Hope for 2025: Welcome to the Circus

It's been a minute since I posted here. In fact, this is the first post of 2025. I spent the winter holiday in my hometown of Sacramento and the first weeks of 2025 in Miami re-calibrating a bit. I've been busy working on fiction writing, taking photos and reading the news. Would I say 2025 was off to a good start? Not really, no. But I aggressively choose hope.
Hope
"We must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope." Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
This past week we celebrated the life of Martin Luther King Jr. along with much of the rest of the nation. Our church dedicated Sunday, as it does every year around MLK's birthday, to Dr. King. The sermon starts at 24:20 in the Youtube video of the service and is worth watching. The whole service is worth watching but the link below is set up to the start of the sermon.



Three pictures by Philip Cardella on January 19, 2025. One of the Coral Gables United Church of Christ Choir singing, one of a trumpter trumpeting and one of a pastor preaching.
The next day, after our car, which had been at the dealer service shop since Thanksgiving week until this past Saturday, died in front of a doughnut store near us. Fortunately, it appears to have just been the battery (undoubtedly due in part to sitting for two months) and we still managed to make our way to Liberty City's 48th Annual Martin Luther King Jr. Parade.









A gallery of nine photos taken by Philip Cardella on January 20, 2025 at the 48th annual MLK Day Parade. Photos are of: a band member banging a drum, a gold rimmed convertible car, a fire fighter woman waving from the ladder basket of a fire truck, two male fire fighters in formal uniform (one waving to the camera), corn on the cob and chicken on the grill, two parade participants sitting in a convertible, an adorable little boy looking up while wearing a bunch of medals, crowd members chatting, one is in a wheel chair, and a rock band performing on a float (three of four rock band members are white).
The two and a half hour long parade marched along a stretch of Liberty City, Miami, Florida that Dr. King frequented when he was alive. It is also a section of Miami that has historically seen what the Kerner Commission, commissioned by President Lyndon Johnson, calls rebellions (but reporters often mistakingly call riots), at the Republican National Committee Meeting in 1968 (held in Dade County that year), in 1980 when the four officers accused of (and one of whom admitted to) beating to death black motorcyclist Arthur McDuffie at Christmas time 1979 were acquitted the following spring, and in January 1989 when Miami police officer William Lozano shot and killed Clement Lloyd, an African American motorcyclist.
Much of the frustration in Liberty City comes from lies from prominent Miamians that stretch back to MLK's youth about how Liberty City would be a beautiful place for Black Miamians to live and thrive. But, as a recent documentary shows, the lies and disappointment persists to this day. A non-profit I volunteer with and my church is a network member of called People Acting for Community Together, which itself was born out of a community response to the 1980 McDuffie Rebellion, is hosting two showings of the documentary this month. Photos from that in the weeks to come!
A four minute long trailer for "Razing Liberty Square"
Even at the parade, however, were not only signs of hope--as is fitting for an MLK Day Parade, but of past victories. Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee while standing in solidarity with sanitation workers who were on strike in that city. Those workers famously demanded equal pay and treatment to their white coworkers, holding up signs in 1968 that read "I am a man."

At Monday's parade, the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, which represents 2,000,000 service industry workers, including janitors, custodians and santiation workers, marched in the parade holding up signs recalling the 1968 strike Dr. King was murdered while attending.



SEIU chapter 32BJ marches in the 2025 Liberty City MLK Day Parade. A man in a yellow rain parka holds up a sign that says "I am a man," a woman in a yellow rain parka holds up a 32BJ SEIU sign, a woman holds up a sign that reads "I am a woman." All photos copyright Philip Cardella 2025.
The Longshoremen's union also marched in the parade. In 1945, with the war in Europe just ended and Black Floridians having played a crucial role in the war effort in Florida, yet, Black Floridians were unable to cool off in any of the waters off the massive peninsula. So, with the Longshoremen standing by to assist, a group of men and women waded into South Florida waters expecting to be arrested. A young civil rights lawyer named Thurgood Marshall also stood by to assist. They were relieved and excited to find this, one of the early examples of civil disobedience in the American Civil Rights movement, to be recognized with the right to swim in the waters off of Virginia Key. That story and the ongoing effort to protect that beach can be found in a book called White Sand, Black Beach. The Reverend King would frequent the beach.



The International Longshoremen's Assn. Local ILA 1416 Miami, Florida marches behind its banner in one photo. In the next, two longshoremen in hats and overalls march in the parade. Photos copyright Philip Cardella 2025.
So, there was a lot to be hopeful for on January 20, 2025 in Miami, Florida. At least for a few hours. But as the weather turned bitter cold for much of the United States and threatened snow in much of Florida this week, the hope wasn't without challenges.
Disappointment
As I mentioned earlier, our car went into a major dealer's shop in November, just before Thanksgiving, and wasn't returned to us for two months, and $200 over the $3600 quote. While there were things the dealer did that were good, like giving us a loaner car (really a good thing) there were others that were frustrating--like going weeks at a time with no updates, no communication and no responses to phone calls. As a person who grew up in a state with robust consumer protections and as a customer loyal to that brand, it was rather disappointing, frustrating and dismaying all at once. A minor inconvenience, to be sure, but one that seemed to encapsulate the colder part of living in Florida.
Likewise, the healthcare system here is a complex, intimidating and frustrating reality. While surely every American has horror stories about the American health care system, the one here almost seems as much about capitalism as anything. I argue on social media all the time that the root problem most people call "capitalism" is far older, deeper, and simpler than capitalism. In a word, it is greed or as Chaucer said through the Pardoner, "Radix malorum est cupiditas," "Greed is the root of all evil." So, while capitalism certainly is plagued by greed, greed itself is a problem in every system we've tried.
Anyway. This week I needed blood work drawn. My doctor's office hurried me past their lab workers, telling me it'd cost like $5 bucks (as if that was a problem), and told me to go to a local lab. Here in Miami, we have local labs in what seems like every strip mall. And boy do we have a lot of strip malls. These places can be shoehorned in almost anywhere and while half of Miami is on a simple grid, the forcing of places into spaces they don't fit can create confusion.

Which, is what happened to me this week. I went to this for profit lab appointment in hand but unclear if they really knew what work I needed to be done because their website wouldn't let me enter it in and didn't acknowledge receipt of my doctor's orders.
The problem is, I had trouble finding it. The building it sits in does not have the lab's signage on it and the entrance is through a front door, following hand written signs, out a back door, and then back into the building via a different back door. And I showed up and clicked on the link they sent me for check in and ... it told me that because I was more than one minute late my appointment had been cancelled and I needed to reschedule.
The lab place itself looked like a DMV office from hell, with a door to go in and out, a door to go into some back area and not one other thing besides chairs and a TV telling you whose turn it was and who had been waiting longer than an hour. The single room was perhaps as big as a standard living room and had maybe twenty people packed in it. It was dystopian and frustrating. While a unified system, like Kaiser, has plenty of problems, the reality is I would have gotten my labs done that day or if not that day, in the same office, comfortable that if my doctor's orders hadn't arrived I could march my butt up to her office and tell her what happened.
But in the land of unregulated competition I can go to any lab I want, whether or not they are actually monitored by any health agency, sitting in a room that looks like its out of a dystopian comedy about beuracracies treating people like animals, people packed in like sardines and when I'm done visit one of Miami's limitless opportunities for a "massage" at a sketchy strip mall place that stays open all night.
Or I can be disappointed that I didn't know where the secret entrance was to the medical business, get my appointment canceled and then have my frustrations rubbed out at the nearby "massage parlor." Yes, I put massage in quotes twice. No, I didn't go into the massage parlor. I just find it funny that I'm in a state that wants to ban books where two kids with the same gender identity hold hands while allowing the rampant proliferation of illegal, unregulated, brothels full of actual sex trafficking victims.

Yay, capitalism. If you really want to see what capitalism run amok looks like, Florida's history from 1910 to present is a great example. There's even evidence unregulated housing markets in Florida helped cause the Great Depression in 1929 AND the Great Recession in 2008. But that's a story for a different week.
Ok, Back to Hope
I decided I need to get even more involved in my community so I earlier this month I attended a meeting of a local group of people trying to make Miami-Dade County better. The group is in the City of Coral Gables and invited three candidates for the Coral Gables commissioner races this spring to talk to us. Each candidate was quite different from one another but each candidate seemed to really care about local folks. This particular race is non partisan–they can't declare to be part of a party–and at least one of them loved the races being in April because it keeps the big money in the general elections in November out of the races. It was honestly refreshing both because the room was packed (which made me nervous being one of two people wearing a mask) and because I liked all three candidates a great deal and I couldn't even tell who the candidates voted for for president.
Despite what news agencies, which increasingly are national entities pretending to care about local stuff (more on that in a sec), most laws and ordinances that impact folks are at the local level. Here these people are shaking hands and talking to citizens who want to listen about how they want to make their city better and safer. While police and fire departments came up (Coral Gables is understaffed in both by national standards) the big topic was street safety. If you've ever been to Coral Gables you might wonder what isn't safe about it. Crime isn't the issue, it's walking across the street and getting struck by a bad driver that they are worried about–and for good reason. We can make a difference if we get involved at the local level.

On Media
An interesting thing about "local media" take the two major newspapers most relevant to my life right now, The Sacramento Bee and The Miami Herald. The Sacramento Bee was started by the McClatchy family in 1857. The Miami Herald was first published a continent away and decades later in 1903 by Marjorie Stoneman Douglas' father. In 2006 the McClatchys bought the Herald with Knight Ridder news. In 2020 the McClatchy family sold off all of the papers to to Chatham Asset Management, a hedge fund.
So what? So, look at both papers. Here's The Bee. Here's The Herald. If you're on a computer you'll see "from our partners." If you're on your phone you'll see "The Street." Notice anything? Fully half both papers' front website page are the same thing. The Miami Herald hasn't even been published in Miami in years.
This is one reason why I push so hard for people to go to Mastodon aka the fediverse. While the fediverse isn't a solution to all the media faults, it is part of the solution as the fediverse is actually this multifaceted nearly infinite set of things, not any one thing. It cannot be bought because there's nothing central to buy. Check out this article on it. I'll see you on the the fediverse (or Mastadon!).
Below are two iterations of the fediverse. They talk to each other just fine but they act a little different. One acts a lot like what Twitter used to be. The other acts a lot like what Instagram used to be. I use both. But I could use just one! Check them out.


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