At the end of 2016 I decided to run for the LA city council because I was angry. Angry about how hard it is for the little guy to have a voice in the political system. Angry that even local electeds like Mitch O'Farrell regularly refuse to meet with constituents unless publicly pushed to do so.

While I knew that trying to mount a viable campaign against an incumbent less than 3 months before election day would be virtually impossible, I still believed that it was important to challenge him on the issues that mattered to the district.

Today, we have seen what grassroots candidates can do with enough time, support, and small donations. Across the country first-time female, native, LGBTQ candidates, stepped up to challenge an entrenched political establishment and....WON!! This is what people power looks like. It is possible if we all roll up our sleeves and commit to doing the work.

Special congrats to progressive Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who I had the esteemed pleasure to meet when she came to LA and asked to tour Skid Row and meet with local grassroots activists instead of Hollywood bigwigs. And congrats to the incredibly tenacious Katie Hill for Congress too. I can't wait to see you ladies in action in our US Congress!!!

Photo credit: Carlos Marroquin

A lot has transpired in the world since I last posted and while it was hard not to jump on one of these platforms to express and release the complex emotions I was feeling, I realized that it was even more necessary for me up to listen, to absorb, and to reflect rather than to respond to it all...not because I don’t care, but because I care too much.

Like many others in this country I have been grieving the tragic death of a man I never knew, but whose face I will never forget. George Floyd. A black man whose life was cut short at the hands of a white man with unchecked authority with the world ultimately watching one of the most harrowing and traumatic displays of abuse of power. It’s a story that has repeated itself far too many times. So often, that as a society, we had become far too desensitized to this violence.

But this time the brutality was so unequivocally undeniable that the shockwaves were instantaneous. They have shaken this country to its very core. As the pit of collective pain, sorrow, and anger in my own stomach grew by the day, I reckoned with how to process it all in the most impactful way.

My deep sense of responsibility compelled me to go do my own internal work to decide how to best support the calls for justice, instead of simply resorting to a display of performative allyship that seemed to sweep through social media. This isn’t meant to denigrate those who deeply, truly, and authentically felt the urgency in joining the movement for racial justice. But it was increasingly frustrating to witness so many people scrambling to hash-tag the right thing to gain social acceptance or worse, to self-promote, while completely absolving themselves of having to do the harder transformative and self-reflective work that is required to unlearn the harmful behaviors we have all been taught in a society that centers the white, western, male experience.

On the other end of the spectrum, there were those who deliberately chose to divert their attention from examining and understanding why hundreds of thousands of people were flocking to the streets in protest across the country. What was their focus on?

Not the killing of a human being.
Not the righteous anger over police brutality.
Not the systemic racism that continues to be weaponized against black and brown people in all of the systems of power in this country.

They weren't horrified that those injustices are so codified into our collective experience that a group of bystanders who knew they were witnessing the extinction of a human life, had no power to do anything to stop it.

No, those people were instead choosing to use their energy to express indignation over the destruction and looting of property.

I don’t believe that real transformation and healing occurs as a result of “call-out” or “cancel” culture and have been challenging myself with new ways of pursuing justice within my sphere of influence that are in alignment with my deepest values. But it was suffocating to realize how many people seemed to be more outraged by the destruction of property, rather than by the destruction of human lives. And what did those people have to say when the looting subsided all while the protests grew more massive?

So if you were someone who, during the protests over justice for George Floyd and police brutality, was expressing more outrage over the looting of businesses than you were over the death of a human being, I beg you to please check your priorities. If you couldn’t see past the broken glass to see broken hearts, broken lives, and broken systems of power that escalated us to this moment in time, then please, for the good of humanity, please take a look at yourself and ask what privilege insulates you from seeing what was so clear to so many. Because the choice to ignore the hundreds of thousands of protestors who took to the streets over the last month to call for justice, and instead to focus on damage to property, is a moral failing.

It would behoove us all as a society to come to terms with the fact that it isn’t law or law enforcement that ensures order or protects our safety. It’s the social contract of a society that does that. And that contract has been BROKEN for a long time. That’s been obvious to many of us who have fought on the front lines for social change and justice. To those referring to the protests as “riots”, this is what a society with a broken social contract looks like.

“When a man is denied the right to live the life he believes in, he has no choice but to become an outlaw.” -Nelson Mandela

This is what happens when we allow oppression, injustice, and systemic racism to reign. People weaponize their anger. People revolt. People redesign their own social order. So if you don’t want to live in a society where people have to resort to looting and chaos, then do your part to call for an end to the inequity that feeds it. Help create a just society where people have a vested interest to maintain the social order because they have equal access to its benefits.

Today is Juneteenth, the celebration of the abolition of slavery in the US. But we haven’t been fully emancipated from the reaches of slavery. If we really want transformative change, each of us has to be willing to examine all the ways in which we participate in a world that enshrines inequity, especially racial injustice; in access to education, stable housing, healthy food, quality healthcare, and economic security. It starts by having honest conversations. It starts by being willing to go outside our comfort zone. It starts by listening and supporting those who have been at the forefront of these issues and proposing real solutions. It starts by reimagining the world we want our children to live in. It starts by healing our own traumas. It starts when...YOU start doing the work, instead of waiting for others to do it for you.

#Juneteenth
#Blacklivesmatter

collage art by Ariel Kohn