“I think it’s really scary this is going on,” said Nicole Micheroni. “I think it says they’re not being careful.”
When Massachusetts resident Nicole Micheroni received an email on Friday from the federal government telling her to leave the country, she was baffled.
“At first I thought it was for a client, but I looked really closely and the only name on the email was mine,” said Micheroni. “So it said my parole status had been terminated and I should leave the country within seven days.”
But the 40-year-old is a U.S. citizen, born in Newton and raised in Sharon.
Mutual aid works well as an exchange of small favors, goods, and monetary assistance. Your alternator breaks down and you have no money. 10 people chip in to help pay for the part. Someone who knows cars donates their time to install it. That’s how mutual aid works in the real world.
Something like the Black Panthers existed in a very specific historical circumstance. They existed in a handful of dense black neighborhoods with deep social roots going back generations. It doesn’t really translate to the way most people in the US live, in low density sururban sprawl.
If ICE knocks on your door, there isn’t going to be time to call for aid. And setting up checkpoints on roads? You’re living in a fantasy world.
Odds are, you will sound like a British loyalist a century from now, who thought things would never change in their British colony. We live in a “fantasy world”, where a mad king is sending the innocent to die in El Salvador without reason nor justice.
The only question is at what point people discard the things that they lived by. Common sense, the rules, whom they believed in, and more.