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Last week, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska publicly stated, “We are all afraid.” She went on to say, “It’s quite a statement. But we are in a time and a place where I certainly have not been here before…And I’ll tell you, I am oftentimes very anxious myself about using my voice, because retaliation is real. And that’s not right.”
Murkowski’s words have earned her both sympathy and criticism, with more of the latter. Steve Bennen notes, “Indeed, let’s not forget that when the Republican Party’s far-right budget plan came to the Senate floor a couple of weeks ago, two GOP senators joined Democrats in voting against it—and Murkowski wasn’t one of the two.”
Listening to Murkowski expand on her “fear,” it’s not hard to surmise that she’s trying to have it both ways with her constituents: she wants them to know that she’s afraid, but that she will continue to fight for them. She is signalling both vulnerability and fortitude.
But who is the “we” in this case, and who really lives in fear? As I write this, people are being rounded up by ICE agents in black vans and disappearing. As seen in this terrifying video, a Turkish Tufts student Rümeysa Öztürk was picked up in broad daylight on March 25 and transported to a immigrant prison in Louisiana, where she still remains; a judge has just ruled that she should be transferred to Vermont for a hearing. (“Detention facility,” a term that the state and media use, is a fancy name for a prison.) Mahmoud Khalil remains incarcerated. Hundreds of student visas have been revoked, leaving international students frightened and in limbo. Many more are afraid to leave their homes for fear of being picked up as retaliation and punishment for having spoken out in support of Palestine. Hundreds of men were hustled into an airplane and sent to one of the world’s worst supermax prisons in El Salvador.
In all the coverage of recent events, it is easy to forget that living in fear has been a daily reality for millions, and for the last many decades. On Facebook, posts detailing how ICE officers have been boarding buses at the border and forcing particular passengers to show their proof of citizenship have been circulating widely, and shocked liberals and progressives have been wringing their hands over what they think is proof of a new surveillance state and worse. In fact, this has been an ongoing practice: in 2021, Greyhound settled a suit over warrantless arrests. Are things worse now? Or are they just more obvious, now that events are witnessed by people in different class positions than those on Greyhound buses? ICE agents recently boarded an Amtrak train while it was stopped in Havre, Montana, and questioned people about their citizenship status, according to a report in the Havre Weekly Chronicle. One of them turned out to be a white judge and lawyer from North Dakota, who spoke to the press about what he saw. The ACLU has reported on the harassment of Latinos in the area. In Havre itself, two women, both U.S citizens, “were detained and questioned by a U.S. Border Patrol agent when he heard them speaking Spanish in a Havre convenience store,” according to the Chronicle. They reached an out-of-court settlement with U.S. Customs and Border Protection in 2020, but still felt forced to leave the town.
For years, undocumented and documented workers—day labourers, factory and restaurant staff, hospital service providers—have been among unseen millions who live under a cloud of fear as they get swept up in raids and disappeared, without crowds to call for their release. None of this is to say that Öztürk, Khalil, and the many others targeted by their universities and the current administration should not be defended and, from what I can tell, they and their supporters are not the kind to distance themselves from those with much fewer privileges, the one who don’t have crowds rallying for them.
My point here is simply that fear has been an everyday experience for many, for a long while. That it should now extend to citizens of all colours, and that even white tourists from places like Germany and Canada are no longer protected does not make that sense of fear any less relevant, or less palpable: what these visitors have experienced is horrific and shameful. But we might pause at this moment and ask: what can we do about this fear?
We can and should recognise that fear has been the reality for too many, and for too long.
More importantly, we can and should decide that fear is simply not an option. This is not a call to individuals to stop being afraid. To be personally unafraid in the face of such blatant misuses of power can be difficult, even impossible. People might have very different responses—and, indeed, many will find themselves subject to raw, open fear, and find themselves shutting down and incapable of functioning: they cannot be blamed for that. The last thing we need to do is turn a resistance to fear into a call for individual bravery.
I want to raise a much more crucial point: if we collectively allow the (somewhat cynical, in my view) view of fear used by politicians like Murkowski, we end up with an escalation of state violence. How long until people aren’t simply grabbed and thrust into vehicles but shot in public? We ought to wonder: what if Khalil or Öztürk had resisted, physically? What would those armed agents have done? Would the public at large have been outraged if they saw someone shot down for physically resisting their kidnapping? Would you? How would you respond to a video of someone refusing to be arrested and then being killed? With sympathy, or with a shrug?
If Lisa Murkowski is genuinely afraid, she should stop and rethink her support for this administration’s every step. She and her similarly trembling colleagues need to stop shaking in their shoes and do something. If she’s still afraid, she should step down. The rest of us need to look at the history of political fear, recall that millions have been living with it for too long, and understand that matters have reached a point where we either begin to work against such a culture of fear or watch a sense of everyday terror become that which immobilises us. If this means marching every weekend, sure, but we also need more town halls like the ones where people yelled at their Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, and at Republican Indiana Congresswoman Victoria Spartz. As I write this, Columbia students are chained to the gates of their university demanding the release of Khalil and an end to the deporations of students. What if we all did something similar for everyone rounded up and deported? For every day labourer, every restaurant worker? Instead of fetishising them as those who will do our dirtiest work, what if we saw millions of people as deserving of our protection?
We need anger, not fear. Like that amazing gent at the Grassley town hall, we should all be yelling, “I’m pissed!”
Fear is not an option.
Update: April 22: I just looked up the phrase “Fear is not an option,” and found that there’s an entire book by Monica Berg with that title! I did not know about this before I wrote and titled my essay, and interested people should take a look at Berg’s work.
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See also:
“On the Psychic Terror of Raids”
“Missing: On Terror and Kidnappings”
“On Trump, Immigration, and the Failure of the Left”
Image: “Everywhere Eyeballs Are Aflame”, Odilon Redon, 1888.
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