Trangdai Tranguyen on the fires in southern California

Firing up the Voices
by Trangdai Tranguyen

The air smells of death. The silence tastes morbid. The sky stops breathing. The ocean becomes distant.

On the balcony strewn with crunchy green leaves and inundated with suffocating ash, the plants and flowers let their leaves off, begging for water respite and CPR.

My nose is bleeding. The same way my heart bled on the empty endlessness of New Orleans freeways, in the boundless blankness of Biloxi neighborhoods, at the fathomless frustration in which disadvantaged Louisiana residents swayed. Months after the hurricanes, green trees pushed elbows with half-witted houses and dangling street lights, as if mocking, as if inviting, as if challenging.

Renters returned home – for they had no where else to go, or could not come to part with that piece of their heart. But there was another piece that they needed. A piece of paper.

A piece of paper is everything. Without it, they no longer exist. It is their life – which they no longer have. Elderly men displaced by wars, then displaced by flood, asked for assistance. They stood in line day in day out, only to be sent home empty handed from the relief stations overflowing with donated goods. Immigrant fishermen came for emergency stipends. They were told that their 'number' could not be located. A place of destruction: that was all they had. Nothing more.

Not many others came back. Yet those who took the risk to return home found themselves deprived of the aids that were reserved for the 'legitimate' who had safely relocated else where in their relatives' homes. Safely. Long ago.

Water. Fire. Different? Maybe so from aerial views. On the ground, the pattern repeats. On the ground, real things happen. It is the human life that is at risk, the marginal voices that resonate into thin air, the inequitable distribution of aids that persist, the refusal to acknowledge that certain lives have value, the violence of perpetuating discrimination.

These lives are not irrelevant. They get fish from the sea to the dock. They get food on the table. They clean the sheets. They water the plants. They build the freeways. They drive the trucks. They are the hands that craft tomorrow and the feet that move today in the most organic way.

Though they are treated as replaceable goods, they are not disposable. They are humans.

They are life.

Trangdai Tranguyen is a member of PANA's Civil Liberty and Faith Think Tank.