"some grim jokers in the act"

Friday Seven // 0006

// 1. We missed a week. I had to look back in my daily logbook to see why, and it seems like I was getting drawn into the beginning of the feature story I'm working on now, that extremely capacious period of reading and notetaking. I create long, long documents to keep track of what I've read, questions to ask anyone about it, the people I want to ask questions of. I will never read everything I want to read for a story and I know that but this was the week where I try to forget that.

// 2. Mahmoud Khalil—who officers without any identification arrested on Saturday on orders to deport him, who has been imprisoned in an immigration detention center in Louisiana since early Monday, who was not allowed to speak privately with his lawyers until Wednesday, and who has not been accused of anything but being an immigrant and protester—should be free.

// 3. "Nobody can protect you ... these are dangerous times," as Jelani Cobb, dean of the journalism school at Columbia University, was quoted Wednesday. This was just one moment of several this week when it truly felt like the bottom fell out. He added later, "I went on to say that I would do everything in my power to defend journalists and their right to report but that none of us had the capacity to stop DHS from jeopardizing their safety ... These are, in fact, dangerous times. They require as much caution as they do courage. It is my responsibility to lay out this fact as clearly as possible for the journalists in my charge."

// 4. The McCarran and McCarran-Walter Acts, and specifically, a pamphlet written by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, that I came across while doing research in the incredible archives at Wayne State in Detroit, explaining the political risks that McCarran had exposed us to with his anti-immigration law in 1950, by permitting the government to deport people from the United States for their actual or perceived political beliefs and activities.

// 5.  "If you don’t fight, you can’t win.”

// 6. All the times I have been in Foley Square, over the years in New York—the morning after the raid on Occupy Wall Street, the early evening waiting for a TRO to let people back into the park, the walk to One Police Plaza with one city council member trying to get another city council member out of jail, the first big rally with labor during Occupy where a friend ran over to Canal Street to buy people a bunch of cheap gloves that still let you use your phone—and where I was on Monday with hundreds of other people. So much is going on, it is possible to drop in on an action in the middle of everything else, if just to say with your feet for a while that a line has been crossed.

// 7. Maybe 1866 never ended.

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