Living in Los Angeles 2025 a test of empathy

Tue 10 Jun 2025 10.00 EDT

... During this year’s fires, I had to move houses. The movers came and dutifully trudged up and down stairs, lifted boxes and drove back out into the red horizon. Some restaurants remained open, serving food despite the toxic air and general sense of dread that consumed the region. Many of those people, who did all they could to earn a living so we could approximate normalcy, were immigrants from countries like Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela and anywhere in between. They were also the ones who kept restaurants open during Covid lockdowns or drove for Uber Eats, again, so I could feel normal in abnormal times.

And they’re doing it again, but the danger is even more immediate. People are being taken from their jobs, their homes, their schools – without warning and without their rights. For a lot of us in LA, it can feel like it’s happening somewhere else. Downtown, the suburbs – but it is happening here. Within the arbitrary geographical lines that form the city of LA and the surrounding county. Those lines, like the ones that we created to divide us into nation-states, do matter, even if they aren’t natural. They matter because they are how we identify, how we form communities. The world is not borderless, even though some of us might wish it to be. They exist, for better or worse.

Right now, it does feel like it’s for the worse. Donald Trump and his administration see those lines and they weaponize them; they use them to create fear and chaos in our cities. They grab human beings and toss them over those arbitrary lines, denying them their dignity – the dignity that is enshrined in our constitution for all peoples. In a moment like this, it’s easy to curse the very notion of those arbitrary lines, as they cause so much misery. But those lines also create commonality. More than ever, those of us in LA should look at who and what is within our city limits. Not because we should fear what’s outside, but because we should care about what’s inside. We should always care, no matter where cruelty takes place, but even more so when the cruelty happens to those who share our home ...

This is a moment where we have the power to decide what kind of city we want to live in. We can cede our agency, our will and our community to brute force or we can live together. We can pass the empathy test and make it clear to the world that LA is not a bastion of unchecked individualism, but a city of communal spirit and diversity. I don’t know what the solution to this crisis is. Governor Newsom is suing to repel the national guard order, but it will take time, and the president has not shown much interest in abiding by court rulings. All I know is that this will not end unless the city and its population stands firm on its values and morals. That it stands together even if it’s so easy to see what’s happening as just another reason for bad traffic ...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jun/10/los-angeles-ice-protests-test-of-empathy