I got the gift link, but only after I gave them my email address and they realized that I was a WaPo defector. Rachel's story is powerful. The avatar of her without hair is a clue as to her decision, but I love that she met the enemy head-on (so to speak), and is able to laugh through it. I hope that should I ever get some form of cancer, I will retain my sense of humor and find ways to laugh. Maybe someday my obituary will say, "She loved animals and loved laughing."
My advice to ICE protesters, don’t burn American flags, don’t wave Mexican flags. If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.
I couldn't answer the poll. The severity of tolerable response depends on things like whether there is still a functioning judicial system, and whether that system can enforce decisions on the executive branch of government. Civil society depends on operating under agreed rules (laws). When the persons in power refuse to accept the rules, then it may not be possible to resist them by any means that are, themselves, within the rules.
I chose to not hurt people as my form of protest. I do have some caveats for the definition of ‘people’. I would love to see the orange one thrown on the ground, handcuffed, and thrown into an unmarked van never to be seen again. I would love to see Miller hit with a few rubber bullets, thrown into a van never to be seen again. I would love to see puppy killer Noem have her extensions removed, puppies peeing on her, and thrown into a van never to be seen again. The list continues (Vought, Homan, Leavitt).
Rachel’s article was wonderful and inspiring. I watched my father and brother die from cancer and have wished there had been someway I could’ve helped them. If I’m ever diagnosed with cancer I don’t think I could be as brave as Rachel.
I fear the Trump administration will plant violent protesters among our peaceful protests. They will use this as an excuse to use force against us.
From this moment forward, at every protest, we must do the following:
The moment violence or property damage begins,
EVERY OTHER PROTESTER MUST IMMEDIATELY SIT ON THE FLOOR OR THE GROUND IN SILENCE, WITH SIGNS DOWN.
USE YOUR PHONES TO VIDEO THE VIOLENCE
The media needs to have video. This will reveal thugs posing as protesters becoming violent. The sitting down must spread like a "wave" in a football stadium throughout the crowd of protesters.
Local police officers will immediately see WHO is doing the damage, and the rest of us will demonstrate our non-violent innocence and retain our Constitutional right to peaceful protest.
Retweet, repost, and shout it from the rooftops at every protest you attend.
If the story told by Catherine Rampell is true and is indicative of a trend, then The Sky's the Limit.
Catherine Rampell
The secret police descending on Small Town, U.S.A.
Masked immigration officials are storming towns and arresting people.
Today at 11:58 a.m. EDT
Linda Shafiroff, standing, and Sarah Stiner outside their business in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on June 6. (Sophie Park/For The Washington Post)
4 min
GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — Maybe they really were immigration officers, just as they claimed. Or maybe they were a ragtag vigilante group, arbitrarily snatching brown-looking people off the street.
“It could have been like a band of the Proud Boys or something,” said Linda Shafiroff, recounting the agents who showed up outside her office in masks and tactical gear and refused to show IDs, warrants or even the names of any criminals they were supposedly hunting.
As unrest and military troops overtake Los Angeles, terrifying scenes are also unfolding in smaller communities around the country. They, too, are being invaded by what resembles a secret police force, often indistinguishable from random thugs.
Shafiroff and business partner Sarah Stiner own a boutique home-design and construction firm in Great Barrington, a New England town largely populated by artists, aging hippies and affluent second-home-owners. On May 30, around 11 a.m., six armed agents showed up outside the women’s office. The agents were dressed as though they had parachuted into a war zone, rather than a small town where the crosswalks are painted in rainbows.
Stiner in the driveway of the design business she co-owns on June 6. (Sophie Park/For The Washington Post)
The paramilitary-resembling group approached a Hispanic man who was outside the design office, picking weeds. The man did not work for Shafiroff and Stiner’s design firm, but rather for a local landscaping company. (The women say their employees are all citizens or otherwise have documents proving they’re here legally.) Neither Shafiroff nor Stiner knew the gardener’s name, but they said they had seen him around before and that he seemed friendly.
They were also incensed by what looked like an extralegal abduction unfolding in their parking lot.
“These guys had guns hanging all over them,” said Shafiroff, but they otherwise had no conformity to their dress. “None of them had the same letters on the front of their vests. Some of them didn’t even have letters, but it said ‘Police’ across the back. … One had light-colored jeans and sneakers on, and one had on a Red Sox hat.” The agents arrived in unmarked cars, some with out-of-state plates.
The women asked to see IDs or warrants, or even the names of the alleged criminals these agents were there to track down. They refused. One briefly flashed a badge, Stiner recounted, but would not let her inspect it even to see what agency it was for.
“It could have been from Cracker Jacks,” she recalled.
The gardener did not appear to understand what these officers were asking him. Another man who had been working the landscaping project with him immediately went into the women’s design office and shut the door upon seeing the masked agents arrive. The agents didn’t try to follow him, Shafiroff said.
When the business owners repeatedly asked the agents to prove who they were, the agents said they didn’t need to show identification and accused their interlocutors of promoting lawlessness. “You want people driving drunk in here?” one of them asked, according to a cellphone video. Shafiroff replied: “I don’t want people driving drunk. I have asked for IDs.”
Business owners confront masked immigration agents who refused to show identification or a warrant while taking away a local gardener in Great Barrington, Mass. (Video: Courtesy of Linda Shafiroff)
The gardener was eventually put in the back of an unmarked car and driven away. Shafiroff, who described the incident as part of the new “police state,” said she has since heard through mutual acquaintances that the man is being detained in an immigration facility, perhaps near Boston. She said she had been told the worker’s family was unable to determine his whereabouts for several days. (My attempts to contact the man or his family have been unsuccessful.)
The business partners, who have received threats in the days after the incident as a result of coverage by local newspapers, had good reason to question who these cloaked agents were.
It’s easy to buy tactical gear online. And around the country, bigots and criminals have already begun taking advantage of chaotic, masked immigration raids to further their own ends. Civilians have impersonated ICE agents while committing robbery (Pennsylvania), kidnappings (Florida, South Carolina), sexual assault (North Carolina) and other forms of public intimidation (Washington state, California).
Some Democratic leaders have demanded that ICE agents show their faces and present identification when carrying out enforcement actions, so they can at least be differentiated from anonymous hooligans. Republican lawmakers have fiercely opposed such efforts, claiming that asking federal officials to identify themselves would put agents in “extreme danger.”
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump ordered the arrest of protesters simply for wearing masks. “MASKS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED to be worn at protests,” he posted on social media on Sunday. “What do these people have to hide, and why???”
This seems like a reasonable question to ask of federal law enforcement officers. America, after all, is not supposed to have a secret police force. And our country’s history of roving bands of masked men rounding up undesirables is a long, ugly one.
Apart from civil disobedience being very much front of mind at present, the conviction of Muhammad Ali ultimately also raised the bedrock principle of due process now too, unfortunately, looking us square in the face. The then Supreme (now Imperial) Court unanimously overturned his five-year sentence for draft evasion because his draft board had not stated the reasons for denying Ali's application for conscientious objector status. Due process requires not only substantive protections but procedural ones as well.
Interesting comparison in Rachel's grand piece. She made the choice that was right for her; a good number of some 77M Americans are now finding out they didn't make the right choice for them. Both literally a matter of life and death.
Great column from Gene, great story from Rachel, which I somehow missed back in the day when I was still a WAPO subscriber. The best. Some writers can make me laugh like a fool and others can wring me to tears. It's totally amazing when (a very few) writers can elicit both from me at the same time.
Congratulations to Rachel! Her story was fantastic. She is an amazing writer who could make Stalin look good (I say this with proper knowledge because she once wrote a story about me, and though I'm no Stalin, she made me seem like a swell fellow [I'm not]).
The Helen trousers story is amazing, recalling the male power that ruled the legal system and so much else. I was looked down on in the 90s for wearing open-toed shoes in court. Seriously it never even occurred to me we were (in small town south) still that rigid about women’s dress while men who knew the judges well could wear shorts and sandals.
On the poll first inclination is 1 because I’ve always been a “Goody two shoes.” Good Quora question. My second is 2 because just because it’s a law, it doesn’t mean it’s right. And we’re dealing with a number of people who consider themselves above the law. After that I jumped to 4 because yeah. It’s that important.
And the rest of Rachel's piece. The first two segments are below.
Because of the particular form of cancer I had, the doctors said, chemo would reduce my chances of dying in the next 10 years by 2 percent. That’s all.
Out of 100 cases like mine, chemotherapy will be worth it for two of us. The other 98 would needlessly suffer in exchange for a small slice of peace of mind. One way to think about it is that I already 2 percent kill myself all the time. Using my phone while driving. Eating processed food. Breathing in a city. Living your life at all pretty much equals 2 percent extra death.
What made this a hard decision is an intrinsic element of cancer: metastasis. If tiny cancer bombs were traveling my lymphatic system — and we could reasonably assume they were trying — they’d have time to set up shop and grow in a lot of places before they’d be big enough to see. At that point, all the treatments we have for them wouldn’t work as well as they would right now. Cancer would — maybe! — be back, in more places, knowing more about how to beat our defensive mechanisms. Cancer, once defeated, is a bad actor who lurks and fumes and tends to return, say, four years later. Older. Angrier. More … malignant.
So here are some ways I thought about it.
While cancer is produced by my body, my body is betraying me: Cancer acts like a parasite. The rest of my cells do more or less useful things in service of the whole-body governance, regulation and maintenance. It is seldom perfect, but it is structured. It operates on well-tested precedent to assure the survival of my constitution. Skillfully or ineptly, it is intent on keeping the body alive and thriving. It’s the boring, imperfect, reliable status quo.
Cancer doesn’t care about any of that. It is self-aggrandizing. It is selfish. It just wants to grow and keep growing, spreading itself, replicating and propagating itself elsewhere in the body politic, drawing forth imitators that bow to its design. In this malign spreading, it gets in the way of the useful things or destroys them.
It is illogical, implacable, unpredictable and ultimately, if unchecked, it is suicidal. It acts not to preserve, protect and defend the body as a whole, but only for its destructive and self-destructive self. It has no plan or justification for the destruction. It is shortsighted and incapable of understanding that it is destroying its homeland.
Cancer might invade my brain, the place that synthesizes input from the rest of my body and certifies my choices. It might attack the defenses I have in place, breaking down barriers, physically displacing my internal governance and violently forcing its way inside to disrupt the very processes by which I make choices. It wants to negate my vote.
Cancer is a thief. It lives by stealing, cheats me of the work I could be doing, tears apart families that loved each other.
To evade detection, to avoid being recognized for what it is, cancer lies to my immune system, pretending to be what it is not: harmless.
Cancer is unpredictable and unscrupulous. It might take an ordinary part of a system and replace it with a little daughter-in-law cell, with its vacuole.
Metaphors are all I have. Some are better than others. But this is, as I understand it, how cancer works.
Not everyone chooses the ugly fight. People older than I am, or in worse health, have their reasons. But if your choice is for America, you need to ask yourself: Do you believe America is 40 and mostly healthy or 85 and fading?
Magical thinking was there the whole time, and so lovely and tempting. There is a whole internet available, extolling the virtues of things such as apricot pits, shark cartilage and Jill Stein. If this is such a big important choice, why is it left to schmoes like me?
Ultimately, though, cancer has won enough rounds. When I get the opportunity to fight cancer, I do. And if I didn’t choose Team Chemo, I would be choosing Team More Chance of Cancer. Her or him.
There’s a financial angle, as well. Being Team Chemo would be expensive, bad for my work and for my near-term economic outlook. But if I have to put my job and (gulp) my health insurance at risk, I’d rather it be in her America than his.
And what if cancer wins? How would I feel not knowing what difference I could have made? What would I imagine my imaginary grandkids would say, when they told my story? Which team was I on, and how did I fight?
I made my reluctant 2 percent choice. Two percent is better than no percent.
It really sucked. I lost my waist-length blond hair that I always disrespected just because it wasn’t voluminous enough, and I suffered what amounted to weeks of on-and-off food poisoning. It did occur to me once that with my rubber bosom and bald genitals I was finally on my way to becoming the woman the internet has always wanted me to be.
Whenever I had a new poison infusion, my nurse would leave the room and come back in two full-body aprons, two sets of gloves and a full-face Hannibal Lecter-style plastic mask and inject me from an IV bag with EPA warnings and exclamation points on it. I had to use a special bathroom just for chemo patients, and I had to promise to double-flush with the lid closed when I was back home. I was Chernobyl.
For weeks, I had a dank dairy taste in my mouth that toothpaste didn’t touch. Some days, all I could do was wanly sit outside and hope my blood was at least murdering the mosquitoes.
Previous times in my life, I dealt with problems by eating and drinking, and it worked fine. It didn’t work here. For one thing, it turns out you’re really not supposed to mix alcohol and poison. And while sometimes I got to do-over whole meals, there was sometimes no joy in food. It all tasted like soy sauce.
For days, I walked around my house in a shirt but no pants, like Winnie-the-Pooh, in case time to be bare-butt on the toilet became of the essence. Where I’m going, underwear only gets in the way.
I do have a practical tip for the estimated everybody who’s going to get cancer in the future, and possibly experience the gastrointestinal side effects of chemo. Change your phone’s notification sound to a fart noise. Do this now. On the Galaxy S24, it’s called “squeeze.” It will save you a lot of humiliation. (“Excuse me, I have to take this.”)
Once, a guy in a gas station in rural red Culpeper, Virginia — where I was taking a picture of the Trump hats, complete with a dangling mane of orange felt for the hair, for sale — remarked that I could use the hat because of my cue-ball head. But he made it funny, and we laughed.
Once, Gene told me that one of the cheap wigs I bought made me look just like Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who also famously went bald in tribute to Charles Manson. And he was right, and we laughed.
Once, during the chemo ordeal, I seized up, somewhere around my kidneys, and my body shook like someone else was using it to belly-laugh. Probably at me.
I am done with chemo, but difficult measures await.
I wanted to come out with all of this later, after it was over and I was fine now, thanks! That’s clearly what Catherine, Princess of Wales, wanted, too: to disappear until it was finished. It’s what we all want. But as I write this, I’m getting ready for radiation. So far it’s just been lying still while people draw on me with Sharpies. It’s coming, though, a nuking every weekday.
When I fought for my 2 percent, with me were hundreds of people who ran my tests or made my appointments, volunteered for clinical trials, fought and died in previous battles, paid insurance premiums, preserved my samples, cleaned the floors, joyfully yelled “SINÉAD O’CONNOR” at me from their car or asked how I was or donated to research or sent flowers or screamed into empty rooms with me.
Another way to think about chemo is that if a hundred people like me choose it, two of us will be saved.
There’s a big day in November, circled on my calendar, when the whole nightmare will finally be over, the whole threat gone. All the people who worked against this cancer will accomplish collectively with our votes more than any individual ever could. We will win. I hope.
Thank you, Dale, for sharing this. I have been in Rachel’s shoes and found that a good sense of humor and recognizing the absurdity of it all was crucial to my survival. I’ve tried that with this current countrywide cancer and it’s not working anymore.
Doctor (imitating me, confronted by neighbors): “My doctor said I should … ”
At this point, my original plan (don’t get cancer) switched to being too entertaining to have cancer. It worked for a week.
When the doctor called, she first asked me to confirm my name and date of birth. Also not great, as signs go. I reiterated that I’d had a lovely time at the biopsy and wished her the best. And then I said, “Okay, so?” which is something you say when you’re afraid a whole sentence will betray a tremor in your voice.
Okay. So.
Before I got diagnosed with cancer, I understood it in a couple of simplistic ways. There was a good stage of basic-bitch cancer, which is when your body grows a pebbly glob and pretty much keeps on keeping on. And there was a bad stage, which is when your body gradually stops being your body and becomes a pebbly glob factory.
Sorry, metaphors are honestly all I have here. This is not a responsible newspaper cancer story with quotes from experts; it is about how I made a choice, using my flawed but earnest choice-making devices, and I think it turned out to be the right one.
My cancer was sort of in the middle. Tiny pebble-making drones had made it to one lymph node right next to the breast. I’ve seen smart people describe a lymph node as a goalie, whose job it is to bat away cancer before it goes further; I’ve also heard the metaphor that the lymph node is an airport. If cancer can get from its home to the airport, it’s almost surely savvy enough to board a plane and fly.
Another metaphor — mine — is that cancer is a hermit, way out in the woods. In America, the hermit — let’s call him Ted Kaczynski — can basically be as antisocial as he wants out there, isolated, without necessarily hurting anyone. But he’s adjacent enough to systems we all rely on and must maintain — the U.S. Postal Service, for instance — that he can mail bombs to innocent people. We can’t shut down the entire mail system when this happens because chaos would ensue. And we don’t realize that he’s there until the packages arrive at their destinations, some distance away from him. Without the damage he does, there’s no way to find him. Also, no need to.
Now, my doctors were interested in finding out whether Ted had gotten any packages onto the mail trucks and planes making the rounds in my America-body. They did a body cavity search, the kind to which you hope TSA never resorts. It detected no bombs. I would need to lose the bad breast. I could keep the good one if I wanted. I did.
After the mastectomy, I would technically be cancer-free (“no evidence of disease”). And the surgeons would eventually build me a brand-new breast out of my belly fat. If, two years ago, you’d come to me and offered to enhance my bosom using my belly fat, I’d have asked what the catch was. And why you were holding a monkey’s paw.
The mastectomy itself was also pretty great, mostly because it turns out it was legal to give me fentanyl. Also, they were upset I had arrived with no underthings — they were in a plastic bag on a different floor — and gave me what the nurses call “party panties,” a hospital-issued, translucent, fishnet garment that was way sexier than any lingerie I already owned. Thoughtfully, they gave me an extra pair to take home.
Almost 20 years ago, The Washington Post Magazine asked me to write a story about my breasts, for somewhat frivolous reasons. It was for a special issue on body image, and my story was about the joys and agonies of having a large rack. In it, I predicted that the only way out of this for me and my boobs was down; as it happens, I was half right. There is also “out.”
For now, I have a rubber-ball-kind-of-thing in place to stretch the skin out for when they Build Back Better in a few months.
I was feeling fine. My pebbly glob itself had not done any damage. Had the medical team done nothing but cut it out, sew me up and send me on my way, I’d probably be okay. But there was a choice to make: Do I have follow-up chemotherapy, which involves famously unpleasant injections of poison in hopes that any microscopically lingering cancer becomes dead, while you just feel like you are?
Okay, apparently a "gift" article from the newspaper whose name we dare not speak comes with strings attached these days so, just to demonstrate what a true bargain in enlightenment TGP is, I will reprint Rachel's award-winner in segments here. The formatting may be wonky, but the piece should at least be readable. The first (of three) segment follows:
Opinion
Rachel Manteuffel
Electing to suffer
A medical diagnosis forced me into a decision I didn’t want to make. Maybe this election is doing the same to you.
Are you okay?” It was my partner, yelling up the stairs.
“Yes,” I yelled back. “Why?”
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“You were wailing,” he said. “Real loud.”
I answered with all the dignity I could summon, writhing on the bathroom floor.
“Yes. I was wailing. Thank you. And I am fine.”
“Okay,” he said. “Just checking.”
I was suffering the consequence of a yes-or-no decision I had made some months before. I chose to become sick as hell. And in my war of choice, this is what victory felt like. Awful.
My choice was between two disagreeable medical options. Polls show that “two disagreeable options” is also the situation a relatively small, but tactically important, group of Americans believe they face in November; if this is you, if you are still undecided, I want to tell you how I made my choice — and how that choice might help you make yours.
You might, conversely, be quite happy with your election options. That is just fine. But if you still have a decision to make, whom to vote for or whether to vote, this might help. Because, in my case, not wanting either option didn’t mean I could avoid the decision. It made it much more important that I chose.
I have no clear memory of when I formed it, but my plan, for most of my life, was not to get cancer. For decades, this worked, until one morning when my partner, Gene, encountered something troubling in my breast and grew thoughtful, then solemn.
“Rachel,” he said. “You need to go to the doctor, like, yesterday.”
“Ha!” I said. “I don’t have a doctor.” See how committed I was to not having cancer? I was 39, and nothing had ever been wrong with me (medically).
Various people encountered the troubling thing, grew thoughtful and then solemn. My sudden new doctor, the kind you pay $200 a year for to get an appointment today, said she was going to make some calls and get me a Saturday mammogram. Not great, as signs go.
On that Saturday, from the waiting room, Gene Googled “how long does a mammogram take,” after I’d been back there well over an hour.
It was the start of a series of sinking feelings.
The biopsy procedure was fabulous. The doctor, nurse and I made one another laugh the whole time. We all have big, willful dogs that misbehave in public, and we know it is our fault but we’re not totally sure what to do. We bonded. It was like brunch. I don’t remember their names, but they are wonderful women, and I will be grateful to them until I die. I mean, eventually. As we all do.
I remember this bit of dialogue from our sisterhood of the needle:
Nurse: “So, for a couple of days, keep the area dry. No shower. Just do a bird bath.”
Me: “Okay.” (Pause) “So like … in the front yard.”
Nurse: “Well, if you WANT to. If your neighbors don’t mind.”
I got the gift link, but only after I gave them my email address and they realized that I was a WaPo defector. Rachel's story is powerful. The avatar of her without hair is a clue as to her decision, but I love that she met the enemy head-on (so to speak), and is able to laugh through it. I hope that should I ever get some form of cancer, I will retain my sense of humor and find ways to laugh. Maybe someday my obituary will say, "She loved animals and loved laughing."
My advice to ICE protesters, don’t burn American flags, don’t wave Mexican flags. If you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t going to make it with anyone anyhow.
Powerful story then and perhaps even more now. Congrats to Rachel.
I couldn't answer the poll. The severity of tolerable response depends on things like whether there is still a functioning judicial system, and whether that system can enforce decisions on the executive branch of government. Civil society depends on operating under agreed rules (laws). When the persons in power refuse to accept the rules, then it may not be possible to resist them by any means that are, themselves, within the rules.
Well said.
I chose to not hurt people as my form of protest. I do have some caveats for the definition of ‘people’. I would love to see the orange one thrown on the ground, handcuffed, and thrown into an unmarked van never to be seen again. I would love to see Miller hit with a few rubber bullets, thrown into a van never to be seen again. I would love to see puppy killer Noem have her extensions removed, puppies peeing on her, and thrown into a van never to be seen again. The list continues (Vought, Homan, Leavitt).
Rachel’s article was wonderful and inspiring. I watched my father and brother die from cancer and have wished there had been someway I could’ve helped them. If I’m ever diagnosed with cancer I don’t think I could be as brave as Rachel.
I fear the Trump administration will plant violent protesters among our peaceful protests. They will use this as an excuse to use force against us.
From this moment forward, at every protest, we must do the following:
The moment violence or property damage begins,
EVERY OTHER PROTESTER MUST IMMEDIATELY SIT ON THE FLOOR OR THE GROUND IN SILENCE, WITH SIGNS DOWN.
USE YOUR PHONES TO VIDEO THE VIOLENCE
The media needs to have video. This will reveal thugs posing as protesters becoming violent. The sitting down must spread like a "wave" in a football stadium throughout the crowd of protesters.
Local police officers will immediately see WHO is doing the damage, and the rest of us will demonstrate our non-violent innocence and retain our Constitutional right to peaceful protest.
Retweet, repost, and shout it from the rooftops at every protest you attend.
#Gandhi #passiveresistance
If the story told by Catherine Rampell is true and is indicative of a trend, then The Sky's the Limit.
Catherine Rampell
The secret police descending on Small Town, U.S.A.
Masked immigration officials are storming towns and arresting people.
Today at 11:58 a.m. EDT
Linda Shafiroff, standing, and Sarah Stiner outside their business in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, on June 6. (Sophie Park/For The Washington Post)
4 min
GREAT BARRINGTON, Mass. — Maybe they really were immigration officers, just as they claimed. Or maybe they were a ragtag vigilante group, arbitrarily snatching brown-looking people off the street.
“It could have been like a band of the Proud Boys or something,” said Linda Shafiroff, recounting the agents who showed up outside her office in masks and tactical gear and refused to show IDs, warrants or even the names of any criminals they were supposedly hunting.
As unrest and military troops overtake Los Angeles, terrifying scenes are also unfolding in smaller communities around the country. They, too, are being invaded by what resembles a secret police force, often indistinguishable from random thugs.
Shafiroff and business partner Sarah Stiner own a boutique home-design and construction firm in Great Barrington, a New England town largely populated by artists, aging hippies and affluent second-home-owners. On May 30, around 11 a.m., six armed agents showed up outside the women’s office. The agents were dressed as though they had parachuted into a war zone, rather than a small town where the crosswalks are painted in rainbows.
Stiner in the driveway of the design business she co-owns on June 6. (Sophie Park/For The Washington Post)
The paramilitary-resembling group approached a Hispanic man who was outside the design office, picking weeds. The man did not work for Shafiroff and Stiner’s design firm, but rather for a local landscaping company. (The women say their employees are all citizens or otherwise have documents proving they’re here legally.) Neither Shafiroff nor Stiner knew the gardener’s name, but they said they had seen him around before and that he seemed friendly.
They were also incensed by what looked like an extralegal abduction unfolding in their parking lot.
“These guys had guns hanging all over them,” said Shafiroff, but they otherwise had no conformity to their dress. “None of them had the same letters on the front of their vests. Some of them didn’t even have letters, but it said ‘Police’ across the back. … One had light-colored jeans and sneakers on, and one had on a Red Sox hat.” The agents arrived in unmarked cars, some with out-of-state plates.
The women asked to see IDs or warrants, or even the names of the alleged criminals these agents were there to track down. They refused. One briefly flashed a badge, Stiner recounted, but would not let her inspect it even to see what agency it was for.
“It could have been from Cracker Jacks,” she recalled.
The gardener did not appear to understand what these officers were asking him. Another man who had been working the landscaping project with him immediately went into the women’s design office and shut the door upon seeing the masked agents arrive. The agents didn’t try to follow him, Shafiroff said.
When the business owners repeatedly asked the agents to prove who they were, the agents said they didn’t need to show identification and accused their interlocutors of promoting lawlessness. “You want people driving drunk in here?” one of them asked, according to a cellphone video. Shafiroff replied: “I don’t want people driving drunk. I have asked for IDs.”
Business owners confront masked immigration agents who refused to show identification or a warrant while taking away a local gardener in Great Barrington, Mass. (Video: Courtesy of Linda Shafiroff)
The gardener was eventually put in the back of an unmarked car and driven away. Shafiroff, who described the incident as part of the new “police state,” said she has since heard through mutual acquaintances that the man is being detained in an immigration facility, perhaps near Boston. She said she had been told the worker’s family was unable to determine his whereabouts for several days. (My attempts to contact the man or his family have been unsuccessful.)
The business partners, who have received threats in the days after the incident as a result of coverage by local newspapers, had good reason to question who these cloaked agents were.
It’s easy to buy tactical gear online. And around the country, bigots and criminals have already begun taking advantage of chaotic, masked immigration raids to further their own ends. Civilians have impersonated ICE agents while committing robbery (Pennsylvania), kidnappings (Florida, South Carolina), sexual assault (North Carolina) and other forms of public intimidation (Washington state, California).
Some Democratic leaders have demanded that ICE agents show their faces and present identification when carrying out enforcement actions, so they can at least be differentiated from anonymous hooligans. Republican lawmakers have fiercely opposed such efforts, claiming that asking federal officials to identify themselves would put agents in “extreme danger.”
Meanwhile, President Donald Trump ordered the arrest of protesters simply for wearing masks. “MASKS WILL NOT BE ALLOWED to be worn at protests,” he posted on social media on Sunday. “What do these people have to hide, and why???”
This seems like a reasonable question to ask of federal law enforcement officers. America, after all, is not supposed to have a secret police force. And our country’s history of roving bands of masked men rounding up undesirables is a long, ugly one.
Apart from civil disobedience being very much front of mind at present, the conviction of Muhammad Ali ultimately also raised the bedrock principle of due process now too, unfortunately, looking us square in the face. The then Supreme (now Imperial) Court unanimously overturned his five-year sentence for draft evasion because his draft board had not stated the reasons for denying Ali's application for conscientious objector status. Due process requires not only substantive protections but procedural ones as well.
Interesting comparison in Rachel's grand piece. She made the choice that was right for her; a good number of some 77M Americans are now finding out they didn't make the right choice for them. Both literally a matter of life and death.
Great column from Gene, great story from Rachel, which I somehow missed back in the day when I was still a WAPO subscriber. The best. Some writers can make me laugh like a fool and others can wring me to tears. It's totally amazing when (a very few) writers can elicit both from me at the same time.
Congratulations to Rachel! Her story was fantastic. She is an amazing writer who could make Stalin look good (I say this with proper knowledge because she once wrote a story about me, and though I'm no Stalin, she made me seem like a swell fellow [I'm not]).
The Helen trousers story is amazing, recalling the male power that ruled the legal system and so much else. I was looked down on in the 90s for wearing open-toed shoes in court. Seriously it never even occurred to me we were (in small town south) still that rigid about women’s dress while men who knew the judges well could wear shorts and sandals.
On the poll first inclination is 1 because I’ve always been a “Goody two shoes.” Good Quora question. My second is 2 because just because it’s a law, it doesn’t mean it’s right. And we’re dealing with a number of people who consider themselves above the law. After that I jumped to 4 because yeah. It’s that important.
RACHEL'S PIECE PART 3
And the rest of Rachel's piece. The first two segments are below.
Because of the particular form of cancer I had, the doctors said, chemo would reduce my chances of dying in the next 10 years by 2 percent. That’s all.
Out of 100 cases like mine, chemotherapy will be worth it for two of us. The other 98 would needlessly suffer in exchange for a small slice of peace of mind. One way to think about it is that I already 2 percent kill myself all the time. Using my phone while driving. Eating processed food. Breathing in a city. Living your life at all pretty much equals 2 percent extra death.
What made this a hard decision is an intrinsic element of cancer: metastasis. If tiny cancer bombs were traveling my lymphatic system — and we could reasonably assume they were trying — they’d have time to set up shop and grow in a lot of places before they’d be big enough to see. At that point, all the treatments we have for them wouldn’t work as well as they would right now. Cancer would — maybe! — be back, in more places, knowing more about how to beat our defensive mechanisms. Cancer, once defeated, is a bad actor who lurks and fumes and tends to return, say, four years later. Older. Angrier. More … malignant.
So here are some ways I thought about it.
While cancer is produced by my body, my body is betraying me: Cancer acts like a parasite. The rest of my cells do more or less useful things in service of the whole-body governance, regulation and maintenance. It is seldom perfect, but it is structured. It operates on well-tested precedent to assure the survival of my constitution. Skillfully or ineptly, it is intent on keeping the body alive and thriving. It’s the boring, imperfect, reliable status quo.
Cancer doesn’t care about any of that. It is self-aggrandizing. It is selfish. It just wants to grow and keep growing, spreading itself, replicating and propagating itself elsewhere in the body politic, drawing forth imitators that bow to its design. In this malign spreading, it gets in the way of the useful things or destroys them.
It is illogical, implacable, unpredictable and ultimately, if unchecked, it is suicidal. It acts not to preserve, protect and defend the body as a whole, but only for its destructive and self-destructive self. It has no plan or justification for the destruction. It is shortsighted and incapable of understanding that it is destroying its homeland.
Cancer might invade my brain, the place that synthesizes input from the rest of my body and certifies my choices. It might attack the defenses I have in place, breaking down barriers, physically displacing my internal governance and violently forcing its way inside to disrupt the very processes by which I make choices. It wants to negate my vote.
Cancer is a thief. It lives by stealing, cheats me of the work I could be doing, tears apart families that loved each other.
To evade detection, to avoid being recognized for what it is, cancer lies to my immune system, pretending to be what it is not: harmless.
Cancer is unpredictable and unscrupulous. It might take an ordinary part of a system and replace it with a little daughter-in-law cell, with its vacuole.
Metaphors are all I have. Some are better than others. But this is, as I understand it, how cancer works.
Not everyone chooses the ugly fight. People older than I am, or in worse health, have their reasons. But if your choice is for America, you need to ask yourself: Do you believe America is 40 and mostly healthy or 85 and fading?
Magical thinking was there the whole time, and so lovely and tempting. There is a whole internet available, extolling the virtues of things such as apricot pits, shark cartilage and Jill Stein. If this is such a big important choice, why is it left to schmoes like me?
Ultimately, though, cancer has won enough rounds. When I get the opportunity to fight cancer, I do. And if I didn’t choose Team Chemo, I would be choosing Team More Chance of Cancer. Her or him.
There’s a financial angle, as well. Being Team Chemo would be expensive, bad for my work and for my near-term economic outlook. But if I have to put my job and (gulp) my health insurance at risk, I’d rather it be in her America than his.
And what if cancer wins? How would I feel not knowing what difference I could have made? What would I imagine my imaginary grandkids would say, when they told my story? Which team was I on, and how did I fight?
I made my reluctant 2 percent choice. Two percent is better than no percent.
It really sucked. I lost my waist-length blond hair that I always disrespected just because it wasn’t voluminous enough, and I suffered what amounted to weeks of on-and-off food poisoning. It did occur to me once that with my rubber bosom and bald genitals I was finally on my way to becoming the woman the internet has always wanted me to be.
Whenever I had a new poison infusion, my nurse would leave the room and come back in two full-body aprons, two sets of gloves and a full-face Hannibal Lecter-style plastic mask and inject me from an IV bag with EPA warnings and exclamation points on it. I had to use a special bathroom just for chemo patients, and I had to promise to double-flush with the lid closed when I was back home. I was Chernobyl.
For weeks, I had a dank dairy taste in my mouth that toothpaste didn’t touch. Some days, all I could do was wanly sit outside and hope my blood was at least murdering the mosquitoes.
Previous times in my life, I dealt with problems by eating and drinking, and it worked fine. It didn’t work here. For one thing, it turns out you’re really not supposed to mix alcohol and poison. And while sometimes I got to do-over whole meals, there was sometimes no joy in food. It all tasted like soy sauce.
For days, I walked around my house in a shirt but no pants, like Winnie-the-Pooh, in case time to be bare-butt on the toilet became of the essence. Where I’m going, underwear only gets in the way.
I do have a practical tip for the estimated everybody who’s going to get cancer in the future, and possibly experience the gastrointestinal side effects of chemo. Change your phone’s notification sound to a fart noise. Do this now. On the Galaxy S24, it’s called “squeeze.” It will save you a lot of humiliation. (“Excuse me, I have to take this.”)
Once, a guy in a gas station in rural red Culpeper, Virginia — where I was taking a picture of the Trump hats, complete with a dangling mane of orange felt for the hair, for sale — remarked that I could use the hat because of my cue-ball head. But he made it funny, and we laughed.
Once, Gene told me that one of the cheap wigs I bought made me look just like Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who also famously went bald in tribute to Charles Manson. And he was right, and we laughed.
Once, during the chemo ordeal, I seized up, somewhere around my kidneys, and my body shook like someone else was using it to belly-laugh. Probably at me.
I am done with chemo, but difficult measures await.
I wanted to come out with all of this later, after it was over and I was fine now, thanks! That’s clearly what Catherine, Princess of Wales, wanted, too: to disappear until it was finished. It’s what we all want. But as I write this, I’m getting ready for radiation. So far it’s just been lying still while people draw on me with Sharpies. It’s coming, though, a nuking every weekday.
When I fought for my 2 percent, with me were hundreds of people who ran my tests or made my appointments, volunteered for clinical trials, fought and died in previous battles, paid insurance premiums, preserved my samples, cleaned the floors, joyfully yelled “SINÉAD O’CONNOR” at me from their car or asked how I was or donated to research or sent flowers or screamed into empty rooms with me.
Another way to think about chemo is that if a hundred people like me choose it, two of us will be saved.
There’s a big day in November, circled on my calendar, when the whole nightmare will finally be over, the whole threat gone. All the people who worked against this cancer will accomplish collectively with our votes more than any individual ever could. We will win. I hope.
I hope.
Thank you, Dale, for sharing this. I have been in Rachel’s shoes and found that a good sense of humor and recognizing the absurdity of it all was crucial to my survival. I’ve tried that with this current countrywide cancer and it’s not working anymore.
RACHEL'S PIECE PART 2
More of Rachel's award-winning piece.
Doctor (imitating me, confronted by neighbors): “My doctor said I should … ”
At this point, my original plan (don’t get cancer) switched to being too entertaining to have cancer. It worked for a week.
When the doctor called, she first asked me to confirm my name and date of birth. Also not great, as signs go. I reiterated that I’d had a lovely time at the biopsy and wished her the best. And then I said, “Okay, so?” which is something you say when you’re afraid a whole sentence will betray a tremor in your voice.
Okay. So.
Before I got diagnosed with cancer, I understood it in a couple of simplistic ways. There was a good stage of basic-bitch cancer, which is when your body grows a pebbly glob and pretty much keeps on keeping on. And there was a bad stage, which is when your body gradually stops being your body and becomes a pebbly glob factory.
Sorry, metaphors are honestly all I have here. This is not a responsible newspaper cancer story with quotes from experts; it is about how I made a choice, using my flawed but earnest choice-making devices, and I think it turned out to be the right one.
My cancer was sort of in the middle. Tiny pebble-making drones had made it to one lymph node right next to the breast. I’ve seen smart people describe a lymph node as a goalie, whose job it is to bat away cancer before it goes further; I’ve also heard the metaphor that the lymph node is an airport. If cancer can get from its home to the airport, it’s almost surely savvy enough to board a plane and fly.
Another metaphor — mine — is that cancer is a hermit, way out in the woods. In America, the hermit — let’s call him Ted Kaczynski — can basically be as antisocial as he wants out there, isolated, without necessarily hurting anyone. But he’s adjacent enough to systems we all rely on and must maintain — the U.S. Postal Service, for instance — that he can mail bombs to innocent people. We can’t shut down the entire mail system when this happens because chaos would ensue. And we don’t realize that he’s there until the packages arrive at their destinations, some distance away from him. Without the damage he does, there’s no way to find him. Also, no need to.
Now, my doctors were interested in finding out whether Ted had gotten any packages onto the mail trucks and planes making the rounds in my America-body. They did a body cavity search, the kind to which you hope TSA never resorts. It detected no bombs. I would need to lose the bad breast. I could keep the good one if I wanted. I did.
After the mastectomy, I would technically be cancer-free (“no evidence of disease”). And the surgeons would eventually build me a brand-new breast out of my belly fat. If, two years ago, you’d come to me and offered to enhance my bosom using my belly fat, I’d have asked what the catch was. And why you were holding a monkey’s paw.
The mastectomy itself was also pretty great, mostly because it turns out it was legal to give me fentanyl. Also, they were upset I had arrived with no underthings — they were in a plastic bag on a different floor — and gave me what the nurses call “party panties,” a hospital-issued, translucent, fishnet garment that was way sexier than any lingerie I already owned. Thoughtfully, they gave me an extra pair to take home.
Almost 20 years ago, The Washington Post Magazine asked me to write a story about my breasts, for somewhat frivolous reasons. It was for a special issue on body image, and my story was about the joys and agonies of having a large rack. In it, I predicted that the only way out of this for me and my boobs was down; as it happens, I was half right. There is also “out.”
For now, I have a rubber-ball-kind-of-thing in place to stretch the skin out for when they Build Back Better in a few months.
I was feeling fine. My pebbly glob itself had not done any damage. Had the medical team done nothing but cut it out, sew me up and send me on my way, I’d probably be okay. But there was a choice to make: Do I have follow-up chemotherapy, which involves famously unpleasant injections of poison in hopes that any microscopically lingering cancer becomes dead, while you just feel like you are?
RACHEL'S PIECE PART 1
Okay, apparently a "gift" article from the newspaper whose name we dare not speak comes with strings attached these days so, just to demonstrate what a true bargain in enlightenment TGP is, I will reprint Rachel's award-winner in segments here. The formatting may be wonky, but the piece should at least be readable. The first (of three) segment follows:
Opinion
Rachel Manteuffel
Electing to suffer
A medical diagnosis forced me into a decision I didn’t want to make. Maybe this election is doing the same to you.
Are you okay?” It was my partner, yelling up the stairs.
“Yes,” I yelled back. “Why?”
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“You were wailing,” he said. “Real loud.”
I answered with all the dignity I could summon, writhing on the bathroom floor.
“Yes. I was wailing. Thank you. And I am fine.”
“Okay,” he said. “Just checking.”
I was suffering the consequence of a yes-or-no decision I had made some months before. I chose to become sick as hell. And in my war of choice, this is what victory felt like. Awful.
My choice was between two disagreeable medical options. Polls show that “two disagreeable options” is also the situation a relatively small, but tactically important, group of Americans believe they face in November; if this is you, if you are still undecided, I want to tell you how I made my choice — and how that choice might help you make yours.
You might, conversely, be quite happy with your election options. That is just fine. But if you still have a decision to make, whom to vote for or whether to vote, this might help. Because, in my case, not wanting either option didn’t mean I could avoid the decision. It made it much more important that I chose.
I have no clear memory of when I formed it, but my plan, for most of my life, was not to get cancer. For decades, this worked, until one morning when my partner, Gene, encountered something troubling in my breast and grew thoughtful, then solemn.
“Rachel,” he said. “You need to go to the doctor, like, yesterday.”
“Ha!” I said. “I don’t have a doctor.” See how committed I was to not having cancer? I was 39, and nothing had ever been wrong with me (medically).
Various people encountered the troubling thing, grew thoughtful and then solemn. My sudden new doctor, the kind you pay $200 a year for to get an appointment today, said she was going to make some calls and get me a Saturday mammogram. Not great, as signs go.
On that Saturday, from the waiting room, Gene Googled “how long does a mammogram take,” after I’d been back there well over an hour.
It was the start of a series of sinking feelings.
The biopsy procedure was fabulous. The doctor, nurse and I made one another laugh the whole time. We all have big, willful dogs that misbehave in public, and we know it is our fault but we’re not totally sure what to do. We bonded. It was like brunch. I don’t remember their names, but they are wonderful women, and I will be grateful to them until I die. I mean, eventually. As we all do.
I remember this bit of dialogue from our sisterhood of the needle:
Nurse: “So, for a couple of days, keep the area dry. No shower. Just do a bird bath.”
Me: “Okay.” (Pause) “So like … in the front yard.”
Nurse: “Well, if you WANT to. If your neighbors don’t mind.”
Continued above.