Journal Excerpt: – 9 January 2025
It is Thursday, January 9th, 2025 and more than 35,000 acres of “Los Angeles” is on fire. More than 35,000 acres of Tongva/Gabrielino Indigenous lands have erupted into flames, not due to circumstance, but as a result of the ever-growing expansion of capitalist greed, corruption, and violence throughout the globe. Los Angeles is merely a looking glass. For years, the beast that we call Amerikkka has bombed, robbed, raped, pillaged and abused the lands and imaginations of the Indigenous people of this world. Those in Afrika, the Middle East, Skid Row and the Caribbean have been slaughtered, martyred and erased from our collective memory as a sacrifice for the insatiable thirst that this beast holds for the consumption and conquest of our lands.
Mother Nature regains her autonomy in moments like these, forcefully and without remorse. Today, she remembers our apathy to the violence enacted against the poor, the unhoused, the immigrant, the diseased and the disabled. We are all responsible for the pacification and justification of this violence. We are all responsible for our blindness to the gravity of deprivation, dehumanization and disenfranchisement that the most oppressed have faced, and known intimately, for as long as we have lived. This violence is one of displacement, one of hollowed memory, of intentional menticide and distractions to keep us surprised and saddened at the smell of singed flesh. We have tasted and seen ash and coppered blood before, but it is our dishonesty that uncovers shock within us instead of activity and the capability of creating tangible solutions that disentangle us from the dependent, nauseatingly abusive relationship that we have with the state.
Instances like these remind us of who is disposable to the state. Pay attention to the lengths at which they go to erase and minimise the gravity of violence we are subject to. We do not know of the destruction of the most oppressed, we do not understand what it means to feel ash within your every breath with no means of escape or solace, whether this be in Palestine or Afrika, or Los Angeles. Those who are left behind in prisons and on the streets are not an unintended consequence, but evidence of the irredeemability and psychosis of the state. Know your reflections. None of us are immune to this sickness. The plight of the disregarded today, is a warning for what we will all face tomorrow. The first will become the last. Your dreams of falsified allegiance to them will swallow you whole.
“We have nothing to lose but our chains.”