The Human Condition
2026 - MC Hyland

St. Paul 2026
What did we learn? 

How and where to read the reports: one tab open all winter 
to the map tracking sightings, snatchings, incidents. Partner to the tab
I checked all summer: independent air quality monitors because 
the weather app relied on NOAA, which was cut—showed 
“25—Good” as smoke oranged the sky. How we drove an hour 
to the emergency room from the ranch in South Dakota for 
a nebulizer and new inhaler. How a body indexes history: 
asthma flare-up, heart speeding as copters circle above.
How a body might be taken, defended, turned into a symbol, 
made into something unrecognizable by its person, 
by the people that love it. The way we know some bodies
more clearly than others, faces wheatpasted to buildings,
stickers & spraypaint repeating their names across town.
How other names pile up, indexed by those who miss them, 
by those who took them away, their bodies sequestered, sorted
at the federal building into citizen and non-citizen, sent on
to Texas or further. We learned not to use our own names 
in the chat, to suspect newcomers asking for names or places, 
to track license plates of SUVs idling in the alley.
Hearing days later how they came for the burger joint cooks 
across the street, I never learned their names or faces, they stayed
an abstraction, a testimony, a brush closer to the violence
working around me like a slow drip into our lives’ foundations. 
As government thugs flooded the cities, kitchen workers asked us
not to put NO ICE signs on the door, hoping to stay below
the level of notice. Who can or should stay hidden, who can 
or should be seen. The first time marchers flooded the city 
in sub-zero temps, I was at a bedside, a loved one going deeper
into, then leaving, her body. The second time, I was in bed,
feverish, deep in my own body, kept at a screen’s remove. 
I sent dribbles of cash to families also trapped inside, 
to neighbors gathering food and supplies, keeping them hidden, 
keeping them safe. As safe as they could be, those bodies, 
those names the state turned against. Sunday nights I logged into    
Zoom for a reading group working our way through Hannah Arendt,
her description of America’s “coexistence of political freedom 
and social oppression,” her postwar attempts to grapple with 
German antisemitism and the Third Reich. In a 1946 letter
she wrote of “a genuine storm of protest” that swept the US 
at the start of Japanese internment—“spontaneous” letters 
to congressmen arguing for “the constitutional rights of all
Americans,” written by people perfectly comfortable with 
segregation by race and religion. The warring of the abstract
and concrete: Eichmann’s clichés on the witness stand 
a substitute for thought, Arendt’s sense that he failed 
to understand what he’d done, understand he could 
have done otherwise, understand enough to regret,
fifteen years later, the enormous numbers of people 
he sent to their deaths. The names, the bodies equally
unreal, beyond the halo of his concerns: his own luck, 
his career. I don’t need to look this far away in time 
or space to find abstraction’s violence, humans 
made not into names and bodies, but ideas. While 
I watched my loved one’s breathing go unsteady, slow,
people snatched neighbors from their homes, their cars. 
Somehow believing a person could be illegal. Somehow
believing the wild fiction of a nation as something other
than neighbors putting their bodies on the line for
each other’s thriving, as the place where those we love
and those we could love live and die and carry on.