The crack in the dam and intensive care (plus ways to help now)

When I was 19, I got very sick. I had pneumonia that wouldn’t go away. I was kept in an isolation room in a Chicago area hospital for weeks. My mom, a former nurse who never took any shit, determined the doctors there were not up to the task of healing me. She put me in the back of her Lincoln Continental and drove me to Minnesota. 

She’d had a successful heart procedure at the Mayo Clinic, so she decided, “The Mayo Clinic is gonna fix my kid.” I don’t think Midwesterners have a monopoly on determination. But we have to have a lot of it to spend decades here. Anyway, Mom rolled up to the Mayo Clinic in the middle of the night with me sprawled across the back seat. Spoiler alert, they fixed me (to the extent I could be physically fixed). 

A lot of stuff happened during those long weeks in Rochester, Minn. I will never forget how kind and thorough everyone was. They treated me as a person, not just a pincushion for endless, sometimes scary tests. They explained things to me and listened when I spoke. The doctors, nurses and staff were smart and they cared. They were often tired; the resident who took my history was was exhaustedly excellent. 

It being the Mayo Clinic, the doctors were from all over. But they moved there to help people. As for the nurses and staff who’d been locals for generations, you could rely on them. Safe hands.

What all these smart people decided needed to happen to the abscess inside me was pretty wretched. 

Part of my right lung was damaged beyond repair, and it needed to come out, or I could get much sicker, even die. No 19 year old thinks they are going to die, but some part of me understood how serious it was. I couldn’t sleep. At night, I roamed around the hospital with Fred, my IV drip on wheels. I often ended up in the pediatric ward and reminded myself I had it a lot better than little kids on their sixth operation. 

My lung operation: They cut through every layer of skin and muscle, they broke several ribs, and they cut out part of my lung. Do not recommend. 

I woke up from that operation sure I was dead. Because I could not be alive and in that much pain. I was in and out, but at some point, they moved me into the ICU. And this next part, that’s what kind of broke me when thinking about Alex Pretti. 

But before I get to that next part, let’s not forget something very important: What happened to Pretti is not rare. People are dying in the 200 detention centers in this country. (Those detention centers? You don't hear about them, because the billionaire class and their servants destroyed the media, and also, because you're not supposed to. But think on this: Many are run by for-profit companies who are employing detainees as unpaid forced labor). But exploitation is just the tip of the ICEberg.

Please remember that Victor Manuel Diaz died in ICE custody on Jan. 14. Last fall, they shot Marimar Martinez five times. They killed Isaias Sanchez Barboza in Texas and Silverio Villegas González in Chicago. They've shot 12 people since September. In 2025, 32 people died in ICE custody. That we know of. May Renee Good’s name be a blessing. May we all remember and think about everyone this regime is kidnapping, wounding, traumatizing and killing. May we remember all their families and friends. 

So. The operation that left me with a very long scar down my back. 

The night nurse who cared for me in the ICU was a man. He looked like he might've played football in high school. He was very much a Minnesota Guy. And he was, I think, like Alex. He was unbelievably kind and patient. I have thought about that nurse a lot since those horrible nights. The word “angel” may seem cloying and sentimental. But when you are in the worst pain of your life and a good soul makes it almost bearable, I can’t think of a better word.  

To be professional yet caring and even loving in how you treat people on the worst days of their lives — that’s a gift (that's one reason I watch The Pitt – to see this in action). To choose to work in that environment is something I cannot imagine. I could not do it. My ICU nurse could. I hope every good nurse understands how much of an impact they make simply by doing their jobs with compassion, diligence and intelligence. Despite all the tubes and the pain, I hope I thanked the man who took such good care of me. I’m still grateful. 

This picture of Alex Pretti’s fellow VA colleagues having a moment of silence for him… I just … 

This video… What is there to say?  

Like thousands of folks in Minneapolis (and Chicago, Maine, L.A., Portland, and on and on), he chose to document, observe, help. He did this knowing that his frigid city is full of violent, murderous men. What happened (and is happening) in Chicago brought many residents to a new place in our understanding of how the world works. These monsters tripled their onslaught for Minnesota. 

I would have given Alex a pass — his day job was pretty tough and draining. He didn’t have to be in the streets. But he didn’t give himself a pass. Routinely, he looked after his patients, his colleagues and his community. He was going to the aid of a woman — asking “Are you OK?” — when these murderers shot him. He was on the ground and they shot him 10 times. 

I don’t care what my son does with his life, financially speaking. I know he has a good heart. As he matures, all I really want is for him to model himself after good men, like his father. Like many of our friends and relatives. Like Alex Pretti. 

I’m done with people in power (and their oligarch enablers) giving the worst of us the impunity to take out the rest of us. I'm done with their openly racist, xenophobic agenda of violence and mayhem. Men with guns are ripping our neighbors out of their homes, hurting us, killing us and facing no consequences. When someone who grew up in Russia writes about the state terror we are enduring, you listen.

It galls so many of us that absolute cowards are being paid to terrorize us. As Adam Serwer wrote, "It takes far more courage to stare down the barrel of a gun while you’re armed with only a whistle and a phone than it does to point a gun at an unarmed protester." As I and others have shouted many times outside Broadview, if you're such big men, show us your big manly faces. They don't. They won't. Losers.

But putting the craven foot soldiers aside, companies aplenty are profiting off selling their surveillance tech, off lucrative DHS/ICE/CBP contracts, off those camps run by for-profit companies, where people are being hurt, are dying, and are forced to work for nothing (or almost nothing). There’s no accountability for any of it. The analogies to New Caprica sure aren’t going away.

But there's a crack in the fascist dam. The smug thug Greg Bovino lost his job. That’s the first thing that should happen to him; many other things should happen to him. Of course, he is the symptom, not the whole panoply of diseases, but he was DHS’ staunch bully-boy. He was a pillar of this regime’s reign of terror. That pillar was broken. They are running scared. About fucking time.

As I wrote in December, nobody wants this. Except a bunch of goons, bullies, narcissists, sociopaths and greedy idiots. Except people who refuse to explore and embrace the concepts of empathy, community and solidarity. I hope the people doing this and funding this stop, and make amends for what they’ve done. But right now? The whole game is protecting people from them, removing them from the levers of power and rescinding their paychecks, dismantling the whole machinery of terror, and making sure none of this ever happens again. Removing Bovino is not the endgame, it’s the floor. But damn did it feel good, for a couple hours, to dance a jig on that floor.

The out-of-touch leadership tiers of the Democratic Party, in my adult lifetime, have never come across an urgent opportunity they could not fuck up. (Do they ask for money while they are fucking it up? Do you have to ask?). Regular people pushed them to do this. We push more. We don’t stop. We don't let the powerful cling to the fantasy that the agencies responsible for concentration camps, shooting people in the street and kidnapping five year olds will change with better training. Are these politicians high? The violence is the training. This is what they do – some do it for a paycheck, some do it for the love of the game, but all of them exist to carry out the current administration's campaign of terror and intimidation. So we rip out ICE, root and branch, angry Ent style.

And in case you're wondering, what needs to be done can be done.

As I said on social media, I have years of experience witnessing people who are perceived as powerless coming together to change the world. Through my journalism and the work of others, through their own testimony and stalwart actions (despite justifiable fears), people who were stepped on by the powerful won. They fucking won. Not always, but it's more than possible. People in power, people with loud megaphones, a lot of them want you to think otherwise, but they're wrong.

Many, many times, I have told scared sources two things: "1) Perpetrators’ superpower is they think they are persecuted and that justifies all; 2) the superpower of people working together to reveal patterns of damage comes primarily from place of altruism, which perpetrators cannot or will not understand thus cannot combat." Rebecca Solnit says it all better here.

The thug armies came to cities they fear and hate to teach people a lesson. Speaking for myself, the lesson I learned was not at all what they intended. I learned – again – that we have each other. I saw, again, that whether we're rural or urban or suburban, whatever our backgrounds, we can come together in altruism and love. We are funnier, we are smarter, we have better signs. And we have fucking determination. It's only growing, from what I can see. Paraphrasing what old Ben Kenobi said, "If you strike us down, we shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine."

This country needs not just intensive care but many more corrective operations, physical and mental therapy, and a massive amount of followup care. We won’t be done in our lifetimes. But let's all remember, it's a marathon, not a sprint. Let's take care of each other. And let's put this nation in the back of a Lincoln Continental, drive all night and fight. 

Here are some ways to help communities around the country (and I’m always sharing more links like this on my Bluesky account): 

• A list of fundraisers for the families of those killed by ICE
• Minneapolis Mutual Aid
• Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota 
• Food delivery in Maine
• Maine Solidarity Fund
• Ideas on how to help from LA Taco
• Safe Haven MN helps those who are released from ICE with no resources, no proper winter clothing, etc.
• Get free whistles or send supplies to those making whistles 
• Pilsen Arts and Community House needs supplies and volunteers to make whistle packages for other cities
• Pissing off nurses? Those ghouls really fucked up. Nurses are taking action
• Stand with Minnesota 
• Pilsen PUNO is looking for volunteers to do educational canvassing in Chicago communities
• My pal Marc Bernardin is livestreaming a really cool event Jan 31, check it out
• Please, with your loved ones, make a plan for when It Happens

Love you. Stay safe. Abolish ICE.