need

What you’ll do: People can volunteer as individuals or in groups to sort and pack food and produce boxes at the warehouse. Other jobs include cleaning and tidying the warehouse and coolers. Westside Food Bank encourages food drives for its programs of non-expired food items, or you can just make individual donations at the warehouse. The Westside Food Bank’s partner agencies serve the neighborhoods of Santa Monica, Venice, Culver City, West Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Inglewood and the LAX area, as well as the West Los Angeles VA and several college campuses.

When: Volunteers are typically needed on weekdays in the mornings and afternoons. Corporate volunteer shifts are typically scheduled on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Weekend volunteer opportunities can be arranged by emailing [email protected].

Where: Volunteers are needed at the warehouse in Santa Monica Mondays-Thursdays or at their mobile pantries around their service area including the Gerard Mobile Pantry, VAP Mobile Pantry and West LA Civic Center Mobile Pantry.

Details: Register online for volunteer opportunities. Drop off food donations at the food bank between 7 a.m. and 3 p.m. Monday through Friday. Frozen and/or refrigerated foods can be accepted by calling (310) 828-6016 beforehand. Appointments are required to drop off large collections of food.

Michaela Thompson, an unemployed mother in the San Fernando Valley, relies on federal assistance to afford the specialized baby formula her 15-month-old daughter needs because of a feeding disorder. At $47 for a five-day supply, it’s out of her reach otherwise.

But with the federal shutdown blocking upcoming disbursements of Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits — previously known as food stamps — Thompson said she doesn’t know how she’s going to fill her daughter’s bottles.

“It feels like the world is kind of crumbling right now,” she said. “I’m terrified for my family and my daughter.”

Millions of low-income families who rely on SNAP benefits to put food on the table in California and across the country — about 1 in 8 Americans — are confronting similar fears this week, as federal and state officials warn that November funds will not be issued without a resolution to the ongoing federal shutdown and Congress shows no sign of a breakthrough.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and state Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta announced Tuesday that California is joining other Democrat-led states in suing the Trump administration to force SNAP payments through the use of contingency funds, but the litigation — even if successful — won’t prevent all the disruptions.

It is already too late for some of the 5.5 million California residents — including 2 million children — who rely on such benefits to receive them in time to buy groceries after Friday, when many will have already used up their October benefits, state officials said. Advocates warned of a tidal wave of need as home pantries and CalFresh cards run empty — which they said is no longer a risk but a certainty.

“We are past the point at which it is possible to prevent harm,” said Andrew Cheyne, managing director of public policy at the organization End Child Poverty California.

About 41.7 million Americans were served through SNAP per month in fiscal 2024, at an annual cost of nearly $100 billion, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

State officials, local governments and nonprofit organizations are scrambling to get the word out to families and to redirect millions of dollars in emergency funding to stock more food at local food banks or load gift cards for the neediest families, but many say the capacity to respond is insufficient — and are bracing for a deluge of need.

“People really don’t understand the scale and scope of what is happening and the ripple effect it will have on the economy and with people just meeting their basic needs,” said Angela F. Williams, president and chief executive of United Way.

Already, United Way is seeing an uptick in calls to its 211 centers nationwide from people looking for help with groceries, utility bills and rent, Williams said. “There’s a critical crisis that has been brewing for a while, and it’s reaching a fevered pitch.”

Cheyne said many families are well aware of the looming disruption to aid and scrambling to prepare, including by going to state food banks for groceries. Newsom has activated the National Guard to help handle that influx in California.

However, Cheyne said many others will likely find out about the disruption while standing in grocery store checkouts.

“We anticipate a huge surge in people extremely upset to find out that they’ve literally shopped, and the groceries are in their cart, and their kids are probably with them, and then they get to the checkout, and then it’s, ‘transaction denied: insufficient funds.’”

Children and older people — who make up more than 63% of SNAP recipients in California — going hungry across America is a dire enough political spectacle that politicians of both parties have worked aggressively to prevent it in the past, including during previous government shutdowns. But this time around, they seem resigned to that outcome.

Republicans and Democrats have been unable to reach a deal on the budget impasse as Democrats fight Republicans over their decision to slash healthcare subsidies relied on by millions of Americans. With no end in sight to the nearly month-long shutdown, federal workers who are either furloughed or working without pay — including many in California — are facing financial strain and increasingly showing up at food pantries, officials said.

A deluge of SNAP recipients will only add to the lines, and some food bank leaders are becoming increasingly worried about security at those facilities if they are overwhelmed by need.

Pointing fingers

In a statement posted to its website Monday, the Department of Agriculture wrote that Senate Democrats had repeatedly voted not to restore the SNAP funds by passing a short-term Republican spending measure.

“Bottom line, the well has run dry,” it said. “We are approaching an inflection point for Senate Democrats.”

The Trump administration had said Friday that it cannot legally dip into contingency funds to continue funding SNAP into November, even as it uses nontraditional means to pay for the salaries of active-duty military and federal law enforcement.

The administration has used tariff revenue to temporarily fund the Women, Infants and Children Nutrition Program, which serves about 6.7 million women and children nationally, though it is unclear how long it will continue do so. The California Department of Public Health said the state WIC program, which supports about half of all babies born in California, should “remain fully operational through Nov. 30, assuming no unexpected changes.”

On Capitol Hill, negotiations to end the shutdown have mostly ground to a halt. Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) once again refused to call House members back into session this week, sparking criticism from Democrats and some Republicans who want to negotiate a deal to reopen the government. In the Senate, negotiations remain at a stalemate.

Senate Democrats, meanwhile, have relentlessly blamed President Trump and his administration for causing the disruption to food aid, just as they have blamed the president for the shutdown overall.

“Donald Trump has the power to ensure 40 million people don’t go hungry during the shutdown. But he wishes to inflict the maximum pain on those who can least afford it. He won’t fund food. But he’s happy to build a golden ballroom,” Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) wrote Monday on X.

Schiff was referring to a $250-million ballroom Trump has planned for the White House, which he recently set into motion by demolishing the historic East Wing.

State and local responses

States have responded to the looming cut in different ways. Some have promised to backfill SNAP funding from their own coffers, though federal officials have warned they will not be reimbursed.

Newsom has stood up the National Guard and directed tens of millions of dollars to state food banks, but has made no promises to directly supplement missing SNAP benefits with state dollars — despite advocacy groups calling on him to do so.

On Friday, dozens of organizations wrote a letter to Newsom and other state officials estimating the total amount of lapsed funding for November to be about $1.1 billion, and calling on them to use state funds to cover the total amount to prevent “a crisis of unthinkable magnitude.”

Carlos Marquez III, executive director of the County Welfare Directors Assn. of California, said counties and other local agencies are responding in a number of ways, including making contributions to local food banks and looking for ways to redirect local funds — and find matching philanthropic dollars — to directly backfill missing SNAP benefits.

Los Angeles County, which has about 1.5 million SNAP recipients, has already approved a $10-million expenditure to support local food banks, its Department of Children and Family Services has identified an additional $2 million to redirect, and its partners providing managed care plans to SNAP recipients have committed another $5 million, he said.

He said his group has advocated for Newsom to declare a statewide emergency, which would help equalize the response statewide and allow for mutual aid agreements between wealthier and poorer areas.

He said his group also is advocating for the state to begin using school lunch programs to direct additional food to families with younger children at home, and to work with local senior care facilities to make sure elderly SNAP recipients are also being helped.

What comes next?

Williams, of United Way, said the organization’s local chapters are “looking for partners on the ground” to provide additional support moving forward, as needs will persist.

“It seems like every day the needs just become more and more pressing, and I’m concerned, honestly, not only about the economic toll that is being taken on individuals, I’m concerned about the mental health and emotional toll this is taking on people,” Williams said. “My hope is that people from all sectors will step up and say, ‘How can we be good neighbors?’”

On Friday, National Guard troops began a 30-day deployment at the Los Angeles Regional Food Bank, where they are sorting produce and packing food boxes. Due to “heightened concern” in the community about the military’s role in Trump’s immigration crackdown, the troops will be working in warehouses and not interacting directly with the public, said Chief Executive Michael Flood.

Flood said there has already been a surge in demand from laid-off federal workers in Los Angeles, but he’s expecting demand to increase markedly beginning Saturday, and building up distribution capacity similar to what was in place during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — which seemed odd, considering “this is a man-made disaster.”

“It doesn’t have to happen,” Flood said. “Folks in D.C. can prevent this from happening.”

Before he arrived at USC, Micah Banuelos was already pretty accustomed to playing through pain. As a standout offensive and defensive lineman at Kennedy Catholic High in Washington, his shoulder would pop out of its socket during almost every game. So Banuelos would check out, have his shoulder popped back in and then reenter the game like nothing changed.

“Then,” his father, Roy Banuelos, says, “he never said anything about it after.”

But when that shoulder injury lingered past high school and into his freshman season, there was no ignoring it anymore. Just weeks into his first fall at USC, the staff suggested Banuelos get surgery.

It would be a while before Banuelos made his way back — and even longer still before he’d be competing for a real role on USC’s offensive line. The shoulder injury robbed him of the following spring, then a knee issue nixed his second season after just a few games. But at the start of his third fall at USC, Banuelos has finally entered the mix at guard, a position at which USC is perilously unproven.

If a federal judge doesn’t grant an injunction Monday to transfer lineman DJ Wingfield in his lawsuit against the NCAA, then Banuelos will be one of many vying for the opening he leaves behind up front. Banuelos has taken considerable snaps through camp with the first-team offensive line, while redshirt freshmen Hayden Treter and Makai Saina and walk-on Kaylon Miller have also factored into the competition.

It’s the first time that USC coach Lincoln Riley has really gotten an extended look at Banuelos, despite the fact that he’s entering his third season in L.A.

“He was probably somebody we knew the least about, just because he was hurt so much,” Riley said. “He’s getting a ton of reps right now, and so far, he’s just carrying on from that. He has a lot of power. He can really move people. He can really play behind his hips. There’s a lot to like about what he does, and if he stays healthy, he’s really going to turn into a good player.”

Riley had similar praise for Treter, who has also dealt with injuries since coming to USC. The coach called Treter “one of the highlights of camp.”

The Trojans entered the offseason in need of more consistency from their offensive line, especially with a relatively new starting quarterback in Jayden Maiava.

The competition at USC’s open guard spot remains one of the closest battles on the team with just over two weeks remaining until its season opener. Even Alani Noa, who started 12 of USC’s 13 games, hasn’t been assured of a starting spot.

That uncertainty up front might be nerve-racking to some. Riley and offensive coordinator Luke Huard insist they don’t see it that way.

Huard said he feels “really, really good” about the current state of the offensive line, while Riley said he feels “much better” now about the depth at the position than he did in spring.

“Some of that young depth coming along, we needed that to happen,” Riley said. “Their ascent is important not just for this year, but for the future.”

It’s just as critical at offensive tackle, too, where redshirt freshman Justin Tauanuu has made his own case to be a part of USC’s starting front. It’s possible that he slots in at right tackle, while Tobias Raymond, the projected starter there, kicks into guard to fill the void left by Wingfield.

But coaches and teammates like what they’ve seen out of Banuelos.

“You can tell when a guy just wants to be out there and treats every day like his last,” left tackle Elijah Paige said. “He’s putting it all out here.”

For a while, Banuelos could only wait for his shoulder — and then his knee — to heal. That part was excruciating, his father says, stuck in place as others made moves up the depth chart.

“He was pretty down,” Roy Banuelos said. “I would call him and just tell him, ‘It’s OK, man. You’ll get your time. It’ll come.’”

Now, with USC in desperate need of someone stepping up at guard, that time may finally have arrived.

“All he wanted to do was play football,” Roy Banuelos said. “So his attitude now — it’s night and day.”

Keenan Allen achieved quite a bit in his career with the Chargers — and that’s probably one of the reasons why they’d like to give him another chance.

The veteran wide receiver, who was a salary-cap casualty when the Chargers traded him last year, was scheduled to meet with the team Friday to discuss a possible reunion, according to a person with knowledge of the situation not authorized to speak publicly.

A potential move to sign the six-time Pro Bowl selection makes sense for a Chargers team in need of a veteran receiving option after Mike Williams’ surprising retirement at the start of training camp.

Allen was the longest-tenured player on the Chargers when they traded him to the Chicago Bears in March 2024 to become cap compliant. He caught 904 passes for 10,530 yards and 59 touchdowns over 11 seasons with the franchise. He caught 380 passes for 4,125 yards and 25 touchdowns playing alongside Justin Herbert.

Allen caught 70 passes for 744 yards and seven touchdowns with the Bears last season, but at 33, his best days are probably behind him — which explains why he’s still a free agent in August.

Still, with some unknowns in the Chargers’ receiving corps outside of Ladd McConkey and Quentin Johnston, it makes sense that they would want to bolster their passing game with a more known quantity in a player such as Allen.

Staff writer Sam Farmer contributed to this report.

In 2012, Cassidy Krug competed in her first and last Olympics. Raised by two diving coaches, Krug was in diapers when she started dreaming of competing.

At 27 years old, she had a shot at the Olympic bronze medal but landed in seventh place instead. Krug decided to retire, something she’d already been considering for three years. But how do you move forward in life when diving is the only thing you’ve ever known?

Krug tried to replace her passion for diving with a corporate career. But after seven years in advertising and brand strategy, she felt lost and without the purpose and motivation she’d once felt for her sport. Fascinated by the endless options of what to do next, Krug wrote “Resurface: A Guide to Navigating Life’s Biggest Transitions.”

The Times spoke with Krug about why we’re so resistant to uncertainty and what tools we can use to get comfortable with change.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Why do you think transitions are an important part of life?

Transitions are an important part of life because they’re an inevitable part of life. An author named Bruce Feiler estimates that we have three to five “lifequakes” in our lives — major shifts that change our habits, our identities, our communities and our sense of purpose. These shifts are even more frequent now that it feels like the pace of change in the world is speeding up. The more we can embrace change, rather than try to hold on to our old ways, the more set up we will be to adapt and move forward.

For this book, you interviewed people going through all kinds of life transitions, from changing careers to leaving prison. What did you find to be universal truths about these transitions?

There were two: that transitions take away our sense of community, and that during a transition, we often need to change our definition of success. Stanley — the man I interviewed who left prison after 20 years — told me that when he did, he lost the sense of camaraderie he felt while there. He also realized that he’d previously defined success by having a family and a stable job. When he left prison, he needed to redefine success to include the impact he’d had on other people’s lives while in prison. Though my experience was not the same, I also felt a huge loss of community and the need to redefine success while leaving diving.

In the book, you write that as humans, we are resistant to change and feel a need for certainty. Why are we so resistant to such an inevitable part of our lives, and how can we overcome this?

We often waver between the need for stability and a desire for change and growth. Right now, as a society, our expectations for certainty are ever-increasing. Twenty years ago, there were no dating apps that could assess my compatibility with a partner and no Yelp reviews that could predict if I’d like where I chose to eat dinner. Now with generative AI, there are many more avenues that market a false sense of security, and I think those avenues give us even more anxiety when it comes to the inevitable moments when we are uncertain. One way to fight that need for certainty is to put ourselves in difficult and uncertain situations. The ability to live in uncertainty is a muscle: The more we rely on external things to give us a sense of certainty, the less capable and the more anxious we feel when we don’t have those crutches around.

In the book, you write that a transition never ends. What do you mean by that?

I used to think of transitions as beginning, middle, end. Instead, psychologists use the phrases moving into, moving through, and moving out of to describe transitions, acknowledging that they rarely yield a clear-cut endpoint. My friend Nora, whom I write about in the book, expected that once she was in remission from cancer, she would move forward and thrive. In reality, she’s in remission, but she has brain fog, fatigue and lingering health issues that will change her life moving forward. The damaging and false expectation is that transitions end. Often, in reality, we don’t return to our previous state, and our transition instead ripples into our future — but that rippling change means ongoing growth and forward movement.

How can we move forward after leaving something important to us behind?

Rituals are a great way to honor what we’re leaving behind, commemorate how it shaped us and help incorporate the lessons from it into our evolving identities. Just like holding a funeral for a lost loved one, people find creative ways to honor different parts of their lives coming to a close. One woman I interviewed who struggled with infertility threw herself a menopause party complete with tampons wrapped in ribbons and women telling their first period and menopause stories. [Author] William Bridges said that change is something that happens to us, and transition is how we choose to react to that change. I think there’s a third step to that — how we interpret that transition — and rituals can help us do so in a way that moves us forward.

What would you recommend someone do when they’re paralyzed by the thought of an upcoming change?

Firstly, I’d recommend someone reframe their anxiety by spinning those fears into opportunities. “I’m afraid to leave this job because I don’t know what will happen” can become “If I leave, there will be so many opportunities open for me, and I’m going to have my own back.” Secondly, it’s important to start with something small and concrete. The idea of finding a new passion is paralyzing, but asking yourself what you’re interested in and finding a small step you can take in the direction of exploring that interest feels much more manageable.

What would you say to someone who’s not sure if they’re ready to make a big jump?

An author named Annie Duke wrote a book called “Quit” — in it, she writes that by the time a decision appears to be 50/50, it is probably better for your upcoming happiness if you move on. We have a societal bias towards grit, and every success story seems to be of someone who had an idea and then overcame obstacles and then succeeded. Stories forget to include all the things that person quit before they chose and invested in the right path. We don’t quit nearly as often as we should, so if you’re thinking about quitting something, do it.

Now that you’ve finished writing your book, you’re going through a period of transition again. How do you feel about it this time around?

There’s grief and loss associated with all transitions. Something I have to remind myself of with each transition I face is that there will be a period where I don’t know what’s next, and that’s normal. Things aren’t supposed to last forever, and I have to remind myself to breathe into the opportunity that temporariness brings, rather than the fear. I think many of us are overwhelmed by possibilities — there are many things we could do, but we don’t know which path to take. I’m in the aftermath of a project I felt so certain about, and my instinct is to wait for that certainty to hit me again before taking a step in any direction. But if I do that, I’ll be waiting forever. What I need to do is ask myself is, “What am I curious about? What is driving me?” and then invest time into exploring it — that is how I’ll figure out what my passion is going to be next.

The Lakers were busy making moves Thursday, doing all they could to move up in the second round of the NBA draft.

Moving up to No. 36 in the draft with their second trade of the day, the Lakers acquired Adou Thiero out of Arkansas.

To get what many with the Lakers and around the NBA view as a “super athletic wing” in the 6-foot-6 Thiero, the Lakers first traded their 55th pick and about $2.5 million in cash to the Chicago Bulls for their 45th pick. Then the Lakers sent that No. 45 pick and cash considerations to the Minnesota Timberwolves to acquire the rights to Thiero (originally selected by the Brooklyn Nets), according to a person with knowledge of the deal not authorized to speak publicly.

The deal will be finalized at a later date.

Thiero averaged 15.1 points on 54.5% shooting from the field and 5.8 rebounds last season for the Razorbacks.

He needs to improve his shooting, as do many second-round wing players, but the Lakers think Thiero will improve on that over time.

The Lakers and other NBA scouts compare the 220-pound Thiero to Knicks forward OG Anunoby, a three-and-D player that L.A.’s scouts thought might be drafted in the first round.

Though the Lakers are in need of a center, they also need athleticism at the wing to play alongside Luka Doncic, and Thiero helps address that need.

One scout said Thiero is athletic and will “catch lob passes” from Doncic.

“It feels good. A dream come true,” Thiero said. “Just happy to be here. Playing for the Lakers, too, that’s a blessing for sure.”

When asked about the Lakers’ roster, Thiero said: “LeBron! It’s going to be fun learning from everybody. But you got Bron, you got Luka, AR (Austin Reaves). It’s a lot of people on that team. I’m just ready to get with the guys and work.”

And the Lakers were happy to go from No. 55 to No. 36 and not give up future assets to draft Thiero. The Lakers didn’t have a first-round pick in Wednesday night’s draft.

People around the league said the Lakers had their eye on Ryan Kalkbrenner out of Creighton, but the 7-foot-1 center didn’t last on the board long, going to the Charlotte Hornets at No. 34.

In other Lakers news, Austin Reaves declined the team’s maximum offer of four years for $89 million, according to a person with knowledge of the situation not authorized to speak publicly.

Reaves, 27, still has two years left on his deal, for $13.9 million next season and $14.9 million in the 2026-27 season, and he holds a player option for the last year of his deal.

He was third on the Lakers in scoring last season, averaging career-highs in scoring (20.2), assists (5.8), rebounds (4.5) and minutes per game (34.9). He shot 46% from the field and 37.7% from three-point range.

Clippers move up to get Kobe Sanders

The Knicks drafted guard Kobe Sanders out of Nevada at No. 50 and traded him to the Clippers for Mohamed Diawara, the No. 51 pick.

Sanders, 23, is a 6-9 wing player who averaged 15.8 points per game last season.

The Clippers chose Penn State center Yanic Konan Niederhauser with the 30th and final pick in the first round on Wednesday.

CONCORD, Calif. — On Saturday, on the streets of Washington, Donald Trump will throw himself a costly and ostentatious military parade, a gaudy display of waste and vainglory staged solely to inflate the president’s dirigible-sized ego.

The estimated price tag: As much as $45 million.

That same day, the volunteers and staff of White Pony Express will do what they’ve done for nearly a dozen years, taking perfectly good food that would otherwise be tossed out and using it to feed hungry and needy people living in one of the most comfortable and affluent regions of California.

Since its founding, White Pony has processed and passed along more than 26 million pounds of food — the equivalent of about 22 million meals — thanks to such Bay Area benefactors as Whole Foods, Starbucks and Trader Joe’s. That’s 13,000 tons of food that would have otherwise gone to landfills, rotting and emitting 31,000 tons of CO2 emissions into our overheated atmosphere.

It’s such a righteous thing, you can practically hear the angels sing.

“Our mission is to connect abundance and need,” said Eve Birge, White Pony’s chief executive officer, who said the nonprofit’s guiding principle is the notion “we are one human family and when one of us moves up, we all move up.”

That mission has become more difficult of late as the Trump administration takes a scythe to the nation’s social safety net.

White Pony receives most of its support from corporations, foundations, community organizations and individual donors. But a sizable chunk comes from the federal government; the nonprofit could lose up to a third of its $3-million annual budget due to cuts by the Trump administration.

“We serve 130,000 people each year,” Birge said. “That puts in jeopardy one-third of the people we’re serving, because if I don’t find another way to raise that money, then we’ll have to scale back programs. I’ll have to consider letting go staff.” (White Pony has 17 employees and about 1,200 active volunteers.)

“We’re a seven-day-a-week operation, because people are hungry seven days a week,” Birge said. “We’ve talked about having to pull back to five or six days.”

She had no comment on Trump’s big, braggadocious celebration of self, a Soviet-style display of military hardware — tanks, horses, mules, parachute jumpers, thousands of marching troops — celebrating the Army’s 250th anniversary and, oh yes, the president’s 79th birthday.

Marivel Mendoza wasn’t so reticent.

“All of the programs that are being gutted and we’re using taxpayer dollars to pay for a parade?” she asked after a White Pony delivery truck pulled up with several pallets of fruit, veggies and other groceries.

Mendoza’s organization, which operates from a small office center in Brentwood, serves more than 500 migrant farmworkers and their families in the far eastern reaches of the Bay Area. “We’re going to see people starving at some point,” Mendoza said. “It’s unethical and immoral. I don’t know how [Trump] sleeps at night.”

Certainly not lightheaded, or with his empty belly growling from hunger.

Those who work at White Pony speak of it with a spiritual reverence.

Paula Keeler, 74, took a break from her recent shift inspecting produce to discuss the organization’s beneficence. (Every bit of food that comes through the door is checked for quality and freshness before being trucked from White Pony’s Concord warehouse and headquarters to one of more than 100 community nonprofits.)

Keeler retired about a decade ago from a number-crunching job with a Bay Area school district. She’s volunteered at White Pony for the last nine years, on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.

“It’s become my church, my gym and my therapist,” she said, as pulsing rhythm and blues played from a portable speaker inside the large sorting room. “Tuesdays, I deliver to two senior homes. They’re mostly little women and they can go to bed at night knowing their refrigerator is full tomorrow, and that’s what touches my heart.”

Keeler hadn’t heard about Trump’s parade. “I don’t watch the news because it makes me want to throw up,” she said. Told of the spectacle and its cost, she responded with equanimity.

“It’s kind of like the Serenity Prayer,” Keeler said. “What can you do and what can’t you do? I try to stick with what I can do.”

It’s not much in vogue these days to quote Joe Biden, but the former president used to say something worth recollecting. “Don’t tell me what you value,” he often stated. “Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”

Trump’s priorities — I, me, mine — are the same as they’ve ever been. But there’s something particularly stomach-turning about squandering tens of millions of dollars on a vanity parade while slashing funds that could help feed those in need.

Michael Bagby, 66, works part time at White Pony. He retired after a career piloting big rigs and started making deliveries and training White Pony drivers about three years ago. His passion is fishing — Bagby dreams of reeling in a deep-sea marlin — but no hobby can nourish his soul as much as helping others.

He was aware of Trump’s pretentious pageant and its heedless price tag.

“Nothing I say is going to make a difference whether the parade goes on or not,” Bagby said, settling into the cab of a 26-foot refrigerated box truck. “But it would be better to show an interest in the true needs of the country rather than a parade.”

His route that day called for stops at a middle school and a church in working-class Antioch, then Mendoza’s nonprofit in neighboring Brentwood.

As Bagby pulled up to the church, the pastor and several volunteers were waiting outside. The modest white stucco building was fringed with dead grass. Traffic from nearby Highway 4 produced an insistent, thrumming soundtrack.

“There are a lot of people in need. A lot,” said Tania Hernandez, 45, who runs the church’s food pantry. Eighty percent of the food it provides comes from White Pony, helping feed around 100 families a week. “If it wasn’t for them,” Hernandez said, “we wouldn’t be able to do it.”

With help, Bagby dropped off several pallets. He raised the tailgate, battened down the latches and headed for the cab. A church member walked up and stuck out his hand. “God bless you,” he said.

Then it was off to the next stop.

During China’s imperial age, those deemed guilty of the worst offenses were sometimes sentenced to death in a public square by a brutal form of execution known as lingchi. Soldiers — using sharp blades — would slice away pieces of flesh from the accused until they died. Translated, lingchi means “death by a thousand cuts.”

Maybe democracy does die in darkness, as journalist Bob Woodward often suggests. Or maybe democracy’s demise comes in the light of day, in a public forum, where everyone can bear witness. Sometimes those holding the knives are the oligarchs or elected officials drenched in corruption. And sometimes there’s blood on the hands of the people.

On Saturday, voters in San Antonio — the seventh-largest city in the country — are headed to the polls to decide the first open mayoral race since President Obama’s first term. Or at least some voters will be.

In November 2024, nearly 60% of the 1.3 million registered voters in the county cast a ballot in the general election. However, in the local election held last month, barely 10% showed up to the polls. Before anyone starts throwing shade at San Antonio, in Dallas the turnout was even lower.

Lackluster participation in an “off year” election is not new. However, the mayoral race in San Antonio has increased national interest because the outcome is being viewed as a litmus test for both the strength of the Democrats’ resistance and the public’s appetite for the White House’s policies.

Like other big blue cities nestled in legislatively red states, San Antonio’s progressive policies have been under constant assault from the governor’s mansion. And with neither the progressive candidate, Gina Ortiz Jones, or her MAGA-leaning opponent, Rolando Pablos, eclipsing 50% of the vote in May, the runoff has drawn more than $1 million in campaign spending from outside conservative groups looking to flip the traditionally blue stronghold.

The outcome could provide a possible glimpse into the 2026 mayoral race in Los Angeles, should the formerly Republican Rick Caruso decide to run against Mayor Karen Bass, a Democrat. When the two faced off in 2022, around 44% of the city’s registered voters went to the polls. Caruso lost by less than 90,000 votes in a city with 2.1 million registered voters — most of whom didn’t submit a ballot.

It is rather astonishing how little we actually participate in democracy, given the amount of tax dollars we have spent trying to convince other nations that our government system is the best on the planet. Capitulating to President Trump’s unsubstantiated claims of mass voter fraud, many local conservative elected officials have tried to ram through a litany of “voter integrity” policies under the guise of protecting democracy. However, democracy is not a delicate flower in need of protection. It’s a muscle in need of exercise.

“Some people find voting to be a chore,” Michele Carew, the elections administrator for Bexar County — which includes San Antonio — told me. “We need to make voting easier and quite frankly, fun. And we need to get those who don’t feel like their vote counts to see that it does. That means getting out and talking to people in our neighborhood, in our churches, in our grocery stores … about when elections are coming up and what’s at stake locally.”

Carew said that the added outside interest in the city’s election has driven up early voting a tick and that she expects to see roughly a 15% turnout, which is an increase over previous years. It could be worse. The city once elected a mayor with 7% turnout back in 2013. Carew also expressed concern about outside influence on local governing.

“One of the first times I saw these nonpartisan races become more political was in 2020, and so as time goes by it’s gotten even more so. I would like to think once the candidate is elected mayor they remain nonpartisan and do what’s best for the city and not their party.”

In 2024, a presidential election year when you’d expect the highest turnout, 1 in 3 registered voters across this country — roughly 20 million people — took a look around and said, “Nah, I’m good.” Or something like that.

The highest turnout was in Washington, D.C., where nearly 80% showed up. Too bad it’s not a state. Among the lowest turnout rates? Texas — which has the second-greatest number of voters, behind only California.

And therein lies the problem with trying to extrapolate national trends from local elections. Maybe Ortiz Jones will win in San Antonio this weekend. Maybe Caruso will win in L.A. next year. None of this tells us how the vast majority of Americans are really feeling.

Sure, it’s good fodder to debate around the table or on cable news shows, but ultimately the sample size of a mayoral election belies any claims about a result’s meaning. Turnout during an off year is just too low.

One thing we know for certain is most voters in America exercise their right to vote only once every four years. Oligarchs and corrupt officials are not great, but it’s hard for democracy to stay healthy and strong if that’s all the exercise it’s getting.

@LZGranderson

The lure for music stars to cinematize their success will never grow old, and the movies — in need of high-wattage attractions as ever — always seem ready to oblige. The latest to enter that terrain is Abel Tesfaye, the artist known as the Weeknd, whose chart-toppers over the last decade-plus have painted, in club colors and through his haunted falsetto, a hedonist performer’s ups and downs.

It’s one thing to croon about the aftertaste of youthful excess to a dirty, mesmerizing dance beat, however, and another to draw the subject out to a compelling feature length, which the turgid psychodrama “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” starring Tesfaye and directed by Trey Edward Shults, mostly fails to do. But not for lack of trying from the visually vibey “Waves” filmmaker, who wrote the movie with Tesfaye and Reza Fahim, and from co-stars Jenna Ortega and Barry Keoghan, roped into playing along in the superstar’s sandbox of tour-nightmare solipsism.

The title also belongs to the latest hit album of Tesfaye’s, released this year, which the singer-songwriter has hinted in the press to be a redemptive mic drop of sorts for his mysterious sex-and-drugs-fueled Weeknd persona. Whether you call the film a promotional tie-in or companion piece — it was filmed two years ago, before all the album’s tracks were recorded — it’s still little more than a long-form music video vanity project, straining for importance, fumbling at resonance.

A tight frame on Tesfaye’s boyish, anxious-looking face, his angry girlfriend’s breakup voice message (“I used to think you were a good person!”), and superficial pumping up from his manager (a bro-mode Keoghan), let us know all is not right backstage for this musician on the first night of a big tour. Elsewhere, a distraught young woman (Ortega) drenches a house’s interior with gasoline and sets it on fire, then drives to a gas station to refill her canister.

These tortured souls meet the night his coked-up, busted-heart malaise triggers a walk-off midperformance, and she’s there backstage to lock eyes with him and ask if he’s OK. (He’s not!) From there it’s an escapist date of air hockey, carnival rides and, once they settle in a fancy hotel room, the sharing of a sensitive new song.

In the cold light of day, though, when her vulnerabilities bump up against his reset untouchability — Ortega gets a great line, “You don’t look worried, you look scared” — this impulsive star/fan connection takes a violent turn. Anyone familiar with the HBO series “The Idol” that Tesfaye co-created will soon sense an unwelcome reprise of that short-lived showbiz yarn’s retrograde misogyny.

The germ of an edgy fantasia about an isolated pop icon’s ego death is swimming somewhere in the DNA of “Hurry Up Tomorrow,” but it’s been flattened into a superficial, tear-stained pity party. Shults and cinematographer Chayse Irvin are gifted image makers, but they seem hamstrung applying their bag of style tricks — different aspect ratios, multiple film stocks, 360 shots and roving takes — to so shallow and prideful an exercise. There’s always something to look at but little that illuminates.

As for Tesfaye, he’s not uninteresting as a screen presence, but it’s an embryonic magnetism, in need of material richer than a bunch of close-ups that culminate in a howl of a ballad. In the flimsy narrative’s pseudo-biographical contours — notably the real-life voice loss he experienced onstage a few years ago — parallels to what Prince sought to achieve with the real-life-drawn “Purple Rain” are understandable. But that film was a cannier bid for next-level success, offsetting its three-act corniness with emotional stakes that led to a crescendo of its genius headliner’s performance prowess.

“Hurry Up Tomorrow” is thinner and sloppier. It won’t slam the door on Tesfaye’s movie ambitions, but as a bid to conquer the big screen, it’s an off-putting, see-what-sticks wallow that treats the power of cinema like a midconcert costume change.