The image of a child by Ruth Neuwald Falcon

When I was a little girl, there were nights when something in me that I couldn’t articulate needed a special kind of soothing. “Another blanket,” I would say to my parents as I lay in my bed. “I want another blanket.” And then another, and another, until all the wool blankets (no fleece in those days) were pulled out of the linen closet and layered on top of me. I remember the comfort of their weight and the rare laughter the three of us shared as the pile grew on top of my small form.

There is now recognition that trauma and other mental health conditions can be eased with the use of a weighted blanket. I feel like the whole country needs one.

I can barely remember what I was like before Donald Trump. And more and more… none of us in this country can remember what we were like before Donald Trump, which is a kind of trauma. — Michael Wolff

A 1943 image of a child haunts me as I read about the middle-of-the-night raid on a Chicago apartment house. He’s known as the Warsaw Ghetto boy, a child with terror in his eyes and his hands raised above his head as an SS officer points a machine gun toward him.

Federal agents rappelled from Black Hawk helicopters. Dozens of others, their faces hidden behind masks, arrived in moving trucks… Hundreds of agents swarmed apartments in the multi-story building, detaining several American citizens, including children, for hours and netting 37 total arrests. The outcome of those arrests remains unclear. — USA Today

Armed federal agents in military fatigues busted down their doors overnight, pulling men, women and children from their apartments, some of them naked, residents and witnesses said… A similar raid was carried out in suburban Elgin, when agents led by U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem rode in a military vehicle and blew down the front door of a home where they detained six people, including two U.S. citizens. — Chicago Sun-Times

That picture of the little boy in the Warsaw ghetto. How did the Polish citizenry allow it to happen? How are we allowing this to happen? I saw a video this afternoon of a woman passionately shouting at whoever those masked men were, taking away one of her neighbors: This is wrong, she cried. How do you sleep at night?

Indeed. How do any of us sleep at night? All the weighted blankets in the world wouldn’t be enough to erase the images of what is being done in this country today. Nor should we deceive ourselves that we are safe from their depredations. Any student of history will tell you that once authoritarianism takes hold, no one is safe. My grandparents—well-to-do, thoroughly assimilated into German society, educated—thought they were safe. Until it became clear that they weren’t, and by then it was too late for them to get out.

Indifference is always the friend of the enemy, for it benefits the aggressor—never his victim, whose pain is magnified when he or she feels forgotten. — Elie Wiesel

The next No Kings Day of protests is Saturday, October 18. We the people must show up in numbers that can’t be ignored. It is not the president we need to reach; he is unreachable. His enablers are not. Nor are they protected by the Supreme Court. The sooner they realize that there is a price to be paid for being on the wrong side of history, the sooner the tide will turn.