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When we moved into this neighborhood some 35 years ago, it was dying. The storefronts on Lake Street were mostly boarded up.

Call it the American miracle. Immigration from Mexico, Central and South America, and Somalia turned this neighborhood around. Little ethnic mom-pop shops resurrected Lake Street.

Now every single one of those businesses is gone. Over the course of the past four nights, I have watched my neighborhood be systematically dismantled around me.

Last night it was the white kids' turn.

Hundreds of angry white kids—let me be nasty and say trust-fund anarchists from the suburbs—defied the governor's curfew orders and marched through a largely ethnic and immigrant neighborhood already traumatized by three nights of fires and looting.

I live just a few hundred feet from the epicenter of last night's destruction. More buildings and businesses—virtually all of them Latino-owned—were pillaged and torched. Four of them are still burning as I write this.

Truly, a mob is an organism with many legs and no brain.

“Why don't these kids all go back to the suburbs and leave us alone?” my next-door neighbor said to me as we stood on the sidewalk and watched the noisy march. Penny, who's African-American, is the block matriarch; she's lived here longer than anyone else.

If it weren't for the violence that accompanied it, it all would have been kind of funny. The whole thing had a defiance-for-the-sake-of-defiance “I'm not going to bed and Mommy/Daddy can't make me” feel to it.

Eventually, of course, the trust-fund anarchists went back to their apartments in other (quiet) neighborhoods, leaving behind them more burning buildings and more mayhem in a neighborhood already traumatized by its own destruction.

I have not the slightest doubt that the vast majority of those folks last night honestly want justice for George Floyd (1974-2002), an African-American man brutally murdered on Memorial Day by a white policeman only blocks from here. Believe me, so does everybody in this neighborhood.

When I first came home to Paganism, I studied goddesses, searching for the one I could most relate to, one who could best help me heal and grow.

Being of Irish descent, I focused on Celtic Goddesses, and found Rhiannon. Rhiannon had her baby taken from her while she was still recovering from birth, and was falsely accused of eating her baby. As punishment, she was forced to carry visitors on her back and tell them her “crime,” for seven years, until her son turned up alive and she was exonerated.

A few shots of whiskey in, an old friend I hadn’t seen in awhile and I decided to do a tarot reading on the upcoming US presidential election.  We are both a bit obsessed, checking FiveThirtyEight (the website that focuses on opinion poll analysis) regularly (and I confess in my case sometimes multiple times a day).  She has also been doing multiple divinations using I Ching and Runes.  As is often the case with divination she never got conclusive answers much to her consternation.