Blue Like A River: The thin blue line.
That thin, blue line is like a river. Which side of it will you be on?
“People are putting a blue light by their door to show that they support law enforcement,” I said to my friend. “I think it’s a great idea.”
There had already been three support rallies for local law enforcement: one on the Capitol grounds and two stretching across Memorial Bridge, with people holding blue flags along the bridge’s walking portion.
It was hard to find a blue light bulb, as it turned out. Oh, there were plenty of places selling the bulbs, but the boxes holding the blue bulbs were empty. We finally located one, and that night the house light shone bright blue.
Driving around town in the evening became a kind of game for spotting the blue bulbs. Some houses had just one, some had several, and some had both green and blue lights to show support for both the military and law enforcement. These were quiet acts of defiance in the middle of anti-law enforcement fervor, perhaps the voice of a people who weren’t prone to screaming in confrontation on front lines but had feelings about something all the same. How do you speak up when the world seems to deny your voice has any bearing on the matter? You shine a light.
And so some people used blue lights. Or tied blue ribbons to their car antennae. Or put decals or magnets on their car that quietly said, to any police officer that might drive by, that people were supporting them.
By the end of February 2017, I felt as if I’d been bathed in hatred and bile for six months. It would have been easier to avoid the internet, especially social media, but I was both collecting information and also, in some kind of way, trying to get a better understanding of what our law enforcement and National Guard were experiencing. Even just reading words of hate on a screen takes a toll on a person. Sifting through thousands of screenshots and scouring the internet for articles to add to the protest timeline meant I was constantly encountering some of the worst online behavior I’d ever seen.
“I can’t believe people are like this,” I said to my friend at one point. “I feel as if there’s no hope for our country.” I showed him a message I’d gotten that day from some stranger that said I ought to kill myself.
My friend asked why she’d sent it.
“I said I supported our law enforcement,” I said. “She doesn’t even know me, and she wants me to kill myself.”
“Maybe you should just stop.”
I had that option. I could stop.
But law enforcement had no such option. There was an urgency to help law enforcement, even if it meant wading into the sludge to find threats and information that would help them do their job.
One particular online threat I received caused me to call the police to at least get it on record. I tended not to take these things seriously simply because my experience, from nearly 20 years of being online, has been that keyboard warriors talk big but still need a diaper change. Still, since there was an economic component to the threat, I thought I should report it.
The officer came out, took the information, and then paused to talk. It was a slow night, he said. He told us about some of what he was seeing at the protest, and I was moved by his compassion for many protesters who had left or been forced out of the camp by various camp leaders. Some were now in Bismarck, homeless in the middle of a brutal North Dakota winter. I guess, after hearing nonstop about how heartless our law enforcement was, even I was shocked to realize they weren’t.
“We’ve gotten to know many of them by name,” he said, describing how some officers even took up a collection to help buy bus tickets for those who wanted to go home. “Some we’ve found sleeping in the laundry rooms of apartment buildings whose main doors aren’t locked. It’s so cold out, they’re desperate to find any place to go that’s warm.”
The federal building downtown had often been a place where, once in a while, I’d find homeless people sleeping in winter. Before this protest, the post office portion of that building was open 24 hours a day, and I’d often pick up my mail late in the evening, after work. I’ve no doubt that if protest action and concerns over vandalism hadn’t forced them to lock the doors at the end of the workday, they’d have had protesters sleeping in there, too.
Given the terrible things being said about them online and in the media, the officer laughed them off as if they didn’t affect him. Perhaps they did not, though I noted he seemed to need to talk about these things he was experiencing. They seemed to burden him in some way, even if he wasn’t aware of it. As he was leaving, I pointed to the blue light. “Did you see the light?”
He smiled. “I see a lot of those.”
Online trolls kept threatening they were “legion,” but each week I’d see another blue light pop up on a house, or another decal on a vehicle beside me at the traffic light. There’d be another billboard supporting law enforcement, another quiet insistence that the noise wouldn’t drown out the quiet resolve.
Those online trolls could be a grunting, sweating legion of incestuous intellect to whatever degree they wanted, but I made sure the blue light was burning at the end of every day, joining the other lights like blue stars on a prairie night.
In May 2017, there was another rally on the Capitol lawn, and the windows of the Capitol building, which would light up in different colors for different holidays, were shown with a thin, blue line of light through the windows, high above the city.
Blue, like a river.
