Point No Point to Deception Pass: Acts of kindness bring light to darkest of days

Published 1:30 am Wednesday, December 17, 2025

It is the darkest time of year. People string lights everywhere to light up the darkness, to make us all feel a little less trapped in darkness. It is a kindness of strangers.

Whidbey Island has a great many people who show concern for strangers. It is easy to show concern for those we know and love. It is much harder to show genuine concern for strangers, especially those who we will never get to know and who can do little in return.

That is why it is so remarkable when I see the evidence of concern. Delivering food baskets to isolated individuals or families that could appreciate the attention. Being a little more patient or attentive in public interactions. Waiting for the elderly driver without getting angry at their actions that delay us.

Waiting patiently in some line for medicine or food or items at a hardware store. Maybe even thinking of kind words you might share with fellow shoppers inconvenienced by delays caused by the busy season. Maybe appearing a bit more at ease or content than you really feel in order to put others at ease. Help them feel safe and accepted and not surrounded by a hostile, malignant world.

If one is paying attention these days it is possible to feel frightened and alarmed by a wave of cruelty that has spread across our nation, a result of deliberate actions by federal agents that we had hoped were there to protect us. Unfortunately, the signs are all there that the Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been weaponized as an instrument of a growing police state.

ICE tried to convince the public that their actions were directed against criminal gangs, when, in fact, the vast majority of the people they arrest have varying levels of legal status, asylum claims, green cards, citizenship applications and the like. Most can only be accused of a nonviolent criminal trespass misdemeanor, certainly nothing that should earn them a violent arrest and indefinite detention in overcrowded, unsanitary, for-profit detention centers run by sadistic jailers.

People all over the U.S. are witnessing scenes in their communities that mirror the observations of Anne Frank, writing in her diary in Nazi occupied Holland in 1943: “Terrible things are happening outside. At any time of night and day, poor helpless people are being dragged out of their homes. … Families are torn apart; men, women and children are separated. Children come home from school to find that their parents have disappeared. Women return from shopping to find their houses sealed, their families gone.”

We here on Whidbey Island have mostly been distant observers of the trouble spreading across the land. We read daily accounts of raids on homes and apartment buildings, people grabbed out of a shopping center or a school parking lot. Workers grabbed from work sites. Always by big, heavily armed men wearing masks and no identification. It is almost hard to remember that it was less than a year ago that no one in America was arrested by roving gangs of masked thugs claiming to be government agents. Now there are tens of thousands of such men spreading out across our blue states and cities.

The intention is to break the resistance of communities in which the majority of people sympathize with their vulnerable immigrant neighbors. Those who not only refuse to cooperate with ICE actions, but often gather others through whistle and car horn alerts in order to witness, record and disrupt ICE activity. School children in schools across America, in Minnesota, Maine, California, North Carolina and elsewhere, in imitation of their elders in the No Kings demonstrations, stream out onto the streets to protest the attacks they are witnessing on the parents of children in their schools. Again, people show concern for strangers.

No doubt, ICE will soon be here on our island, in force. We witnessed a smaller presence some months ago, but anyone can plainly see that there are construction and landscape maintenance crews here composed of young men not unlike those being wrestled to the ground and arrested by ICE elsewhere. So it would be naive to think that our community will be spared.

It is also clear to me that concern for the stranger among us is strong here. Even if people never have attended a church service and heard the words of Leviticus 19:33-34 “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt.”

There are Nativity scenes beginning to appear in various places around the country that depict Mary and Joseph and the baby Jesus as refugees under threat from hostile present-day authorities. Everywhere one can see evidence of officials and common folk showing love and concern for the suffering stranger among them. Take heart from the light and the good that is everywhere among us today.

Dr. Michael Seraphinoff is a Whidbey Island resident, a former professor at Skagit Valley College and academic consultant to the International Baccalaureate Organization.