At Monday’s candlelight vigil along Cabrillo Boulevard, I walked the line of people standing shoulder to shoulder with candles and signs, covering the vigil for the Santa Barbara Independent. The line stretched for about two blocks in each direction from the Dolphin Fountain at Stearns Wharf. I walked it back and forth. I talked to families, to seniors, to young couples. I spoke with Ellen DeGeneres, who stood quietly holding a candle on her birthday because, as she told me, “This matters.”
People thanked me — first for being young and showing up. Then, when they learned I was a reporter, for being there at all.
A few hours earlier, I had been sitting in the newsroom watching the carnage of America. Video footage of Alex Pretti being shot and killed in Minneapolis, article after article about Pretti and Renee Nicole Good. I saw federal officials go on television and offer accounts that were flatly contradicted by video evidence — statements so detached from reality they felt ripped from 1984. I kept wanting to say it out loud: This is false. This is a lie.
And yet, a few hours later, I stood among hundreds of people holding candles in the dark, and something else was happening too.
The vigil was not angered chaos or preformative rabble-rouse. It was calm. It was neighborly conversation with strangers standing inches from you. It was parents handing candles to their children. It was neighbors checking in on one another. It was being together — and remembering that we the people are not alone, something I tried to emphasize in my reporting.
And that’s the part I want to hold onto.
Because yes — the footage is horrifying. Yes — the state of affairs is shocking. But what I can’t stop thinking about now is this: We are not alone.
There are millions of Americans watching the same videos, reading the same statements, and rejecting the same lies.
You know something is deeply wrong when Minnesotans themselves are calling on local officials to protect residents from federal immigration agents. When people risk being seen simply for being present, it changes the calculus. Power expects silence or explosion. What it does not know how to handle is calm solidarity.
As for me — the young person, as was repeatedly pointed out at the gathering — I am in a state of shock.
I am 22 years old. I have only been alive in this country since 2003. I have only been fully sentient of its politics for about a decade. What I am seeing now is devastating — scenes that look like dystopian movies I watched as a kid, where “peacekeepers” beat and kill innocents and then lie about it on the evening news.
Apologies that I keep returning to books and movies. But that is the closest reference point I have. I grew up watching stories that were never supposed to be real — stories where authoritarian forces wore uniforms, where government soldiers enforced subservience through fear, where the warning was always the same: This is what happens when people stop paying attention. Those movies were meant to be cautionary, not instructional. And yet here we are.
There’s a line from National Treasure that has been stuck in my head all week. It paraphrases the Declaration of Independence:
“But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and provide new Guards for their future security.”
In the film, Nicholas Cage says, “People don’t talk that way anymore.” Justin Bartha responds that he has no idea what he just said.
And then comes the translation: If something is wrong, those who have the ability to take action have the responsibility to take action.
That is the America I was taught. Not the Hunger Games version I am currently witnessing.
My America is by the people and for the people — made up of neighbors who help one another, who build spaceships that touch other planets, who advance science, math, and the arts. My America is not one that sends federal forces into cities and then dares the public not to believe their own eyes.
For those who muttered “go home” from the sidelines Monday night — we needed a vigil.
We needed a place to mourn. Because the American spirit is not dead.
But two of her citizens are. And people feel that deeply.
It is a long road back to my America.
But standing together may be the only way to walk it — because as the people, we have not just the right, but the responsibility, to take action.
