It can’t happen here.
Palm Springs, California. Where the winters are like spring in most places, where spring sees the temperatures rising steadily toward that first triple digit day each year, and where the summers, if you’re not used to them, feel like you’ve been transported to the surface of the sun.
Palm Springs, California. Where rainbow flags outnumber American flags, where we have a fifty foot statue of Marilyn Monroe in the center of town, where we can point out where Liberace lived on our way to buy groceries at Ralphs, and where streets have names like Gene Autry Trail and Dinah Shore Drive.
Palm Springs, California. Where golf courses dot the landscape, where there are more swimming pools than parking spaces, and where upwards of 8,000 cyclists every year converge on the city to raise millions of dollars for local nonprofit organizations in one of the largest cycling charity events of its kind in America – the Tour de Palm Springs.
Palm Springs, California. Where the International Film Festival in January brings the stars out to bridge cultures and promote knowledge and tolerance of the universality of the human condition through the medium of film, where Modernism Week in February celebrates the unique midcentury modern architecture, art, interior design, landscape design, and vintage culture of the area, and where Pride Weekend in November celebrates diversity, equity, and inclusion.
Palm Springs, California. My adopted hometown for two decades. Nobody is from here. We are each here for a reason. Whether you were one of the great migration of HIV positive men in the 1990s, are a “snowbird” escaping the cold of winter elsewhere, or an LGBTQ+ person escaping the cold of bigotry almost everywhere, Palm Springs has a way of welcoming you and putting you at ease. Tourist or transplanted local, the city opens its arms and says “make yourself at home.”
You’ll see it in the city’s motto, inscribed above city hall: the people are the city. The phrase is derived from William Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus (in which it is rendered “the city is the people”) where it is used to express the idea that a city is not just a collection of buildings but a living, breathing entity formed by the people who inhabit it – a vibrant and thriving city is one where people can interact, build relationships, and participate in the social fabric that makes up a place. And that is Palm Springs, California.
Our sense of self was shattered Saturday around 11 o’clock on an otherwise gorgeous, Palm Springs morning when a a 25-year-old from nearby Twentynine Palms named Guy Bartkus detonated a bomb outside an IVF fertility clinic – a place of hope, a place of life. The US Attorney for the Central District of California, Bill Essayli, posted on X that an “anti pro-life manifesto believed to be authored by the suspect has been located and is being examined by the FBI.” It was an act of madness by a madman. What does “anti pro-life” even mean?
Akil Davis, the FBI’s assistant director in charge of the Los Angeles field office, said the FBI is treating the explosion as an act of terrorism. According to him, The FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force is working alongside the Palm Springs Police Department and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; he described the multi-agency effort as “one of the largest bombing investigations we’ve had in Southern California.”
Palm Springs Police Chief Andy Mills, who I had the pleasure of meeting, along with his wife, at an awards ceremony just two weeks ago, said it best: “Terrorism came knocking on the door of Palm Springs. We survived, and I can tell you… this city will rise.”
I live a mile from the bomb site. I heard what I thought was a sonic boom from a jet airplane and my windows shook in their frames. Gordon was so frightened he ran under my bed and refused to come out for most of the afternoon. It wasn’t until I started hearing from friends, some from Los Angeles two hours away where it was breaking news on TV, that the magnitude of what had happened in my usually very quiet neighborhood here in the north end of Palm Springs – called Uptown – entered my consciousness. A bomb? Here? Nah, that sort of stuff happens elsewhere, not in Palm Springs.
In the day since, it has sunk in. And far worse for me than the blast, though I imagine not worse for the people injured (only the bomber is reported to have died), is the shattered sense of “security” I felt here in my beloved town. Chief Mills said we will rise, and we will, like a phoenix from the ashes. But we will be – the city will be – different now.
Because it did happen here.