Five Things I Thought About Today

in a state of anxiety but also joining in to collectively object to the madness

My grandmother, Josephine

1. Unless you’ve been hiding under the proverbial rock, and I get it — no judgement — you will have learned that our federal government is currently stirring up civil unrest in Los Angeles, our beloved city, so that they can take over. ICE was trolling the Home Depots, the elementary school graduations, the fashion district downtown, in full military gear and even detained the leader of Los Angeles’ biggest unions, SEIU, my union actually. David Huerta was injured protesting downtown yesterday, exercising his first amendment rights and is still being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center. “What happened to me is not about me; This is about something much bigger,” he said in a statement from the hospital. “This is about how we as a community stand together and resist the injustice that’s happening. Hard-working people, and members of our family and our community, are being treated like criminals. We all collectively have to object to this madness because this is not justice.” That our current fascist government is deliberately stirring up civil unrest is perhaps hypothetical but not its apparent desire to intimidate, terrorize and take over the city. I felt truly anxious today watching it unfold on the world wide webs. Lots of sirens, lots of police, lots of helicopters. Anger, anxiety, bewilderment.

2. Nearly every single caregiver who has ever worked with Sophie is an immigrant — mostly documented, several becoming naturalized or obtaining a green card through marriage. I know that several of these women came over the border in the direst of circumstances — one a teenager in the trunk of a Volkswagen Beetle, another fleeing an abusive husband, one detained as a tween in a Texan border jail for three months. They are Jamaican, Belizean, Mexican, Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan. They are trained caregivers and LVNs, have extended families here in Los Angeles and back in the countries of their birth. They pay taxes and are active in their communities. They go to church. They take care of babies and the elderly. They have been devoted caregivers for Sophie for many years. Today, one of them, who lives downtown, near where the fascists are doing their jobs said that it was really, really bad.

3. My maternal grandfather, paternal grandmother and paternal grandfather were immigrants from Syria and Italy. My Italian grandmother never got citizenship, as she was illiterate. She raised five children in a small apartment over a fire station on 139th Street in Manhattan. My uncle and aunt were born in Italy and immigrated with my grandparents as a child to New York City (another aunt and then my father and his twin brother were born here). My uncle lied about his age and joined the Navy, fought in the Pacific in World War II. He was so proudly patriotic it was almost annoying. My Syrian grandfather immigrated to New York City as a child with his entire family, fleeing persecution. They settled in Brooklyn, NY. He was a traveling salesman who made his way to the Mississippi Delta where he met my grandmother, a blue-eyed girl of Scottish and English descent. She was working in one of her brother’s general store. She was eighteen. He married her and brought her to Brooklyn, where she learned Arabic and cooked Arabic food for her new family. She had 5 children there, the youngest of whom was my mother.

   

   The Syrians - my grandfather is the young man second from the left

   

   The Mississippi Relatives — my grandmother is the little girl shielding her eyes on the right

4. I was thinking how everything, everything is dying — that the patriarchy is trampling on everything because it is dying — that it’s a last gasp. That the gasp might be a generation or more is more than sobering — it’s agonizing. I was thinking about the LBGTQ population and how they are bearing so much of the brunt of Dear Leader, Leon and the Fascists and the rest of the cult — how their very identities are being erased. Gender fluidity gives me hope, makes me think that something good is coming — something that we do not yet understand fully. I want to fiercely protect these humans.

5. I was thinking about what I’d do if I saw things going down, if I witnessed cruelty or violence. I discussed these things with a beloved friend who reminded me that we do not know what we’d do or not do. We can intellectualize and hope that we would do the right thing, but even now how can I wash my car, eat a quesadilla, suction Sophie’s secretions, clip the bottom inch of the peonies, while fascists in tactical gear are threatening fellow citizens in our beautiful city? I should visit the people I know right here in my neighborhood who are in the Cult, who don’t wear the masks of ICE but turn their bland faces toward everything and continue to mock and deride us, who exist in a different reality, a clown show, a cruel and indifferent reality. I’d like to ask them what the actual fuck? How could you?