The Fires in LA, Health Agencies Slashed, FBI and FAA Gutted — Shocked by the Headlines
In a city like Los Angeles that is usually so self-absorbed in its own reflection in the celebrity culture of fashion, sports and cinema, it was astounding to see the selfless outpouring of support for the refugees of the Palisades and Eaton fires.
From all over Southern California came truckloads of goods and volunteers to help the devastated victims of fires and then floods —mostly from just common working folks. Simultaneously, there was a deluge of executive orders from the Oval Office. We were warned about both the force of the winds and the words from the Convicted Orange Blowhard in Chief. It shouldn’t have come as a surprise for either disaster. The 2025 plan was leaked over a year ago and studied by every state attorneys general and many others.
The National Weather Service warned us about the hurricane-force winds but doesn’t have a prediction model for an autocratic coup. Nature can be unpredictable, but not so Don the con, who has been espousing all of the “deep state” anti-woke and DEI lingo that he can dish out, with all the anti-immigrant fervor he can muster. Sure, the problem is that foreigners have been “invading” this continent since Christopher Columbus landed — most of them got here without papers.
On the ecological side of the disaster headlines, we were warned years in advance by the likes of Mike Davis, author of the Ecology of Fear — Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. When that book and others by him were written in the 1990s, some called him a doomsayer. Today he’s a visionary who saw the future before it arrived. However, it doesn’t take a prophet to predict what the future holds for the 2.0 version of the Orange Tyrant. The dismantling and defunding of the various health and aid agencies will surely bring on the next pandemic that could have been stopped. The defunding and firing of Justice Department and FBI agents will only make our nation less safe from criminals and corruption — for the real criminals are now in charge!
As the lawsuits mount up against the executive orders – 46 at last count and mounting daily — the Constitutional crisis looms on the horizon and like the response to the fires, people are starting to show up. First on street corners, then in state capitals and then in DC with a “He’s not our President” day of protests. And nary a discouraging word from a cowed national media, who are now afraid of a billion-dollar lawsuit.
As California and the rest of the nation watches for the ICE sweeps coming to town, I have received reports from nurses that they have already raided Kaiser Permanente in Harbor City and will be targeting other local hospitals in this region. This only spreads a layer of panic and fear amongst the Latino and immigrant communities for anyone might get swept up and deported if they aren’t carrying their papers and even if they were born here. Don’t leave home without your passport.
Down at the local U.S. Post Office, the clerk who processes the passport application says that there has been a 100% increase since Jan. 20 for people getting their children registered – and in San Pedro, there are just as many Croatians and Italians as Latinos applying. People want to make sure that if they leave the country their children can actually return!
The Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles was not shy about promoting Republican anti-abortion candidates before the November election, but now they too are shocked at the inhumanity of the new regime in the Capitol.
Archbishop José H. Gomez wrote recently:
“Our national debate about immigration frustrates me. … Many of our leaders seriously believe the issue can best be ‘solved’ by rounding up and removing everyone caught living in our midst without proper legal documents. This would be a human rights nightmare, involving the forced repatriation of a population roughly the size of Ohio. … Politicians talk in euphemisms about … making life so scary and harsh for people who are here illegally that they will want to leave the country of their own accord. From the courts and legislatures to the media and popular opinion, there is an outraged, personal tone to our immigration debate that you don’t hear very often in our politics.”
I am certain that many more religious leaders of many faiths might put it in more blunt terms– except for the white evangelical nationalists who believe that America was founded by Christians, for Christians only and everyone else is corrupting the nation. This of course is pure hogwash. The Founding Fathers may have been deists and a few atheists but not one thought that a theocratic state was sustainable or desirable. This is why the division of church and state was built into the Constitution — you can’t have a United States of America that is divided by religion, caste, or creed.
Even more so after the American Civil War and the passage of the 14th Amendment, all people born here have birth-right citizenship. That issue has withstood challenges many times and is still the law of the land today. But the far-right xenophobes would like to take that case all the way to the Supreme Court to have it overturned like Roe vs. Wade.
What we are seeing today in reaction to the fires and the coup is that at our core the average citizen of our country still believes in E Pluribus Unum the Latin phrase that means “out of many, one.” It is the official motto of the United States on the Great Seal of the United States. It is embodied in the concept of our Statue of Liberty and the poem by Emma Lazarus, at its base:
Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
America is now divided again about who has rights and who doesn’t, but at some point in the very near future you’ll have to decide if we in fact are still one nation of many and if freedom and liberty can survive the tyrant in the White House that the founding fathers warned us about.