No. of Recommendations: 15
There’s a video circulating right now of this Texas guy crying because his beautiful fiancée was taken by ICE, and after watching the interview a few times now, I gotta tell you something...
I don’t give a fuck about him.
I don’t give a fuck about his tears.
I tried. I really did. I sat with them. I contemplated them.
I meditated on this man’s anguish with the solemn concentration of a monk on mushrooms, reflected on it deeply, then shallowly, then from that strange little mezzanine between empathy and incredulity where you’re no longer sure whether you’re approaching enlightenment or having a small fucking stroke.
And after rummaging through every remaining cupboard, drawer, crawlspace, coat pocket, storage locker, and condemned emotional outbuilding inside my soul, I have reached one blindingly clarifying cosmic conclusion:
I am all out of fucks.
Completely.
I do not give one fuck, two fucks, red fucks, blue fucks.
Not one solitary microscopic fuck remains. Not a crumb of a fuck stuck to the emotional countertop, not one feeble little fuck blinking underneath a pile of expired compassion coupons, not the translucent ghost of a fuck drifting down the hallway in a Victorian nightgown begging me to remember what empathy used to feel like.
Nothing.
The warehouse is empty. The shelves have been stripped. The inventory computer is flashing OUT OF STOCK, and some exhausted little employee in the back has already checked twice and would really appreciate it if I stopped fucking asking.
At one point, I stood in a completely quiet house and called out, “Here, fuck-fuck!! Come out, come out wherever you are!”
Nothing.
Not a creak. Not a shuffle. Not one tiny fuck peeking around a doorway.
This is now the latest installment in the Nancy Drew mystery series of books entitled The Secret of the Missing Fucks, and I regret to inform you that Nancy has found absolutely fucking nothing.
Because the man crying in this video is John Gannon, a seventy-five-year-old Texas businessman, lifelong Republican, and Trump voter whose fiancée, Yasmin Suarez Reyes, was surrounded by eight plainclothes ICE agents at the Houston airport and taken away from him.
And in the interview, while trying to comprehend how something this terrifying could possibly have reached into his life, he says:
“You never think a guy like me would ever be involved in something like this.”
A guy like me.
Four words.
Four tiny fucking words, and somehow they contain the whole festering, pernicious moral bargain.
Because he didn’t say, I never thought my government would treat another human being this way. He didn’t say, I had no idea families were being put through this. He didn’t say, Holy shit, the people warning us about mass deportation were telling the truth.
He said:
A guy like me.
And suddenly every last surviving fuck in my possession packed a tiny suitcase, put on a hat, and left town.
Because what the fuck is a guy like you, John?
A businessman? A taxpayer? A Republican? A man with money? Someone who voted correctly enough times that you thought the federal government would laminate you a little KEEP AUTHORITARIANISM OFF MY LAWN card?
Did you think ICE agents honored some fucking punch-card rewards program?
Ten deportations and the eleventh family separation is free, unless you’re a Platinum MAGA member, in which case please enjoy complimentary snacks while we terrorize somebody whose name you don’t know?
Because that sentence, “a guy like me,” is the whole fucking thing.
He understood that there would be guys involved in things like this. Women too. Mothers. Fathers. Fiancées. Children. Families. People disappearing into detention centers, people calling lawyers in a panic, people trying to figure out where somebody they love has been taken, people staring at an empty passenger seat or an empty side of the bed while the gears of the federal government keep grinding along without giving the faintest fuck about their terror.
He just never pictured himself standing close enough to hear the machinery.
And I want to be extremely fucking clear because Yasmin is the one paying the fucking price.
She is the one my heart breaks for. Because one minute she was a woman moving through her own life, making plans, loving someone, expecting tomorrow to look more or less like yesterday, and the next she was surrounded, taken, and fed into a detention system that can turn a person into a file number before the people who love them have even figured out where the fuck they went.
I have empathy for her. I have anger for her. I have every available fuck for the woman swallowed by this nightmare.
But John?
John helped make this shit her reality.
He fucking voted for it.
No amount of climbing over it, crawling underneath it, emotionally pole-vaulting around it, or wrapping it in some lovely little Hallmark meditation about how suffering teaches us all to be better people changes that.
Donald Trump didn’t campaign on a secret immigration agenda hidden inside a locked briefcase beneath Mar-a-Lago.
He screamed mass deportation into every microphone shoved near his face. He promised raids, roundups, removals by the millions, the biggest deportation operation in American history, and the rabid, raging horde around him clamored like chummed fucking piranhas to “send them back,” not giving a single solitary fuck whether some of the people they were screaming about had ever actually had a “back” to fucking go to.
And they never, not once, seriously considered that this shit could happen to the brown people they actually knew.
It wouldn’t happen to Yasmin.
Or their coworker.
Or the woman their son married.
Or the guy who fixes their roof.
Or their daughter’s best friend’s dad.
Or the mother whose kid sits next to theirs at school.
Certainly not a guy like me.
Somebody else.
Always somebody fucking else.
So I’m talking to YOU, John, and every Ma and Pa MAGAidiot just like you.
You were FINE with all of this just so long as it happened to “they, them, those people.”
The ones who don’t talk like you, or look like you, or love like you, or worship like you.
The ones whose names sound foreign to your ear, whose neighborhoods you don’t drive through, whose families you don’t know, whose fear never has to sit across from you at the dinner table.
You were fine with the atavistic racism. Fine with the nativist bile. Fine with the raids. Fine with the intimidation. Fine with the cruelty, the cages, the calculated dehumanization. Fine with the giant federal machine coming down on human beings with all the tenderness of a fucking meat grinder, so long as the blood spatter stayed off your shoes.
That was the deal.
And it’s the same deal curdling all across Trump America now, where the red-hatted congregation of buyer’s-remorse dipshits is finally looking around at the country it explicitly ordered and whining:
Wait.
The war?
I didn’t vote for this.
The prices?
I didn’t vote for this.
The tariffs hitting my business?
I didn’t vote for this.
ICE taking somebody I love?
I DEFINITELY didn’t vote for this.
Ya fucking think?
We now have people staring at a protracted war in Iran after voting for the guy who sold himself as the man of no new wars, acting like somebody swapped presidents while they were sleeping.
He lied to us!
Yes.
Donald Trump lied to you.
Alert the fucking Smithsonian. Call Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Get David Attenborough over here immediately because apparently we’ve discovered the first recorded case of Donald Trump lying, which should be displayed in a glass case between the Loch Ness Monster and a Republican healthcare plan.
Yet somehow, every fresh consequence still arrives to these people as breaking fucking news.
Because the smooth-brained price-of-eggs patriots are now shuffling through grocery stores in stunned disbelief that their tariff-humping messiah did not, in fact, descend from the escalator carrying stone tablets engraved with TWO-FOR-ONE FROSTED FLAKES.
“He said prices would come down.”
And?
This man has spent his entire adult life lying with the serene confidence of a toddler covered in chocolate insisting he has never seen the fucking cake.
You didn’t get conned by a master illusionist.
You got fooled by a fat kid with frosting on his face.
What exactly were you waiting for before skepticism kicked in?
A cymbal crash?
A flashing marquee over your frontal lobe reading CONGRATULATIONS, YOU HAVE DEVELOPED OBJECT PERMANENCE?
Did you need somebody to smack two brain cells together like jumper cables until one of them finally coughed up a working fucking thought?
Did the epiphany need to arrive by FedEx with SIGNATURE REQUIRED stamped across the box?
It wasn’t that you were lied to.
Millions of us warned you.
Economists warned you. Immigration advocates warned you. Military experts warned you. Doctors warned you. Teachers warned you. Women warned you. Immigrants warned you.
But you, and your plurality of the dumbest dumbfucks who ever dumbed, shrugged with the obdurate certainty that the consequences had somebody else’s address.
That is the disease.
Cruelty is remarkably easy to tolerate from the cheap seats. It becomes considerably less entertaining when it walks up your driveway in a ski mask carrying handcuffs and a handgun.
You wanted mass deportations until the woman being deported was your fiancée. You wanted tariffs until the bill landed on your counter. You wanted disruption until your livelihood got disrupted. You wanted the strongman until his fist swung wide enough to catch you square in that gaping open “this shit won’t happen to me” mouth.
You wanted the wrecking ball.
You just wanted some magical little targeting system installed inside it guaranteeing it would smash everybody else’s house and gently float over yours like a fucking parade balloon.
And you didn’t give a fuck about family separation until your daughter’s bestie’s daddy was the one being hauled away.
And now the thing you applauded is sitting in your living room. Now it has your phone number. Now you know its name. Now you can hear someone you love crying.
And NOW:
“This isn’t what I voted for.”
Yes.
It fucking is.
You just thought cruelty came à la carte.
You thought you could order the racism and anti-immigration venom without the babies being starved behind bars, the authoritarianism without the fear, the tariffs without the prices, the chaos without the consequences, the chest-thumping, flag-flapping, fucking militarism without another war, and the giant state deportation apparatus without ever having to watch it drag away somebody whose hand you had actually held.
You thought the leopard came house-trained.
And now you’re bleeding on the carpet wondering why nobody warned you it had teeth.
We did.
Over and over and over again.
And after all of that, I’m apparently expected to watch John Gannon cry and manufacture sympathy for the shock of discovering that the beast he helped loose does not distinguish between human beings according to his solipsistic hierarchy of who deserves to have their face torn off and who doesn’t.
So once again, I searched.
I turned my soul upside down like an overstuffed purse in a Target parking lot and shook it. Receipts flew out. Loose change. An ancient ChapStick. Three emotional Tic Tacs. Whatever scrap of optimism survived 2016.
But no fucks.
I sent Yukon Cornelius into the frozen subterranean reaches of my conscience with a pickaxe and instructions to tap every goddamn surface until he found something resembling sympathy for a man discovering what the thing he voted for feels like from underneath it.
Tap.
“Nothin’.”
Another wall.
“Nothin’.”
One last hopeful lick of the pickaxe.
“Nothin’.”
The fuck-mines are barren.
Does it make me happy to feel nothing for this man?
No.
Does it make me a bad person that I don’t?
Also no.
Because if he had given a fuck about anyone else before the cruelty came home to him, I wouldn’t be sitting here writing about my complete and spectacular lack of fucks for him now.
If the terror of strangers had mattered before the terror had Yasmin’s face, if somebody else’s shattered family had been enough to move him before his own heart was the thing being broken, there would be something here for me to reach for.
There isn’t.
I hope Yasmin comes home. I hope she gets to walk out of that detention system and back into her own life. I hope she never has to experience anything like this again, and I hope the millions of innocent people living through consequences they never asked for eventually get their country, their safety, their stability, and their fucking peace back.
But him?
No.
Because his heartbreak did not begin when America started doing this.
It began when America did it to someone he loved.
He didn’t suddenly discover cruelty.
He discovered proximity.
And there is a canyon of moral difference between the two.
He says he never thought “a guy like me” would be involved in something like this.
Of course he didn’t.
That was the whole fantasy.
The suffering would always belong to somebody else. The crying family would always be somebody else’s. The empty chair would always sit at somebody else’s table. The boot would always land on somebody else’s neck.
You just never thought the cruelty would come knocking on your own fucking door.
So now YOU can cry harder, John.
Because I do not have a single solitary fuck to give.
JoJo from Jerz
