A peek into the printer that runs for 15 hours a day in my basement.

In the early days of Covid, when nobody knew anything—when we washed our mail, when everything seemed dangerous, when nothing was available—I made masks. Hundreds of them, a sewing machine permanent on the only table in our small house. I'd bag them and take them to friends and neighbors, tossing them onto their porches and stoops. Eventually, when I felt OK going into the post office, I'd mail them to groups that needed them. The Navajo Nation got packs from me, an org in Chicago for homeless LGBTQA+ youth, a teen mental health facility in Minneapolis. Anywhere I could find, I sent.

Because back then—back in those uncertain, frightening, early days—we were all we had.

As I write this, my freezing-cold basement is filled with the chipper hum of a 3d printer making whistles. Hundreds of whistles now, thousands. All bright oranges and pinks and greens and blues, a full spectrum rainbow, tiny and loud. At the beginning of the year I got jumped into a crew printing whistles at a remarkable clip. They've shipped nearly 100,000 this month. 2500 of those printed by me over the course of the last few weeks, sent coast to coast in packets of 100, 200. The thousand I sent to Minneapolis with folks from Chicago who went up took three days to finish. Five hours to make a hundred, I run the printer 15 hours a day.

Because right now, like back then, we are all we have.

The printer chirps away as I do the work that needs to happen to actually make it through a day, even while my brain feels like its on fire from the latest updates from Minneapolis. Updates not just from the news, but over texts and signal chat and DMs from friends spread across the Twin Cities. The come in urgent and hot and each one triggers the same impetus in me: to help.

The Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St Paul are among my core places. I've been traveling there since I was a teenager, enamored by its tight-knit punk scene back in the day and now by its resiliency and spirit and independence. I have so many friends there—true ride-or-die types, friend-to-the-end types—and I've spent a lot of time checking in with them as the nightmare of the federal occupation (ten times the size of the one we lived through in Chicago) has unfolded. To a person they are very much Not Okay.

Every single of one them has had abductions happen on their block, to their neighbors, right in front of them. Their kids have seen their classrooms empty out, remote school instituted like there's another plague. They all know the smell of tear gas, the burn of pepper in the air. One described the number of abandoned cars, windows smashed. Another described a neighbor screaming out. All of them talk of helicopters, the endless helicopters. They talk about trying to stay safe, knowing that none of them are. They talk about how hard it all is. How they don't feel like they can make it through. They talk about how angry they are. How angry every person they know is. They talk about how they feel abandoned, left to fend for themselves.

Abandoned, left to fend for ourselves. If this feels familiar, it's because that's what it felt like during the lonely early months of Covid too.

Today, if Democrats talk about the masked goons snatching us off the streets at all it's couched in terms of training and of equipment. They talk about body cameras as if every one of the Fed's abuses aren't filmed by a half dozen normal-ass people armed with a whistle and a phone. They talk about better training as if the agent who killed Renee Good wasn't a veteran of the force, not one of its new barely-trained recruits. They talk as if they don't have eyes, don't have ears. They talk as if they haven't seen the things that we see every day, some outside our doors and others in social channels and chats and livestreams. They talk, so disconnected from reality, that they may as well be discussing a different planet. A different world. A different life.

And so it's just us. We are all we have.

But we're doing it. They have come to the Twin Cities with 2000, 3000 troops and the people of Minneapolis St Paul have answered back with tens of thousands more. The call for help goes out, and it gets answered by so many. The people lining up to help support those in Minnesota is legion. Everywhere you look there are people—regular-ass people like you, like me—standing up to literal troops, everyone knowing full well how it could go and doing it anyway.

Nobody should have to do this.

But we do it.

It seems impossible to imagine right now, but eventually the feds will leave the Twin Cities the same way they did Chicago: suddenly and surprisingly (and also not completely). The surge will end, the tide will go out, and the aftermath will linger for a long, long time.

And then the goons will go elsewhere.

Maybe to your town. Maybe back to mine. We'll be ready. We will take what we learned in Minneapolis the same way we took what we learned in Chicago, and apply it to the next place. To your place. To mine.

The time to organize for that is right now. Talk to friends, talk to family, have a plan.

But beyond that: There are people in your community, today, doing the work that needs to be done. Reach out to the immigrant rights organizations that exist in your town and your region. They are already preparing for what feels inevitable. Find out how you can help. Find the food banks and pantries in your area, ask what you can do. Source whistles now, not just one but enough for your family and friends and neighbors, your clubs and church groups and whoever else. Find the mutual aid groups. Find who is delivering groceries to homes. These groups, these people, they all exist, near you, right now.

Minneapolis needs your help, your money, your supplies, absolutely right now. But so does the community you live in.

We are all we have and the more you do, today, to reach out in your neighbors, your town, your community, the better off everyone is.

Right now feels impossible, and unfortunately there's a lot of impossible still to come. There's no fast fix, no one easy trick to defeating fascism.

But.

But honestly I've never felt more hopeful that we actually have what it takes. That we can do the impossible, even when it seems insurmountable.

Because what it takes is us.