It’s harrowing even from afar to witness unrest in Minneapolis, a city under siege by federal police. Neighbors are blowing warning whistles and rallying around their own, risking tear gas and trigger fingers in the name of community. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump is threatening to call in the military, as if the problem isn’t the pack of lunkheads raging in tactical cosplay.

Here in Florida, a red state, conditions are not as inflamed, but they are still frightening. Gov. Ron DeSantis and Republican state leaders have fallen in line with the Trump ethos by opening a series of appalling human encampments and cheering on Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE has arrested more than 20,000 people here this year, second only to Texas. A Miami Herald investigation found that some were immigrants here legally and even U.S. citizens, including a woman in scrubs pulled screaming from her car.

Amid Florida’s absolute fealty, one could argue that it’s even more important to organize, to form whisper networks and show up on street corners. Floridians are doing just that, demanding moral clarity on the space of a posterboard in the most banal of places.

For example, I witnessed more than 100 protestors at the Carillon Hilton in St. Petersburg this week denouncing a border protection job fair. Within Pinellas County’s most prominently staid complex of cubicles and desk salads, protestors hoisted an enormous banner that said “MICRO PENIS,” emphasis on the letters I, C and E (crisis really does breed humor). Cops swarmed, by my count one officer for every few protestors at the crowd’s peak. Meanwhile, financial types in khakis passed by to grab sandwiches at Publix. An absurd scene, something out of history’s Mad Libs.

Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri and St. Petersburg Police Chief Anthony Holloway held press conferences from the hotel, lending the whole thing an air of performance. On the second day, two protestors were arrested for misdemeanors.

Both Gualtieri and Holloway supported the right to protest and defended their agencies’ agreements with ICE. Holloway told me separately that he doesn’t like all the tactics he’s seen on the news.

“I’m not going to sit and lie to you about that,” he said.

Gualtieri said protestors needed a better understanding of what they were against; no one from ICE was inside the Hilton, he said, but rather Customs and Border Protection.

Point taken, but with respect to the sheriff, the two agencies are closely connected under the Department of Homeland Security. Customs and Border Protection received a huge financial bump and has plans to ramp up immigration enforcement in Florida. And while accuracy matters, this kind of hair-splitting gives conflicted people room to stay trapped in their own cognitive dissonance.

Plenty of folks right now say they believe one thing but act a different way.

Say Jane thinks puppy mills are unethical, then Jane turns around and buys a French bulldog from one. Jane may work overtime to defend her choice. She might shove the discomfort down. Or she might do the hard work of admitting she has bent her own moral code. Then she can start to live more honestly.

Many otherwise decent Janes are faced with a choice right now. They say all lives are worthy of dignity. They say the government should not tread on them. Then, from the comfort of safe homes, they watch footage of humans being snatched by masked goons operating outside the bounds of law. They see video of a woman shot point-blank in her driver’s seat. And they hear the party line that she’d be alive if she complied.

What now? Who are you? Who do you want to be in this moment? That’s what protestors, imperfectly alive in their rabble-rousing, righteous indignation, force us to confront en route to a Pub sub.

While wading through the spunky crowd Tuesday, Imet an 83-year-old grandma named Katie Green from Dunedin who peered up valiantly when officers asked her to move back. She was there, she said, because she cares about her neighbors. I met 33-year-old Magdalene DuPree from Lakeland, who tried to keep fellow protestors from sparring with an agitator.

“These people are lost,” she shouted into a megaphone. “And we cannot change their minds.”

She implored everyone to turn focus toward the Hilton, toward anyone considering taking a job with the Department of Homeland Security. She had empathy for job seekers, she told me, especially for those who need to support themselves or their families in a thankless economy. Men in particular, she said, may be struggling to carve out meaning in life.

“It offers men purpose,” she said of jobs rounding up immigrants. “But it takes advantage of that desire for purpose. They don’t have to do this. It is not worth selling their soul.”

If anyone going through the doors of the Hilton felt a tug on their conscience, she said, it was crucial that they listen. One little voice can be so loud.

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