berrystrawbs

[berrystrawbs]

[berrystrawbs]

does anyone wanna hold hands until we feel a little braver

[berrystrawbs]

Please stay safe my loves. This message is especially for those who feel so alone and hurt and who are doing badly right now: You deserve to live even when the environment is stifling, toxic, and hates you. You deserve to live on for yourself, to make things better for yourself even when the world is spitting on you and laughing at you. It’s okay to cry and hurt and crumble, but pick yourself back up after, okay? I’m so sorry. It’s not fair. It’s not right. But you have to be strong. Things can get better. We will make it better. You can do this.

[berrystrawbs]

*gripping your shoulders and shaking you* you gotta promise me one thing, if nothing else. you have to promise me to live, do you hear me. and if it's for nothing else but spite, LIVE. donald trump wants you to feel defeated and alone. let's show him and all the americans who voted for him that we will not stay quiet, we will not be devided and we will LIVE. we will survive that 78-year old felon, we will OUTLIVE him. so please reach out to friends and family, reach out to each other and STAND TOGETHER.

PLEASE, LIVE!

[berrystrawbs]

Hey. HEY. Pause the election doomscrolling for a moment and look at me. We're gonna be okay. I'm still gonna be right here on tumblr tomorrow, reblogging my silly little posts, and you'll see them and you'll smile. Nothing is decided yet, these things take time and there is still hope, and however things turn out this is not the end, okay? An idealogy relying on hate wants you to be disheartened and give up, and I know it's hard but we won't give them that satisfaction. None of us individually can hold that line of resilience; that's a community task, and when all else fails that's what we have. Queer people have been in this world as long as people in general have, and we're not. fucking. going anywhere.

[berrystrawbs]

This is going to fucking suck but I will not do my enemies’ work for them. I will not just roll over and fucking die.

[berrystrawbs]

we owe too much to each other to give up.

[berrystrawbs]

oddly enough, i feel relieved. i know now where we stand with this country. i know now that this is a nation that, despite her protestations, does not want to be saved. at this point, i am not sure she can be anyway. but what i do know is that there are people here who still need protecting. there are disabled people here, trans people here, pregnant people here, brown and black people here, queer people here, and as long as my feet rest on american soil, those people are my family and they are worth protecting. so, like, maybe this nation doesn't want to be saved. that's fine. trump and his friends can have whichever parts they lay claim to. but they can't have us. so. if you have breath in your lungs, you're my people, you're my family and i am going to fight for you for as long and as hard as i can. that's all i've got at the moment. we'll figure out the rest together, okay?

[berrystrawbs]

[berrystrawbs]

any trans person reading this I love you

any woman reading this I love you

any poc minority reading this I love you

any queer person reading this I love you

[berrystrawbs]

[berrystrawbs]

ok. well we have each other

[berrystrawbs]

Might be in part due to the stress but this news legit just made me cry.

[berrystrawbs]

If you are trans I need you to stay alive.

Stay alive for every other trans person fighting, stay alive for every trans person who is no longer here, and most importantly stay alive for yourself.

They don’t get to erase us! They don’t get to take away our rights, and treat us as less than human. Don’t let them erase us, and don’t let them make you a statistic. Don’t let them win.

Stay alive

If you won’t do it for yourself, then do it for others. Do it out of spite.

[berrystrawbs]

[berrystrawbs]

I've been thinking about the "burn it all down" rhetoric used by a lot of the individuals on this website. Like, the people that are waiting for the violent, glorius revolution to overthrow the United States so they can finally rebuild it as a better, functioning society.

The idea being that if everything keeps getting worse and worse, eventually somethings gotta give. It's gotta break, and then the rebuilding will begin.

This seems to be closely related to the desire to withhold votes for Harris/Walz, because all they will do is maintain the status quo. And while Trump is arguably worse, he will take them toward the desired "breaking point."

But something that I learned during the height of the Covid pandemic is that this is not true. Or at least, not in the way we think it will be true.

Covid, to me, felt very much like a kind of apocalypse. It was definitely the kind of thing that would have been an apocalypse, if real life was the like the movies.

Society collapses, mass panic as all our systems fail and the world returns to disorder and chaos and life starts to become purely about survival. Streets are empty, you're scavenging for food, the world of polite society has ended for good.

Obviously that didn't happen. It was like, this horrible disease tore the world apart, the apocalypse happened... but nothing really changed. I mean, it did. The whole world changed, and it will never be exactly the same as it was before.

But everyone just kept going, too. There was a stop for some people (white collar workers whose jobs could be done remotely, mainly) but not for everyone else.

And everyone kept having to pay bills and taxes and do their laundry and walk the dog and buy groceries and whatever. We were just doing that all as the world felt like it was ending around us.

Like that's what movies don't tell you about the end of the world. It doesn't end. Not in a big way, a huge explosive way. It's just a whole bunch of little endings where the world just gets shittier and harder to bear in all these ways. Your job becomes harder, your life is literally threatened every time you leave the house.

Certain services just shut down and don't come back, new mandates that make everything harder and shittier are put into place, people die in masses but you're still expected to get on the bus to work every day at the same time.

But all those little endings and the all the ways the world got worse and worse and worse, they never add up to the one big explosive apocalypse that the movies promised.

Where life stops being about paying taxes and scheduling dental appointments and paying bills and starts being about learning to shoot a gun so you can kill your dinner and then take shelter in an abandoned Cheesecake Factory before the zombies show up.

In the real world, the zombies are eating your friends and family and your boss still expects you to clock in at 9 am like usual. And you do it because what other choice do you have? The zombies didn't get you today and you still gotta pay all those bills.

And I think that's just what the world is. I think that's just life, to an extent. The world as we knew it ended forever with Covid, but it also kept on going (not to be like "we were the zombies all along" but the comparison is tempting).

It seems logical that something can only bend so much before it breaks. That the world can only get so much worse before it blows up completely. Capitalism, at least. It's a self cannibalizing system, it's not sustainable forever.

But I don't think it will die the way you'd think it would. With the big satisfying explosion, the absolute end where it all burns down and paves the way to rebuild.

The big revolution, the huge overhaul of it all.

What's more likely is it will just get worse and worse and worse in a bunch of smaller ways, until we redefine our tolerance for suffering to accommodate it.

Because that's what we do. We think "this is rock bottom, it can't get worse." But it does, because it can, so we get our jack hammer and go lower because the bus is waiting and we've got bills to pay.

I think we could do that for a long time. Not forever maybe, but decades more? Almost definitely? Another century? Who knows. I won't.

"Burn it all down" may never come. Just smaller deaths, little apocalypses happening all around us every day.

I see the appeal of burning it all down. It almost feels like it would be a relief, at times.

It's much, much more tiring to try and find all the little ways we can build it back up right now. While it's still standing, maybe a little worse than it was yesterday, but functional. To find the cracks and seal them up, plaster over the holes and find a way to repair the little deaths.

Because it gets worse in little ways all the time, but it can get better, too. And it does. In small ways, every day. Good policies are passed, bad ones are repealed. People make connections and campaign for positive change and there's no big, splashy "we saved the day and ended all evil for good!" resolution like the movies, but the little wins do exist.

The thing about real life is that there is no big apocalypse. Not for everyone. And there is no happily ever after.

But there is small happiness, small victory. Small change, small fights that can be won. And just like the little deaths add up to a world that always seems to be getting worse, the little victories add up too.

The trick, i think, is to not get so caught up in the way it's worse that we stop seeing the ways it's better. That we get so entranced by the romance of burning it all down that we forget all the smaller ways we can and should be fighting to build it back up.

Because at the end of the day, you're still gonna have to go to work tomorrow. Might as well do what you can to make it better in some small way, instead of waiting for it to all get worse.

[berrystrawbs]

btw functionally for the US election today you are not picking your "hero" or whatever you are picking your opponent for the next four years because all presidents are bastards and they oppose the working class. you are simply selecting the one you can get the most ground on. this really helped reframe some stuff for me, hope this helps