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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Reports of an ominous jet circling low over Pasadena on Sunday, February 5th circulated online early this month, spurring conspiracy theories and stirring panic in the good people of the cities perched on the northeastern border of Los Angeles.
The South Pasadena Police Department apparently had no answers.
An enthusiast identified it as a JAVA21 military jet and, given the reports earlier that week about a Chinese spy balloon sucking up secrets across America, it took little time before someone suggested it was searching for another off-course weather balloon to shoot out of the sunny California skies.
Others thought it was a cargo plane. A C-17 globe master.
Someone started tracking it on https://www.flightradar24.com/.
Perhaps it was a precursor of a Russian invasion in retaliation for United States media calling Putin out for meddling in the Presidential election. Or to open a new front in the war against Ukraine.
A theory connecting it to the Grammies at the Crypto.com Arena was shot down when someone found a Tweet from NASCAR announcing that they were ready. But… ready for what?
Turns out that the plane was indeed setting up for a flyover of the BMO Stadium, as pre-race entertainment to impress fast-car fans at the Busch Light Clash, something it had done last year as well.
Someone from Alhambra chimed in that people were over-reacting to the plane’s go-rounds in its holding pattern before heading south.
Others just enjoyed the free entertainment.
Then someone digitally perched the real threat to Pasadena pet-owners – a coyote – on top of the plane. Another linked to the 1969 Arlo Guthrie song “Coming into Los Angeles.”
There have been plenty of prior instances of planes over Pasadena, circling pre-Dodger stadium openings, or stealth bombers creating not-so stealthy roars along the ridge separating the City from the Valley on the way to wow Rose Bowl fans.
And for the conspiracy theorists among us, there’s lots of documentation of FBI surveillance planes, registered to fake companies, flying over American cities supposedly as part of ongoing investigations.
One, photographed by AP in a flight over northern Virginia, appeared pretty alarming with weird attachments to its fuselage. And the conspiracy theorists may be on to something – these planes really can carry aps to identify people through their smartphones.
Paranoia?
Yes. And the Pentagon and American armament industry depends on keeping people revved up to keep the flow of tax dollars coming.
Last week China sent them a gift in the form of a disabled and off-course whether-or-not weather balloon. Which allowed the Air Force to belatedly launch a U.S. F-22 fighter jet to shoot it down.
And all other agencies to heighten awareness and enhance their technological scanning of our skies in its aftermath, leading to the identification of three additional high-altitude unidentified flying objects – over the north central states, Alaska and Canada’s Yukon last weekend, scrambling more U.S. fighters.
Intelligence officials have since downgraded those UFOs from a dastardly Chinese plot or a possible on-the-loose ICBM to disintegrated debris from innocent commercial or other benign endeavors.
But this is a disturbing reminder of how America’s default setting is kill first, ask questions later.
This country has a violence problem.
Mass shootings, police brutality, more and more money poured into foreign wars. Too often we turn to violence as the solution rather than the ingrained social crisis it really is that desperately calls for our tax dollars to be apportioned in ways to resolve the underlying issues.
More money goes to enrich the prison-industrial complex which serves to further impoverish families than is spent on trying to educate the next generation of Americans.
Inequality and inequity directly contribute to the level of gun violence, to the lack of opportunities for those in need to improve their lot in life, and ensures that criminality is treated as something to be solved by more guns and more policing.
Our government keeps failing the people it is supposed to represent. Instead of funding education and health care, social support and housing, it escalates profligate Pentagon spending and authorizes donation of military-grade equipment to local authorities perpetuating the violence in our communities.
And we are failing the world.
Together with most other countries, the United States signed the Kellogg-Briand Pact in 1928, vowing to refrain from war to resolve disputes or conflicts, and it has certainly contributed to a reduction in the numbers of wars since.
Although the treaty remains in effect today , our country has certainly been one of the most egregious violators of its strictures, wading into wars around the world, all too often with meagerly manufactured justifications.
The Pentagon and its allies pushed a war and military budget of $858 billion through Congress last year. Pundits cynically see them as reaching for close to a trillion dollars in the 2023 budget waving ginned-up threats of the danger of imminent war, danger that we alone are creating by our massive military build-up and continued overt and covert interference in the affairs of foreign nations.
Law enforcement agents murdered close to 1,200 people in this country last year – if we can trust their record-keeping – the most in over a hundred years. Blacks were three times as likely as whites to be their victims, and these black victims more commonly were unarmed.
The internet has become a feeding frenzy of verbal violence that too often overflows IRL. Our past president escalated divisiveness and spawned further violence throughout and following his time in the White House.
We need to demand our elected officials at all levels of government change their approach. In every decision they make, they must ask if this action will help remake the United States from a nation of violence into one that pursues peace at all costs.
And take to heart what Martin Luther King articulated in a speech given on April 4, 1967, one year before his assassination:
“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war.”
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
