Chicago, October 2025. I need you to know we tried.
I bought whistles and saline eyewash for my friends, students. The theatre bought 150 whistles. They were gone in days. A neighbor 3D-printed hundreds, placed them into Little Free Libraries, dropped them off at businesses with “ICE Not Welcome” signs. My ward held a community defense workshop: 700 people showed up.
Up in Rogers Park, a hundred residents got rapid response messages and patrolled the streets with whistles, alert. Across the city, people guarded schools. Unmarked cars showed up in Lakeview and fifty neighbors quickly showed up to follow them, yelling because they’d pulled someone off the street. In response, masked agents teargassed a residential street. In a white, affluent neighborhood. Their boss, the Border Patrol chief, had recently teargassed a Latino neighborhood himself, in direct violation of a court order.
The morning of the annual Halloween Parade, federal agents teargassed a quiet residential block in Old Irving Park. Neighbors had poured out of their homes just moments before—one still barefoot and in pajamas—when they heard urgent whistles. Kids in costume down the street saw the tear gas wafting up. Three people were taken, two of them US citizens. The parade was canceled.
They took two construction workers. Left their lunches on the ground. They arrested an elected official who went to the hospital to check on a constituent. They held a state rep—my state rep—at gunpoint as he tried to warn residents about their rights. They shot a woman on the southwest side five times. In the suburbs, they shot and killed a soft-spoken father of two. They raided an apartment building in the middle of the night, rappelling from a Black Hawk helicopter, dragging naked children into the street. Everywhere—in wealthy neighborhoods, in poor neighborhoods, in suburbs—they pull people off the streets. They took someone practically outside my door.
Protestors carry “We have friends everywhere” signs, evoking Andor. A brigade of cyclists buy out tamale carts so vendors can go home and not risk being outside, distributing the food to folks in need. Mutual aid groups buy groceries for immigrants who worry about leaving the house. Ordinary people see danger and run to it, not away. Their only weapons are whistles, cameras, and words.
I love Chicago so much it hurts.
Fascism always tells the same story.
It claims the nation is superior to all others and demands we return to imagined glories of the past, to the “good old days.” It blames present troubles on a scapegoat, a convenient enemy—it shouts that they deserve violence.
The names change but the beats remain the same. Rights and due process don’t matter. Artists and academics are viewed with suspicion. Dissent is punished. The press is a mouthpiece for the ruling regime.
Science fiction teaches us to recognize the warning signs.
In Babylon 5, we see how quickly a democracy can descend into fascism. But it doesn’t happen overnight. It begins with seeds: We see the rise of anti-alien hate groups on Earth. Humans from Homeguard terrorize aliens on the station, stabbing and branding them. “Stay away from Earth, freak.”
We see the escalation in small ways. Zack joins Nightwatch for fifty credits a week in addition to his regular paycheck—he’s not rich, the money is useful, and he rationalizes that he’s already working in security. He’s given a black loyalty armband and pushed to report “subversion” or criticism of President Clark’s regime. He’s then encouraged to turn in his friends, his colleagues. An escalation. In a fascist regime, no one is safe—safety is an illusion conferred by proximity to power.
Nightwatch is granted the authority to bypass due process, making warrantless arrests, detaining suspected “subversives” indefinitely—eventually, they take over Babylon 5 station security.
President Clark takes over the entire Earth government, deporting aliens, turning the media into a state propaganda machine, pouring energy into surveillance and control. Earth becomes isolationist.
Under the current US regime, the show feels prescient. But it isn’t prophetic when it depicts the rise of fascism. It sees the patterns from history and says we too could repeat this. Science fiction is a mirror.
Star Trek reminds us that freedoms and humanity can easily be denied when we’re afraid or looking for someone to blame.
A dilithium chamber hatch explodes. Initial signs imply sabotage and the likelihood that the Romulans are responsible. An admiral is sent to investigate, and a Klingon exchange officer is revealed to be a spy. But while the Klingon confesses to sending schematics to the Romulans, he denies sabotage.
Admiral Satie becomes convinced there must be a second collaborator. And thus begins a witch-hunt through the Enterprise crew. She discovers that a crewman has a Romulan grandparent, not Vulcan as he claimed—so even after Engineering determines that the explosion was not, in fact, sabotage, the admiral continues her prosecution. His blood contains that of their current enemy: He must be a traitor, even though there’s no evidence that he was ever disloyal. Heritage is enough; race is enough. The crewman’s service record doesn’t matter.
Convinced there’s a conspiracy, Satie expands the investigation, viewing more and more of the crew with suspicion.
“With the first link, the chain is forged. The first speech censured—the first thought forbidden—the first freedom denied—chains us all, irrevocably.”
Because he defends his crew, due process, and the Constitution, Satie turns her ire on Captain Picard. She interrogates him. Publicly. She questions his competency, his loyalty, his judgment and violations of the Prime Directive. She implies that Picard is working with the Romulans. She accuses him of treason.
But he fights. And in the optimistic future that is Star Trek, just one good man—especially one in a position of power—standing up for what is right is enough. Picard wins. The drumhead trial ends.
“Villains that twirl their mustaches are easy to spot but those that clothe themselves in good deeds are well camouflaged. But she, or someone like her, will always be with us, waiting for the right climate in which to flourish, spreading fear in the name of righteousness.”
“You were a witness!” says G’Kar in a dream, indicting Londo for his inaction. Babylon 5: “The Very Long Night of Londo Mollari” indicts the ambassador for enabling both an emperor’s personal cruelty and planetary genocide while remaining only privately, quietly horrified. “It doesn’t matter if they stopped. It doesn’t matter if they’d listen. You had an obligation to speak out!”
We can’t always stop what’s happening. Our city and state police hold back, our leaders doubtless afraid of sparking a civil war if they authorize arrests or force.
So we record. We record men as they break an elderly man’s ribs, dragging him out of his car—a citizen, he was driving home and lived on the street they’d blocked off. We record agents pinning down another man and repeatedly punching his head. We record masked men in baseball caps surrounding an SUV in a school pickup line, dragging two women out—they’d been following them for seven miles. (Both women were apparently released in the end, implying they hadn’t done anything wrong to begin with.)
We refuse to stay privately, quietly horrified.
We protest. We call reps. We speak out.
We start to post signs on the street noting where we successfully protected neighbors. And where we couldn’t.
We refuse to be silent.
“Tyranny requires constant effort. It breaks, it leaks. Authority is brittle.”
The stories we love teach us how to resist.
In Andor, the words of a single old woman, already dead, were enough to ignite a rebellion.
Narkina 5 held thousands of prisoners, but it took just two voices saying enough to launch an uprising. There are more of us than there are of them.
Leaders take the first step: They gather information, make plans, give words to feelings that are already rumbling. Leaders give hope and strategy and direction. But crucially, what makes them successful—what allows Cassian and at least one other to escape from an impossible prison—is collective action. Every prisoner who fights makes escape just a little more possible.
An entire prison unit commits to a plan. They hide tools to use as makeshift weapons. They sever power connections. Two of them stage a fight. More of them join a real one. Dozens rebel on one level. Then two. Then every level, helping each other, picking up the lost and confused and continuing to move.
It takes all of them fighting together to take their captors down.
Resistance is not without cost. And sometimes the odds are so stacked against us that success is perhaps one in a thousand, perhaps less. But alone, we are sure to lose. Together, we have a chance.
Those in power know this. They know how much power we can wield if we band together. So they will keep trying to divide us. They will keep trying to make us complacent and compliant, willing to keep our heads down, to work on one widget at a time, hoping we’ll eventually be free.
But sometimes the widgets build the Death Star. And sometimes we’re powerful enough that together—between the bands of rebels stealing plans and fleets providing cover, between the architect building in a flaw and a farm boy piloting a starfighter—we can take the entire machine down.
I don’t know what the world will look like by the time you read this. In Chicago, the escalation was quick. We’ve narrowly avoided military occupation twice now, but the last restraining order will have expired by the time this is published.
I do know I love this city. Hard.
And I need you to know that whatever happens, we did not go quietly. We tried to protect our neighbors. We tried to protect each other.
By the time you read this, I imagine what we’re currently experiencing in Chicago will be the lived experience of multiple cities. I hope you’re not going quietly. I hope you’re trying to protect your neighbors. I hope you’re trying to protect each other.
Hate is a powerful force. Even if we don’t win this battle, even if things aren’t better in our lifetimes, we are still required to fight, still required to contribute what we can. This is our obligation. And we’re part of a long line of people—generations—that have fought too. We are not alone. One day, we will win the war.
“I have friends everywhere.”
Shout out to Dan Sinker’s post “What I Need You to Understand,” which inspired this essay.
© 2026 Dawn Xiana Moon
