Exodus
Frantic, confusing, and dangerous trips to the airport continued day and night. There were checkpoints on the ways to the front entrance, some of which were operated by the newly victorious, if somewhat disorganized, militants, and some of which were operated by what appeared to be vigilantes, who likely were trying to join the militants or at least not to appear opposed to them. The planes came and left carrying families, many forced to abandon their livelihoods in a home that did not welcome them anymore. It was a kaleidoscope of rising and falling anxiety, stress, dread, and hope.
Those feelings were matched in the Situation Room of the White House as senior military officers and political aides were broadsided by the breathtaking speed with which local forces gave ground, in most cases without a fight. Within a week, militant forces, who knew the country well and who knew the country’s psychology and the peculiar intranational forces in ways that no outsider would, were within reach of the capital.
Pro-democracy forces within the government were not able to overcome the corruption of the entrenched systems of the state, supported largely by the U.S. government, which seemed to have accepted it, even if distastefully, as the way business is conducted there.
On Friday, President Biden admitted that he could not “promise what the final outcome will be, or that it will be without the risk of loss.” His statement acknowledged a series of miscalculations that left the state vulnerable to fundamentally anti-democratic warlords who would surrender to keep some part of their already diminished power.
Uncertainty gripped the schools in particular, as educational ministers and local teachers were left unsure that their work would be allowed to continue, or if would be altered so as make it unrecognizable and potentially criminalized.
One teacher, unnamed for fear of retribution, considered “quitting the formally recognized schools and going to work in an informal network of underground schools” where she could try to teach young girls and boys not only basic literacy and numeracy, but also the history of their region. She was committed to teaching what life was like before the current takeover and the proud, but fraught history of “the last three hundred years and well before that leading up to where we are today, the conflicts between various colonial and occupational powers and our annexation from one nation to another, and the unsure place we find ourselves in today among various states each with their own problems, but generally more democratic in their views than we find ourselves to be now.”
She added that “our children deserve to know who they really are and where they come from, including all our imperfections.”
Fear in particular gripped women as new legal requirements would certainly be forthcoming, but none could quite say what the requirements would be, how they would be enforced, or even who they would be coming from. This fear of unknowable dangers was pervasive.
There has been a diffusion of power thus far, some say by design, so that women in the state cannot be sure whether they could be accused of wrong-doing by the state or turned in by a neighbor hoping for a reward. Nor is it clear what such prosecutions might entail, thus hindering their ability to defend themselves, as long as legal defense remains possible and, in some sense, principled in the new state’s laws.
All of this is enveloped in a crisis of ethnic tensions in a generally well-armed populace with little to no control of who can carry weapons. Shooting deaths are common and frequently motivated by ethnicity and the mere suspicion of victims being citizens of various other nearby nations. The most egregious of these had happened less than three years ago in a store and left 22 people dead and injuring another 26.
All these uncertainties left 29 million people in a state of deep anxiety and, in some cases, desperation to get out.
The airplanes, some of them chartered from American-based airlines, some of them military C-17’s, lumbered on and out to their occupants’ uncertain futures. The last of them took off just past midnight. And thus, our shaky exodus ended, the end to a once bright future in a beautiful state, dimmed by a malice most of us cannot comprehend, where, let us not forget, President Kennedy was shot within living memory.
— Dex Dexpherd reporting from Austin, TX, at Austin-Bergstrom Airport