Something Has Shifted In The Air. We All Feel It.

As I raced around the North Hills of Pittsburgh on Saturday morning, gathering last-minute supplies for the impending snowstorm, I noticed a quiet wave of energy roll through shoppers as we navigated busy aisles. And then, I realized why: A buzz in my pocket alerted me to another nightmare — another human being shot and killed by federal immigration agents in an American city. I stood, holding bananas, as my feed showed me a video of a man on his knees being shot multiple times by masked men.

Again. It was happening again.

Not even three weeks ago, federal agents murdered a mother of three named Renee Good. A few days before that, another federal immigration officer shot and killed Keith Porter, Jr. in Los Angeles. Daily, our city network of concerned citizens is documenting the injustices happening against our neighbors. Pittsburgh — like America itself — would not exist without immigrants, yet we watch them be dehumanized and terrorized hourly in what has long been known as Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

The pressure that has been building in this country since the 2016 election felt uncontainable, unconstrainable — in an instant.

I spent the rest of Saturday balancing parenting duties with grief, doomscrolling, and trying to stay on top of things. Play a board game, check the local Signal chats to see if ICE is near our community once again today. They’ve been consistently trolling our local businesses where immigrants work, asking for papers like modern-day Gestapo. Load the dishwasher, watch a video from a new angle that shows, once again, that Pretti was not a threat. Stare in horror as we watch death via 10-second social media clips over and over and over in this country. There’s no way it does not affect us, this collective ritual of bathing in trauma daily.

I struggled to place the feeling in my gut until later in the evening, once our household of six had settled in to await the impending snow — snow that would look fresh and clean, blanketing a country that feels dirty and broken.

Then I placed that feeling. I was 17 again, sitting in my senior math class, as a quiet wave of energy rolled through my high school. Our teacher, a hardass who was not known to pause a lesson for anything, insisted we keep learning. Another teacher shoved into the room and demanded he turn the television on, “Now, Mark!!”

As the screen came to life, we watched smoke stream out of the World Trade Center. An accident, surely. Then the second plane hit as we collectively gasped.

In that moment, the timeline shifted. We all knew it, even with limited details and understanding. Next, we heard a third plane had crashed near Pittsburgh, looping over our metro region before heroes took it down in a Shanksville cornfield.

“What’s next?” we wondered. None of us knew. Even as high school kids, we knew things were irrevocably altered in our country in a moment.

I’ve had that sickening hollow question mark in the pit of my stomach at other times in my life. I know others have experienced it before my time, too. Pearl Harbor. Emmett Till. The Kent State shooting. For me, the death of Trayvon Martin. And Michael Brown, and Tamir Rice.

Like many of us during difficult times, I turned to the internet to see if that hollow feeling was mine to bear alone. I knew it was not, of course, but I sought the connection nonetheless.

A friend from Romania, now a U.S. citizen, struggled to tamp down the panic in her chest. “This is triggering for the 10-year-old me who witnessed what happens when the army shoots at their own people,” she said, telling me how she snuck into the television room to see the news her parents tried to shield her from. She had blocked many of those memories until this weekend brought them rushing back. “The execution of people in the street; they opened fire on the protestors. Not a good day.”

A neighbor, Cait, told me about the day she ran through Manhattan, a sweatshirt wrapped around her head to shield herself from debris as the planes struck.

“After the towers fell, we became settled in the realization that loss was the climactic event,” she told me. “It’s different now, not yet knowing if we’ve seen the worst, and living with the unsettling truth that we haven’t… There’s a very similar vulnerability now to what I felt then, but it’s honestly worse.” She told me it was easier to wrap her head around evil terrorists on the other side of the world attacking us than this. “Knowing our own government is the terrorists, and not knowing when or how this plays out, is so much worse.”

Another friend shared about her son’s first nightmare about ICE grabbing him — his brown skin has always made his young body a liability in America. “I felt that feeling even more when I was being eyed by some rando at a gas station with an American flag on his arm,” she continued.

“And my heart sank completely down when I heard more than half a dozen shots fired into that man and the lady screaming,” she shared truthfully. “I think it was her screams that finally did it. Something terrible is coming.”

I felt her words fill that hollow question mark in my stomach that’s been gnawing and angry for days. I know what she means. I caught myself thinking, “Maybe this time it will matter? A white man, this time, maybe they will care?” Anyone with a reason and a conscience has long been caring, but we know this to be true. The true injustice of this country is that we have to recognize that many value white lives over all others.

That moment where it felt like the air was collectively sucked out of our rooms across the country? That feeling is change coming. It’s the dam of the last decade breaking — even during the Biden years, this hatred was relentlessly chipping away at the bedrock of our country.

We listen to the federal government command us to ignore the evidence we see with our own eyes and ears, to the point where even conservative Reddit and the comment sections of Fox News are dubious about the lies we’ve been asked to swallow this time. We take that feeling and we lean into it, use it.

Something has indeed shifted in this country — I know I’m not alone; that’s what many of us feel, what so many of us now know. I think back again to that math class on that day so many years ago, and those famous last words of Todd Beamer, a passenger on Flight 93, just before they crashed it into that Pennsylvania field.

“Let’s roll.”

Meg St-Esprit, M. Ed. is a journalist and essayist based in Pittsburgh, PA. She’s a mom to four kids via adoption as well as a twin mom. She loves to write about parenting, education, trends, and the general hilarity of raising little people.