Nine of Swords

I am eight years old, a third grader at the local public elementary school in town, and lately I’ve been plagued by a stubborn recurring nightmare.

In the dream, my parents wake me up. I’m groggy and confused, it’s still dark outside — are we going on a trip? Sometimes when we are flying places, we get up before the sun has risen, and my brother and I are carried from our beds into the car to beat the traffic. Is this like that? “Shhh,” my dream parents say, “shhhhhh.”

I am strapped into my seatbelt and only then do I realize that my brother isn’t coming with us. This trip is only for me. Over the course of our time on the road, I begin to piece together where we are headed. My parents speak in muffled whispers in the front seat. Occasionally my mother dabs at tears in the corners of her eyes, my father stifles a guttural noise in his throat.

This is a journey they do not want to be taking.

We are headed to a place I have never been before, but that is strangely familiar to me from the books I have been reading in my waking life. A large brick building in the middle of nowhere. When we get out, I look to my parents for answers, but they, with eyes filled with tears, have none to give. 

We walk, hand in hand, into the cold brick building, where I recognize my classmates and their parents. We are let into a great big hall by men in uniforms holding guns. On the walls are iron chains, the types of chains you might find in the dungeons from any of the fantasy novels I loved to read in those days.

My classmates and I begin to worry. What are we really doing here? The adults can no longer stifle their emotions as they chain us to the walls. Tears spill from their eyes, and they keep repeating, “We have no choice,” and “Do this for your country.” Do what? we wonder, mouths agape, as an austere voice comes over some previously unseen loudspeaker. “The countdown has begun. Please say your goodbyes.” 

Dream logic is strange, and it’s been thirty years since I had this dream, so what happens next is the sudden realization that I am the recipient of a terrible lottery. The world of my dream, the world that looks and feels in every way like our own, is plagued with a problem — overpopulation. Specifically, there are too many third graders. This excess of third graders has become untenable, and terrible measures have been taken to deal with the problem. Every third grade class in the United States has been entered into a lottery. At random, classes have been drawn, and my class has been chosen.

My classmates, which include my first real crush, my best friend in the world, the boy that bullies me, the girls I play soccer with, shake our chains and cry out for our parents. “Please don’t do this!" "Don't leave me!” we plead. The parents respond according to their emotional abilities — some are sobbing, others are stoic, some are stone-cold, almost angry. 

And then, they are leaving, as the cold voice on the loudspeaker begins to count down from thirty. Twenty-nine… twenty-eight… twenty-seven… A strange hissing sound reverberates around the room as gas is released from pipes I now begin to notice… nineteen… eighteen… seventeen… Children begin to scream, their cries echoing around the room, ringing in my ears… ten… nine… eight… Our parents look on from a window above the room, and I lock eyes with mine. They are terrified. Bereft. Heartbroken. Helpless… six… five… four… three…

And then I wake up.

I have this dream a couple nights a week for most of third grade. 

In first grade (age 6), I flew to Prague to shoot a movie, Swing Kids, about teenage Germans during the rise of the Nazis. I had a very small part, but because one of my lines was "Heil Hitler" (a turning point in the film when Robert Sean Leonard's character realizes that he's been delivering the ashes of fathers killed by the Nazis), my mother wanted to make sure I understood the seriousness of what I was saying, and why it was not something I could ever repeat outside of the context of the film.

In the course of that trip, I was introduced (all at once and perhaps in a little too much detail) to the horrors of the Holocaust. Nazis had long been the villains in my favorite movies — the Indiana Jones series — but after that trip I was able to grasp that the horror of their crimes against humanity extended far beyond a quest for the Holy Grail. When I got home, I read The Diary of Anne Frank, and then obsessively read everything I could get my hands on about one of the worst chapters in world history (whether it was intended to be read by children or not).

This recurring nightmare was, in part, the embodiment of that obsession — my unconscious mind trying to comprehend how ordinary people could turn on their friends and neighbors, their parents, their children in such a depraved, unfeeling way. I was particularly stunned by the bystanders, not the Nazis per se, but the "good Germans" who ignored what was happening and continued on as atrocities occurred all around them. I obsessed about how each of the people in my life would react in similar circumstances. From the ages of six to eight years old, I spent a significant amount of time trying to understand how something as horrible and inhuman as the Holocaust could ever happen. I then spent the next thirty years writing about this question over and over again. The banality of evil is a theme I cannot escape, a theme that thrums throughout much of my creative work, and a fear that still keeps me up at night.

And now, it seems, the anxiety has caught up to me in my present, waking life. We are living in the nightmare scenario. Over the last week, Los Angeles has become a nexus for ICE raids targeting law-abiding, tax-paying immigrants on their way to and from work (some undocumented, and some with green cards and work visas). Children are being kept home from school, unmarked vehicles with plainclothes, armed ICE agents are trailing people, parking outside their workplaces and apartment buildings, lying in wait to snatch them up. People are being disappeared to El Salvadoran torture prisons that are touted as so tough that "no one ever leaves." In neighborhoods where the population is majority Latino, families are holed up in their homes, afraid to walk outside, afraid to go to work... just afraid.

The terror is the point.

There are verified stories of harassment, the handcuffing of a pregnant woman, legal residents swept up in raids because ICE agents "don't believe" that their documents are authentic. I've also heard other stories – ICE agents lurking in SUVs on quiet streets, lying in wait for workers they suspect are undocumented, nannies (with traumatized kids in tow) arrested at playgrounds, women who clean homes afraid to walk down the street with cleaning supplies because it will make them a target (that and, of course, the fact that they are Latino). I can't verify all of those stories because they are being told through a whisper network, and the media can barely keep up.

There is an all-out assault on Los Angeles, but not the one the Trump administration wants you to imagine. The images of burning cars (self-driving Waymo vehicles) or of masked assailants throwing rocks at police... this is not even remotely reflective of the majority of protest happening in this city. It's also not something the police cannot handle. City buses are set on fire when the Dodgers win, okay? That's not something anyone should be proud of, but the police can handle the destruction of a self-driving robot car. The police can also handle a tiny handful of people throwing rocks (have you seen how heavily armed the LAPD are?). The Chief of Police, Mayor Bass, Governor Newsom (who I still think is a fucking asshole) pleaded with Trump not to send in the military or the National Guard. They tried to appeal to reason and logic, correctly arguing that sending soldiers onto the streets of a major US city against the wishes of its police force and political leaders will only enflame existing tensions and stoke violent outbursts. Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly why Trump sent them in the first place.

Here is what the protests in Downtown Los Angeles actually looked like over the weekend (a weekend of political assassinations in Minnesota that our monster of a president has barely mentioned):

These images give me inklings of hope. There are millions of Americans who are willing to resist our rapid decline into fascism and authoritarianism. And hopefully as Trump's voters see and feel the impact of these brutal deportations on their friends, neighbors, and communities, the cult-like fog could lift. America is not immune from fascism. It never has been. That's why we teach history, why we remember the Holocaust, why we should continue to grapple with, examine, and study our national sins.

The Nine of Swords is a card about nightmares, obsessions, compulsions, dark and twisted thoughts, anxieties, self-doubt and even self-hatred. If you pull the Nine of Swords, you’re going through it. Often, Nine of Swords points to a self-inflicted wound. If you pull the Nine of Swords, ask how you are keeping yourself in a doom loop, and if there is an off-ramp for whatever is plaguing you? If so, why haven’t you taken it yet?

My childhood nightmare was the self-inflicted variety of the Nine of Swords – a way to terrorize myself with unfounded anxiety. But the moment we are living through now? This is a nightmare made real, one we need to be clear-eyed about. People are being snatched off the streets of American cities with no due process, disappeared to foreign prisons. Liberal cities are specifically being targeted in order to terrorize and seek political revenge, with direction from a vindictive asshole who threw a shitty military parade to celebrate his 79th birthday.

I am exhausted and scared. I'm sure you are too. Every day brings a fresh set of horrors, and in the midst of all of this terror, we all have responsibilities – jobs, marriages, kids, bills, pets, parents. It's easy to keep our heads down and avoid the bad news at all cost, hoping someone else will fix it. But no one else is coming to save us.

We're all we've got.

I hope you're safe. I hope you're finding ways to resist. I hope you're helping people who are actively being harmed, and those who are next in line for Trump's ire. I hope you're holding your people close, and opening your heart to as many strangers as you can. I have spent my whole life wondering how I would have handled Nazi Germany – whether I would be brave enough to stick my neck out for others when keeping my mouth shut would keep me safe. Now I have the opportunity to find out.

At this point, this poem is cliche. You see signs all over resistance protests with only the line "First they came for..." and your mind fills in the rest. But it's important to remember, that even if no one ever comes for you, the reason to speak out is the preservation of your humanity. The reason to speak out is because others cannot (every day international students and immigrants are being punished for the offense of ... writing an article, posting political opinions on social media, free speech).

There are so many of us. Last weekend's protests proves that.

When we stand up together, we win.