Please watch their charming video! Watch, and look at the faces: kids of many races and many genders, all different levels of knowledge, every one of them showing this deep-seated sense of agency and ownership about science and about their own learning: “I belong here. This is for me.” It’s everything the fascists fear.

Full disclosure: my kid is one of the kids in the program (but not in the video, sorry!). I can thus vouch for this fundraiser with extra confidence.

https://vimeo.com/1152657185

2/

To be clear: we were able to cover our own kid’s cost; this fundraiser is so •all• the kids can go. There’s a bunch of families who absolutely need community support to go to Space Camp — and unsurprisingly, there’s a large overlap there with the families that the Trump admin is directly targeting.

3/

Space Camp fundraising has been hard this year. Beyond the cancelled fundraiser in Jan, people are kind of tapped out with donation requests: there’s been so much dire need for groceries, rent assistance, stuff like that…well, when survival is in question, education and joy become luxuries for the privileged.

That’s what happens in times like these. But I’ll be damned if I let ICE rob these kids of Space Camp without a fight.

4/

So much of the ICE invasion’s harm here in Minneapolis is going to be diffuse, long-term, things that faded away quietly, things that •didn’t• happen, injuries barely seen and never tallied.

Long after the media spotlight is gone, we’re going to be repairing, rebuilding, trying to catch back up, trying to heal, trying to fill the holes these months left. It’s like a whole second pandemic for us.

5/

There’s definitely a hopeful feeling in having room to worry about Space Camp fundraising right now, instead of, say, ICE staging at the local Target parking lot yet again (with Target’s tacit blessing, damn them). It’s been quiet in the city these last few days. Fingers crossed.

Hopeful, but also melancholy: even if ICE does in fact draw down to pre-Dec levels, our “after” is not really going to come for a long time — and when it does, it will feel more like a scar than a sunrise.

/end