Displaced Black families of Altadena GoFundMe directory: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1pK5omSsD4KGhjEHCVgcVw-rd4FZP9haoijEx1mSAm5c/htmlview?gid=0&ref=tyburrswatchlist.com#gid=0
Direct funds to incarcerated firefighters on the frontlines of the fires: https://docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vScclQ2rjZWKa438YHnnBbouvr1bmE_DpaGzc8hTI33BVsv9LP0mRPAvihlKht0pxa4V3OcFGQymef-/pub
The 21st Cent. Poly-Crisis Management Era
In November, before the election, I covered a get-out-the-vote event at an HBCU in North Carolina. I had a sense at this event that something wasn’t right.
NC is a Movement State. It is not a Red State, although it is controlled by Republican legislators that make our lives as citizens more challenging, especially our school systems. It’s not a Blue State, by anyone’s standard. I say Movement State because it’s a swing state where the politics of place are driven by coalitions, mutual aid, fusion campaigns, door knocking, and old-school big-tent revival style rallies and demonstrations. For 15 years, this part of the North Carolina fiber has been integral to my life and work. And it’s a huge reason why I love it here. It’s taught me what the people’s politics actually is; why and when it works. And also when it does not.
At the HBCU event, even with a huge pep band, cheerleaders, dancers, a CHOIR for goodnesssakes— I could still sense that the vitality just wasn’t there. I just knew the light was dim. I felt the same later that month when I trailed a group of canvassers in Wake County. No one would open up to them. They got in an argument with a young white man about abortion rights. Any high hopes I had about the election began to rapidly diminish.
That was when I realized it was possible Kamala Harris would not win; not only was it possible, but it was probably going to happen. We’d have another Trump administration. And we will.
Post-election, I spent time on the phone with people dear to me, answering and making calls every hour.
“We’re crisis managers,” I kept telling my friends, especially parents. They, like me, are survivors of 9/11, drug epidemics, a respiratory plague. We outlasted the first Trump administration, job insecurity of our fields, losing loved ones to the insanity of QAnon and MAGA, and manmade climate disasters.
“We’ve been doing this for so long,” I told them (and myself). “We know how to do it. We’ll keep doing it.”
Now it’s 2025, and the fires have been raging in Los Angeles. Friends and colleagues have lost homes, evacuated. Thousands more are in a state of limbo.
The essence of not knowing and beginning from nothing has become normal for us.
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