https://www.thewrap.com/ice-raids-in-los-angeles/ 😡🤬😢
I am appalled. (But what's new with that?)
Here's what: I don't understand how people can celebrate Pride and Juneteenth in this country when other communities are being terrorized. Civil rights is civil rights, regardless of the community. The smart move this summer would have been advocating for others instead of invoking victim porn and literal porn when, in reality, every tribe and every community on Earth has suffered.
What this demonstrates, juxtaposed against the, frankly, silliness of Juneteenth and Pride revelers twerking their asses all over town, is that nothing matters to most people until it happens to them. A lot of these people getting deported voted for Trump Okay, I get it. But black people kill black people in this country like most people kill cockroaches and yet most still think the White Boogey Man is their biggest enemy. And don't get me started on the LBTGQLMNOP so-called community. I know it was rough as a teen coming to terms with Identity and yada yada yada, I was there. But do we have to look so embarrassing? Do half of us need to be on meth to have a party or a hookup? Newsflash: Everyone likes sex, no matter what their sexuality. But it's not big of a deal. In fact, the unsexiest thing in the world is to be sexually overexposed.
When our community was facing its own life or death crisis 30-40 years ago, many wondered what it would take for others to listen and fight with and for us. Well, what happened is HIV and AIDs started to spill into the straight community as gay culture spilled into the mainstream. Now everyone goes to see the spectacle of Pride and is proud to walk for AIDS. Not because many of them cared. But because many of them were affected.
So what will it take to bring the rest of us out for the Latino culture whose food, music, culture, style, and diaspora of some of the most beautiful and hard-working human beings on the planet who are being abducted by masked GI Joe action figures and, worse, not even sent to wherever they came from, but possibly places they've never been? Or held indefinitely.
People getting kidnapped off the streets by large men in face masks with no identification, no demonstrated authority, and automatic weapons and gays and blacks are dancing in the streets. And this week, it will be the suburban barbeques while our legislature likely passes a bill that's going to throw these celebrants off of their insurance and add food insecurity to an already deprived poor and working class. Countless Palestinian women and children are being slaughtered and starved to death and nearly every Jewish person I know, many of them my dearest friends, can only talk about the kidnap victims, as if there were no problems in that region before October 7th or that any of the overwhelming majority of people being killed in Gaza had anything to do with that act of unthinkable terror and, not to be understated, that we aren't seeing other kidnap victims here in our own country. Ahhhh, but they're from a different tribe. They're not "us." Meanwhile, condemn anything the State of Israel does and you're labeled the A-word. Or, worse if you're not a US citizen, deported.
Well, with the world I'm looking at today, I don't mind being an asshole, even if that's not the word I meant. I'm tired of the tribalism. You cannot have sympathy for groups if you don't love everyone -- unless you only care about your own. Which means we are still as tribal as we were 100,000 years ago. Just better dressed. Well, some of us.
Latinos of all backgrounds are being kidnapped and separated from families like African slaves, afraid to leave home like Anne Frank, being rounded up and "contained" in dubious custody like Holocaust victims, and afraid to come out (only literally) or singled out for who they are like young gays. What they aren't are people coming here to build a better life for their families who are treated with the same respect as the Italians, Irish, Jewish, and German immigrants of the previous century and before who built their generational wealth in the same mobs and gang warfare the latest iteration of immigrants are struggling with, but who lack that crucial phenotypical proximity to Anglo-Saxon whiteness. But you're dancing in the street because it's not your turn this time? That's gross. It's inhumane and a wasted opportunity.
This is why I'm alone and finally all right with it. But if there's every a demographic that comes along and just wants to call themselves human beings, I'd love to see a holiday we can call the Golden Rule. And we can even celebrate it daily.
This is why I'm alone and finally all right with it. But if there's every a demographic that comes along and just wants to call themselves human beings, I'd love to see a holiday we can call the Golden Rule. And we can even celebrate it daily.
