Reading this below on the 36th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall and by extension the symbolic end of the GDR, the place I grew up in... with neighbors and parents of classmates belonging to the Stasi (east German secret police), the fear my own parents might be disappeared — years later seeing the thickness of the files of surveillance materials the state/stasi had collected on my family... remembering early autumn 1989, joining friends protesting in the streets every Monday after school, every week more and more people joining, from all walks of life, slowly replacing our fear with a feeling of invincibility, then the unthinkable (positive) happening in early November... the wall falling, driving into West Berlin for the first time the day after (and getting stuck in the largest traffic jams the country has ever known). The '90s were born that day and anything seemed possible...
Reading this post by @aphyr is intensely moving, not just today, and in many ways the situation already is so, so much worse and so much more brutal, more like 1930/40s Germany and numerous other dictatorships throughout the 20th century...
I Want You to Understand Chicago
https://aphyr.com/posts/397-i-want-you-to-understand-chicago
"I write to leave a record, to stare at the track of the tornado. I write to leave a warning. I write to call for help."
"I want you to understand, regardless of your politics, the historical danger of a secret police. What happens when a militia is deployed in our neighborhoods and against our own people. Left unchecked their mandate will grow; the boundaries of acceptable identity and speech will shrink. I want you to think about elections in this future. I want you to understand that every issue you care about—any hope of participatory democracy—is downstream of this."
(via @timbray)
