LA is great!
I have been watching the protests in Los Angeles from my vacation in New Orleans and I just wanted to take this opportunity to say that Los Angeles is a great, peaceful place to live, and that I like it there very much.
Many people who have moved to LA experience a phenomenon where relatives from other places will see outrageous claims about LA in the news and automatically believe them. It's a place that is very easy to lie about, partially because it is so enormous... and partially because "LA is dangerous" is one of those things people are willing to believe without evidence.
I'm not the first person to say this, but the things people are willing to believe without evidence always paint a super clear picture of their desires. Whose suffering are they hungry to see? Whose subjugation would make them happy? What simple and easy morality-play stories do they long to see acted out in the world around them?
The thing about mass protest, however, is that people mostly participate in it because it doesn't seem particularly dangerous to them. Sure, everyone knows things could go south... but when thousands and thousands of people my age - with lots to lose - show up at a protest, it's because the risk made sense to them.
I'm queuing this one up early on the evening of the 8th, all the way on the other side of the country, agitated that I can't be there or see any of this for myself. But I wanted to say: life is good in LA. People turn up in the thousands because they trust the other people turning up alongside them. There's nothing that could happen in this story that would make me scared to live there.
If you ever, ever ask me whether LA is too dangerous a place to live, I'll fucking hate you until you die. Your heart is a slime mold.
I have biked through a lot of LA in the middle of the night, which is an activity containing two separate ideas - LA at night and LA on a bike - that already make people say unhinged shit to me about this city and its safety. Add the fact that I'm A Lady, and you can probably imagine some of the shit that (often older, but not always) people will say to me about city life. But a whole day of anti-fascist protest is the kind of thing that makes me feel safer to live in a place like this.
Demented shit happens everywhere. ICE raids were happening nationally. I'd rather live in the places where people actually do something about it.