I'd feel like a hypocrite, but I was outraged before

It's just that now I'm outraged, shaking, nauseated, and Not Crying.

If you buy into the Many Worlds Intepretation of quantum physics, there must be a parallel universe in which I crossed the US/Canada border without incident last Tuesday. In some other dimension, I was not waved over by a cluster of border guards who swarmed my car like army ants for no apparent reason; or perhaps they did, and I simply kept my eyes downcast and refrained from asking questions.

Along some other timeline, I did not get out of the car to ask what was going on. I did not repeat that question when refused an answer and told to get back into the vehicle. In that other timeline I was not punched in the face, pepper-sprayed, shit-kicked, handcuffed, thrown wet and half-naked into a holding cell for three fucking hours, thrown into an even colder jail cell overnight, arraigned, and charged with assaulting a federal officer, all without access to legal representation (although they did try to get me to waive my Miranda rights. Twice.). Nor was I finally dumped across the border in shirtsleeves: computer seized, flash drive confiscated, even my fucking paper notepad withheld until they could find someone among their number literate enough to distinguish between handwritten notes on story ideas and, I suppose, nefarious terrorist plots. I was not left without my jacket in the face of Ontario’s first winter storm, after all buses and intercity shuttles had shut down for the night.

In some other universe I am warm and content and not looking at spending two years in jail for the crime of having been punched in the face.

But that is not this universe.

Peter Watts is a friend of mine. Not a close friend, necessarily, but a good one; I try my best to see him whenever I'm in Toronto. I'm appalled and furious and worried and generally incapable of writing a good post about this. I'm not sure I could say anything I haven't already said at one time or another about people I do NOT know who were subjected to this kind of treatment, and I probably said it better then. So I will let other people speak for me right now.

David Nickle, via Boing Boing:

The charge is spurious. But it's also very serious. It could mean two years in prison in the United States, and a ban on travel in that country for the rest of Peter's life. Peter is mounting a vigorous defense, but it's going to be expensive - he's effectively going up against the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and he needs the best legal help that he can get.

He's got that help, courtesy of one of the top criminal lawyers in the State of Michigan. We, Peter's friends and colleagues here in Canada, want to make sure he gets the help he needs financially to come out of this nightmare whole.

The need for that help is real. While Peter is a critically successful science fiction writer, he is by no means a best-selling author. Without help, the weight of his legal fees could literally put him on the street by spring.

We can't let that happen. So there's going to be fundraising.

Donate (and read some of Peter's work) here.

And - I don't normally say things like this. But in the words of coffeeem

Don't tell me Watts should have known better. He's a free, law-abiding citizen of a free country, who has a right to believe in the rule of law and reasonable behavior in the nation right next to his. If you tell me he asked for it, he deserved it, what happened to him was justified by his actions, I swear I will ban you from this goddamn journal. Because that could have been any of us.

ETA: It occurs to me in retrospect that if his cel phone is sitting in an evidence bag somewhere I may have just painted a large target on my ass. And you know what? I don't much care right now.

Chilling Effects

cristalia nails it. In fact, she nails it to the wall, with precision and elegance and very sharp and dangerous pain.

Let me tell you a little story about the cold.

In 1990 in Saskatchewan, a 17-year-old boy named Neil Stonechild was found frozen to death in a field outside Saskatoon. He had last been seen, handcuffed and bloodied, being packed into the back of a squad car.

Ten years later, two more Native men were found frozen to death outside the city in a single week. A third came forward with a story of being driven around outside the city by the police and threatened. There was a public inquiry. Two police officers on the Saskatoon force were ultimately charged and lost their positions.

There's a name for this thing. It's called a starlight cruise.

...

See, here's the thing about living in a cold-weather society. You stick together, because you have to: it's you against the winter. That is, on a certain level, the basic division of life. That's where the concept of the Wendigo comes from. A wendigo is famine, starvation, greed; the insatiable need to eat until you eat the members of your own society. Wendigo are creatures of the cold, the North. They are supernatural, but a human being can become one, if they resorted to cannibalism.

A wendigo is what happens when human beings turn away from their own and throw in with winter.

These are the worst sins of a cold-weather society, the ones that are irredeemable: siding with winter. Feeding off your own. Taking another person as prey, or leaving them as prey for the winter, in jeans and a shirt with no wool coat or scarf or hat; with no lined gloves and no transit home, knowing full well what the winter does.

And she's right. This is the part that was making me feel truly sick, earlier, and still is, though I couldn't articulate it at all, even to myself. Certainly not that well, though it does explain why I felt myself compelled to buy someone a hot drink so that they could stay inside the coffeeshop for another hour or two, earlier, and why that was what made the knot in my guts untie a bit.

As random said to me earlier: you could almost, if you looked at it sideways, find excuses for the beating. For the pepper spray. Peter's a tall and an imposing guy. Border guards are human and they can be frightened, or succumb to the pressure of the group.

Only almost, and not very good excuses, but at least it's a thing people DO. They overreact. They do stupid, vicious, violent things in the moment.

They took his coat. With lots of time to think better of it. In a blizzard. And then they, in their nice warm uniform jackets and hats and gloves, went back inside to their nice heated building, and they left a fellow human out there. Because they could. At least they didn't throw water on him. I suppose we're meant to be grateful; and I am, though to the Universe, not to them. It's been known to happen.

Like cristalia, I'm scared of that. Any sane human being who has lived through a 'real' winter is scared of that. We're meant to be scared of that. This is what Insufficient Deference will get you. Placate the Windigo, or join them, or be food for them.

And now I am going to go and get a hot drink, and remind myself that Peter Watts is somewhere warm and safe right now, and pray for those who are not. And for courage in the face of winter, and in the face of Windigo, when and as needed.

ETA: Peter says: Some are concluding that, when I was “dumped across the border in shirtsleeves”, I had to walk across the Blue Water Bridge in a snowstorm without my coat. No. The bridge is on the US side of the border, which they had to drive me across to dump me on the other side of; and Canadian Customs was on that other side. This was no Starlight Cruise; I was not exposed to the weather unprotected for an inordinately long time. Still. It’s winter. And they have my coat.

I am glad he didn't have to cross that bridge on foot. It is one long damned bridge. But it doesn't, really, change as much as all that. People do not leave people outside in the cold with no coat, no money, and no phone. Not in winter.