Welcome to A Habit of Hope — a weekly practice of optimism and joy. We get inspired, there’s music, and use a set of tools for community and accountability.
Living through this moment is like living in the Upside Down in so many ways. We’re engaging in a trade war with Canada? We’re supplying Russia with passwords and logins to sensitive government data? We’ve got masked ICE agents abducting students on the street in broad daylight?
On that last note, it’s unexpected and encouraging to see conservative thinkers Bill Kristol and David Brooks full-throatedly joining the opposition.
The other day Kristol shared an article on his substack about the brazen arrest of Tufts grad student Rumeysa Öztürk with this post on X:
And yesterday, David Brooks responded to all of it by straight-out calling for Americans to rise up against the government:
"It’s time for a comprehensive national civic uprising. It’s time for Americans in universities, law, business, nonprofits and the scientific community, and civil servants and beyond to form one coordinated mass movement."
So here is something I did not expect to hear myself say: “Let’s join activists Kristol and Brooks in a nationwide protest!”
Find a spot near you TODAY, April 19, and show your patriotism. And if there’s nothing organized locally, grab some friends and stand at your courthouse, city hall, statehouse to declare: NO. This is not the America we want. We care about fair trials, and healthcare, and being a good neighbor to our longtime allies.
Which way?
It’s shocking to see the videos of Americans — visa holders, naturalized residents and citizens alike — grabbed off our streets and taken away. No trial, no phone call — in many cases shackled on a plane and hauled off to CECOT, the notorious “Terrorism Confinement Center” in El Salvador from which, as President Nayib Bukele proudly asserts, no one will ever leave.
The degree to which “sending an accused person to die in a foreign gulag without a trial” is unAmerican is hard to overstate. Throughout our history we have fallen short of many of our ideals, but we have in the past at least claimed we believed in them. We have an entire Bill of Rights designed to protect citizens from their own government. Now we have an administration that openly mocks the notion of due process, even though they already admitted that one notable case — the arrest of Kilmar Abrego Garcia — was an “administrative error.”
Which way, America? Do we keep sliding into the abyss of dictatorship or do we somehow hit the brakes? And if we want to hit the brakes, how do we do it?
How do you respond to a government that disappears people? How do you turn the tide of opinion against them?
Las Madres
Let’s look to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo.
During its Dirty War from 1976-1983, Argentina’s military dictatorship kidnapped and murdered over 30,000 civilians — torturing them in detention centers, executing them by firing squad and dumping them in mass graves, and dropping them from planes. They also abducted over 500 pregnant woman and murdered them after they gave birth, distributing their children to families friendly to the government. It’s truly one of the most horrific chapters in a human history.
On 30 April 1977, after these atrocities had been going on for several years, Azucena Villaflor and a dozen other mothers walked to the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina's capital city, across from the Presidential palace, linking arms in pairs and marching together. Over the next weeks, more mothers joined them. They carried photographs of their missing children and called themselves the “Mothers of the Disappeared.”
From the wikipedia entry about the Mothers:
When the disappearances began, each mother thought that their child's disappearance was a single unique case. Initially, the lack of media coverage of the disappearances led the mothers to believe that they were alone in their plight. As each mother visited prisons, hospitals, and police stations searching for their missing children, they began to notice other mothers who were also searching for their children. The women began to realize that these disappearances were systematic, organized, and planned.
At first, the government mocked them, calling them “las locas.” But they were undeterred. In September 1977, they joined an annual pilgrimage to Our Lady of Luján, 30 miles outside Buenos Aires, wearing as headscarves white diapers with their children’s names embroidered on them in order to stand out from the crowd.
It was politically tricky to crack down on a group of sympathetic mothers. But by 1978, the government decided suppressing their dissent was worth the potential backlash; they kidnapped and murdered founder Azucena Villaflor and other leaders of the group.
Once your children have been taken from you, what more do you have to lose? The Mothers didn’t stop. They protested during the 1978 World Cup, bringing international attention to their cause. They kept protesting for years. In 1980 they created a 24-hour “March of Resistance” in the Plaza. In 1981 they did it again.
In 1983, in the wake of economic devastation and the disaster that was the Falklands War, the military government was finally overthrown.
But the mothers — and now grandmothers, known as Las Abuelas de la Plaza — still gather today, searching for answers, attempting to bring the perpetrators to justice, tracking down by court records and DNA testing children who were taken so long ago.
The Wiki for the Mothers of the Disappeared calls them “a dynamic and unexpected force.” And that is exactly what Bill Kristol and David Brooks are calling for today as we face a stark question. Do we stop government “disappearances” now, when we’re still shaking our heads in disbelief that they are really happening, or do we wait until we, like the Mothers of the Plaza, have nothing left to lose?
Music
“They’re really afraid of these women.” In 1987, U2 released their landmark album The Joshua Tree, which featured this song about the Mothers. This is one of the first times the band sang it live:
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xo Rain
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