“Eve, can you keep a secret?”

Instantly my earlobes shoot up. Who doesn’t love to hear secrets? Who doesn’t want to believe that s/he is the only one who knows something not privy to anybody else? Suddenly it feels like an enhanced relationship that says something great about me: I’m trusted more than others, seen as loyal more than others. I am not a betrayer.

But even as I murmur “Yes,” I hear Bernie’s words in my ears, words I heard many times over many years: “I don’t believe in secrets. Life is one, there are no secrets. Maybe we don’t know the details, but we know something.”

He was always surprised by how much energy people put into holding and keeping secrets. It wasn’t that he didn’t keep things confidential; there were many things relating to his students that he never shared with me, nor I with him. But he always marveled at how much people invested in keeping things under wraps. For him, it was a battle against reality.

I try to be careful. We not only want to protect our feelings, but in this age of social media we want to protect our privacy, too. In this blog I mention names of specific people whose permission I ask for ahead of time, or else of those who are public figures in some way or other.

I know the dangers. Like many writers, I’m fascinated by the landscape around me. I like to take photos like the one above, looking through the window of my office where Saraswati sits on a windowsill accompanied by flowers, a plant, and an incense bowl, and behind her, outdoors, Aussie suns herself lying belly down on multiple layers of snow. I fall victim to the impulse to use other lives as content, catalyzing ideas and imagination, well aware that the most likely sources of beauty, joy and meaning lie in the mundane, everyday things around us.

I’ve been thinking about secrecy since my trip to Minneapolis. Even the Dept. of Homeland Security admits that the idea was for ICE agents to grab people from their apartments, cars, or streets, restrain them, throw them into the back of large, unmarked, black SUVs, and get out of there pronto. They even practiced doing such maneuvers very quickly: identify, grab, toss into the car, and go in less than five minutes, before anyone begins to understand what is happening. Keep it flowing seamlessly, quickly—and secretly. Wear face masks.

What I so appreciate about what I saw in Minneapolis—and what I see people learning and adopting in other cities in the country, including in my own back yard—is the importance of not letting ICE agents maintain secrecy. Even if the law dictates that we can’t stop them, in fact must keep 25 feet away, we’ll video what they’re doing, identify them as well as we can, and send the video out, be it to LUCE (Immigrant Justice Network), the media, social media, however we can make it public.

It’s interesting to see how much our and other governments bank on people not knowing what is really going on. A friend of mine, a TV journalist who was proud of her work and who subsequently worked as a press secretary for one of Bill Clinton’s cabinet secretaries during Clinton’s first term, told me that she was amazed to discover how much even the most zealous of journalists knew very little about what was actually going on in the government. “You can’t imagine how little people know,” she observed.

What abets that secrecy is how many things we also don’t want to know: What goes on in prisons such as Angola? How many inmates get put in solitary confinement, for what reason, and for how long? What really goes on in Amazon warehouses? Factory animal farms and slaughterhouses?

I even wonder about ICE agents: What are they told about their work? How are they trained?

Bernie didn’t believe in secrets. He walked around in his jeans, Hawaiian shirts, and suspenders, waking me up in the early morning to scare me to bits after his bath left the little hair he had left standing upright like Edward Scissorhands’. Me? I consider myself in the mirror in the morning, wondering whether to put on make-up or not, and if so, how much. In his memory, I sometimes give a loud, wild whoop.