Something to remember, as the election approaches:
The work is never wasted.
Even if the Republicans keep control of Congress–yes, that would be terrible, yes, I would be furious and frustrated and sad and it would hurt like hell–EVEN SO: the work we have done to get here was not wasted.
I was part of the previous “biggest worldwide protest ever,” the global protests against the Iraq War in February 2003.
We lost. The war happened. Is still happening.
But some of the people who got involved then worked for Obama’s campaigns, a lot of them are part of the resistance now, and all of us learned something. The work was not wasted.
Even if we lose. There were Democratic primary debates in my hometown for the first time I can remember. Even if our terrible Republican Congresswoman gets re-elected, there’s still a broader and stronger Democratic Party organization in Mike Fucking Pence’s home state.
The election can’t be an end. It will only be an end if we win and get complacent, or if we lose and give in to hopelessness. We cannot afford either. We do the job that is in front of us. No matter what.
The work is never wasted.
The stories our world tells us are about Great Heroic Struggles With Triumphant Climaxes In Which Good Vanquishes Evil And They All Live Happily Ever After. It’s all about the one extreme emergency during which people rise to the occasion.
Problem is, that’s not how the world actually … works. That’s not how change happens. That’s not how societies are reshaped. We hear about MLK and the bus boycott and the protests, but not the DECADES OF WORK that came before, the organizing and the education and the legal challenges and the hundreds of thousands of people, from great heroes to ordinary people, who put in the grinding every-day work to make the world a better place, step by step, bit by bit. The big things–the speeches, the marches–were the tip of the iceberg. Nothing would have happened without the rest of the iceberg.
The 2018 midterms are the tip of the iceberg. They are incredibly important, yes. But without the rest of the iceberg, they mean nothing. Without ordinary people across America organizing and talking to their friends and coworkers and paying attention to politics and getting involved and volunteering (not just politically, but for all the nonprofits out there working to make the world a better, fairer, more just, more merciful place) the election is useless.
This is not a sprint. It is a relay marathon. If you can run a major leg, awesome. If you can help organize the marathon, awesome. If you can coordinate the people running, awesome. If you can hand out bottled water along the route, awesome. If you can cheer along the way, awesome. If you can remind people that the marathon is happening, awesome. It’s not about great heroes or one person doing it all or one climactic battle in which everything magically gets fixed.
It’s about ordinary people doing what they can. What you can do right now is vote. What you do on November 7 and the months and years following (no matter who wins the election) is stay involved and stay working.
Take care of yourself. Take care of others. Don’t hyperfixate and burn out. Be the tortoise, not the hare. Vote. And then keep moving on.
Hey so friendly reminder about voting and elections that I haven’t seen going around yet but is SUPER IMPORTANT.
Watch what you wear and say while you’re waiting in line for the voting booth/at the polls. It is against federal law to do anything that might be considered campaigning once you’re there, and since we know that voter suppression is the name of the game this election, there will be people looking for ANY reason to remove you from the polling place. And they will nitpick. You have a shirt with a artistic picture of donkey on it? You’re visibly supporting the Democrats, you’re disqualified from voting. Want to wear a Black Lives Matter shirt? Not there you don’t. They’ll call it intimidation and kick you out. Pins, buttons, stickers, none of it. Wear the most bland, plain clothes you can imagine.
And then keep your mouth shut. Even the slightest hint of discussion about which candidate you’re voting for can get used against you. Don’t assume the people around you are safe to discuss it with. You might be overheard. There WILL people watching for these things, hoping to get rid of anyone they can. Voter suppression isn’t just about making registration impossible. It happens at the polling stations too. Be smart, be bland, be quiet, and make sure your vote gets in.
Also- and I have seen this mentioned but it bears repeating- DO NOT TAKE A PICTURE OF YOUR BALLOT. EVER. It’ll also disqualify your vote. Take a selfie when you’re out of their with your fun little sticker.
This is for your protection as much as your oppression: this means the opposition party can’t use those tactics against you either – and if anyone tries, REPORT THEM.
The national conversation about trans identity and community tends to focus on the newest crop of trans youth. But why don’t we hear about older trans and gender-nonconforming individuals who manage to overcome the at times seemingly impossible odds and survive — and thrive — in America?
Photographer Jess Dugan’s latest project To Survive on This Shore aims to bring attention to those voices. For over five years, Dugan and social worker Vanessa Fabbre have traveled across the United States photographing and interviewing older trans and gender-nonconforming individuals to ensure their stories, largely untold, are finally shared. Dugan told BuzzFeed News in an interview that she views the project (now a published book, released this week) as, first and foremost, an “educational and activist mission.”
“Prior to starting this project, I heard from several younger trans people that they had never seen images of older transgender people and that they had no roadmap for what their life might look like going forward,” she said. “I wanted to create this project for them, as well as to record and validate the experiences of older transgender people, many of whom are directly responsible for the world we live in today.”
Your professor will not be happy with you if he says the Stanford Prison Experiment shows human nature and you say it shows the nature of white middle class college-aged boys.
Like he will not be happy at all.
For real though. That experiment. Scary shit.
This reminds me of a discussion that I read once which said Lord of the Flies would have turned out a hell of a lot differently if it was a private school of young girls (who are expected to be responsible and selfless instead), or a public school where the children weren’t all from an inherently entitled, emotionally stunted social class (studies have shown that people in lower socioeconomic classes show more compassion for others).
Or that the same premise with children raised in a different culture than the toxic and opressive British Empire and it’s emphasis on social hierarchy and personal wealth and status.
And that what we perceive as the unchangable truth deep inside humanity because of things like Lord of the Flies and the Stanford Prison Experiment, is just the base truths about what happens when you remove any accountabilty controlling one social group with an overwhelming sense of entitlement and an inability to feel compassion.
I will always reblog this.
I just wanna say that the Lord of the Flies was explicitly written about high-class private school boys to make this exact point. Golding wrote Lord of the Flies partially to refute an earlier novel about this same subject: The Coral Island by
R.M. Ballantyne. Golding thought it was absolutely absurd that a bunch of privileged little shits would set up some sort of utopia, so his book shows them NOT doing that.
This is also generally true about most psychological experiments.
There’s an experiment called “The Ultimatum Game”. It goes something like this.
Subject A is given an amount of money (Say, $100).
Subject A must offer Subject B some percentage of that money.
If Subject B accepts Subject A’s offer, both get the agreed upon amount of money. If Subject B refuses, no one gets any money.
The most common result was believed to be that people favored 50/50 splits. Anything too low was rejected; people wanted fairness. This was believed to be universal.
And then a researcher went to Peru to do the experiment with members of the indigenous Machiguenga population, and was baffled to find that the results were totally different.
Because, to the Machiguenga, refusing any amount of free money (even an unfair amount) was considered crazy.
So the researcher took his work on the road (to 14 other ‘small scale’ societies and tribes) , and to his shock found the results varied wildly depending on where the test was done.
In fact, the “universal” result? Was an outlier.
And that’s the problem. 96% percent of test subjects for psychological research come from 12% of the population. Stuff that we consider to be universal facts of human nature… even things like optical illusions, just… aren’t.
You can read an article about it here. But the crux of it is that psychology is plagued with confirmation bias, and people are shaped more by their environment than we realize.
“At every turn, women are taught that how someone reacts to them does more to establish their goodness and worth than anything they themselves might feel.”
“But next time we’re inclined to wonder why a woman didn’t immediately register and fix her own discomfort, we might wonder why we spent the preceding decades instructing her to override the signals we now blame her for not recognizing.”
It’s become sort of a running gag at the physio place with the rest of the staff that Magic Physio Man and myself are in a platonic S&M relationship. My pain tolerance is renowned with everybody in there, as is his ability to reduce full grown men about three times my size to a sobbing heap at his feet with a few well aimed pressure point taps. He’s got a well earned reputation for being a hard task master, and the staff and even the owner are endlessly entertained by the fact that when I get up off the table, he’s the one that has to go put ice on his hands.
This comparison is absolutely helped along by the fact that he is very good about using consent language when he is dealing with me. He knows my history of medical trauma, he knows people have hurt me by putting their hands on me before, therefore everything is narrated to me so I know what to expect, and feel comfortable and safe with tapping out at any time. Which in all honesty, I’ve rarely had to do with him. There’s been a few moments when I’ve very calmly had to tell him “that is approaching a Red Feeling for me” and he’ll ease up or switch up what he’s doing to alleviate the pain/switch to something else. But it’s always been like, a good pain. Never something that would do me injury or would register above the overall background chronic pain tolerance.
The only other time I’ve really tapped out was when he was working on removing muscle adhesions from my throat and the pressure so close to my windpipe was making me antsy and I needed to take a break. But I’ve never had to straight up safeword because something was too painful.
Until today when he tried to do a hip evaluation and I startled the fuck out of everyone by screaming “STOP RED HARD STOP HARD STOP!”
My right hip hurt (both are inverted and rotated) but it was more of a “tight muscle” feeling, and after a few minutes of doing the stretches and him applying some pressure to some tender spots, it eased up enough that he was nearly able to hike my knee up over my shoulder to sit flat on the table, something I haven’t been able to do since my teens/very early 20s when I still worked the holistic circuit and did yoga training multiple times a week. My left side? We didn’t even get through the basic resistance stretches before I was having a meltdown and begging him to stop because I was in so much pain I couldn’t stand it.
It was like no other pain I’ve experienced before, and y’all know my history with painful experiences. I honestly never thought something would ever top having two root canals done without anesthesia but this was something else entirely. This was “the sun is going nova in my hip joint and there will be no survivors” levels of white hot agony just flaring out from my pelvis to consume the world.
Basically he thinks the hip is out and grinding itself to pieces against the socket. I need an x-ray fairly quickish, which we’re working on, along with hopefully being able to fix it. Cause that was… yeah. Yeah. I am not about that. And neither is he.
Like his alarm was evident, and I’m so thankful he’s a calm and consummate professional because I could have seen someone else dropping my leg in a panic in that situation. Instead he talked me through it, letting me know it was okay and the pain would stop in a second, he just needed me to stay calm and let him move slowly because he didn’t want to jar the joint any further. As soon as my leg was flat on the table he was lighting quick down at my eye level going “what do you need, how do I help?” and doing everything he could to make sure I was okay. At which point he called a halt to all physio moves and went with pure pain relief massage for the rest of the session.
I felt like a tit afterwards with my head in the little hole thingy just staring at the floor, and apologized for being a big baby and not being able to finish the exercise, and he straight up stopped what he was doing, knelt down beside me again, tapped me on the back of the head so I’d look up and then very seriously with a lot of gentle concern said, “never apologize for being in pain and protecting yourself. Your comfort is a part of your recovery.” and honestly it’s been six hours and I’m still thinking about that.
Your headcanon is your headcanon. The characters in your mind are what they are, and nobody is trying to take them away from you. Think of the Good Omens TV series as a stage play: for six full hours, actors are going to be portraying the roles of Crowley and Aziraphale, Shadwell and Madame Tracy, Newt and Anathema, Adam, Pepper, Wensleydale and Brian and the rest. Will they look like the people in your head? The ones you’ve been drawing and writing about and imagining for (in some cases) almost 30 years?
Probably not. Which is fine.
The people in your head and your drawings are still there, and still real and still true. I’ve seen drawings of hundreds of different Aziraphales over the years, all with different faces and body-shapes, different hair and skin, and would never have thought to tell anyone who drew or loved them that that wasn’t what Aziraphale looked like. (And a couple of years after we wrote it, I was amused to realise that the Aziraphale in my head looked nothing like the Aziraphale in Terry’s head.) I’ve loved every instance of Good Omens Cosplay I’ve seen, and in no case did I ever think anyone was doing it wrong: they were all Aziraphales and Crowleys, and it was always a delight.
Good Omens has been unillustrated for 27 years, which means that each of you gets to make up your own look for the characters, your own backstories, your own ideas about how they will behave.
The TV version is being made with love and with faithfulness to the story. It’s got material and characters in it that Terry and I had discussed over the years, (some of it from what we would have done it there had been a sequel). Writing it has taken up the greater part of my last three years. You might like it – I really hope you will – but you don’t have to. You can start watching it, decide that you prefer the thing in your head, and stop watching it. (I never saw the last Lord of the Rings movie, because I liked the thing in my head too much.)
Remember we are making this with love.
And that your own personal headCrowleys and headAziraphales and headFourHorsemen and headThem and headHastur and headLigur and headSisterMary and all the rest are yours, and safe, and nobody is ever going to take them away from you.
Veterans Ask Native Elders For Forgiveness At Standing Rock.
I never thought I would see this day when a white man apologizes for the tyranny and oppression of Native American population. This is so powerful. This is the nation that I want – responsible, compassionate and that learns from its mistakes.
I hope that all lesbians who once thought they were bi know that they aren’t contributing to the “bi is just a stepping stone to gay” stereotype. That stereotype was made up by straight people who refused to try to understand bisexuality. I also hope that all bi women who once thought they were lesbians know that they aren’t contributing to the “all lesbians must secretly like men” stereotype. Again, this was made up by straight people who refuse to try to understand lesbians. It’s not anyone’s responsibility in their journey of self discovery to dismantle every harmful stereotype along the way; sometimes you’re just figuring yourself out and get mixed up along the way and that’s okay. We have each other to support each other as wlw regardless of whether or not we got confused down the line at some point.
I give so much of myself to the world for free everyday, and somehow I still always encounter people who tell me I should give more. I love myself and my gifts enough to know when to pull back. Self love and boundaries are so important for healers and givers. You can say no.
This is very true. I know how hard it is to pull back, but sometimes as a healer you have to remember to take time to heal yourself!
Queer Fiction Writer 