STOP CALLING IT NORMAL: (Part One)
How to Refuse Power That’s Gone Off-Leash
Power that fears limits will always invent emergencies.
It will call them borders, threats, invasions, disorder—anything but what they are: excuses.
When an agency like Immigration and Customs Enforcement begins acting beyond the law, it isn’t strength—it’s panic. Law exists to restrain power, not to decorate it. The moment enforcement stops answering to courts, warrants, or accountability, it stops being protection and starts being force.
We have been trained to accept this as normal.
It is not.
Authoritarianism doesn’t arrive with a trumpet. It arrives with expanded authority, blurred oversight, and people too tired to object. It thrives when citizens are told there is nothing they can do—while being shown exactly how much is being done to them.
This is not about left or right.
This is about legitimacy.
A government that breaks its own rules teaches the public a dangerous lesson: that law is optional for those with power. That lesson does not stay contained. It spreads. It corrodes everything it touches.
We refuse that inheritance.
We insist on memory over amnesia.
Process over panic.
Human dignity over bureaucratic cruelty.
If the law is to mean anything, it must apply upward—not only downward. And if it no longer does, then the obligation is not obedience, but resistance through exposure, record, and relentless insistence on accountability.
We are not waiting for collapse.
We are documenting it—and demanding repair.
This piece is part of the series Stop Calling It Normal. The full archive lives here → The Gathering Place