I am living in the strangest of paradoxes. A hateful dictator has taken over our country, but today my life looks about the same as yesterday. I wake up in the morning, the sun is shining through my windows, and the birds are singing. I see these bright spring flowers on my walk. And yet, US-made bombs are being targeted on children in Gaza, they are dying in flames or slowly starving because food aid has been locked out by the Israeli government. International students (here in the U.S. on legitimate visas) are being kidnapped and jailed by ICE and threatened with deportation for having spoken up against this genocide in Gaza.

And I can’t stop thinking about Kilmar Abrego Garcia being detained by “administrative error” and sent to the one country his immigration status said he could not be sent to (El Salvador), because of danger from gangs; and now he is trapped in a hellish prison there because the president will not bring him back. This regime is renditioning hundreds of people without trial to this “prison” in El Salvador–and really, without trial it is not a “prison” but an extra-judicial concentration camp. All the people the president sent there should be brought back to the U.S. If some of them are gangsters and criminals, they should face trials–everyone has human rights, or no one does. But the president jokes instead about sending “homegrowns” to El Salvador next.

So since I’ve spoken up publicly about genocide in Gaza, and about immigrants being deprived of human rights, does that mean that they will come for me one day? Maybe it does. But I can’t live my deepest ethics without bridging the gap between the bright sunshine of today’s ordinary morning and the nightmare that is going on all around us, just at a little distance from my house at the moment. Every day I read about more atrocities taking place, and I try to do the little that I can do: to bear witness, to speak up about them, to share my outrage, to protest the injustice. The temptation is to get quiet, to try to hide under the radar. But I do believe, as lesbian poet warrior Audre Lorde said, “Your silence will not protect you.”

The more of us who resist, the more chance we have to reverse this nightmare.