Bruised but unbroken in Charlotte

The story of a strange week

I really didn’t want to write this column, and I definitely didn’t want to write it here. I mentioned just a few weeks ago that I want the Writing Shed to be a place where we come to marvel at the world, to laugh, to enjoy music and books and European detective shows.

But I can’t let the events of the last week here in Charlotte pass without saying something. I’ve lived here 36 years and this place is dear to me.

So here’s my compromise: This week I’m going to separate my list of 10 shareables into a separate post. I’ll publish that one Sunday morning. That way, if you just want to see the more fun stuff, you can skip this post and still read that one.

Now then. If you’re willing to go forward, let’s talk about immigrants and the Border Patrol and the giant waste of time and money and stress visited upon this great city.

***

It’s possible, I guess, that the Border Patrol/ICE raids in Charlotte over the past week were a political success. The polls and the midterms will tell us that. But in every other way they failed. They were a moral failure. They were an ethical failure. They were a failure of common decency. They were a failure of democracy. They were a failure based on their own stated goals.

They were even a literary failure.

They called the operation “Charlotte’s Web.”

I mean, I understand why. It’s the most obvious phrase that includes the word “Charlotte.” It continues our current government’s theme of trying to sound clever and cruel at the same time, like naming the detainee prison in Florida “Alligator Alcatraz.”

But what was immediately clear, after watching these people attempt to terrorize our city, is that nobody involved in this operation has ever read the book CHARLOTTE’S WEB, or otherwise absorbed what the book is about.

CHARLOTTE’S WEB, like all great works of art, is about many things. But it has two core themes:

• Friendship is one of our greatest virtues—especially when we reach out to someone different than ourselves.

• The whole community prospers when everyone sacrifices to help one another out.

Armed agents stalking the streets, chasing down and handcuffing immigrants, is the opposite of friendship and community, the opposite of everything CHARLOTTE’S WEB teaches.

It should be noted that the Homeland Security press release celebrating the arrests of “the worst of the worst” listed detainees who … are not the worst of the worst. They arrested 370 people but just 44 had criminal records. The criminals they highlighted didn’t include a single murderer, rapist, or even a drug dealer. One man had been arrested for domestic violence. There were a couple of assaults. The most common conviction was DUI.

I suspect if you hauled in any random group of 370 people from Charlotte, you’d turn up a similar batch of criminal records. Maybe the Border Patrol would like to sweep one of the big Baptist churches this Sunday morning, just to compare and contrast.

But the point of all this was not to actually catch criminals. It was to scare people—not just the undocumented immigrants who populate all of our cities and towns, but the ordinary American citizens who wonder what reason our government will make up to start coming after the rest of us.

Case in point: A friend took video of agents breaking the window of a car in our neighborhood to arrest two women inside. Their crime: They had been following the agents around, honking their horn to warn people they were coming.

I want to take just a second to talk about the ICE and Border Patrol agents who did the dirty work. They are easy to hate, and I’m sure some of them believe they are on the side of righteousness. But I can’t help but wonder how many signed up thinking they would be doing something meaningful, like keeping drug cartels out of our country, only to find themselves chasing some terrified construction worker across a Home Depot parking lot.

The job corrodes the soul.

I am proud of the way ordinary people in Charlotte responded.

There were the usual marches and protests on street corners and such. But my favorite stories were smaller, more personal. People stood lookout outside the beloved Manolo’s Bakery in case anybody but customers showed up. A woman pushed back against Border Patrol agents who showed up at her home to question two men putting up her Christmas decorations. “Get the hell out of my yard, you assholes!” she yelled as they drove off.

Our immigration system is broken. But it’s broken in the opposite way that all these raids would make you think. The major problem is not that we can’t keep criminals out. The major problem is that there’s no easy way for enough law-abiding immigrants to get in.

Every day those of us lucky enough to be born here depend on undocumented immigrants to build our houses, take care of our children, cook our takeout, pick our vegetables, landscape our yards, and do a thousand other jobs that keep our entire economy afloat.

And in exchange, our government tries to scare them off just to score a few political points.

I think it’s clear who “the worst of the worst” are.

***

Last Saturday was one of the strangest days I can remember. It was the day of the annual Charlotte Marathon. Part of the route runs just one street over from our house. Every year there’s a block party out there, with beer and a band and dozens of people cheering the runners on. I’ve been laid up for a bit with a bum knee, but I could hear the joyous noise from my porch.

We also live just a few blocks from Central Avenue, which has long been Charlotte’s main international corridor. As I scrolled my phone that morning I saw the Border Patrol arresting people just down the road from our house.

Now that they’re gone, if they’re gone, I can’t help but think of the waste they left behind. Thousands of immigrant kids stayed home from school all week. Dozens of businesses closed or restricted their hours. Families were afraid to work or shop or even go outside for fear they’d be caught in some random sweep.

It’s still not even clear why the Border Patrol was deployed here in the first place. We’re 1,500 miles from Mexico. Crime is down here, as it is in most big cities, despite the perception otherwise. About the only thing I can think of is that we’re a blue city with a black mayor in a state with a Democratic governor, and these are the places the people in charge of our country want to hurt.

Well, it hurt.

It will continue to hurt those families trying to find out where their loved ones are detained. It will continue to hurt the ones who will have to decide if they should remain in a country whose government so clearly wants them gone.

But it doesn’t hurt just them.

I can’t help but think it hurts some of those agents—not all, but some—who are going to have a little more trouble sleeping at night.

I can’t help but think it hurts some of those people—not all, but some—who voted for an administration that doesn’t care how many lives it ruins.

I can’t help but think it hurts a country where so many of its citizens trace their families back to immigrants who came here for exactly the same reasons immigrants come here now.

So yeah, it hurts. But here in Charlotte, they didn’t break us. Not even close.

In the book CHARLOTTE’S WEB, Charlotte the spider writes messages in her web to praise Wilbur the pig and keep him from the slaughterhouse. TERRIFIC, she writes. RADIANT. HUMBLE.

There were some terrific and radiant and humble people doing the Lord’s work of friendship and community in Charlotte this past week.

The others holstered their guns and put on their masks and got out of town.

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