I keep having nights where pangs of anxiety shoot out from my stomach and radiate down my limbs. It is crazy-making to be living through our moronic fascist times. It is constantly nauseating ;feels like reality is slipping through your fingers. As one awful thing happens, like the tragic deaths of over 120 young campers and their counselors due to apocalyptic flooding in central Texas, it gets compounded with another horrific thing, like ICE and Border Patrol invading MacArthur Park in an openly militaristic “show of force.” ICE just got more funding than Russia’s military last week, $170 billion for ICE vs. roughly $140 billion in Russia. I routinely keep finding my brain filled with static and it feels like all I can do is play simple phone games and try to disassociate. But we all have to keep pushing ahead anyway, and I’m going to try to explain why I still find a lot of faith in other people in these troubling times. Our institutions are failing us at every turn, but everyday people are discovering their moral courage and compassion in the face of our overlapping disasters and I think it’s essential to recognize that. 

First, let’s consider the invasion at MacArthur Park on July 7th. This was meant to be a joint operation between 10 federal agencies as well as LAPD and LASD, and by all accounts it went spectacularly poorly. Their intention was to create a coordinated show-of-force patrol, similar to how the US military used to patrol in Baghdad and Kabul. MacArthur Park exists in a mythic dystopian headspace for the right; they’re convinced it is a 24/7 den of fentanyl overdoses and MS-13 crime. In reality, there are plenty of tragic problems in MacArthur Park, but on the day the feds invaded there was a children’s soccer camp going on. Luckily, the community patrols that have ramped up in response to ICE over the last month were able to mobilize when people got wind of what the feds were planning and they were able to warn people to clear the park. This meant that ICE and Border Patrol marched through an empty park and made no arrests. It appears that their real intention in staging this may have been purely for optics, but even those didn’t look great, considering they mostly stood around while various community members screamed at them. Kids on scooters getting right in the face of HSI goons in tactical gear makes them look pathetic, because they are. In Ken Klippenstein’s excellent reporting of the incident, he wrote: “This is just the latest operation that didn’t go off as planned, amplifying the sense amongst the California Guardsmen that the whole spectacle is idiotic and shameful.” Anything that demoralizes the forces occupying our city is a net positive in my book.

As I’m writing this on July 10th, we saw ICE and Border Patrol descend on farmworkers in Camarillo and Oxnard in full military fashion, sending people running for their lives and mass arresting them. The standoffs with the community that have ensued have lasted for hours. Some people will almost certainly be going to prison on federal charges for a very long time for doing this, and they most likely knew that when they took a stand. These are people armed with little but goggles and leaf blowers standing up against full military gear and tear gas. In a time where people’s capacity to enact unspeakable cruelty is in our faces every second of every day, I want you to really appreciate how brave these people are. 

As for the ICE raids, as they continue to terrorize our neighborhoods, we’re seeing people show up for each other in pretty spectacular fashion. Vendor buyouts are being organized neighborhood by neighborhood to keep vendors in their homes while still being made whole financially. Food aid programs and grocery deliveries are similarly being organized while migrants can’t safely work. My neighborhood YMCA that became a donation hub during the LA fires has been reactivated to deliver groceries. The “No Sleep for ICE” campaigns continue to deploy people around the county to do noise demonstrations outside of hotels where ICE is staying; I am stunned how many people continue to turn out to these actions a month into this invasion. Particularly inspiring is the grassroots campaign to get ICE out of Home Depot. The owners of Home Depot are major Trump donors, despite the fact that day laborers gathering at their stores are literally foundational to their business model. Home Depot has done nothing to intervene or condemn the kidnappings of people in their parking lots. Pressuring Home Depot to take a stand, hurting their business and public reputation, feels like the first step in breaking the corporate alliances with Trump’s fascism, and it’s a method of tangibly building solidarity within LA. If we can demonstrate that people won’t shop at businesses that collaborate with ICE, we can build power in any number of other ways to continue ramping up resistance to these fascists. 

Next, let’s consider how spectacularly the attempts to attack Zohran Mamdani are failing. After his win last month, everyone from Kirsten Gillibrand to the New York Times has been trying to find a way to discredit Mamdani and tank his campaign, but nothing is sticking. Fox News just keeps posting lists of Mamdani’s policies that make him sound awesome. Attacks calling Mamdani a radical Muslim for his support of Gaza just don’t stick when 69% of Democrats now have an unfavorable view of Israel. Everyday people are refusing to back down or apologize for wanting the slaughter of children to end. This week we saw the National Education Association, the largest teacher’s union in the country, vote to break ties with the Anti-Defamation League over their mischaracterization of what’s being done in Palestine. Similarly, AB 715, a bill that would’ve banned honest teaching about the history of Israel-Palestine in California, failed to move forward after educators forcefully pushed back on it. Mamdani has now officially received the most votes of any primary candidate in New York history; his growing popularity around the country is a bellwether of how dramatically public opinion is shifting under our feet. 

I’ll admit one area where I’ve really felt the chasm of despair open up has been these floods across the country this week. The Camp Mystic floods have obviously captured everyone’s attention, but there have also been deadly floods in North Carolina and New Mexico. It’s easy to spiral out in weeks like this and decide that everything is hopeless. It’s easy to feel like we’ve gone over the tipping point and these disasters are just going to become more and more frequent. But I want to highlight a network I encountered after the LA Fires, a group called Extreme Weather Survivors, who connect survivors of recent climate disasters with people who have previously survived them. It’s a means of processing trauma and getting practical advice about how to apply for aid, navigate insurance, and rebuild your life from scratch. I see it as a very practical adaptation to our new reality, just like vendor buyouts and grocery deliveries are adaptations. We are remarkably adaptive creatures when our survival depends on it, and we are going to have to learn how to activate tools to share our techniques for adapting to these disasters across the country. 

I’ve been grappling with this ever since the fires ripped so close to us, the deep knowledge that life is never going to be the same again. It’s a thing I believed in the abstract for years, that eventually all the rot in this country would boil over and cause a steady collapse of American society as we know it, but it’s something very different to live through it. There is absolutely no turning back now and that’s a very hard thing to live with. The only things that have buoyed me through the last few years have been two works of fiction: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future and Octavia Butler’s Parable books. Ministry for the Future was published in 2020 and was KSR’s attempt to describe how he could see the next 30 years playing out as we live through climate collapse as honestly as he could. In some ways, I think the book may have already proven to be overly optimistic, but it is a very solid story for wrapping your head around what’s going to happen over the rest of our lifetimes. It’s also good because it does offer a path out of the crisis; it demonstrates how we as an entire species could adapt and survive. Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents were written in 1993 and 1998 and begin in the year 2025, when a young Black girl living in the suburbs of LA is driven from her home due to drought and fire. She has to survive in a post-apocalyptic world, and she does so by developing a religion called Earthseed, which teaches that everyone has a responsibility to embody God by consciously changing their surroundings for the better. The central tenant of the religion is this:

All that you touch

You Change.

All that you Change

Changes You.

The only lasting truth

Is Change.

God is Change.

It’s an incredibly powerful tool for centering ourselves during this chaotic period. We cannot stop the change now that it’s in motion, we can only respond and adapt. Even if we dramatically cut off all fossil fuel use today, a lot of the severe climate change is already baked in. Learning how to change, how to grow with other people, is going to be essential. And I think people are starting to realize this. I think there’s a growing sense that the legacy institutions that brought us to our intersecting crises can no longer serve us. I think people are open to the stories Bernie, AOC, and Zohran are telling like never before because nothing about the old world makes sense in our circumstances. “If the rule you followed led you to this, then what good is the rule?”

I’ve been sitting with this lecture that Naomi Klein gave at UCLA a few weeks ago. She tells the story of the Camp fire and how it destroyed the town of Paradise. It rendered thousands of people homeless; they were initially all camped out in a Walmart parking lot. The surrounding communities turned out in incredible shows of solidarity and support, helping people get what they could to survive after they had lost everything. But as the months dragged on and many of the people couldn’t find stable housing, Walmart eventually evicting them from the parking lot, the people became homeless in tents and cars and the residents of the town started to resent them. Eventually some of the most brutal anti-camping laws got passed and people got pushed further and further to the fringes. The point Naomi wanted to make was that there are limits to people’s generosity and solidarity. If we don’t have the social and political structures in place to keep people remembering to care for their fellow man, they can fall back into the casual individual cruelty that defines Americans. Our work is to build those structures that make caring for everyone’s collective survival the default. So let it be done.