it could be your city next

no matter where you are…you are not immune to tragedy

Jun 21, 2025

it’s such a privilege to only experience a horrific atrocity through the screen of your phone.

i live in los angeles (born and raised) and over the past month, it’s been so fucking surreal being here with the ice raids ravaging the city: complete communities are being targeted…families torn apart….businesses being raided…and it’s all happening at fucking record time.

something i've been meditating on the minute this started is the fact that part of the reason trump even got elected was because of the massive number of latinos who came out and voted for him. and for me (and so many others) that was just... deeply ironic.

seeing a massive chunk of a demographic trump has targeted over and over show up in waves to support him…didn’t make sense to me at all. just a whole different level of self-hatred.

and then…six months after he got elected…here we are…in this scary-ass situation with ice raids tearing through the city…going into businesses…pulling people out of their homes…like for fucks sake they are literally chasing farmers through the fields of oxnard.

and (surprise, surprise) i’m seeing all these videos and posts from latinos who voted for trump, sobbing on social media, pulling a full 180 and berating him because their family member got deported.

“i shouldn’t have voted for him!”

“i didn’t think it would be like this!”

despite the fact that trump very clearly stated (during both his first and second term) that he wants to deport undocumented immigrants and specifically target the latino community.

like...what did they think they were signing up for?

it’s really hard for me to have any sympathy for trump supporters who are only now, after he’s been in office, “seeing the light” and realizing his administration isn’t what they thought it was going to be.

but a common thread that i have seen with all of those former trump supporters is that they’re only deciding he sucks the moment one of his policies directly affect them.

this mindset of staying indifferent towards shit until it become impossible to ignore is such a deeply disconnected problem. i’ve found it to be more common in first-world western countries (like the united states) where we’ve been conditioned to treat global suffering as something optional to care about. and that’s fucked up.

this also happened earlier this year when the trump administration announced layoffs across the national park system (and i recently found out they were aiming to lay off over 1,500 people…like what the actual fuck). what struck me was the shift in tone from former workers who had been initially silent on everything to do with trump, and then suddenly started criticizing him once their livelihoods were directly impacted.

i’ve see it all the time with the way people discuss what’s happening in palestine. it baffles me that there are still people who can look at a photo of a beheaded child that was blown off by the idf and just shrug their shoulders as if it’s nothing (and this brings up a whole other issue of us as a collective being so desensitized to gore because we’ve been so digitally overexposed by it).

i’m going to keep it real: we are potentially on the brink of war. shit is progressively hitting the fan. there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty about what the future is going to look like across the board.

if you do not live in a country or city that is suffering (like palestine) (or iran right now) (or sudan) (or for the context of this essay…los angeles) it’s so easy to look at vulgar images on tv or social media and think “that could never happen to me.”

it very much can.

no matter where you are…you are not immune to tragedy.

the bottom fucking line is that it shouldn’t take something tragic happening to you personally for you to care about what’s happening in the world. it shouldn’t have to take a family member or friend being detained by ice, or having your house blown up to pieces, for you to finally wake up and give a shit about basic human rights.

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