The World On Fire.
I haven’t slept more than a few hours since Tuesday: as many other people in California and across the states answering the call of engaging in mutual aid and rapid response again. I feel like a bucket of ice water was poured over me while I slept — I thought we had a couple more weeks to organize and try to find some rest before the race. In the snap of a finger, I found myself falling back into the despair of last Trump’s presidency. I always described the last term and my work as an immigrant justice advocate as being in a constant state of putting out fires that eventually burned me out.
Irony rules our timelines where in the Southern states there is blizzards and fires rage on in California. Climate crisis and the mis-managment of entire ecosystems due to colonization is to blame. Along with every oil executive and big corporation owner draining California of its water for profit, and elected official that saw it fit to give the LAPD millions in funding by cutting funds from the fire department and other key social safety nets that would have prevented the deaths of so many people that are unhoused (many who are working families and elderly folks victims of genrtification as well as people struggling with mental health or addictions on the streets of LA.) This ecological devastation, paired with insurance companies dropping people’s policies in climate affected areas is already driving predatory buyers trying to buy working family’s properties. Climate change will continue to exacerbate these events, creating more and more climate refugees as families too poor to move back to their areas after rebuilding will have to find homes elsewhere in the country.
When the fires began raging, some professional firefighters were poached out of their departments by rich homeowners expecting that their money would keep their second or third home safe. The brave people that continue to fight deserve as much recognition as the inmates being paid sixty cents on a dollar risking their lives fighting fires for 48 hrs straight.
The universe looks disdainfully down on the American project coming to an end after an orchestrated intervention the likes that only America itself has pulled off in the past in well, half of the world.
I won’t even mention the elections anymore — Trump was certified on Monday and sentenced as a felon by the end of the same week. To me, he is as inevitable today as he was a year ago, and so are the patterns I am recognizing. Considering the New Year’s terrorists attacks, paired with interesting events, like in November when a MAGA was arrested on a DC bus for screaming homophobic slurs before attempting to set a man on fire, the white woman during New Year’s Eve who drunkenly who set fire to a bar and several businesses in Puerto Rico and the MAGA woman who was caught setting fires in LA, it is safe to say that chaos and terror is part of the agenda and none of us are safe from the promised devastation that Trump’s cult of death will surely deliver.
Across California, during the same week, ICE spent millions of tax payer’s dollars conducting a week of terror in California’s rural areas, doing raids, setting up check points, snatching undocumented farmworkers, day laborers and US citizens alike. Imagine if those resources were used to actually help people instead of disrupting our entire food system due to racism. Instead, we see a in-coming president that assures scientists and experts on their field that climate change is not to blame for the fires and that “the climate will cool off” leaving us all to wonder if we, as a collective are cooked.
Despite the attacks to the immigrant community and the generally unpleasant, unwelcoming societal climate, Mexico sent over 100 firefighters to support fighting the fires. Time and time again, in the face of mind boggling, downright evil (fascism to name it) people showed up: I witnessed for example, as people in Richmond VA supported each other through a water crisis and snow storm AND organized mutual aid support to victims of the fire and of the ICE raid across the country this week, this is one in a million of reminder of what community can do. Do not despair.
Leonina Arismendi is an award winning Uruguayan artist, human rights advocate and environmental justice activist in the process of rematriation from living in the USA for 25 years back to their Motherland of Uruguay. Support their safe transition: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-the-arismendi-family-in-their-return-to-uruguay
