in burning winter

Jan 25, 2025

Fine Art Print The Sun II — *Solen, 1916, Norway, Edvard Munch.*

Dear Beloved,

While the winter solstice marked the return of the light, the sun slips past the horizon early and it is darkening where I am now. Two snow storms roared through my new city a week ago, and we woke to a frozen kingdom. It was 12°F on Monday and after a 3-minute walk, my face burned from the chill.

Meanwhile, Los Angeles is burning.

I hope that when you read this, you are safe and surrounded by loved ones in the burning winter.

I reflect on this past year and years prior. Each one seemed the hardest, but now I feel nostalgic for them as we face new challenges with horribly familiar enemies. In 2016, the US presidential election results were so devastating, that I walked in numb disbelief the next day; today I reflect on how simple that year was. 2020 was an international dumpster fire. This year, the shutdowns would be a welcome reprieve from a world spinning out of control.

2023 was harsh, and 2024 was its disastrous twin. 2025 is a devastating reality.

Throughout our winter holidays and celebrations, looking forward to the New Year sometimes felt like looking down the barrel of a gun. But who is holding the gun?

Who holds the real power?

I’ll give you a hint: It is no individual dictator nor is it a small group of people, however wealthy, however influential. Their power is but an illusion.

Look at your own hands, Beloved. And hold tight to mine.

“All people are free. When we speak of freedom, we acknowledge that freedom is a relationship between the people of the society. This relationship of freedom is created by the means of mutual respect, the acknowledgment of one another's autonomy, and the ability to hold one another responsible for their actions. All people are free and all people are responsible to themselves and to one another.” -

Margaret Killjoy

We don’t know exactly what will happen in 2025, Beloved. The word “unprecedented” has been so overused in the last four years, it is so tired. We must lay the word to rest once and for all.

We are living the consequences of centuries of extraction and exploitation. This is what happens when you let the nobility keep their jewels after a revolution. When there are no reparations after apartheid and the elites keep other people’s lands, money, and mines’ when you make exceptions to genocidaires, pocketing their scientists and engineers to fortify and expand empire; when you let architects of destruction and power-hungry depots, this is what happens: They go on to have cruel, spoiled children who dream of their parents’ tyranny and grow up to nurture new tumorous far-right movements.

Beloved, we are all one collective body, and the elite is societal cancer.

“Settle your quarrels, come together, understand the reality of our situation, understand that fascism is already here, that people are already dying to be saved, that generations more will live poor butchered half-lives if you fail to act. Do what must be done, discover your humanity and your love in revolution.” - George Jackson (Sept. 23, 1941 - Aug. 21, 1971)

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I’m reluctant to use the word elite. Using the word to describe any human being as such, feels like giving them another inch of power. Even saying it feels like consenting to a fabricated status quo that none of us asked for.

Who is elite, and who gets to decide that? Why is anyone ever considered an elite? What does an elite offer anybody, and who do they offer anything to but themselves?

When you look up the word “elite,” the word defines itself first by an assertion of superiority, “a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society.”

This definition is distilled into how we most often see elite used: “a group or class of people seen as having the greatest power and influence within a society, especially because of their wealth or privilege.”

When you look at the origins of elite, its imperial heritage is unsurprising as the English word descends from to French and before that, Latin.

Eligere - to pick out, to choose. The same root word that gave us elect. The concept of “elite” is human-made, and whatever is created by humans, can be abolished by us.

It’s a choice. It has always been a choice made by the collective.

Beloved, I ask you: why do we ever give any individual or small group of people this kind of power over us?

More importantly: What will you and I and everyone around us choose instead?

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Thousands of people pick up clothes, foods and toiletries during a wildfire relief pop-up for those effected by the Eaton Fire, at Santa Anita Park in Arcadia, California, on January 11, 2025. — *Image source.*

In Octavia Butler’s 1993 book Parable of the Sower, the epistolary protagonist starts February 1, 2025, with “We had a fire today.” Reality sparked the fires a month sooner, and today Octavia’s Bookshelf - named in Butler’s honor and opened in her hometown - has transformed into a mutual aid hub. It is one of many mutual aid sites activated by the urban wildfires.

In this time, it is community members coming together to support each other - not the government, not any corporation, not the numerous wealthy based in Los Angeles. Even while people’s homes burn, police continue to follow Democratic Governor Newsom’s anti-homeless directive by harassing and arresting unhoused people, and ICE agents are taking advantage of the climate chaos to kidnap immigrants. Already predatory real estate agencies prowl the burning land, offering deals to desperate climate crisis-impacted people just like they did in Maui.

As shown to us at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, after Hurricane Helene, after winter storms and polar vortexes and water shortages and cyclones and many, many wildfires, the government is not going to help any of us. Grant-constrained nonprofits are not the solution. The answer lies in each other - we are the ones who will save us.

Angelenos need our help, and there are countless fundraisers offering a chance to give and help. One way you can help is by donating directly to the Mutual Aid Los Angeles Network.

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