[SPEAKER_01]: You got problems that you ought to be concerned with.
[SPEAKER_01]: You don't know how you're supposed to burn it, or what to do with it, or how to keep it.
[SPEAKER_01]: You're a freak with a dark shank, old secret.
[SPEAKER_01]: But you're not the only one.
[SPEAKER_01]: Picture it in fine nature.
[SPEAKER_01]: Beers with a blast of sun.
[SPEAKER_01]: Now your healing has begun.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's bad with what you win.
[SPEAKER_01]: Give us done.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to Bad With Money, a show about finances and feelings where we don't talk down to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm your host Gabe S. Dunn.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as you might have noticed, there have been sparse episodes lately.
[SPEAKER_00]: I described this in another episode that I just did if you want to go back.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's called citizenship means nothing that I have been struggling for over a year.
[SPEAKER_00]: with like one of the worst depressions I've ever had.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm also extremely angry about everything around me.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I thought I would read another pre-article from my sub-stack a thousand natural shocks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though it's supposed to be back and forth on paid and free for the essays, I did two free in a row because I just think these ones are not pay-wallable.
[SPEAKER_00]: In terms of like, I wouldn't feel good about it because it has to do with the current political moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: Next week, if Los Angeles exists, I will hopefully have something up that's a little more
[SPEAKER_00]: Evergreen, I guess.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I had something prepared that was about sentience and self-awareness and I even watched the film I robot for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: But instead, this came pouring out of me.
[SPEAKER_00]: So here we go.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this is available to read for free up on my sub stack, a thousand natural shocks dot sub stack dot com.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is called buck everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: On Sunday, as U.S.
[SPEAKER_00]: immigration and customs enforcement raids, amped up in downtown Los Angeles, I worked a dog birthday party on the west side that was Mexican-themed.
[SPEAKER_00]: The dogs parents had set up some decorations that looked like they were from Disney's Coco.
[SPEAKER_00]: They gave out little dog toy maracas and bags with some burrows on them.
[SPEAKER_00]: On my phone in the cramped break room, I watched Latinos being rounded up and disappeared.
[SPEAKER_00]: And here I was across town in a rich area, chasing dogs around a rented out party room to the sounds of mariachi music.
[SPEAKER_00]: Afterwards, the dog's mom came over and gave me and my boss Chero flavored Oreos for our troubles.
[SPEAKER_00]: We don't get bonuses for working parties.
[SPEAKER_00]: My boss is Mexican and Filipino.
[SPEAKER_00]: At one point, I whispered to her that I might pass out from how anxious this all made me.
[SPEAKER_00]: She laughed so hard she cried and had to crouch down behind the cash rep.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was all too absurd.
[SPEAKER_00]: My head was split into these worlds do not touch each other.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not even funny as the premise of a sitcom episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you wanted to make a madman type show about the year, twenty twenty five, this storyline would be considered too on the nose yet a gay man and a Mexican woman were setting up wall decorations of tacos and avocados waving maracas while ice keeps a gay male makeup artist seeking asylum from violence in Venezuela.
[SPEAKER_00]: In a prison in El Salvador, because his tattoos could be gang signs.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were not no due process, no signs of life, just gone.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a whole other essay plan for this week that was going to go behind the paywall, but fuck the paywall right now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fuck.
[SPEAKER_00]: everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm on the highest doses allowable for all of my medications.
[SPEAKER_00]: I asked my psychiatrist to go up more, but she said, look, sometimes you can't dull the feelings that the real world is giving you.
[SPEAKER_00]: She said, I'm not just fucked up and depressed for some unknown reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's part of why you medicate if there isn't a clear reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just reacting to the world I'm living in.
[SPEAKER_00]: She said, and we can't fix all of that with meds.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trying to look for the good people, the ones helping or working hard, but there are so many useful idiots.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have Googled why would someone want to work for ICE over and over and over as if that will explain it?
[SPEAKER_00]: I look at the sea of masked people with guns and think how I've done a ton of research on the Holocaust both because I wanted to and also because my grandmother survived it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It came up a lot in personal histories when I was a kid.
[SPEAKER_00]: As last week's essay explained, I found joy at this time only in imagining the future Nirmberg trials for these cause-playing storm-tribrass losers.
[SPEAKER_00]: How could they ever think they're on the right side?
[SPEAKER_00]: What are they telling themselves?
[SPEAKER_00]: Who are they looking up to?
[SPEAKER_00]: What poison have they been sold?
[SPEAKER_00]: As we fall into a dictatorship, I need dopamine hits like crazy.
[SPEAKER_00]: At night after work, I drink whiskey out of a children's plastic cup from Albertsons that says, Explore.
[SPEAKER_00]: I snack all day long, mostly healthy stuff like baked chickpeas or baby carrots, but still, I'm never not eating.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, I simultaneously feel like throwing up, twenty-four-seven,
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm writing this in bits on Sunday and Tuesday.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm polishing it up right now at ten fifty three p.m.
[SPEAKER_00]: PST Wednesday.
[SPEAKER_00]: My post go up on Thursdays and all week as I wrote this piece, I had no actual idea what Thursday was going to look like.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm an accidental stub toe away from a full on crash out and I may not even need the stub.
[SPEAKER_00]: My heart thumps, logging off right now seems insane.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm tired of being told to breathe or relax or not worry.
[SPEAKER_00]: We have to worry.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the time to be worrying.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't stand anyone who isn't talking about this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Take some time off from looking at the news.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, you take some time to start looking at the news.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of my bosses, white male, had no idea anything was even happening.
[SPEAKER_00]: He heard about it from me this morning.
[SPEAKER_00]: When people tell me we can cross whatever bridge when we come to it, I'm like, baby, we are on the bridge.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are crossing it in its falling apart plank by plank like in an adventure movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: If I read one more lefty blog talking about, well, you know, this democratic candidate out of New York doesn't have all the policies I want, so I don't know if we should vote for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to implode sky high and leave a crater in the parking lot of the West Hollywood Whole Foods.
[SPEAKER_00]: There are holding hearings for five year olds without legal representation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Rose and Rose of men with shaved heads on their knees on a prison floor with no trial, no due process, no help and no hope.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can't unsee it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're my new politics, do not matter.
[SPEAKER_00]: This was maybe directed at John Fetterman, but in general, it is war, it is a bloodbath, it is monstrous.
[SPEAKER_00]: I turned to Reddit to see what those in the Border Patrol subreddit have said about why they took their jobs.
[SPEAKER_00]: The posts are very old.
[SPEAKER_00]: Turns out no one really wants to chat about working for ice these days.
[SPEAKER_00]: One gentleman said he joined because he fucking despise, and it spelled like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: The cartels, the drugs, muggling, and human trafficking.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another spoke Spanish and went into it with benevolent intentions, wanting to help immigrants understand their hearings and paperwork.
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea of her job as far as she knew was to get the immigrants to meet the requirements and stay in the country, not to deport them.
[SPEAKER_00]: An ICE agents average salary is like sixty-one K, according to Zip recruiter.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's decent for some areas, but not high enough to pull a screaming baby from someone's arms.
[SPEAKER_00]: For more on the topic, I highly recommend the twenty twenty five piece in the bull work about the mind of an ICE agent.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also found an old AMA post on Reddit about being in ICE.
[SPEAKER_00]: The person who started the thread and was verified to work for ICE was asked about an average day for them.
[SPEAKER_00]: The agent replied, we routinely do paperwork, lots of required training, email, etc., like any other job.
[SPEAKER_00]: We also do law enforcement activities like make arrests, transport, detainees, surf Warrens amongst other things.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look at how casually this person talks about their work.
[SPEAKER_00]: How passively make arrests instead of we arrest people.
[SPEAKER_00]: We transport detainees to where?
[SPEAKER_00]: Who are they?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why are they detained?
[SPEAKER_00]: Where are they being held?
[SPEAKER_00]: We serve warrants to who?
[SPEAKER_00]: To people?
[SPEAKER_00]: What people?
[SPEAKER_00]: Why?
[SPEAKER_00]: He continues red detainees.
[SPEAKER_00]: We always give them food, shelter, respect, and dignity, even after they fight us and try to hurt us.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is a classic displacement of violence.
[SPEAKER_00]: They are fighting you and hurting you because you arrested them, kidnapped them, and imprisoned them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your violence was the initial move.
[SPEAKER_00]: Be active in your description.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why are they there fighting you?
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't end up there by accident.
[SPEAKER_00]: You say, well, they broke the law.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is the punishment for breaking the specific law they broke?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you even know?
[SPEAKER_00]: Is it what you're doing to them right now?
[SPEAKER_00]: I can go back and forth reading about jurisdiction and policy, but it all comes down to who fucking cares?
[SPEAKER_00]: We made these laws up fairly recently and we can remake them again when they start traumatizing people and breaking up families.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why am I torturing myself trying to guess an ice agent's motivation?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm never going to be able to figure out what these people are thinking.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thankfully, that's someone else's gig.
[SPEAKER_00]: On Tuesday, I carried beans, my little black chihuahua, down Santa Monica Boulevard, past a white woman, probably in her sixties, who was wearing a bright red maga hat with gold and white tassels on it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I heard her tell someone on the phone, keep doing what they're doing downtown, real peaceful, huh?
[SPEAKER_00]: She was walking to elderly spotted dogs.
[SPEAKER_00]: I waited at the crosswalk.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once she passed, I was surprised to hear her yell after me.
[SPEAKER_00]: Your baby is so cute.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm sure you already know that.
[SPEAKER_00]: She smiled and waved at beans doing some dog baby talk in his direction and shouting, my guy's eighteen.
[SPEAKER_00]: No reaction for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just ignored her and walked away.
[SPEAKER_00]: I should have said, thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm trans and he's an immigrant.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the middle of downtown LA, on Monday at eleven a.m., I attended a peaceful protest with a large crowd in Grand Park.
[SPEAKER_00]: I asked off work for the morning and my supervisor said yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just needed to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Paycheck will have to suffer.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the park, there was a stage in signs being handed out and live music and speeches by various union leaders.
[SPEAKER_00]: People greeted each other warmly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Politicians were there.
[SPEAKER_00]: The NAACP was there.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was a stand with free donuts and coffee by the service employees in their national union.
[SPEAKER_00]: When that protests, specifically asking for the release of SEIU President David Werta officially ended, I headed over to the corner of Alameda in Arcadia.
[SPEAKER_00]: I followed the lights and sounds of cop cars.
[SPEAKER_00]: There was one cop car per person.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd say there were fifty people protesting in fifty individual cars lined up.
[SPEAKER_00]: A larger protest was happening around the corner in front of City Hall.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the way, David Werta was later released on fifty thousand dollars bond, so the protest worked.
[SPEAKER_00]: The police presence was so, so overblown.
[SPEAKER_00]: It occurred to me as I walked through endless fuck ice graffiti that it was pretty convenient how many different colors of evenly applied spray paint there were on these buildings.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was also strategically placed and readable.
[SPEAKER_00]: All in graffiti handwriting you'd find on defont.com or whatever, just saying.
[SPEAKER_00]: I ended up on the street where the clergy were holding court.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pastors, priests, rabbis, and preachers stood in front of the crowd praying and singing worship songs.
[SPEAKER_00]: They held hands, they knelt in front of the officers heads bowed, one pastor in a colorful choir stool, a man in a yellow yamica, a woman in Birkenstocks.
[SPEAKER_00]: They sang, we shall not be moved.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's never been a more perfect vision of peace.
[SPEAKER_00]: They reminded me of the end of Shabbat and my summer camp, when around the Havdhala candle we'd link arms and sing Elyahu Hannavi.
[SPEAKER_00]: You would have thought these religious beacons were carrying bombs the way the police were acting.
[SPEAKER_00]: They looked like the guards in front of Buckingham Palace, stone-faced.
[SPEAKER_00]: They wore full tactical gear with helmets with shields and big batons.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some had green rubber bullet or bean bag guns with their literal fingers on the triggers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bad gun safety at the very least, and a show of threatened force at worst.
[SPEAKER_00]: These types of ammunition are considered less lethal, but not, you know, not lethal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Armored trucks and white man started coming around the corner to move through the crowd, even though it would have been easier to come from the other way and avoid us.
[SPEAKER_00]: One man kicked the side of a van, but everyone else yelled at him not to do it and he stopped.
[SPEAKER_00]: vans in cars with national guard members kept coming.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes they'd stop in the middle like bait.
[SPEAKER_00]: It seemed like bangerling through the protesters was a trick to get us to react.
[SPEAKER_00]: The most people did was scream shame until the cars and vans moved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Behind City Hall, I could see truck after truck of soldiers and beige fatigues gathering and securing their uniforms and weapons.
[SPEAKER_00]: They didn't come over to us.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were preparing for the other side.
[SPEAKER_00]: On our side, the cops sent for backup.
[SPEAKER_00]: The sides of our group had not changed.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many of them were also from the press who labeled themselves or carried big cameras and microphones.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'd say it was ten clergy, ten journalists, and maybe twenty regular citizens.
[SPEAKER_00]: Slowly, twenty-five or more cop cars pulled up to block the street in front of us leading to City Hall.
[SPEAKER_00]: A group of officers walked down the street towards us to help the ones who were already there to block the street and push us back.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a cluster of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the videos I took, they moved like two swarms of bees coming at you.
[SPEAKER_00]: I decided to walk around toward the front of City Hall.
[SPEAKER_00]: On the other corners I passed four or five more cop cars sat with police milling about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Three helicopters circled.
[SPEAKER_00]: I looked out at the show of force by these officers and I kept thinking one thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is fucking cosplay.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is so fucking stupid.
[SPEAKER_00]: These people really think they're superheroes or that they're in a cop movie.
[SPEAKER_00]: They think they're John McLean.
[SPEAKER_00]: They think they're Elliott Stabler or Dirty Harry.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're rating restaurants and car washes.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're arresting pregnant women.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're taking people who are at immigration court doing the right thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as if doing the right thing is what gives you humanity and worth and dignity.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, I fuck you for making an immigrant beggin crawl for something you did not even earn yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Are we supposed to sit in our homes and go to work and watch our neighbors and co-workers be taken by people in masks and to unmarked cars?
[SPEAKER_00]: What exactly do they expect us to do?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like do they think we're gonna stand by and let them kidnap people without due process?
[SPEAKER_00]: Listen to me, kidnap without due process.
[SPEAKER_00]: What the fuck?
[SPEAKER_00]: The bar is on the floor.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not interested in finding out who started it and I'm not interested in the deportation numbers of other presidents.
[SPEAKER_00]: I am only interested in context in this way because of the way it's being used by fascists to justify their violence against community members.
[SPEAKER_00]: Take it all the way back.
[SPEAKER_00]: I read on MSNBC or CNN, oh, the protests have turned violent.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's that weird passive language again, turned violent by who?
[SPEAKER_00]: Violence started by who?
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, if graffiti and breaking a window are violence, then what is taking a mother away from her screaming child?
[SPEAKER_00]: I tried to link to an example here, but they are endless.
[SPEAKER_00]: Take your pick.
[SPEAKER_00]: I understand the idea of peaceful protest, or trying to convey ourselves as peaceful so that we carry the favor of people who are too sick to be saved.
[SPEAKER_00]: But must we always bend over backwards to do things the right way, even though we have to know at this point that it doesn't really change anything?
[SPEAKER_00]: We're still applying reason where no reason exists.
[SPEAKER_00]: I stood in the crowd downtown in awe of these religious leaders.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wore a bandana over my face and dark sunglasses so I wouldn't be recognized.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm glad I did because you can see me on the news, but you'd never know it was me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I stood there and I knew that it wouldn't matter what we did.
[SPEAKER_00]: The police and the military wanted to beat us.
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanted to shoot us.
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanted trouble.
[SPEAKER_00]: They wanted to go back to their precincts and brag about surviving the war zone of downtown Los Angeles as if their presence wasn't what made it war.
[SPEAKER_00]: What do you tell each other back at the office or in the motel room or on the floor where you now have to sleep?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because Los Angeles did not have enough room for this many soldiers.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you think, well, we're soldiers.
[SPEAKER_00]: We are basically doing a tour in a quote unquote foreign country.
[SPEAKER_00]: So of course, it won't be comfortable as you lay under tin foil blankets streets away from the Hollywood sign.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you ever think about the people who did not enlist to be soldiers and who are also on hard floors with metal blankets?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you not see the invisible string between you?
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for listening, and I love you guys, and I'll keep reporting from the front lines, but also expect some more changes to the podcast that I'm really, really excited about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, I'd love to hear from you all, and again, stay safe, whatever that means to you, and whatever comforting way it means to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, love you guys.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bye.