Some seasons arrive quickly, carrying more than we planned to unpack.
It was probably best that I didn’t subscribe to Dry January. I should have known the year was going to be a beast when, less than six hours into it, I was in a hotel and the fire alarm went off—and it wasn’t a drill. This is not how you want to meet a new calendar year. Then the gods of fate said hold my beer when four members of my immediate family experienced “medical” events, including three emergency room visits, three hospitalizations, and a surgery. January came in like it had a clipboard and a very aggressive agenda.
Along the way, I learned—or was reintroduced to—phrases like spinal stenosis, Clostridioides difficile, colitis, concussion, and tympanostomy. My medical vocabulary has expanded more in a few weeks than it had since I snuck into my dad’s home office and leafed through his copies of the Journal of the American Medical Association and Annals of Surgery. I may not have earned a degree, but I’ve at least qualified for a certificate. Possibly laminated.
And in case you hadn’t noticed—perhaps because you, too, were distracted by sirens and discharge papers—there is also a lot going on in the world.
Much of my attention has been on the Twin Cities. My family has been impacted. My friends have been impacted. This hits close to home. I watch and wonder how we got here. Early in my professional life, I spent time both prosecuting and defending criminal cases, which means I have a reasonably high tolerance for human dysfunction. Even so, many of the things I now see and read—especially through that lens—are genuinely shocking. Not shocking in a cinematic way. Shocking in a quiet, procedural, this-is-how-it’s-written-down way.
Current events often pull me back to what I studied in college, back when you could take courses that wrestled directly with uncomfortable truths instead of politely circling them. I took more than one class focused on the Holocaust and similar atrocities. As a senior, I enrolled in Light in the Darkness: Courage and Evil in the Twentieth Century. The course focused heavily on the Holocaust. At the time—and still—I struggled with how something so terrible could happen.
We studied life in Nazi Germany. We discussed Anne Frank. We read Elie Wiesel. We also read Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad, a book I still don’t fully understand, which puts me in excellent company that includes most honest readers.
Though my memory of the course is imperfect—college being a long time ago and optimism being a powerful anesthetic—several moments stand out. Perhaps most significantly, we took a “field trip” to Minneapolis. While there, we attended a concert at Orchestra Hall, spent an evening at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre, and visited a Holocaust museum.
But there is one experience I will never forget.
We met Holocaust survivors.
One woman had been sent to Auschwitz. She told us her story patiently and answered our questions with care. Then, in a moment that permanently fixed itself in my memory, she rolled up her sleeve and showed us the tattooed number on her arm—a mark that had been there for more than forty-five years. No build-up. No warning. Just history, sitting across from us in a folding chair.
She spoke about the days leading up to liberation. She described the moment she knew she was free. She was offered a ride to the nearest supply camp roughly a mile away. She declined. This, she said, was her freedom walk. She walked the entire distance, stopping frequently because she was so weak. She had to keep her head lower than her heart to avoid losing consciousness.
She spoke about her first bite of food—and the danger of eating too much, too quickly—because her body had essentially shut down. She knew she was close to death, close enough to feel it in a practical, unsentimental way, but she willed herself to live. She told us she kept repeating to herself: Not today. Today I am free.
Someone asked her how she felt about Germany now. Very calmly, she explained that she bore no ill will toward Germans born after World War II. They were not responsible, she said; they carried the scar, not the guilt. But Germans who were present at the time—who did nothing and said nothing—were responsible for the atrocities.
There was no theatrics. No slogans. No grand conclusions. But the emotion, the pain, and the anger hung in the air, doing what facts sometimes do when delivered by someone who earned them the hard way.
I don’t remember her name. I remember her message.
Make sure this never happens again.
Since then, I have found myself returning to her words. I wonder—perhaps naively—whether a similar regime could ever arise in my own country. I keep reaching the same conclusion: yes, it absolutely could. Not because of any single current event, but because we are human, and humans have repeatedly shown a remarkable capacity for atrocity, especially when paperwork is involved.
I also arrive at a more uncomfortable conclusion: there is no way to know how I would respond.
Would I recognize what was happening in real time? Would I speak out? Would I protect those being targeted? Or would I choose personal or family safety over principles and values? Would I convince myself that compliance was temporary, reasonable, or necessary? History suggests these decisions are rarely dramatic. They are incremental. Transactional. Rationalized. Often explained afterward with excellent grammar.
And that, more than anything, troubles me.
What unsettles me most is not that the news feels alarming—news often does—but how quickly alarming things begin to feel normal. A headline that stops you cold on Monday becomes background noise by Friday. By the following week, it’s something we summarize with a shrug and a sentence that starts with, “Well, I guess that’s just how things are now.” That is usually the point at which questions about how we would respond quietly turn into questions about what we are willing to tolerate.
What we are willing to tolerate is shaped, in no small part, by what we understand to be our rights in the first place. When those boundaries are clear, normalization has limits. When they are vague, everything becomes negotiable. Fortunately, we do not have to define those boundaries from scratch or rely solely on instinct and outrage. We have a well-worn roadmap. It is called the Constitution. It does not prevent abuse or guarantee wisdom, but it does establish a baseline—certain rights meant to exist regardless of convenience, popularity, or who happens to be in power.
At its most basic level, that baseline includes the right to move through daily life without harassment; the right not to be stopped and required to justify one’s existence; the right to be free from restraint, harm, or worse based on minor suspicion; and the right to observe authority without becoming its target. It includes the right not to be threatened, exploited, confined, or erased—and the right to speak freely, worship freely, and to have a home that remains a refuge rather than a checkpoint.
None of this is abstract. None of it lives safely in textbooks or court opinions. It unfolds in real time—often within hours: a traffic stop at dusk, a crowd forming, a knock before sunrise, a decision made quickly by someone with power and limited restraint. At that speed, there is no meaningful pause, no appeal, no rewind. Due process—the idea that power must justify itself before it harms—only protects people if it exists before force is applied, not afterward. If this feels distant or exaggerated, it is usually because it has not yet arrived at one’s own door.
These are not rights granted by government, nor privileges extended for good behavior. They exist prior to government—whether understood as gifts of God, products of nature, or the result of generations of hard-won human progress. We entrust them to the state for one narrow purpose: protection. When that order is reversed, what remains may look like order, but it is not law.
It is force, borrowing the language of authority.
I began by describing how difficult January felt for me—personally, professionally, and emotionally. But those struggles, real as they were, pale in comparison to January of 1945, when Auschwitz was liberated and survival itself depended on the refusal to give in, even when the body was failing and the future uncertain. Remembering that contrast doesn’t diminish present concerns; it sharpens them. It reminds me that perspective matters, that endurance has a history, and that resolve—then as now—often begins with a single, quiet decision: not today.
Sireadh Toileachas 