Watching the fires in Los Angeles last night, I sat back and thought about this last year. I lived most of my adult life in Southern California. I know how it changed over the years. How the fire season became a year round event. And I was flooded with a deep sense of dread.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that this was a harbinger. That we are entering a new Dark Age. I can feel it in my skin. In my blood. In my bones. Maybe you can too. But we are constantly told to practice wellness. To be inured to the madness. The ecological devastation. The violence. The unraveling.

I thought about watching a genocide being livestreamed on my Instagram. The firebombing of children. Of the elderly. Of the sick. In hospitals in Gaza. Scorched earth, just as in Los Angeles. And the starvation. The humiliation. The annihilation. Funded by our tax dollars. All coupled with a kind of numbing agent, as if I was sitting in a chair at the dentist office waiting for a tooth to be pulled.

“It’s all ok. Make sure to practice self-care. You are doom scrolling too much!” The messaging seems constant.

Yet, everything feels surreal. As if we are in an AI generated reality. And we seem to accept it all through a tyranny of miniature screens we hold closest to our skin. Closer than we hold actual humans or animals. Closer than we hold ourselves.

We are in a different world now. A world rapidly devolving. Climate change, fascism, and the predations of late capitalism. A world where nonsense is elevated. AI generated content is taken as truth. Where starving or burning children alive is normalized. Where the unhoused and the poor are criminalized. Where the marginalized are easily dehumanized. Where billionaires are viewed as demigods. But even the billionaires are running now as their mansions are devoured by an angry earth. Oh, how the gods fall before us.

And the rise of one man to the seat of power in the strongest empire the world has ever seen is ushering in an age of chaos. Because that is what he does best. He brings chaos. He is already doing that and he isn’t even in office.

I keep seeing people say that “it will be a long four years.” And my response is no, my friend, it won’t.

I have come to believe that his ascent to the throne of American Empire signifies the beginning of the end for organized human civilization on this planet. It isn’t he that is bringing this to us. He is merely a symbol of our age. An emblem of narcissistic privilege. A personified and collective id we are afraid to acknowledge.

Hyperbolic? Maybe. But the so-called Doomsday Clock devised by concerned scientists puts us closer to the midnight hour than ever before. And what do we get in response? Lies and bromides. Platitudes and veiled threats. But the veil has been slipping for some time now.

I hope I am wrong. I really do. And I will celebrate my wrongness. But I’ve seen nothing to change my mind thus far.

Resist. Defend. Love. For some reason, these words keep repeating in my mind.

And I guess that is because, at this point, it is literally all we have left to us.

Kenn Orphan, January 2025

*Photo is a satellite image of the fires in Los Angeles.

Apparently, there is some confusion over the politics of Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. This is largely because his politics do not seem to align with the approved framework for today’s arrangement of power. They are messy. Because we live in messy times. Confused times. But this isn’t as bizarre or problematic as some would make it out to be. And anyone who has been traumatized is a victim of these messy, confusing times.

The reality is that he fits the archetype of hero. Not in a romanticized or sentimental way. Not in the Hollywood manner which infantilizes the very concept of hero with cheap nationalistic tropes, hyper-masculine numbness, or superhuman capabilities. He is a hero because, like all heroes, his life was scarred by trauma and unfathomable pain. Like all heroes, he has stepped out the shadows of deep, systemic injustice in our times to make a stand, however flawed, against this injustice. Like all heroes, he is misunderstood, maligned and demonized by the rich and powerful and celebrated by the oppressed, the lower caste, the underdog. He represents the latter’s disappointment and rage, and he channeled that rage into action, albeit misguided.

You don’t have to understand or agree with all of his political opinions to understand that he emerged from the pathos of an age where a group of wealthy businessmen have arisen to extract extraordinary wealth from the denial of medical assistance to millions of sick or injured people. An age of sheer barbarity, where life saving or pain-alleviating treatments and medications are only available to those who have the ability to pay exorbitant fees. An age where a small class of people, propelled by avarice and cupidity, enjoy pampered and untroubled lives of luxury via the siphoning of wealth from the vast working class who suffer daily indignities at their hand.

The assassination of Brian Thompson made clear that if you’re poor and murdered there’ll likely be no manhunt mounted for your killer or any blanket media coverage of the incident that could ever compare with what we’ve seen this past week. This one fact alone highlights the vast inequities within American society. It goes beyond healthcare. The justice system, the media, the whole system is unequal, unfair and staggeringly cruel. Far more cruel than any action allegedly taken by Luigi Mangione.

Heroes don’t always save people’s physical lives. In fact, they seldom do. Heroes save our humanity by showing the wealthy and the powerful that our lives have meaning, that we are enraged by the inequality, cruelty and injustice that they profit from, and that we are not going silently into the night as they would have us do.

Kenn Orphan, December 2024

*Photo is of alleged shooter, Luigi Nicholas Mangione.

A mother sits at the bedside of her baby girl, who appears more like a skeleton than a living human child. 

A team of rescuers frantically dig through the rubble of a bombed home, hoping to find any sign of life from within. They find a cat meowing weakly. She is covered in dust, her human companions all dead, suffocated by the bricks and concrete of their home or burned slowly to death. 

A father runs screaming down the street with his son in his arms. The boy’s face is almost unrecognizable. 

A young man gingerly and with utmost reverence places a child’s head in a body bag with the rest of her remains. 

The decomposing body of a boy with Down’s syndrome who was left to starve in his home are discovered by his family after they were forced at gunpoint to leave him with assurances from soldiers that he will be taken care of. 

A six-year-old girl pleads for help on a cell phone from her family’s car. Her dead family all around her as she bleeds. A tank rolls in aiming at her. Her rescuers ambulance is bombed, and her remains are found with those of her family days later. 

This is just a fraction of what I have seen, heard, or read so far, for almost a year. 

Add to it scores of photos or videos of soldiers parading around in women’s lingerie. Women who may be dead or forced to flee for their lives. 

Soldiers playing with or smashing children’s toys, school rooms, bicycles. Children who may be dead or forced to flee for their lives. 

Soldiers dancing while they blow up shelters, hospitals, universities, mosques, churches, bakeries, water, and food supplies… 

Add to it political leaders calling for complete annihilation. Civilians blockading aid trucks. And western leaders waving a scolding finger at anyone who dare speaks out. After all, they are “speaking” and we should not “interrupt” their election cycle, steal their “joy,” lest we get an even worse leader than them. 

In my entire life, I have never seen this many children slaughtered, bombed, maimed, starved, or shot at for almost an entire year. A livestreamed genocide. The evidence is beyond clear, yet we are still being gaslit that it is self-defense. That this is about “security.” As during the war against Vietnam, we are told to disbelieve what we are witnessing because it is “tragic, but complicated.” We are shadow banned or suspended on social media for posting pictures or videos of the atrocities (one wonders how they would have censored the photo of “napalm girl”). Or told that we are bigots for wanting an immediate end to the slaughter of children, women, and men. 

We are truly witnessing a nightmare. But one without even the glimmer of morning light to give us hope. 

Kenn Orphan, September 2024 

The recent, manufactured controversy over Imane Khelif reminded me of a speech by the great abolitionist Sojourner Truth. She made this speech to a white audience in 1851, but the message was especially directed toward white women. In it, she describes how many Black women were subjected to heinous bigotry especially if they did not conform to a specific and narrow white standard of femininity. Sound familiar?

No woman can ever totally meet such rigid and exclusionary standards. Imane, though assigned female from birth, isn’t what many men (and sadly some women) think a woman should look like. She is strong, confident, athletic and she is competing in a sport that used to be only for men.

But we cannot ignore that Imane is a woman of colour, and how many other women of colour have faced similar attacks? The attacks on Imane are most definitely rooted in large part in a deep-seated and pernicious racism that persists to this day. Sojourner Truth’s speech is but one example of this.

Sojourner could plow a field better and eat as much as any man. She could hold her own. But this didn’t conform to the patriarchal notion of white femininity. And this is what it all comes down to. The anti-trans mob isn’t out there trying to “protect girls and women”, they are out there to police gender. They demand a ridiculous litmus test for “purity” that echoes the calls of white nationalists and other racist ideologies, and it doesn’t just negatively affect transgender women, it negatively impacts cis-women as well, as Imane has unfortunately discovered these last few weeks.

Sojourner brought the house down with this speech because, despite being discriminated against as a Black woman, she wanted to unite ALL women in solidarity to make this world a better place for everyone.

The real transcript was lost to history, but there are many reliable accounts of what she said. Here is one.

“Ain’t I a Woman?” by Sojourner Truth.

“Well, children, where there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that ‘twixt the Negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. But what’s all this here talking about?

That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud-puddles, or gives me any best place! And ain’t I a woman? Look at me! Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me! And ain’t I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man – when I could get it – and bear the lash as well! And ain’t I a woman? I have borne thirteen children, and seen most all sold off to slavery, and when I cried out with my mother’s grief, none but Jesus heard me! And ain’t I a woman?

Then they talk about this thing in the head; what’s this they call it? [member of audience whispers, “intellect”] That’s it, honey. What’s that got to do with women’s rights or Negroes’ rights? If my cup won’t hold but a pint, and yours holds a quart, wouldn’t you be mean not to let me have my little half measure full?

Then that little man in black there, he says women can’t have as much rights as men, ’cause Christ wasn’t a woman! Where did your Christ come from? Where did your Christ come from? From God and a woman! Man had nothing to do with Him.

If the first woman God ever made was strong enough to turn the world upside down all alone, these women together ought to be able to turn it back , and get it right side up again! And now they is asking to do it, the men better let them.

Obliged to you for hearing me, and now old Sojourner ain’t got nothing more to say.”

*Title image is of Sojourner Truth and is courtesy of the African American History Collective.

Kenn Orphan, August 2024