It was several days after Alex Pretti was murdered. The silver haired, professional White woman in her seventies was driving home from taking a friend, suffering cancer, to a much needed breakfast out in Minneapolis. As a luminary trauma expert, who has herself survived abuse, sex trafficking and institutional abuse, and who was at the time also suffering a complex illness, she carefully avoided the areas were ICE and Federal agents were confronting mourners and protestors. She was startled, then, when in the outskirts, driving past four parked cars, she was ordered to stop by a masked man.
“Do you live with garbage?” was the first thing she was asked and the vicious taunt was continued two more times. While she was kept there, another masked man pulled a man out of his car, seemingly without asking for ID, threw him howling to the ground, grinding down his head as seems to be the way these men are trained to operate against all humane and legal standards. The Federal Agent took a picture of her license plate, demanded her driver’s license, and wrote down some details. Proving himself the goon he was apparently expected to be, he shouted to his counterpart to show his victim what pain really is and so the second Federal agent stepped on the agonized man’s back with his heavy boots while my friend was interrogated for the next 20 minutes before being let go. She understood as she drove away, shaking, that he was questioning her relationship with Somali people, with whom, as it happened, she has had close working relationships in the last years and that the Agent had her address and she was, once again, like too many others, many very dear to her, no longer safe in the world.
When I asked my friend with whom I have walked the healing path for so many years, if she had reported this, it was clear she had not and could not, but would be very agreeable to my reporting it as long as she was kept safe. Our hope is that through reporting yet another illegal, criminal event, which I have done to the Minnesota authorities and more so, also to several in Congress who are now responsible for withholding funding for the Department of Homeland Security unless it meets, at the least, the basic human, constitutional requirements, (see below). And so, I also write about it here.
We can’t know in advance what is going to break us, what is going to take us down. Having spent so many years holding communities together, protecting whoever comes into our purview, continually asking, contemplating, this phrase that must be familiar to you by now – How do we meet these times? – it was a shock to me that this attack on my friend undid me and I needed to know how to restore balance and some wisdom in order to sustain a sanctuary for all beings.
One of our Daré members, Brian (Waldo) Pritchard has gifted the community a labyrinth, where in the tradition of the ancient Greeks and Egyptians, one might walk the paths in order to come to an understanding of a question one is carrying through inner contemplation. One holds the question, walks in meditation to the center of the complex path, listens deeply, makes an offering, then walks out often with a sense of a response from the spirits and the natural world.
The arbitrary and irrational detention of my friend, albeit for a very short period of time, wherein she was subject to witnessing the torture of another human being, most probably, also, for no reason whatsoever, demands that we find ways to shift the balance of power away, difficult as it may seem, from the official current gangsterism. Walking the labyrinth, I didn’t want to be naïve or Pollyanna about our possibilities nor was I willing to be dismissive of the potential of aligning our hearts and determination with spirit, Earth and beauty. I needed help. The labyrinth could provide it.
What was in my mind as I walked was my understanding that we are all responsible.
When I exited the labyrinth, I was understanding that though I am an elder, I am also not the only one responsible for protecting the community. I wasn’t the only one responsible to figure it out because it can’t be accomplished alone. We need everyone to participate in resisting safely and peaceably in small, interconnected groups, in whatever ways we can, in ecologically bound, mycorrhizal entities, nourishing the human and the more than human as we devise new or restore the old, old ways to live that undermine the criminal mind, what Senator Jon Ossoff has just called Epstein Mind and we know what that means. According to Congressman Tom Lieu, in the Epstein files, “… there are highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children. Of Donald Trump threatening to kill children. So I encourage the press to look at these allegations.…” he said.
Alarmed as I believe we all are by the moral and ethical perversions of the current administration, many of us have seen the unnerving similarities between the rise of the Third Reich and the 2nd Trump regime. A friend from Berlin sent me this photograph of as early as 1938, the reconstruction of Berlin into what was to be called Germania began. Hitler intended to have an Arch of Triumph to signify the center of the world. Here is a drawing as he and Albert Speer, his architect, imagined it. Not too dissimilar, if not as high, as Trump’s hoped for 250’ tower.
A far more disturbing is this link from Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, February 7, 2026:
“On Tuesday, February 3, 2026 more than a thousand people turned out for the Surprise City, AZ, Council meeting to oppose the establishment of the federal detention center. One of the speakers reminded the council of Ohrdruf, the first Nazi camp liberated by U.S. troops, on April 4, 1945. He said:
“The U.S. Army brought the leading citizens of Ohrdruf to tour the facility, which turned out to be part of the Buchenwald network of concentration camps. A U.S. Army colonel told the German civilians who viewed the scenes without muttering a word that they were to blame. One of the Germans replied that what happened in the camp was ‘done by a few people,’ and ‘you cannot blame us all.’ And the American, who could have been any one of our grandfathers, said: ‘This was done by those that the German people chose to lead them, and all are responsible.’
“The morning after the tour, the mayor of Ohrdruf killed himself. And maybe he did not know the full extent of the outrages that were committed in his community, but he knew enough. And we don’t know exactly how ICE will use this warehouse. But we know enough. I ask you to consider what the mayor of Ohrdruf might have thought before he died. Maybe he felt like a victim. He might have thought, ‘How is this my fault? I had no jurisdiction over this.’ Maybe he would have said, ‘This site was not subject to local zoning, what could I do?’ But I think, when he reflected on the suffering that occurred at this camp, just outside of town, that those words would have sounded hollow even to him. Because in his heart he knew, as we do, that we are all responsible for what happens in our community.”
***
On Friday, February 12, 2026 conscious legislators will attempt to impose very reasonable and familiar restrictions on ICE and DHS so they resemble our police and not Stormtroopers. Here are some of what is being requested:
1. No arrest or detention or entering private property without a judicial warrant for a verified criminal and certainty the individual is not a U.S. Citizen.
2. No face masks or coverings.
3. DHS officers must display their agency, unique ID number and name.
4. No enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches and places of worship, polling places, courts.
5. Stop racial profiling. No activity based upon an individual’s presence at certain locations, their job, their spoken language, accent, their race and ethnicity.
6. Preserve the State and local jurisdiction’s ability to investigate and prosecute potential crimes and use of excessive force incidence. Preserve evidence and share with jurisdictions. No large scale operations without consent of States and localities.
7. Detention must occur in humane structures, with sufficient food, sleeping conditions, bathrooms, medical care, necessary medicines, and access to person’s attorney and habeas corpus. Children are not to be detained or mistreated in any way.
8. Body cameras for accountability. No tracking, creating or maintaining databases of individuals participating in constitutionally protected activities.
9. Uphold reasonable use of force policy only when officer is really threatened. In the event of an incident, officer is identified and removed from the field while investigations are conducted.
10. No paramilitary police. Regulate and standardize uniforms and equipment carried during enforcement operations undertaken with responsible supervision to bring them in line with civil enforcement.
***
To try to hold all of this in our minds and hearts and try to find our own ways to act asks a great deal of everyone. But to understand that we are all responsible is actually to deepen our own individual sense of responsibility. It means we each look continuously toward ways we each in our own ways, individually and collectively can protect and assist our neighbors, all the beings who live alongside us and on this planet.
You might want to consider this as you trace a labyrinth. Here is a visual image of a labyrinth you can follow with your finger that may bring you to the same insight.
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