Don't Lose the Plot
some rambling thoughts on Ice + the Internet. this one's a doozy.
It’s currently -33 degrees outside. That isn’t a typo. My children are home from school and the air outdoors is so bitingly cold that they can’t go sledding or tromp through the piles of snow. We are curled inside, safe and warm, watching endless How to Train Your Dragon and stuffing ourselves with oatmeal cookies.
We are so, so lucky, and it brings to mind the GK Chesterton quote that “the most extraordinary thing in the world is an ordinary man and an ordinary woman and their ordinary children.”
The other day I was indulging in a little scroll session when I saw a friend post a harshly-worded rant about Catholics “staying silent” about ICE. Let’s call her Sarah (her name is not Sarah). She called anyone who was not consistently sharing Instagram stories about the terrible situation in Minnesota a bigot and told them to fuck off. She said that they will be held accountable in front of Jesus when they die and that they probably would have given up Anne Frank for cash.
I don’t regularly share posts about political situations online because in the year of our Lord 2026, I am tired of being bamboozled by AI and old videos and liars and trends. I’ve been caught with egg on my face enough times to know that a quick “share” of a little video clip is not going to help that much. And so I wondered, for a moment, if she meant me. I shared a photo of a little boy that ICE took from his driveway. He was five and he had a Spiderman backpack. There was no order of deportation against him; he had papers.
We were just saving him from the freezing cold, someone on the internet says.
Would you just let a burglar come on in and rob your house? someone on the internet says.
There’s a difference between your neighbor and a burglar. Hope that helps, someone on the internet says.
I spent all day pondering this: Liam and Sarah. She isn’t a dear friend I see all the time but she’s someone I’ve shared some significant life moments with. I thought of Sarah at the grocery store as I picked out soup, I thought of her as I drove one child to soccer practice and another to Girl Scouts, and I thought of her as I vacuumed under the kitchen table. I thought of Liam as I emptied my daughter’s Frozen backpack, scolding her for not finishing her beef stick at snack time.