
When the violence causes silence
We must be mistaken
"Zombie" by The Cranberries
So, there are masked men in my neighborhood dragging fruit vendors and taco truck operators, Home Depot workers into unmarked vans. So, a caregiver I know can’t go to work because she is protecting her parents who’ve lived and worked in this city for over thirty years. She is trading errands with her sister, a teacher, so their parents, who are “documented”, won’t be kidnapped and deported without due process. Her friend’s parents were both deported, suddenly, after living their entire adult lives here, raising a family, working and sending their children to college. So, a teacher I know showed me a list of ICE alerts from their neighborhood, NEST camera alerts of shadowy men in masks, no uniforms, no badges and told me that their father has not been able to go to work for nearly two weeks. They also told me that there’s a bounty on the heads of undocumented workers — $1500 a head. So, it’s understood, too, that men may be dressing as ICE, impersonating ICE and kidnapping women, assaulting them.
So, on October 7, 2023, I called my neighbor, an Orthodox Jewish woman with whom I feel a deep bond as a mother and caregiver, and I told her that I hoped her friends and relatives in Israel were safe. Since then, we have broken off communication, largely because I can’t abide what is going on there, because we just can’t go there and where else is there to go? The piles of dead children, the bombs and threats and vengeance and yes, the innocent hostages rotting underground. I asked her, before we stopped talking about the situation, before we stopped talking at all, what is the end game? Silence.
So, the streets of Los Angeles are very quiet, eerily quiet, and I am wondering what the end game might be.
Elizabeth, you have articulated everything I was sitting in front of a blank page trying to say, your first paragraph says it all, the inhumanity of it, the absurdity of it, the prosaic cruelty of it, and the fact that it is all for naught in the end, no purpose at all, it will not achieve the ends the bald Nazi orchestrating it all imagines, he will never turn the country back to white, it was never all white to begin with, so in the end it is cruelty for cruelty's sake, not that cruelty is ever purposeful, some would argue with me, but on this point, i am resolved, cruelty is NEVER purposeful, and so the streets are empty and lives unravel, and since no one knows the end game no one knows when or how it will end, and i go from my brain exploding to my brain being ice cold, frozen, because it cannot compute it cannot compute it cannot compute
i am glad your write. i am glad you bear witness. someone needs to say this is how it is.
Oh - well, the endgame is clear. Enough Palestinians tortured/killed to make them leave and live as refugees elsewhere, and move into their remaining land. And then move on to Lebanon, etc. Lebensraum. They say it all the time, it's not like it's a secret or mystery, or anything.