We were standing in a circle with the family who arrived last night. Doing all we could to make sure they knew they were welcome within this weird tribe of original wanderlusty creative heads that by the grace of God I’d returned to the outpost of for some R&R on a whim before all this broke out. Full of compassion, all of us on the road all the time one way or another anyway, comprehending the jarring reality of all this from completely different vantage points.
They were strong, resolute in spite of everything vanishing. On task, finding next. Then we were told that our openness was appreciated.
“What I really …am just mystified by, just don’t understand…is how so many people…just don’t care-” one of them whispered. Someone had told them to let people know what’d happened to them as they were out handling things and you could see her heart as her face went gray. She looked down as she tried to impassively describe the dismissive callousness with which she’d been met upon doing so.
“It’s not even about the “discounts, it’s-” she paused and looked up at us, raw vulnerability all over her.
“Human compassion-” a tribe dude grimaced in understanding as everyone nodded.
“Yeah, just-” she whispered.
I heard it clear as day and got on task. There’s not much I can do , but the one thing I am a boss with is finding where the love IS hiding in this. Because I KNEW it was there. & I know what it feels like to be grinding through a catastrophe, soldiering through your life blowing up and just needing… to see someone sincerely sympathize with your plight for a split second.
Within ten minutes I’d tracked down a starter list of spots they could stop in today’s slog if they needed a re-upping on people in Los Angeles giving a fuck to Keep going. Things big and small.
& there was no pity, or saccharine whathaveyous. …This was business. This is war. A spiritual one, at that. Beleaguering your spirit is the goal of every person playing for the other side in this right now. Because you’ve already survived so far.
People have a lot of weird ideals about God’s Angels. But one of the things they are called to is being ‘ministering spirits’ to humans. Sounds lofty but sometimes the loftiest thing done is getting down into the practicals. The pragmatic shit offered that helps a human pull through, aka:
Providing supplies: To give things that are needed, such as medicines or relief.
AngelBrynner, on The de facto Who shot the dawg definition of the title.
The catch? Believe it or not, in times of crisis all of us are conscripted into the fucking Angelic Guard. So suit up & do good got dammit.
.
When all you’ve known as paradise experiences a paradigm shift & bewilderingly reveals itself to be enemy territory full of old acquaints that become Opps out of nowhere…
When you are at war, You gotta know where reinforcements are.
You gotta know where little outposts of the resistance quietly stand.
& as for you? If the battle hasn’t swung your way yet to slap you in the face…You HELP…however you can.
Help like you’d pray to God you’d find if the shoe was on the other foot as you stand watching all these folks who thought it could never be them walk around in a haze that so many all around the country and the world have recently been brought to their knees by, watching folks that solely by the grace of God …are not you now.
If you find an outpost, construct a Kairn, call it out for those in the trenches so they can get a spike of relief.
& one final thing: Be Prepared.
This experience is going to radicalize a whole bunch of people against this system that they’d been fine with until they too felt it’s teeth. That is going to be one of the most debilitating things for many to work through because they’d bought into the lies of the system hard and long.
It’s not that they didn’t care until it happened to them, even though it may seem like that on the surface. It was that their ignorance- their not knowing[actual definition, no insult]-was a feature of outfacing control that was programmed into the system from jump. They were trained not to be ready for anything like this. To be vulnerable. Hence the decades of corralling them with fear, cut off from everyone else, fearing the Other. Because the Other… all the time…tries to tell y’all.
The mitochondria in certain communities in America have been trained by our ancestors surviving by the skin of their teeth when all these community catastrophes were enacted upon us. I was just posting about the drowned 200+ Black towns positioned as necessary ‘infrastructure programs’ in America that so many people waved off dismissively. THREE DAYS BEFORE THE FIRES.
Imagine casually mocking the plight of Black Americans past & present over your chilled glasses of rose with friends because that’s what you were programmed to do…then watching those fires burn some of those same friend’s sanctuaries for 4 days straight with 0% containment. It would be horrific on so many levels that this is what it took to snap you awake. But it’s horrific on all levels, period. Already.
We’ve had generations deal with the gaslighting metted out by those blinded by being coddled by those who willfully destroyed our communities just to slow us down and hem us up. So many people’s family equity and wealth in the USA hinges on unspoken about pogroms against Blacks, against interned-imprisoned Japanese, against jews…as they dismissively murmur”get up & work” towards the masses.
But There are certain paths forward the beast always aims to take here. rules it lives by, playbooks it runs because it works. The letter circulating up in Oregon about clocking the wealth of brown folks in the community so you can roll in and commandeer their stuff soon as Trump gets in office didn’t even have to change vernacular from the ones that circulated Venice before the scourgers swarmed, or the letters that peppered Bruce’s beach or the Camelia farms down in Southbay LA before the onslaught.
Wrap your head around the reality that this is actual war. Those who just lost their homes are starting to. Those who say Make America Great Again are hearkening back to a time where decimating communities you were envious of and reaping the spoils was par for the course.
They are clamoring for a chance to make their own strikes against their neighbors with impunity, for the atmosphere to be okay and passively allow such fucked antics.
It’s up to all of US to show them they have misread the tea leaves once and for all by how we show up for one another instead. Even if it is just being a space someone can decompress and not think about the destruction moved through that day.
Yes. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…
But sometimes a hamburger given in empathetic solidarity is salve for the fucking soul sloshing through the battlefield they are still reeling from finding themselves on.
The full KTLA list can be found here.