Another long one: Week ending June 13, 2025
By Philip Cardella
June 14, 2025
Introduction
Tallon (sic) the Cat went over the rainbow bridge last week while I was in North Carolina. We met him in a Humane Society trailer 17 years ago as a cute little kitten batting at passersby as they went through the trailer. Because he was being so gentle, someone decided a cat named "Tallon" was in fact declawed. Also, they thought he was four years old.
Two weeks later I tried to take this cat, who was endowed with claws like Freddy Krueger (the movie villain with claws, not the crocodile that resides in the Flamingo Area of Everglades National Park) to the vet and he didn't fit in the box he came in.
Turns out, he was probably nine months old, not four years old, and absolutely fully clawed.
For the first few years he'd sit atop his cat tree and swat, claws out, passersby demanding to be pet. After about 30 seconds he'd bite them, fairly hard, to get them to stop.
As he entered middle age for a cat he mellowed out and became a full time lover, with a potty mouth. He really could cuss the vet out in a special way.
Coming home with his empty carrier and then listening to our other cat call for him when she got home was brutal.
Anyway, I take a week off from writing and my cat dies. 2025, amirite?
Tallon, by the way, is a planet in the Metroid video game series. Obviously, claws on eagles are talons. Not long after our oldest child (who was at that time three but somehow is now a sophomore in college) demanded we keep the name for reasons unrelated to the video game, we got a dog we called Samus. Samus is the protagonist of the Metroid games. So they were a pair until Samus went over the rainbow bridge.
I don't want to put Tallon's passing in the sections below because, like the movie Inside Out, I'm both sad he's gone and filled with joy he was in our lives.
I guess that's as good a way to start this newsletter as any.
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Finite Disappointment
Jackie Robinson mural defaced with swastikas and racial slurs in Miami
"Miami murals honoring baseball trailblazers Jackie Robinson and Minnie Minoso were defaced with swastikas and racist slurs this week," began The Guardian story on the hate fueled attacks in the historic heart of Miami's Black community, Overtown.
Along with the mural of Major League Baseball's first Black player, Jackie Robinson, the mural of Major League Baseball's first Cuban born player, Minnie Minoso, was also defaced with swastikas and racial slurs last week.
The baseball imagery around Dorsey Park's baseball field honors the legacy of the barnstorming Negro League Baseball teams that frequented the field for travelling games.
I know to those reading this this might be old news (from last week), but, alas, it is an important, if finite, in the words of MLK Jr., disappointment.
Miami's oldest Black owned and operated paper, The Miami Times, reported that over 650 children and their families participated in the creation of the murals in 2011. Local community organizations immediately promised to help restore the murals.
Yet, since it was painted just over a decade ago, Miami has been a national leader in new high rise buildings (it now ranks 3rd for tallest cities in the US, behind only New York and Chicago), many of which are visible from the scene of the hate crime.
Yet, the immediate area around the Dorsey Park–though named after Miami's first Black millionaire, Dana Anderson Dorsey–where the crime occurred is not what one would call wealthy and is absolutely the heart of historic Black Miami. One must wonder if the members of the quickly amassing gentrifying class decided that now would be a good time to send a message to the group of people that has lived in Overtown since Miami's founding that they are not welcome.
Scenes from the neighborhood within a few feet of Dorsey Park: an unhoused person with a makeshift tent, a cute but small library and a tiny apartment building that's seen better days.
The Miami Herald's Editorial Board quickly took to the public their stance that "A can of spray paint and a hateful act can’t erase Miami’s shared Black history."
Hating people for who they are is just wrong. The swastika is an explicit threat of racial violence– in this case it was put in a park, over a mural of Black men who are heroes to this community. It is a threat of violence, based on hate, to Miamians, in a park, where baseball legends played when they weren't allowed to play in Major League Baseball and where children play today.
It is wrong. Period.
As, is often the case, the Herald's editorial board gets it right, I'll let them have the last word:
As the Miami Herald Editorial Board pointed out after the shooting in D.C., we have almost become accustomed to hate crimes in this country, an awful thing to contemplate. This is not something we should get used to, even though the language of hate — name-calling and anger and vilifying the “other” — runs rampant through our politics. The defacement of the Overtown mural isn’t just vandalism. It’s an attack on who we are and who we want to be. The perpetrators must be caught, but our efforts can’t stop there. This is a symptom of a problem we have in this community Miami needs to fight hate with everything we have.
Rising Antisemitism
Protesting rising antisemitism in the United States, including the horrifying attack in Boulder, Colorado last week, hundreds marched in Northeast Miami-Dade County. I did not know it was happening or I would have been there myself taking pictures and video, but the Miami Herald was there and covered the story.
As Time Magazine reports, "In September 2024, FBI data showed that anti-Jewish hate crimes had increased by 63% since 2023. Despite Jewish Americans making up just 2% of the U.S. population, reported single-bias anti-Jewish hate crimes made up 15% of all reported hate crimes in 2023 and 68% of all reported religion-based hate crimes."
Hating people for who they are is just wrong. Period. Hating people for who their elected or appointed leaders are is also wrong. Full stop.
Attacking civilians is, despite the sentiment used to the almost the breaking point, cowardly. It is also just plain wrong.
It breaks my heart this needs saying.
Callum Sutherland
Immigration in Miami Dade County
"It felt different," ran the headline in the Miami Herald last week about flying into Miami International Airport from abroad. It goes on to recount three different people's objectively frustrating, harrowing and embarrassing interactions with Customs and Border Patrol.
"What they all have in common: They’re American citizens, and their recent experiences with Customs at South Florida airports have left them perplexed and concerned."
Here in South Florida people from all citizenship and immigration statuses are on edge with these raids even while the attention is in Los Angeles.
The deployment of the National Guard and United States Marines in Los Angeles is already impacting the protests scheduled for Saturday, which were already called "No Kings Day," in a direct response to Executive overreach by the White House.
“We always communicate with the police, who have been absolutely phenomenal,” Raquel Pacheco of Miami Indivisible, one of the groups organizing the protest in Miami on Saturday, told CBS 10 in Miami this week. “We see anybody in the crowd who’s here to antagonize, we’re quick to point those people out.”
NPR national ran an interview this week with George Carrillo, a former US Marine and former police officer turned CEO of the Hispanic Construction Council that talks about the devastating impact ICE raids are having on the construction industry right here in Florida. It is worth a listen:
The protests are likely to be passionate, however, given that half of all residents of Miami Dade County were born outside of the United States– many of them fled authoritarian dictatorships to seek asylum in the Miami. However, while only 1 in 8 asylum seekers are granted asylum in the United States, in Miami-Dade County that number is markedly smaller. From the story below:
The odds are much worse for asylum claims filed in Miami, which sees more asylum applicants than any other jurisdiction in the nation. In fiscal year 2024, only one out of every 145 asylum applicants were granted permission to stay in the country.
Tom Hudson
From a historic context, while the present anti-immigrant actions by the White House focus mainly on Spanish speaking people, the reality is that Latino immigrants to the United States saved the American city writ large from white Americans fleeing them during the so called "decade of nightmares," aka the 1970s. During those years while white Americans were fleeing urban centers in droves during the Latino immigrants found urban landscapes with affordable housing and a need for a labor injection.
It was their migration that rebuilt the urban landscapes abandoned by white Americans. Here's a review on a thorough and exquisitely written book on the topic, Barrio America: How Latino Immigrants Saved the American City, by scholar Andrew Sandoval-Strausz. Full disclosure, this was perhaps my favorite book from the graduate level class I took on the history of the American City.
It's worth noting that while Miami is gearing up for the World Cup, which is a year away, the Mayor of Miami-Dade County was at an event celebrating the countdown that was shutdown due to a "routine" Coast Guard inspection with an ICE Agent.
Meanwhile, the Governor of Florida gave his blessing for running over protesters this week.
"We also have a policy that if you are driving on one of those streets and a mob comes and surrounds your vehicle and threatens you, you have a right to flee for your safety, and so if you drive off and you hit one of these people, that's their fault for impinging on you," the Governor of the third most populous state in the country told the host of the Rubin Report.
No, seriously. See what Snopes (the rumor squashing website) has to say about this.
How does it need saying that protesters– no matter who or what they are protesting– don't deserve to get run over. I've been to protests where the point of the thing was something I strongly agreed with and to ones where I strongly disagreed with. Never in my life did I think anyone there should be assaulted with a vehicle.
If you go to one of the at least eight South Florida "No Kings" anti-Trump protests in South Florida Saturday, whether you're there to protest or counter-protest (both activities well within your First Amendment rights), please be safe and make sure others are safe too. People out there will be in enough danger from the weather (where the "feels like" temperatures will be near 100) and don't need other humans attacking them.
Historic Interlude
On June 12, 2016 I was travelling with my family so we were in a hotel lobby eating breakfast when it became apparent that, as a parent of young children, I should make sure they weren't paying attention to the news. 49 people were murdered at Pulse Night Club in Orlando, Florida and another 53 wounded in one of what's become all too common in the United States: a mass shooting.
This one targeted the LGBTQIA+ community.
The leading image for this story is of Stonewall Inn, which in June of 2016 had recently been designated a historic monument (officially, the ceremony was on June 24, 2016, just a week after the atrocity in Orlando), in recognition of the role it played for the LGBTQIA+ community for years before it was the site of a large rebellion against crackdowns on gay rights. The 1969 rebellion kickstarted the gay rights movement that ultimately led to recognition of sexuality as a protected class and the right for non-heterosexual couples to marry.
Though the rebellion at Stonewall Inn in 1969 featured a disproportionate number of trans people, including a trans woman named Marsha P. Johnson, taking a stance for their rights as human beings, the current Administration is trying to erase these people from the history books.
, USA TODAY
How soon we forget the price we paid for our rights.
The body of the perpetrator of the mass murder was interred in Miami-Dade County.
Killing people for who they are is wrong. Period. Attacking civilians is always wrong. Full stop.
Infinite Hope
Miami Times piece on Miami Gardens kids challenging stereo types
Photography? Check. Doing cool things? Check. Fighting for the community? Check.
Check out this story in the Miami Times, Miami's oldest Black owned newspaper, on kids "using photography to challenge stereotypes in their hometown."
What began as a classroom conversation evolved into a community-centered art project. O’Connor asked students to write down the single story people have about Miami Gardens. Words like “crime,” “violent,” “unsafe” and “Murder Gardens” emerged. She then asked them to think beyond, and students wrote affirmations of beauty, strength and diversity.
A really neat piece I highly recommend and fills me with that sweet infinite hope for our community here in Miami-Dade County.
Riders on the Storm Rally for Science and Safety
Two minute video on the Riders on the Storm Rally
On Sunday about 30 people gathered with Miami Indivisible near the Frost Science Center down the street from the Torch of Friendship to champion the need for properly funded climate science and research. Speakers at the event included recent employees from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)– one was the former director of NOAA's ten research centers, the other was a researcher who flew into hurricanes to study them.
If you're interested in the full speeches from the rally and/or pictures from it check out my "Protests and Actions" page, aka "P and A."
Bear the History Hound finds
Books
Jordan S. Carroll
Podcast
This podcast is one of my favorites. As it notes in this particular episode, the foreign national professor who is one of the people who makes it, is leaving the United States so the podcast will be on hiatus until maybe late July. Still, this is worth checking out.
NPR story on life in Miami
Tom Hudson
NPR story featuring supporters of the Adminstration's immigration policies
New Video Series
Legal History
Jay Kuo
Former US Ambassador to Russia on The Russian and American Presidents
Michael McFaul
On Global Interconnectedness and what the Sistine Chapel taught a local columnist
