I am a history buff. Recognizing what we are and naming that aloud is significant because we have different roles, different purposes, and my ability to comprehend the distinctions between my roles and somebody else’s requires that we figure out what I can do, and can do well, and what I cannot do well, or do at all coupled with what someone else does well, can do to a so-so extent, and what they shouldn’t do at all whether that’s because they don’t like it or are awful at it.
I sat and conversed with a comrade for hours on Saturday as we watched humans play, toil, cheer in the elements. We had an exchange reminding me of how much I not only ask questions — as that is an identity (a form of self-awareness) I’ve known and claimed for two decades — but how I seek parallels from other historical incidents and phases. I am a history buff (along with a math nerd, a baker, a wordplayer, a youngest child who, as an elder, is advocating that other middle-aged people embrace the identity of elder, too).
For the last five weeks, Los Angeles has harkened to Ferguson 11 years ago, when (I recall) Elizabeth Warren expressed outrage and disbelief that U.S. military vehicles rolled through streets of Ferguson in ways that she was accustomed to seeing in Baghdad, Mosul, Kirkuk, and Nasiriyah in the previous decade (as well as Panama City in 1989, or St. George’s in 1983, Kandahar in 2017 and on and on). Warren was appalled that the military was invading domestic communities.
In a Democracy Now broadcast last week, L.A.’s Mayor Bass described the scene in MacArthur Park as:
We went to the park. I could see a helicopter in the air. I think it was a Black Hawk helicopter. And I saw military tanks. It was the Custom and Border Patrol, and it might have been military on the periphery…. what I saw in the park today looked like a city under siege, under armed occupation. And I have to tell you, spending many years traveling into conflict areas, you know, it’s the way the city — it’s the way a city looks before a coup.
For a mayor to be talking about a coup in the place where she is the executive is ominous.
Later on, Vladimir Carrasco, of CHIRLA, described how, “At one point, one officer had even had to be pulled back by their vest, and this person was carrying a machine gun. And I’m like, if this person with a gun, federally trained officer with a gun, is already coming into the community agitated, I can’t imagine the horrors that are going to be coming forward if this continues.”
The bullies not only want to continue in Los Angeles but multiply this state-sanctioned terrorism in 40, if not 400, more locales. Most of them will be cities, most of which will be in so-called Blue counties or states, as the fear-mongers intend to stoke more violence that they will claim justifies more weapons, soldiers, and occupation.
The pressure is upon us. The fascists’ seizure is spreading. And no remnant of the 20th Century suffices, 25 years into this century. Let us stop waiting for a celebrity a politician or some other caricature to be our hero, since there are no fairytale heroes, just human beings.
washing dishes: a father’s glimpses 