This is the year.

2016 from New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. This year has felt jolting, like a rickety wooden roller-coaster with rushing moments of beauty, community, laughter, and love, punctured by long opposing segments as I move through a society designed to divide, fear, oppress. From ranks of riot-gear police violently attacking peaceful protesters, hours of conversations with people separated by iron chain link and dressed in orange uniforms trapped in local and federal prisons for migrating, for poverty. I’ve gotten a preview of the hate politics that soon will envelope the whole country working in the Louisiana state-capital trying to undo any victories won by communities in our cities. I am scared about what is to come from a new President and his chosen cabinet, willing to divide and dehumanize to win power. A President that portrays all Muslims as terrorists, all undocumented immigrants as rapists, job stealers. All those trapped by this country’s racist, anti-poor criminal injustice syste...

The last time America elected someone so unabashedly white supremacist - 1 million people in iraq died. Hundreds of thousands more in Afghanistan and throughout the middle east. Climate change didn't exist. New Orleans was left to flood. My father’s country was branded as part of some axis of evil within all this american neocolonialism. And the whole world just prayed and wondered who was next. I came to the U.S. because i was tired of wondering and praying from the outside . i came to support the brave organizing that somehow survives through the racism and classism and criminalization and militarization in this county. This morning, I’m praying and scared again about what’s next. But I’m also listening to my father — who woke up to tell me: Sima, we have survived and we will survive. we just need to mobilize.  Hold each other today and hold those who fight despite it all. Because the whole world is scared.