Description
On January 30th, 2017 I was traveling home from a conference in some other city, not an unusual situation for me at the time. This time however, I landed at LAX just as a massive protest was shutting down the entire airport. A few days earlier then President Trump had enacted Executive Order 13769, or more commonly known as The Muslim Ban, and people were not having it. Rather than be frustrated by the complications to my travel, I pulled out my camera and started trying to document a little bit of what I was witnessing, and tried to capture a little bit of the emotion.
What struck me most at the time, and does to this day, was the outpouring of love. While people were angry, the protests were intended as a show of unity. You could scan the crowd and find someone from any demographic, all coming together to say no, this was not OK. To say, together, we can show that this isn’t the direction we want to go, we want something better. This image in particular always grabbed me because of the juxtaposition of the two signs - the foreground message being super clear, the sign just a little further away expressing love for their neighbors a little harder to see, a little out of focus - but still there and attainable. In hindsight we know this worked, as just over a month later this order was revoked due in part to the ongoing protests and flood of legal challenges. While this wasn’t the end, and none of this ever seems to end, that day and at that time, love won. The people stood together and told the government, no, you will not separate us.
I think fondly on these events, but also sitting here almost 8 years later, watching what is happening in the world right now I can’t help but feel like on a global scale things have gotten so much worse. The scope of suffering we’ve seen in the last 12 months, in the last 2 weeks, in the last 24 hours… it’s overwhelming. I don’t know where things are headed next, but I’m sure that governments are engaged in activities that most of their people do not want. In the US it seems to me, from a distance, that neither current presidential candidate is listening to the people and I desperately wish that there was a way for everyone to come together again and say no, not today motherfuckers.
