WHAT WILL WE DO AS AMERICANS?

 

By Ruth A. Sheets

January 21, 2026

This morning Robert Reich presented a challenging “Office Hours” in his Substack column.  He asked what we would risk “to counter ICE’s Bullying and Brutality?”  He gave 4 choices from “doing nothing” (writing to members of congress and signing petitions) to putting one’s life on the line.  I was not the only respondent who had some difficulty with this question.  Issues of racism, immigrants, and ignorance came up as one would expect.  These are some of my thoughts on this question. 

To one comment, I said, how terribly sad that whole communities have chosen to teach and curate hatred of anything they don't understand or fear instead of working together to understand and include.  There is value for some in this kind of negative behavior performed while claiming a religious faith that demands love and inclusion as well as service.  It helps some people to believe in their own superiority. It is a deeply engrained hypocrisy that has for many, become normalized.  Trump is just the most current practitioner, the con artist who sets one group against another and models how to do it while looking like the "good guy" just passing on the  secrets of life.  It seems We the People, or at least the part of us that cares about this nation will have to stand en masse to show others that they don't have to build their lives on hatred, dismissal of others,  and ignorance unless they choose, and it is  a choice.  Trump will never stop his conning ignorance because dementia does that to a person, but We the People can help each other become more like the people we claim we are.    

Compliance was a topic because of the way a lot of Republicans, white people in power, and some others have “obeyed in advance” to the illegal orders and actions of Trump and those around him.  My response to that is, people who so easily comply and go along with what the rest of us know is nonsense do it because they think it is what their group expects of them.  If they don't, they won't be accepted by that group, for them, a disaster.  We so often teach our children to comply "because I said so" and forget in our frustration that an explanation is necessary, if not at that moment, shortly afterward.  Women are groomed and threatened into compliance from birth and it is amazing that so many of us manage to break out and say "no."  Peer pressure is enormous in most people's lives and unfortunately those peers who are bullies and bad actors get by far the most attention and coverage.  Just look at our media to see how this works in real time.  Trump was often covered far more than Obama or Biden when they were actually president.  Those who are most susceptible definitely took notice and got the message that Trump was something special or the media wouldn’t cover him so much, and their loyalty went directly to him.  It still rests there no matter how much those people suffer from Trump's actions.  I do not believe these people are stupid, just willing to follow what is expected of them with as little fuss as possible.  We encourage that kind of compliance and blame people who don't comply as being "bad mothers" or "absent fathers" or "troublemakers" or whatever term those doing the manipulating come up with to shame people back into line.  Thank goodness there have always been people who would resist that shaming and called it what it is "BS."  We need more of that standing up right now, but without insulting too badly, those who have been cowed by the social pressures to conform and comply. 

Related to the many comments about the Trumpian treatment of immigrants, I said, yes, immigrants have always been America's strength, but rarely seen as that until the masses had become used to their presence, their accent as it disappeared, and their different customs.  Unfortunately, many Americans never allowed themselves to "get used to" Black and Native Americans, possibly because those folks had been present here from the beginning.  It was so hard for people who had been groomed to believe in the inferiority of Black and Native peoples, to readjust to the fact that they are at least as intelligent and capable as white folks and due to appalling treatment over the years had become even more resourceful in their efforts to survive.  It seems a whole lot of people like believing in their own superiority and will do nearly anything to keep that false idea alive and kicking.  We saw that on full display in the 2024 election when a woman of color who was eminently qualified ran for president.  I am sure there was some fraud perpetrated by Musk and his AIers, but if the same number of Democrats had come out to vote as had in 2020 for Biden, the Musk cheating would have been obvious and caught.  They didn't and despite all their whining about something or other, the real reason was racism and misogyny, the deep-seated need to keep a woman of color out of high office.  I am guessing we don't think about it much, but it is there and part of nearly everything white people do.  I taught in a disadvantaged school district with about 85% of the students Black, Hispanic, and other people of color.  I told them that it was likely I, as a white woman, would do or say something racist in my time with them, even though unintended because that is how endemic racism works.  I asked them to tell me if/when I did.  I don't know if I did because they never said anything, but I did know it was a definite possibility that racism would raise its ugly head at times.  The mostly white men recruited for ICE are guaranteed steeped in the racism that is endemic and are encouraged by their "leaders" to grow it and use it to "identify" immigrants of color they can snatch (kidnap) and drag off to the prisons that they are told those people deserve for daring to come into this supposedly "white country."  It is clear this is racism and also that our Supreme Court's Roberts 6 embody that racism, even Thomas whom one would think should know better.  ICE operatives are permitted to whine "I was scared for my life" as they murder and brutalize people when they are the only ones armed, masked, and wearing combat gear.  Does that mean white men are more easily damaged than unarmed people of color?  Inquiring minds want to know.   

This issue will not go away.  I am hoping Congress will be sick of the anti-American behavior of ICE and Sec. Noem of the Dept. of Homeland Security, and will totally defund and disband ICE.  ICE is a menace and we all need to think of how we will respond if/when they show up at our door.