Rogers Park
“The Ark rocked. The waters were swirled.
Troops poured into the City of Daughters.”
-Agha Shahid Ali
Nothing prepares you for the emotional toll of your country’s descent into fascism. The sun still rises in the morning, the birds still stop at the feeder, the green leaves still yellow into fall–but the world is suffused with an ambient sense of dread. Every conversation, no matter how pedestrian, has a rank rivulet of fear and stress burbling just underneath it. The transformation is totalizing. No matter how many 20th century authors you read–no matter how much Milan Kundera or Hannah Arendt–you can only truly understand the way that it insinuates itself into every facet of life by living through it yourself.
Two weeks ago, I was in Rogers Park, a neighborhood in northern Chicago where ICE has been especially vicious. On the Sunday I was there, ICE had staked out a Spanish-language mass at a local church, drawing a stiff protest in response. It’s one thing to watch videos of the secret police. The neighborhood was tense. It’s another to go to the place where they have been operating with impunity, and experience the impact that kind of oppression and abuse of power has on a community firsthand.
I go to RP frequently, but walking around that afternoon was the emptiest I’ve ever seen the neighborhood on a weekend. Apprehension dusted everything like a smothering ash. We had to knock at our lunch spot to be let in, a measure to deter ICE should they try to illegally enter of their own accord. Throughout the neighborhood people were wearing whistles around their neck in case they needed to alert others to an ICE sighting. The place simply didn’t feel free. Even if they were not visible, the presence of The Men With Guns put everybody on edge.
It reminded me of somewhere I’ve been before: Srinagar, Kashmir, where in 2012 I spent two months as an intern for a small NGO called Anhad. Srinagar felt like–Srinagar is–an occupied territory. As a white foreigner, I could move freely about the city, but the presence of soldiers with long guns and military checkpoints covered in sand bags and barbed wire made every place feel precarious, even in quiet neighborhoods far from the city center. Though ostensibly there to keep the peace–Srinagar has frequently been rocked by paroxysms of violence–in truth the soldiers were a projection of force, there to intimidate the Kashmiri population.
Just a few years after I was there, the Indian government under the control of Narendra Modi cancelled Anhad’s license to receive money from foreign sources, severely crippling an organization committed to democracy and secularism. Further convulsions of state and separatist violence culminated with the revocation of Kashmir’s state constitution in 2019, and a two-year communications blackout across the state from 2019-2021. Authoritarianism has a hundred different ways of tightening the noose around civil society, but it draws its strength from intimidation. It rules through fear and threats both explicit and implicit.
Srinagar and Chicago are not perfectly comparable. Srinagar has, for decades, been riven by civil unrest and state violence, all echoes of a violent insurgency that arose in the 1990’s. India has long refused to extend democratic and civil liberties to the people of Kashmir, and Pakistan has long capitalized on the resultant discontent to foment jihadist militancy. Kashmir’s convulsions stem from this collision. Chicago has not suffered from anything nearly as destructive. It is my fear, though, that our current government will engage in the kinds of repression that I saw in Kashmir—permanent garrisons of soldiers, neutered NGOs—in order to maintain its grip on power, despite the fact that there is no insurgent violence in Chicago. It is also my fear that years of this kind of political repression will exacerbate what is already a violent period in our country's history. People who feel threatened and deprived of representation will resort to extreme measures to reassert agency, especially in a country as violent as our own. The current US government is both oppressive and opportunistic. They will use any violence to as cover for further oppression—look at the assassination of Charlie Kirk—and the cycle will continue. Once that type of conflict is uncorked, it doesn’t go back in the bottle.
I have always contended that the Trump administration doesn’t have any idea of the forces that it is playing with. Maybe, in the most perfervid corners of Hitler Group Chat, they fantasize that can crush all opposition for real this time, but harsh measures, rather than quashing all resistance, risk provoking the formation of a counter-response. Armed opposition of this sort is incredibly difficult to dislodge. Even if the Trump regime is voted out in 2028, a radical insurgency won’t necessarily demobilize its opposition to the federal government. It can persist for decades, festering away and occasionally flaring up like a wound that refuses to heal.
I’m not saying that what I’ve seen here in Illiniois will necessarily lead to those kind of problems, but I see a plausible pathway to that kind of violence, especially if the upcoming election of 2026 is contested. A contested election is what led Kashmir to violence in the 1980's. I would hate to thing that this country—where I was born, where my family and friends live, where I have traveled and lived and loved—would suffer anything like the violence of other places I have seen. The American people do not deserve that. Nobody does.
This is why the nonviolent resistance that we have seen so far is so important, and so affirming. It may seem absurd to face down the Men With Guns while wearing an inflatable frog suit, but the most effective response of their attempt to escalate violence at this time is to refuse that escalation. Authoritarians rule through fear. By intimidating you, they hope to control you. The author Timothy Snyder calls it, anticipatory obedience. At this point, a violence counter response is a type of anticipatory obedience, and nonviolence robs them of that power.
