for providing this guidance.
Side note, but I do wish we could talk about the cruelty and cowardice of ICE agents without talking about how out of shape they are. Being fat doesn't automatically mean you're a loser (although their actions prove are all definitely losers). I find this rhetoric from the left to be very disheartening. I know I'll get some eye rolls for this, but the use of fatphobic language does matter to those of us in larger bodies.