In My Head, Neurons Blaze

LISTENING: to some jams
FEELING: tired after traveling
SEEING: my usual sights

On Monday, I was on Bainbridge Island off the coast of Washington. I spent a summer there and fell absolutely in love with the ecology and landscape. I have many tortured memories there, but I returned this time with my partner. It was lovely to rewrite the story of a place. Some stories, of course, cannot be paved over anew.

Bainbridge Island is where the U.S. government forced the first Japanese Americans to leave their homes and move into detention camps in 1942. This happened during World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The government held over 100,000 people in detention.

Nearly 70,000 of them were like me — citizens but descendants of immigrants. In the eyes of White America, forever other.

These families lost their homes and their businesses. They were traumatized and sent to new lands in far-off states. I worry whether our government could repeat such an atrocious act. In 1944, the Supreme Court ruled that this detention was constitutional. It wasn't until 2018 that the court walked back on that ruling. And it wasn't until Donald Trump began his travel bans during his first presidency.

"We might want to believe that something like the U.S. government's mass incarceration of people of Japanese ancestry would not happen again," said Maya Sen, a public policy professor at Harvard University, in a 2022 interview. "It’s not impossible that the government could do something like this again, especially in a time of war."

If "time of war" isn't an accurate description of the Current Mood, I don't know what is.

Welcome to Possibilities, a creative climate newsletter on the possibilities that lie where crisis meets community. I’m Yessenia Funes, and my mind has been busy at work, thinking about all the potential ways the incoming president will hurt people who look like me.

If the climate movement wants people to engage on the issue of a warming planet, it needs to urgently prioritize the experiences of the most vulnerable. Sen's research on Japanese-American internment found that the trauma of such an event can last generations. It discourages political involvement and leads to political disillusionment. That's a dangerous place for a people to be.

People of color are already feeling this way. Isn't that why Trump won? I think it's why so many of my Latine people, in particular, voted for him. They're sick of the same political bullshit. They want something "new," something "real." It's strange because, of course, Trump is yet another form of that political bullshit. He just comes without the lifelong politico career and Congressional voting record. Somehow, that makes him more authentic to folks. I can't fully understand, but I'm trying to. We all need to try. Or the political disillusionment will eat us all.

I couldn't shake off this haunting feeling of history during my trip to the Pacific Northwest. Japanese and Asian cultures, more broadly, are a bright spot during my visits to Seattle. I love eating sushi and teriyaki. It's strange to be in a country that both simultaneously hates immigrants but obsesses over the culture they bring with them.

It's equally strange to work in a space — the climate journalism space — where reporters obsess over carbon emissions goals and clean energy technologies but not the populations whose decisions and well-being determine the trajectories of such topics. People will not accept a transition away from fossil fuels if they don't know what good it's doing for them. Or if the leaders telling them it's good for them do it while continuing their problematic behavior.

What kid listens to the adult who tells them to not drink or smoke with a glass of whiskey and cigarette in their hand? The adult looks like a joke. And that's how most politicians and "climate people" look to the majority of folks. We drive our cars and eat our meat, yet we tell everyone else to give a damn. I know, there's nuance, but climate messaging has long failed to reach mass appeal.

During my few days in Seattle, a bomb cyclone hit. For those who aren't aware, this is a weather phenomenon where a cyclone rapidly intensifies in a short period of time. This happens when cold air and warm air collide over ocean waters, creating a severe drop in pressure. In Seattle, the bomb cyclone resulted in wind speeds up to 77 miles per hour and "life-threatening flooding rainfall." At least two people have died, and nearly 300,000 homes and businesses were still without power in Washington state as of Wednesday night.

I'm always surprised by how weather can strike a chord among people. Rain is normal in Seattle, but everyone was talking about the "cyclone" on my final night there. My friend drove me past entire neighborhoods that were in the dark. People seemed scared, but I wonder how many knew this was yet another symptom of a changing planet. I wonder whether city officials were particularly worried about the county's 16,000 unhoused people — the largest number Seattle and King County has ever recorded.

Will the city's unhoused be safe should the detention camps come back? After all, it's a crime to be homeless now, remember? Then again, did detention camps ever really disappear? Nearly 40,000 immigrants remain detained in the U.S. Most of them have no criminal record.

Will I be next? I'm not an immigrant. I'm a citizen, but that protection has failed before in the U.S. And outside these borders, the Dominican Republic revoked birthright citizenship for some 245,000 Dominicans in 2013. Most were of Haitian descent. In 2023, some 130,000 were still stateless.

I know today's edition is a bit all over the place, but this is the state of my thoughts. Everything's changing, it seems — and yet the status quo remains. I'm not so sure these days that my words are enough to break the chains of a system that holds our peoples back. I'm not so sure that I can write about carbon emissions and extreme weather when all I can think about is who will be encaged next. 🌀

Rest in Power

While we can't say for certain that climate change led to these specific weather events (we need attribution studies for that), we do know that the Earth's rising temperatures are already creating more disasters like these.

At least two people are dead in Washington after the bomb cyclone.

In the Philippines, at least seven people have died due to Typhoon Man-yi's destruction.

Tropical Storm Sara struck Central America over the weekend, killing at least two people in Honduras.

Currently Reading

This ProPublica story is a must-read.

Rachel Ramirez at CNN digs into how the ongoing drought in the Northeast is hurting Christmas tree farmers.

I haven't stopped thinking about this story from New York Magazine on the working-class Latines in Queens and the Bronx who voted for Trump.

Sorry, no poetry or collage this week. I'm still catching up from my time on vacation! I'm overdue for some artwork, though, so I promise I'll have a new collage to share next week. xx

- Yessenia