#Vote! it's not too late

[remembertheplunge]

Rage on the page

11/03/2024 Sunday 12:50am

We are in that weird 2 hour time in which it’s really 11:50pm on 11/2.2024, but until 2am it’s masquerading as 12:50am.

Day light savings time begins at 2am. 

We fall back an hour.

Kind of matches the weird political state we are in in the United States. When the calendar strikes November 6, 2024,  the Christian Right wants it to read 1950-1954, the McCarthy era on steroids. They want Trump to be President' so he can be  dictator and  institute martial law as the law of the land.

————————————

Writing helps. The journal was built to survive this kind of  a potential atrocity.

This proved true after I learned of my mother’s death October 28, 2012. 

 On November 3, 2012, the day after I learned that I had been disinherited by my mother, a devastating blow, I wrote “I had my journal in place this week to catch the debris and the insights and the fury and the rage resulting from the disinheritance and the events leading up to it.

What was good for the fury and rage resulting from being disinherited will be good for the fury and rage potentially resulting from the 2024 election and it’s aftermath.

Write! Document! Rage on the page! 

End of entry

Note:

McCarthyism refers to hearings officiated by Senator Joe McCarthy held between 1950 and 1954 in which he and his committee attempted to expose and confront communists and gays employed by the government. It was a witch hunt.

Martial law refers to civil law being replaced by military rule and control.

[yangjeongin]

HYUNJIN | 『GIANT』 Music Video

[twisting-in-wonderland]

Bye bye Sebek, :]

(he didn’t stand a chance, poor guy :[  )

[rampantram]

Drawing results from the most recent poll!

These were honestly a lot of fun and I'm proud of how they came out - I hope you all enjoy them~ 🥰

[meganwhalenturner]

California, Colorado, Connecticut

DC, Hawaii, Idaho

Illinois, Iowa, Maine

Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota

Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire

New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota

Utah, Vermont, Virginia

Washington, Wisconsin, Wyoming

[surreal-duck]

tin soldier and a disastrous doll

[pastelaspirations]

Controversial opinion; Error should have lost because the bit of him coming 2nd place for three freaking years in a row would have been comedy gold.

O h w e e e l l, I love you, Error. Congrats on finally winning, ya handsome lad. I drew a crap post comic where Ink expresses the same sentiment that I do lmao

Transcript just in case my handwriting is awful to read

Error: FINALLY, people see my ✧˖°.greatness.°˖✧ Ink: Yay! I'm so happy for you! <3 Ink: Although... I was kind of hoping you'd lose- Error: WHAT?! Ink: Just- It would have been really funny if you came 2nd place 3 years in a row, wouldn't it? Error: .... Error: You're dead to me Ink: I'm sorry! I just thought it'd be funny-

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

In 1972, in the Democratic primary, we had our first Black woman presidential candidate, “unbought and unbossed” Shirley Chisolm, who knew that she was only running a symbolic campaign, a protest campaign, that America was not going to elect a non-white person or a non-male person, let alone someone with the temerity to be both at the same time—of course she didn’t get the nomination. When she ran, Barack Obama was going on eleven. Kamala Harris turned eight later that year. I doubt anyone was telling them they could grow up to be president.

I was so moved by how Kamala Devi Harris was received when she became our presidential candidate in July of 2024, 52 years after Shirley Chisolm, how much more enthusiasm and respect and how much less racism and sexism than I anticipated from Democrats and progressives. It made me feel like I lived in a better country, a country that had somehow invisibly, incrementally, moved forward, in those ways too slow and subtle to measure until a milestone like this is reached. Somehow something as subtle as values, consciousness, norms had changed through the work so many people were doing in so many ways, the feminists and antiracists, the slow process of decentralizing power just a bit from the long grim era when only white men ran and won and governed.

Things are changing. Last week, President Biden went to the Gila Reservation in Arizona to apologize for the Indian boarding schools and other genocidal acts toward Native Americans. He said in a tweet:

Today, I’m in Arizona to issue a long overdue presidential apology for this era—and speak to how my Administration has worked to invest in Indian Country and our relationships with Tribal Nations, advance Tribal sovereignty and self-determination, respect Native cultures, and protect Indigenous sacred sites. We must remember our full history, even when it’s painful. That’s what great nations do. And we are a great nation.

A few decades ago, Native people were largely ignored by the non-native mainstream, and what the US government had done was justified when it was not just ignored. We live in the impossible world, the world that no one quite imagined, in which things happen—marriage equality, the possibilities brought by solar energy, a Black woman presidential candidate—that were inconceivable not long ago.

I think of all the land-back happening around the West, of the four dams coming down on the Klamath River under the stewardship of the several Native nations there, of the salmon already swimming more than a hundred miles up that river to Oregon after more than a century of being shut out, of this presidential apology that acknowledges 532 years of colonialism. Biden’s tweet strategically rebukes Trump and MAGA and all the fragile white nationalists by insisting that this country is already great, and that greatness means remembering and taking responsibility for the wrongs of the past, including this genocidal racism.

That this country is polarized is often deplored, but the backlash against the progress on human rights, equality, inclusion, environmental protection, and acknowledging the US’s often-brutal history, is no reason to give up or cave in on that progress, though it’s a reason to reach out to try to convey that we all benefit from it.

What’s also been moving to me since this election really picked up momentum a few months ago is to see how much people care about something beyond narrow and immediate self-interest, to see that we care about public life, about the fate of the nation, about the rule of law, about the survival of the most vulnerable. To see that we are idealists, we are dreamers, we are citizens in that sense not of nationality but of membership in the greater community. Something striking this time around is to see men speak up for reproductive rights to a degree and in a way they mostly have not before.

We love so much more than the narrow version of who we are acknowledges: we love justice, love truth, love freedom, love equality, love the confidence that comes with secure human rights.

So many powerful forces conspire to try to convince us that we are basically selfish animals, that all we want is the the goods of private life, some safety, some sex and personal love and family, some nifty possessions. That’s the story of human nature we get told the most. But in fact most human beings are altruists and idealists, which is to say we want a lot more, we care about a lot more, we need a lot more to feel right with the world. We want justice and peace, want to live in a society that supports these things, want a relationship with nature, and we want that nature to be protected and thriving.

We want a world that reflects our values, we feel injured by things that may not affect us directly, whether it’s a wildfire or a loss of rights. Of course they’re not all the same values, and yeah some people believe they need to persecute immigrants or trans youth to have their happy world, some people still think nature is so vast and immutable we can keep trashing it without consequences. But mainly what I’m trying to say is that most people care about a lot beyond the usual definition of self-interest. We’re bigger than that.

You can see that by how much people care about the outcome of this election, whether they’re sitting home refreshing polls as if the polls tell us what will happen or doing the work that decides what will happen. Someone said to me a week or so ago that people over 70 shouldn’t be allowed to vote because they had no self-interest in the future. I rebuked him, because across the political spectrum most of us vote our broad values, not our narrow self-interest, unless our values are that we’re just our self-interest (and that’s a core belief of the right).

Most of us are idealists. There’s been a lot of exclamation in recent years about right-wing working-class voters who vote against their self-interest, often portrayed as baffling, as a sign of ignorance or confusion. What’s really going on that they’re more committed to their values than their practical self-interest. So are we (though you could also argue that the recognition that we are inextricably connected to each other and to nature means that self-interest and the well-being of the whole are not separate).

I used the word care, but let me clarify: what we care about is what we love. And we love so much more than the narrow version of who we are acknowledges: we love justice, love truth, love freedom, love equality, love the confidence that comes with secure human rights; we love places, love rivers and valleys and forests, love seasons and the pattern and order they imply, love wildlife from hummingbirds to great blue herons, butterflies to bears. This always was a love story.

Part of what gives our lives meaning is the confidence or at least hope that these good things will persevere beyond us.

What I learned from studying how most human beings respond to disasters (for my book A Paradise Built in Hell) is that they’re brave, generous, creative, acting in solidarity with those around them, and that those experiences of immediacy, of community, of care, of connection and meaningful work, are often so profound that people speak up with joy even amidst the devastation and loss. Because we want meaning and meaningful work so much, we want connection so much, we want hope, we want to believe in ourselves and the people around us and humanity in general.

I’m hearing so many stories like that from the survivors of the climate-intensified hurricanes that trashed western North Carolina, coastal Florida, and other parts of the Southeastern USA. From the victims of a climate-intensified catastrophe that has wrecked whole towns and torn out roads, flattened forests, washed away homes and put parts of Asheville underwater. I don’t want any more disasters like that, and I’m a climate activist to try to keep nature from getting more violent and destructive, which it will if we keep being violent and destructive toward the climate. But I do want us to know who we are, and how hungry we are for meaning, purpose, and connection, and sometimes disaster lets us see that.

When it comes to the climate we want faith in the future, we want the symphony of life to continue with the harmonies, the beauties, the integration of the parts into one harmonious whole to continue. Part of what gives our lives meaning is the confidence or at least hope that these good things will persevere beyond us, that there will be bison grazing the prairies in the year 2124, that there will be whales migrating in the oceans, that wildflowers will bloom in spring and pollinators will come for the nectar and leave with the pollen, that the people we love who are one or six or seventeen or their grandchildren will have a chance to enjoy some of the things we have, that there will be joy and beauty and possibility in the year 2074 and after.

Polls offer the false promise of knowing what is going to happen, but what is going to happen in this election is what campaigners, activists, and the electorate make happen. It is not yet decided. We are deciding it with what we do, as voters, as organizers, as voices for truth, justice, inclusion, the reality of the climate crisis and the importance of acting on it. In June, I got to meet one of my heroes, Congressman Jamie Raskin when he gave a keynote for the Third Act chapters in DC, Virginia and Maryland. (Third Act is a climate group founded by Bill McKibben for US people over 60; I’m on its board.) He gave me his memoir of prosecuting the impeachment of Trump after January 6, right after his beloved son Tommy had died by suicide, and there’s a dazzling passage in it that reminds us of the power of participation.

He writes that, during his first campaign, there was an article in a local newspaper quoting a pundit who described my chances of victory as “impossible”; and nine months later, when we got 67 percent of the vote, there was another article, in the Washington Post, quoting a pundit who said my victory was “inevitable.” So we went from impossible to inevitable in nine months because the pundits are never wrong, but as I told Tommy, we showed that nothing in politics is impossible, and nothing in politics is inevitable. It is all just possible, through the democratic arts of education, organizing, and mobilizing for change.

We’re here to make the victory of democracy and the defeat of authoritarianism not just possible but actual. We’re here to make history. We’re here to get out the vote. For the climate, for the children, for the continuance of this experiment in democracy, imperfect as it has been.

_____________________________

This is a version of a talk given to Third Act Nevada as part of a rally for people getting out the vote in that swing state. 

Rebecca Solnit

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of twenty-five books on feminism, environmental and urban history, popular power, social change and insurrection, wandering and walking, hope and catastrophe. She co-edited the 2023 anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility. Her other books include Orwell’s Roses; Recollections of My Nonexistence; Hope in the Dark; Men Explain Things to Me; A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; and A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she writes regularly for the Guardian, serves on the board of the climate group Oil Change International, and in 2022 launched the climate project Not Too Late (nottoolateclimate.com).

[dabidagoose]

This is my time to post something political (USA-specific). I've seen so many people arguing over whether or not people should compromise and vote for Biden in the presidential election, but no one calling to vote in the primaries. There are candidates who are calling for a ceasefire. There are people with better policies. Depending on your state, you may not need to be registered as part of the Democratic party to vote in their primaries. If you can do so, get a primary ballot and vote.

[spiritsglade]

what really fucks me up about a death in the family is that, beyond the fact that jason's death was determined by vote, the fact people could vote as many times as they liked, the closeness of the margin, etc.

it's that the vote wasn't for 'does batman get there in time to save jason' it was for 'when bruce digs through that blown up warehouse, does he find a corpse or a living body.' the vote is for 'does jason get to have enough plot armor to survive getting beaten with a crowbar and then blown up'

either way, batman is too late. he was always going to be too late.

[muzzlemouths]

looking at the current DFtR vote rn like

[annamatix]

not to get too political but i genuinely feel nauseous and terrified right now

[thedreadvampy]

my favourite thing about American """democracy""" is you guys still literally spend two years going on about how it would be EVIL and UNACCEPTABLE to vote for anyone except the main party, and it becomes more and more fucking annoying, and then the minute the election is over you'll start again within days. ooh don't forget midterms are coming up so you can't criticise the government 😨 wait midterms are over so now it's basically the next election so you can't criticise the government 😨 if you make your vote conditional on anything, anything at all, at any time, you're allowing fascism 😨 oh our guys won the election but hey you can't criticise them it'll be midterms soon 😨😨😨

it's amazing how your fucking country is stuck in permanent election season and yet everyone is so frightened of using their vote to enact pressure in case it loses the Blue Team any election ever. and you're so wrapped up in this shit even though it literally does not matter how you vote because you don't live in a direct democracy. "ooh not holding your nose and voting for the blue cunt let Trump in" no the fuck it didn't because Trump lost the popular vote and won the election anyway because y'all have a system of Guys Who Can Override Popular Elections.

[grellssquishyhusband]

Office crush

[iamfitzwilliamdarcy]

i'm not giving a nuance option because this MUST be from snyderverse lex and i can see that not happening- you can still tell me though what i missed!!

i wanted to give more specific quotes but the poll blocks don't let you go for long (i also reduced a lot of specifics like daddy's fists and abominations, wagging his finger in front of clark's glowing eyes)

[pafsplayground]

God I hate being American I feel like I'm gonna throw up