Took a drive around, looked at the situation. I'd like to think of these as Before pictures, instead of After, since I hope there'll be an After that looks as if life is returning to the area.

The building on the right is the housing project that incliuded below-market-rate housing. The other one had a long life, with about forty years as an unglamorous facility in a commercial district. It was fixed up recently, as you see. And then it was fixed again.

Let’s talk about this nice lady. Warning: profanity.

		She is a poet, and has published a book. I think it goes without saying that the world has heard enough from young female poets and their problems, and that the publishing house should have bought something from a POC, no? This woman’s professional success literally erases female poets of color.

That’s how it works, right? Zero sum and all that?

Anyway, her tweet.

Let's go right to the obvious exchange:

Written, perhaps, from her home in California, where she presumably was able to utter these important sentiments while not distracted from a fire on her block.

Is thisa one person she wishes to be punished?

Jin Lin. Can one presume the poet is in favor of the destruction of the property of Asian-Americans, if it advances, you know, racial equity?

Here is another piece of property that should be fucked, adnd presumably rogered with such vigor that the lesson is apparent to all and the oppressors will shrink away in fear:

		The entire history of the Native American center, lost. I learned that some tapes had been digitized, and perhaps stored off site. But the center was located in property, and fuck property, and anything that happens to be in there.

Anything that happens to be in there.

Here is another person we might want to ask her about:

Korboi Balla had invested his life savings in the bar and was planning to open it before the coronavirus pandemic caused mass business closures. Balla then moved the opening date to June 1, when Minnesota plans to lift restrictions on restaurants, but the bar has since been wracked and looted in the riots, CBS first reported.

He does not have insurance. Oh bUt hE hAs a GofUnD mE now Yes, because there are good people in the world.

One could also note that if you balanced the contributions to the world and put a firefighter on side, and a poet on the other whose subjects include menstrual underwear, the scales might tip in a way that would dismay the poet. But of course what did that firefighter attempt to save? Property. Oh sure the occasional person, but mostly buildings. Just bricks.

After all, stores can be rebuilt; lives lost cannot. The store might not be an independent business that represents someone’s dreams and hard work - it might be another AT&T store, or perhaps a check-cashing place. But the store would be rebuilt, eventually, and if it took ten years for the street to come back, and the jobs to return, well, the poet might permit that to happen without her scorn. If she even thought to look at the place.

I know, I know, this isn’t fair. She’s a fool, and her politics have filled the space where a heart should be, and she believes that the nobility of ideas, the lovely incandescent bloom of her anger, are more than enough proof of her goodness. It’s still something to be sitting in a city with the helicopters overhead and the night still raw and ready for horror, and read of someone in California point a manicured finger at the people who are hurting, and say fuck you.

I went looking for her poems, and found this:

“I want to know 
what it means to survive 
something. 
does it just mean 
I get to keep my body?” 

Well, when you survive a looting, and you've no place to stay because you lived above the shop they burned, and they were dragging women out of stores and beating them for interfereing with the fun, you might be grateful that your body wasn't something they decided to take as well.