Your twenty-four hours aren't the same as mine

[sovay]

I wrote a rather more restrained letter than I felt when signing CAIR's petition to my members of Congress to intervene for the release of Mahmoud Khalil. I did not use profanity or recall the Palmer Raids. I did invoke American ideals and identify myself as a Jew, since the notion that I should thus cheer the stripping of civil liberties on the grounds of pro-Palestinian activism is revolting and at least two ways racist. I hope the federal order to halt his deportation is effective. This country became something of a specialist in the vanishing of detainees in my lifetime and the Overton window has these jagged holes punched in it.

Comments

[asakiyume]

You've referenced the Overton window before, and somehow I had in mind that it was something like a black hole event horizon, but today I actually looked it up, so now I know... so now I can say, wow, yes. I have never seen things jump from unthinkable to policy in one step like this. As with things like peer pressure, I'm wondering, why does this seem only evident in the negative? Is it never possible in the other direction? Or maybe we don't notice it in a positive direction because to us whatever-it-is wasn't unthinkable in the first place?

And that's probably it with the current administration. Totalitarianism is just fine, A-okay, best-most-efficient way of doing things, so long as they get to be the ones doing the totalitarianing.

[sovay]

Is it never possible in the other direction? Or maybe we don't notice it in a positive direction because to us whatever-it-is wasn't unthinkable in the first place?

Overton windows can slide positively! Civil rights advances are a major example. The sash-rattling reversal of the last few months is a particularly extreme reversion.

And that's probably it with the current administration. Totalitarianism is just fine, A-okay, best-most-efficient way of doing things, so long as they get to be the ones doing the totalitarianing.

I am afraid that last turn of your phrasing gave me instant To Be or Not to Be (1942): "Yes, we do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping."