ARE YOU OKAY?

SANDI AULT—Reporting from the WILD

Are you okay?

You don’t need to answer that. We all know we’re not okay right now—not individually, not collectively, not kids, not mothers or fathers, not aunts or uncles or grandparents, not old or young. Not in our homes, not on our streets, not in our states, or in our nation. Not yellow, red, brown, black, or white. Not! Not! Not! We are not okay.

We are awash in sorrow and anger, disbelief and outrage, and a sudden sobering to the soaring severity of the new state of play. Our collective hearts are hurting more than most of us can bear right now. And as much as we are suffering from wherever most of us might be at this moment, unless you are there: imagine Minneapolis.

These words: Are you okay?—are reported to be the last words Alex Pretti spoke before his life was snuffed out by a putrid pack of paid assassins.

We saw it on video...from a variety of agonizing angles. We watched his killers in a feral frenzy, twitching with testosterone, fiending as they fixed on him, their civility sold some time ago for a signing bonus and a synthetic sense of self-importance. They thought—what?— that with a license for lawlessness, it didn’t matter how deep beneath decency they descended?

Did they pause to wonder, even, if what they did might matter? Those at the top of the corrupt cabal in our government immediately showed us that it didn’t matter to them, when they spewed poisonous lies about the citizen we lost, and pronounced immunity for the brownshirt butchers. Those charged with upholding rule of law and justice at the pinnacles of our government rushed to exonerate the killers at once, and to defile the good name and reputation of citizen, neighbor, nurse, son and grandson Alex Pretti. A man whose life had immense value. A man who had shown valor by working in the ICU where lives are at stake and a moment’s hesitation and/or one wrong move could cost a life. A man who was there on the streets of his city as a witness, filming the onslaught of evil that Trump and his syndicate of sycophant siphoners of wealth from the American treasury sent to perform political punishment and ostentatious oppression of the people of a state that did not vote for the vile villain at the top of this tyrannical regime.

I have to ask: what are we really looking at here when one moment we are scrolling through the notifications on our phone, still in our jammies on a weekend morning, sipping our coffee...and we suddenly see the searing, soul-wounding video of the violent ending of an innocent civilian on the street of an American city occupied by gestapo goons?

We have all viewed these videos. In our hearts, in our right reasoning, in our deepest knowing, we know what we see, despite the odious attempts to brainwash us by the upper tiers of this tyranny. Trump’s henchmen murdered Alex Pretti with foreknowledge of impunity for that or any other crime of cruelty they might feel the urge to exercise.

We saw this, and because we saw it through the eyes of our most knowing souls, most of us believe our own eyes, despite the follow-on of atrocious lies shot like a fusillade of mind-melding missiles attempting to force their way into our frontal lobes to rewrite our own lived experience. But there is more to this scene that we witnessed than the moving imagery exposing the state-sponsored execution of another innocent citizen.

We are watching a fast-paced, unfathomable undoing of our own personal and shared understanding of who we are. It’s not only the shocking depravity—already beyond our ability to process in real time. Anymore, it’s as if we are living the movie INCEPTION, and the ghouls in the new American Gestapo now invade our every moment and mind space. They barrel through the boundaries of normalcy, they steal our serenity as they seed the collective subconscious with deceit, deception, and distortion, through their incessant incursions into our dreams of democracy.

This unfolds day after day, a colossal new shitload of stuff we have to try to process and respond to. A never-ending news cycle brings a barrage of barbarity. A daily avalanche of atrocities. Remember the confounding shock and horror as we watched the demons demolish the East Wing of the White House? That seems like a million nightmares ago. The pace quickens as the misconduct metastasizes, as the indecency infects every formerly civil process. Injustice and lawlessness flood the foundations and further the rot. They take a wrecking ball to the walls of our ideals and values, our faith in the future. They shatter our alliances across the world. Even our once-proud military proves that it, too, is poisoned—by performing unsanctioned aggressions and international crimes against civilians and overtly toppling regimes in another country to take their wealth.

One moment, several spin cycles ago, we might have been holding onto the hope of the next election and an end to this nightmare of Nazism, and now we see that begin to disappear. Corruption has corroded every corner of the dream, and our faith in those Democrats we chose to lead has fallen with their failure to mount an appropriate response. While promising new leaders (and a scant handful of those in office) rise and ignite inspiration and optimism, the hour is late and the other side has already changed the rules and begun to bombard the bulwarks of American democracy writ large, here in our country, and across the globe.

And now we are seeing innocent American citizens gunned down on the streets of an American city. We are stunned with disbelief when a five-year-old child in a bunny hat is abducted after being used as bait to get his parent to open the door of his home. We are horrified at the footage of armed ogres shooting a priest point-blank in the head with pepper rounds, with gangs of ghouls piled onto a person lying prone in the street while one of the attackers sprays mace into their face. As if this were not enough, now we have a new pattern: escalating cruelty, lawless performative punishment, and cold-blooded murder of residents of a state that did not support Trump.

Make no mistake. This is retribution, the worst, cruel and relentless penalizing by a despotic dictator for purely political reasons. It has nothing to do with anything else. There is no border crisis in Minnesota, nor in Maine. There is no immigrant or crime issue that local officials can’t respond to appropriately in either of those states. There is no reason why any American city should be occupied by a domestic force of terrorists, roaming the streets in mobs of masked gunmen, eager to apply cruelty, terror, and even murder.

How is the United States today different than a drug cartel’s domain—controlled with coercion, corruption, self-enriching, seizing of assets and demanding donations to the boss and his lieutenants, and maintained by sicarios—hitmen executing violence, kidnapping, and murder?

I can’t begin to count how much we all lost when we watched the videos of the president’s paid assassins gunning Alex Pretti down in the street in Minneapolis. Apart from the loss of a beloved precious person, a healer, a neighbor, and a loving son...apart from the violent extinguishing of a life well lived and full of continued promise, a man already saintly for so many lives saved...apart from the world’s loss of a man who daily waded into trauma to save veterans’ lives, a kind spirit who loved his dog companion and the outdoors...in addition to and because of all that, we lost all hope that all of this can end soon or end well.

Many among us wanted to believe that if we worked relentlessly for justice...if we informed and educated...if we stood up and spoke out and engaged with our communities that we could magically vote our way out of this, beginning later this year... and that ultimately it could be over two years after that, if we just fought hard enough to defend our democracy.

I know now, and surely so do you, that this is going to demand so much more of each and every one of us than just working to elect another congress under the current conditions. I know, and surely so do you, that this is going to be a battle for the soul of democracy, as President Joe Biden said. And that we are going to have to stand up in astounding numbers, together, in peaceful protest, in national strikes, in new alliances, with locked arms and for long days, and like the citizens of Minneapolis, maybe in freezing cold, and perhaps elsewhere in extreme heat, everywhere for as long as it takes, in unrelenting devotion to the ideals this country was founded upon.

We must sacrifice the comfort of any illusion that this is not fascism descended upon us and forming up as the fourth Reich. We have to sacrifice our sense of safety and go together into the streets in massive demonstrations to shut down the wheels that are turning too fast towards an irreversible point of total takeover. We are going to have to suffer the loss of comfort—physically, and especially financially—as we strike, stop work, stop buying, and start donating...and stand shoulder to shoulder in solidarity.

And if our neighbors and community members made the mistake of buying into the MAGA mirage and are now wavering, we must welcome them with open arms into the fight, into the fold, into the future we must be prepared to create together at all costs from the ground up again. A future not just repaired but renewed, remade and reinforced with new bulwarks, bastions, and buttresses designed to forever uphold and defend justice, equality, freedom, decency, and real and true democracy.

And on this day, and on the day we relight the torch of true democracy in this nation, let us say the names of those citizens who paid the ultimate price to ignite our dedication to defend against fascism and recreate our dream of democracy:

Keith Porter

Renee Nicole Good

Alex Pretti

We must rise together today and stand together physically, spiritually, financially, and politically. It is the surest way out of this nightmare. It will ask everything of us—more even than we have already paid with the loss of these saintly souls and the cruelty thousands more have endured. It will demand the best of us, and we will rise to it. Because this is who we want to be. This is who we are. We are America.

And if anyone asks, “Are you okay?”...after all this...let us prepare, let us plan, let us engage in the endeavor that will ensure that we will one day again be able to answer:

YES

Photos of Alex Pretti’s hospital colleagues holding a moment of silence in his honor, Kaivan Shroff, SUBSTACK, https://substack.com/@kaivanshroff/note/c-205493781