#btw this has all escalated within the past month and a half. looking where we came from with normal mc to...THIS is so wild

[quaranmine]

im not into hermitcraft, not even the slightest bit, but i logged off of tumblr for 3 days to return to the hermitcraft world being lifted towards the moon??? That grows big?? ?And theres a cult??? Around the moon???? Big Moon???? Something about a company too??? I think they hate the glare guy. he looks like he has zero thoughts constantly.. .But why sleep deprived skins??? Do yall need therapy holy shit-

(btw ur not obligated to explain, im just so lost and i think its very funny not knowing any of the context)

oh anon 😭 this is so funny here I'll try to give a short breakdown. if you want to continue to not know context you can skip it. honestly you may end up more confused anyway though!! yes the hermitcraft server is going through it and it seems we're hurtling towards the apocalypse at a rapid pace. it may possibly happen next week. multiple people are, like, fleeing the planet since it seems doomed. so:

1. Moon is big because it is moving closer to earth. It seems like it will crash into the server.

1a. Tango is trying to set off an explosion on the moon to put it back in its original orbit. mumbo wanted to blow up the moon but failed.

1b. keralis is inexplicably in space and has been for months despite being seen by the server more recently than that, and i for one am really interested in knowing if this is like, a hallucination? or a clone? or an alien? is keralis just Like That? bdubs can also apparently travel to space regularly. this is not explained

2. The moon being so close is affecting gravity. Everyone seems to have permanent flow falling and jump boost. The blocks that were being picked up and dropped back down are now just flying off into space and not returning so the ground is littered with holes (although not really from an out-of-story perspective). there's also a lot of earthquakes. basically, it looks and feels like the world is literally disintegrating around them

3. the Mooners is a...group (cult) created by Mumbo worshipping "The Great Lunar Neighbor." Mumbo was convinced that they had angered the moon by sleeping the night away, and that if they all stayed awake they would please the moon.

4. hence, the sleep deprived skins of everyone who joined the mooners who didn't sleep for days. also, they made the phantoms laugh and recorded hallucinations for each other. they are dedicated to the bit. impulse built a sanctuary for the phantoms since they're "friends." pearl is having a sleepover <3

4a. the one who wants bdubs (glare guy) dead is scar. he only joined the mooners so he could specifically murder bdubs. bdubs is known for always sleeping ASAP (the exact thing the mooners is against) but i think scar would have murdered him no matter what because he's just Like That

4b. cub thinks one of the paintings in the game (a moon with a flaming skull) is a prophecy, apparently. also scar is being a perfect little scamming capitalist and fleecing everyone in exchange for getting on a rocket to escape the planet

5. there's also a mind controlling moon rock that ren and doc have been killing hermits and sacrificing their heads to it. also, the hermitcraft server may be a simulation according to ren and doc's lore. frankly I don't think I could explain hermatrix lore to you but it's an arg basically that is being solved by the community as episodes release and seems to influence this lore

6. the moon being closer also seems to be interfering with evil xisuma's magical powers, causing xisuma to start to break free from mind control he's been under all season? at least based on what I hear on tumblr, im not caught up on X right now. basically the whole evil empire is yet another plot thread woven in that connects in places! also there was an animation on one of X's videos a few months ago with some hels (evil) hermits in it and I'm still wondering about that too

7. i don't think i even have to answer this they ALL need therapy. we all need it too

[clitorista]

So I met this really strong witch Sarah when I was a teenager, through one of the most awful, horrible, abusive people I’ve ever known. He met her while he was away at college, and he was my best friend at the time and had yet to show his full crazy. I was 16 and he was 19, and she was 19 and I was absolutely enamored of her. She was wonderful, she didn’t judge, she seemed very Light and Kind, and I stayed as in contact with her as I could over the years.  We only checked in off and on throughout the years after she fell out of touch with Rowan, and he had been growing more and more controlling and abusive over the years towards me, so I wasn’t /allowed/ to talk to people he didn’t like or it escalated his behavior. In 2013 when I was 26 I finally broke free of him because he went to prison for assaulting a toddler. [Long story there, might be kinda tangentially related to my long streak of negative luck, actually. He was a powerful witch, too] When Harmony and I moved out together into our own apartment in 2015, things were hard. They were my PCA, and that was the only income we had besides my SSI, because they were in grad school and finishing it up. They were commuting an hour one way to school each day, spending $400 a month on a commuter rail pass, and our rent was half of our income, our car payment was another $300 a month, and then utilities, and groceries, and the money they had to spend on things FOR school... It was a fucking mess. About two months after we moved into that apartment, Sarah contacted me. She wanted to come by and see how I was doing, and show me some new makeup stuff she had. She was a Mary Kay consultant, and I had [out of kindness, not because I supported Mary Kay, or liked makeup] given a part for her a few years before. She wanted to see about following up with that, and honestly that party she had held for me the few years before had kickstarted my obsession with makeup. I’d already outpacecd the Mary Kay quality stuff, but I wanted to be kind to a friend I’d had so long, and so I let her come and bring all of her goods. We had a little extra money because it was in between both of our birthdays, so we bought some stuff from her and figured that would be it. But then she asked me to join her team. I told her I wasn’t interested, because I wasn’t able to travel to do parties, being a wheelchair user would make it impossible for me to access most people’s houses. She insisted, and talked me into it, telling me I could hold parties at my house, and all of my ordering could be done through my company website. I wouldn’t have to hold any product stock, and I’d be able to /make extra money/ that we so desperately needed. I tried for about a month, and wasn’t bringing in any orders, so she devised a plan. I would be her personal assistant and help her run /her/ Mary Kay business, and she would make orders in my name to keep me active, and then would pay me $300 a month under the table for us to be able to afford groceries because we /weren’t/ at the time, and I kept getting denied SNAP benefits.  This seemed like a sure fire thing, so I agreed to try it out. Within the month, she had started shirking her duties of on boarding people, and I was running the facebook launches, and teaching people all of the stuff they needed to know to run their businesses. She kept going to Mary Kay seminars, and I had to transcribe her notes, both from her private notebooks, and from her audio notes. It was fine, because I type quickly and accurately and I’m actually really quite good at that. The problem with everything was, she kept getting more and more erratic. She’s a very powerful Christian Witch who works with the Archangels, and that was fine to us while we were on her good side... She bought us witchy gifts, she helped Harmony hone their craft and bring me back to my practice that I’d let lapse.  She slowly stopped going out to do in person launch parties. She would just completely abandon the girls whose parties were supposed to happen the day of them, and leave me to tell them how to run them and to field any texts that came from them, or any vox messages. Her marriage was falling apart, she couldn’t keep a job.... Which was unlike her, and unusual for her. She grew up in a very wealthy family, went to school and got a ton of tech certs, and had always had a 6 figure job. She stopped going to work. She lost at least two jobs in the three months everything spanned over.  In those three months, she paid me $100, once. I’ve obviously got serious mental illnesses, and am physically disabled and just couldn’t keep up with running a business, let alone one that was not benefiting me at all. I told her that I couldn’t do it anymore, because it wasn’t working for me and it was driving me into the ground, and she did not take it well. She got incredibly angry, and said some really derogatory things about how poor Harmony and I are, and she got some of her stuff from our house but never came back for others. We thought we had gotten rid of all of it in the immediate aftermath.  FFW a little adn Harmony has graduated grad school with a degree in Clinical Psychology. They get hired at a very well acclaimed youth counseling program, and they start working right away. We move into a fancy new apartment that’s huge, and on the top floor of an 8 story building. It’s late June when we move in, and the central air is apparently not working. They tell us to keep our windows open, and fans going because it’s an unbelievably hot outside, even for that time of year. We do so, not knowing our windowscreens are breakaway and our boy cat, who is only a year old at this time, falls out of the window. He broke his pelvis/hip and ended up in kitty ICU for a week, and having a pin put in his hip.  He survived, and is just fine now.  Harmony and I have always had chronic health issues we’ve tried to be taken seriously about by doctors, and always had them brushed off. In 2016 they start worsening, rapidly. Well, mine didn’t get so bad so quickly, but Harmony’s fucking bottomed out all at once. In 2016/2017 I was 29-30, and Harmony was 24-25 so it was weird /how/ bad it got, how quickly. They were working their high stress job, that was focused very minutely on productivity, and they kept asking for accommodations for their disabilities and being hand waved off. They had been FINE and then all of a sudden were very NOT FINE. They scheduled meeting after meeting with their supervisors and they were told to just find ways to manage, and they did their best to keep up with their unrealistic productivity expectations. People were quitting the company left and right because they were working their people into the ground, but we couldn’t afford for Harmony to quit because I can’t work, and our bills are too much. In 2018 they were finally fired for their disabilities, which their company completely openly admitted.  Their last year working there, after Trump changed the tax laws, their job didn’t withhold enough, and they ended up owing $3000 dollars to the government that year. They applied for unemployment, and were told they were entitiled to it. The unemployment agency did /not/ walk them through the paper work the right way, and when they filled it out there was no option given for them to list their part time job as my PCA. They collected unemployment for about six months, and at the end of the six months started looking for another job. Nowhere was hiring, and they took the only job that accepted them, a fee-for-service clinician job. It promised that they were going to have a full caseload of 25 clients within 6 months, and that then they would be salaried. That never happened. They’re still working with a partial caseload, and making barely any money.  In the past 4 years, a /ton/ of other fucked up shit has happened to us besides both of our health. [Mine ended up rapidly deteriorating in the past year and a half, btw.. worse than it was before. Even worse in the past six months.]. Our brakes went twice on our car that we’ve only owned for four years as of this month. We hit a pothole so hard and deep that it broke our wheel, and completely fucked up our alignment. Our battery randomly died, more than once, and then finally completely shit the bed January 2019 on the coldest day of the year. Our radiator started leaking antifreeze due to loose hoses.  Harmony has had a bunch of weird, wild, fucked up shit happen to their mouth. They’ve broken both of the crowns they got in 2016, they broke a tooth and had to have it extracted. Dental phobia is like their biggest phobia, and they literally can’t even talk about dental procedures.  We just kept running into emergency after emergency that cost $500+, with no way to pay for them ourselves. We also ran up our credit cards to completely maxed out, and defaulted on them because we had no other option and needed to use them for groceries and gas and living essentials. This job they’re still currently at [ but leaving at the end of apri ] has never paid more than $500 takehome for two weeks of work. They were getting paid $30 an hour before the past few months when a raise of $2.50 happened. The thing is, as a fee-for-service clinician, they only get paid if they HAVE sessions. They get paid nothing for paperwork, they get paid $17 an hour for collateral work, and for their supervision. We’ve had to fundraise a ton of different times through mutual aid groups, and take money from my parents to make ends meet.  There was just a lot of little stuff that went wrong, as well, and a huuuuuge falling out between Harmony and their parents over our Christmas vacation and they haven’t spoken since because of some really passive aggressive ass letters their parents wrote them.  We’ve both had a lot of negative interactions with doctors, a lot of health problems, doctors telling us we’re just fat and that’s where all of our problems are stemming from... Obviously that’s bullshit, and we’ve both tested for there being ACTUAL THINGS WRONG but still aren’t getting taken seriously. It got so bad, and we were struggling so hard no matter what we did, we came to the conclusion we had /definitely/ been hexed/cursed. I tried mirror charms, to reflect it back, I tried shielding stuff. I tried some banishing stuff. None of it worked. For the past year Sarah has been sending me emails that have no info in their body, and their subject line is always “Is this still you, Nikki?” And I accidentally opened the first one without realizing it was “empty”, and haven’t opened any since, and have them directly deflected to my spam folder now.  On Valentines I was presented with the PERFECT opportunity for some NAME MAGICK. San Antonio Zoo was offering this fundraising effort “Name a cockroach and we’ll feed it to our animals for $5. You can name a mouse for more, and we’ll feed it to our snakes.”  I named a fucking cockroach after Sarah, with her last name attached, and things MAGICKALLY started getting better. Just before Valentines is when we found out they weren’t renewing our lease, after Valentines we started looking for somewhere new to live and had a hard time finding somewhere that met our requirements, but as soon as we did and applied with my mum cosigning [because our credit scores suck from tanking them being jobless], we got accepted. Harmony found a new job too, after having been applying to them for months. It’s not a GREAT job, it’s a call center job at Spectrum cable, but it will be stable pay, with the same hours every week, and the same pay every paycheck. Which is what we need the most so we can keep our budget on board.  Some random problems have obviously come up with these situations, being that their current day job is basically non-existent because even their boss isn’t answering their calls for their sessions/supervision. They got one session in in their first week of work from home, and their boss didn’t answer their supervision call. We haven’t received our lease to sign yet, despite the fact we’re moving on the 4th, and found out today it’s because they didn’t have some paperwork from my Mum that they didn’t tell us they needed until today, after I asked them about why we hadn’t gotten it yet... We’ve fixed that, and they’ll have them all on Tuesday.  But there was a literal air of Negative Anxiety for the past 4 years, we sniped at each other a lot and had to learn a lot of really good communications skills. Now it feels a lot lighter, and more positive, and we’re arguing less even though we’ve been in the house together for 22 days straight. We’re getting along really well, and still being really supportive of one another with all of our anxieties, and traumas. We’ve been so good together, and putting all of the work of the past four years into this month, and it’s working so well. And things are finally looking up.  My Tarot and runes keep telling me I’ve got financial stability, material gain, wealth, romantic love, and life stability, home and hearth, and family. It’s fucking w i l d and I don’t know what to make of any of it. It’s also pointing towards the love coming from someone already close to me, which I definitely realized I’m in love with one of our best friends recently, so there’s that.

[nofomoartworld]

Art F City: We Went to Protests: Scenes of Inauguration Resistance in Three Cities

WASHINGTON/Whitney Kimball

MEXICO CITY, NEW YORK, WASHINGTON—Over inauguration weekend, three members of the AFC fam found themselves in different cities, united by pissed-off-edness at Trump and the rise of the Right-wing. On inauguration day, Whitney Kimball navigated the surreal belly of the beast: Washington, DC. Meanwhile in Mexico, D.F. Michael Anthony Farley joined in a #J20 solidarity strike, protest, and march from the U.S. Embassy. The next day, Corinna Kirsch was among the hundreds of thousands participating in the New York City chapter of the Women’s March on Washington.

Whitney: DC on inauguration day was a weird labyrinth of barricades populated by me and untold thousands of zombie people with stupid red hats trying to find a gap into the National Mall and failed. Everything blew.

The city was barricaded off in chunks, so that you’d walk 10 blocks and then hit a bunch of soldiers and traffic police who’d make you turn around. (Same with Cleveland at the RNC last summer, where lots of us fully expected a bomb to go off). It’s an effective crowd control method because it makes it really hard for large groups of people to coordinate, but it also seems like it could go horribly wrong in an evacuation scenario.

WASHINGTON: Line for the parade? Or escape from DC? No one knows. /Whitney Kimball.

Anyway I spent the hour before the inauguration with wandering bands of people who also didn’t seem to realize that you needed a ticket to get within five miles of the Capitol Building. At the very last minute, a kind soul gave up his ticket, and I sprinted through the security checkpoints just in time to catch the speech on a jumbotron that I could just barely see over the crest of the hill. Even then a TSA agent blocked off all incomers from getting any closer, so for me, Trump’s “This is your celebration” line was a fabulously ironic closing note for the whole campaign. (Readers, if anybody has experience navigating previous inaugurations, please comment!)

So, it was a bust. BTW judging by the lines coming out of there, Trump’s claim to a million and a half attendees– about double the population of my hometown of Boston– seemed crazy. If it tells you anything, around lunchtime I was able to get in and out of a Pret-a-Manger bathroom within 15 minutes. By comparison my mom went to the Boston women’s march, had to go to the bathroom, and couldn’t even escape the square. I’ll add the caveat that the attendance numbers are a huge dispute at the moment, so he can’t sue us for libel.

In any case, this was a made-for-TV event.

WASHINGTON: one of the peaceful protests everyone ignored/Whitney Kimball

Also the “riots” were totally overblown. From what I witnessed over the course of a few hours in the afternoon, the number of media people nearly matched the number of anarchists mulling around and occasionally knocking over trash cans. The now-famous limo fire was the climax of a long, drawn out vandalism which was the main event throughout the afternoon. Eventually the boredom escalated into brick throwing and pepper spray, but the nearby tank stayed parked. All of this annoyingly overshadowed a much larger, entirely peaceful protest down the hill. The sanest conversation I had in the riot area was with a Trump supporter in his twenties whose mother had suffered under the Castro regime in Cuba and was annoyed with protesters’ comparisons to fascism. Other Trump supporters gave protesters credit for exercising their First Amendment rights.

And then there were the renegade guerilla window-smashers. A group whom DC local Kelly Rice described as “these like black ninjas”– who looked nothing like the regular protesters in rainbow-themed homemade protest apparel– allegedly ran through the streets with baseball bats and smashed storefronts like McDonald’s and Bank of America, but also non-symbolic spaces like the locally-owned breakfast place. “Who smashes the Atrium?” Rice wondered.

All in all, I dearly wish I’d had that day back. I’m hoping yours was better?

Michael: To be perfectly honest, if I had been in the United States I would’ve totally been one of the fire-setting, window-smashing kids in black. That’s part of why I am in Mexico instead. But I do kinda want a tattoo of that limousine in flames with the anarchy sign…

Whitney: Noooo! Those guys make protesters look bad. I hate McDonald’s, but a small business operator runs that franchise. And seriously, why smash a local breakfast place?

Also the kids sitting on the limo refused to offer any coherent message other than “it’s a bench now” or “it’s an insurance claim.” I’m down with limo-smashing, but for a greater good.

Michael: Eh, I’m becoming much less of a pacifist (in regard to private property) in my bitter old age. No one gave a fuck about Baltimore, especially cops killing Black kids, until they burned a stupid CVS.

Whitney: I agree that pacifism isn’t working, but I think the common enemy are the superrich, not other working class people. After spending a bunch of time with white supremacist groups over the past few months for my master’s project, I’m concluding that most people are generally okay with each other after they spend time together. We’re all getting screwed, but it’s not by the local CVS owner or the McDonald’s guy or the limo driver, it’s the corporate overlords.

But yeah, artistically, the burning limo is an A+. In life, I feel sorry for Muhammad Ashraf of Nationwide Chauffeured Services. Who knows, maybe he deserved it, but I still think a Fox News van or something would have been a better target.

Michael: CVS isn’t locally-owned at all.

Whitney: Oh shit you’re right. Ok, fuck CVS!!

MEXICO CITY: Dancing anti-Trump Socialists in Centro/Michael Anthony Farley

Michael: But we digress. Overall, things were more orderly (but still passionate!) here. Mexico City had several anti-inaugural protests on J20, most of which were centered around the American Embassy and the nearby Ángel de la Independencia monument. It’s hard to get a sense of crowd size, what with all the comings-and-goings, but I’d estimate at least 1,000 people were in the streets at any given time. A handful of American flags got burned, some protesters built a fake wall in front of the Embassy’s terrifying-future-looking security barriers, and a lesbian couple were dressed as a KKK Nazi and “Latino concentration camp” prisoner. But the mood was weirdly much more convivial, compared to Trump protests I’ve attended in the U.S., which can feel like funeral marches. After assembling in front of the Embassy, we marched about 2 ⅕ miles to the city’s historic center, where everyone from goth kids to abuelitas would lean out of balconies or storefronts and cheer.

Corinna: Sadly, I may have missed out on all that fire; I went to the Women’s March on New York City this past Saturday. It sounds like Mexico City and D.C. were the equivalent of a wet-tongue make out, while New York was one big hugging sesh.

NEW YORK/Corinna Kirsch

Here in Manhattan we had grandmothers; tykes with pink hats and cat ears; people  with their boyfriends, girlfriends, partners; very well-designed protest signs; and a guy who prepared for the march by carrying around a full box of pizza. New Yorkers know how to turn protest into a well-mannered march. I’m sure it was different for other protesters in New York, but being out on Saturday, for me, had, on one hand, the effect of lounging out in Prospect Park on a Saturday—if we were all crowded like sardines to fit into city-block-size containers, of course. The Women’s March on New York City was the family-friendly event of the weekend.

All types of New Yorkers came out in huge numbers—approximately 400,000—to express their support for progressive causes. Yes, all types of New Yorkers challenged the direction our country is taking. Yes, all types of New Yorkers cheerfully sang “Dump Trump!” in the streets, without fear. Huzzah! New Yorkers, we are the many, the proud, and a bastion for social good.

New Yorkers, keep marching, not just this once, but all the time. Here we have protesting, normalized. I’m looking forward to showing up in the streets every week if need be.

Michael: Be careful what you wish for, as far as normalization goes. At one point, while marching down Paseo de la Reforma (a major office/government skyscraper district) I ducked into a luxury mall to pee, and even though you could still hear people chanting from the mall and see countless people through the windows, no one batted a second glance in that direction. Protests are so common in this neighborhood they’re like noting the weather. I guess that’s a good thing, though. I’d love to see America’s Left turn into such a well-oiled disobedience machine. And on the street, of course, all bystanders were super supportive. 

NEW YORK: A shower of flowers, gifted to protesters awaiting the march./Corinna Kirsch

Corinna: One anecdote on the lovefest that was Manhattan this Saturday revolves around this guy. We’re at the corner of 2nd Avenue and 40-something, well above the overflow for the march start. Expecting a march, we were given a standing-room only situation. Unsure of how many blocks we had to go before being given the go-ahead to walk, with the march officials invisible, somewhere off in the distance, we moved two blocks within an hour—max. As we’re standing with the hundreds, maybe thousands of other sardines on this block, comes out this Tom Cruise in Risky Business bro, showering the protesters with his own type of support: pink flowers. We could have been in an opera, showered with single flowers, but during the performance, not after.

Great, New Yorkers who weren’t protesting support the protesters. But…would this same, flower-giving gesture have taken place during a #blacklivesmatter march? My magic eight-ball says “Doubtful.”

Michael: By that you mean, Burning-Man/Berlin-Love-Parade-Kooky-Acts-of-Kindness aren’t showered on BLM protesters? Totally true observation. But can you imagine the Leftist-think-piece-machine infighting if they were?

Corinna: Ah, good point. Whatever contention that might provoke, I wish the “caring-yet-silly” aura of the marches were mentioned more frequently.

MEXICO CITY/Michael Anthony Farley

Michael: One nice thing about the protests in Mexico: the sense of Mexicans and US Citizens being in this together. Mexico is none too happy with its own president, Enrique Peña Nieto, who recently privatized the nation’s gas supply to corporations. This, combined with Trump’s anti-Mexico rhetoric and economic policies has led to a crazy spike in prices here, as the value of the peso has slipped. It’s funny, because Peña (a neoliberal who’s seemingly pro-globalization) and Trump hate each other, but it was great to see Americans and Mexicans marching together to say “we understand, we both have shitty presidents.”

Whitney: Lol. Were there any popular slogans or pussy hats? How do Mexico City residents feel they’ll be personally affected by the Trump administration?

Also, have you been meeting a lot of ex-pats down there?

Michael: One of the bi-national protests’ slogan was “Tu generación construyó el muro, nuestra generación lo destruirá.” Your generation built the wall, our generation will destroy it.

MEXICO CITY: Mexican and American protesters in a solidarity bloc outside the US Embassy/Michael Anthony Farley

But there are so many slogans here (which rhyme better, obviously)! One of the things I love most about this city is its active Leftist political culture. There are multiple songs about general strikes in Spanish! People here protest so much they have reusable protest flags, not flimsy cardboard signs destined for the landfill.

I totally forgot that I saw this one pussy hat until I made the above GIF. I didn’t make it to the women’s march the next day, otherwise I am sure I would’ve seen more! Plenty of feminist-socialist flags at the J20 demonstrations though!

Corinna: I’m so interested in what a reusable protest flag looks like. I’m wondering if people here in the states are getting more and more used to protesting, based on the number of people I saw using cardboard signs. If you never protest, you might be more willing to spend some money on making an entirely new sign out of new materials. Maybe it has to do with recycling. Or people having plenty of Amazon Prime boxes lying around to make signs.

You don’t need a sign to be effective. As I arrived to the march, an elderly woman, who, like my own grandmother, shuffles slowly when she walks with her neck twisted toward the ground, kept up a chorus of “Dump Trump” throughout the crowd. I want to be her when I’m older. She’s my hero.

Michael: There were so many good older lady role models in our protest too! It was so inspiring to see older people march for miles holding banners about climate change and reproductive rights, next to transwomen demanding better rights for migrants, next to students with banners in solidarity with workers. Here, there seems to be a lot less of the weird, ineffectual Leftist balkanization over identity politics and specific issues than in the US. 

Mexico City/Michael Anthony Farley

But speaking of flags, my reusable “FUERA TRUMP” protest flag cost me less than the USD equivalent of $.75 thanks to Trump’s own vitriol towards Mexico, which is putting the Peso’s value in a tailspin. In answer to your question, Whitney, The majority of Mexicans are already feeling the effects of his economic isolationist policies via inflation at home. People are also resentful (or resigned) to the fact that it’s become prohibitively expensive/complicated (and likely to get much, much worse) to visit friends or family in the United States, largely thanks to our stupid visa system. I’m always embarrassed when I forget about this and invite people to visit me back in the States, especially considering the ease and warm welcome with which we can come here.

I’m actually a little disappointed about how relatively few Americans turned out for the march. Don’t get me wrong—there was a sizable contingent marching behind a “US-MX Solidarity” banner, but that crowd’s numbers were also inflated by Mexican, Canadian, and Japanese friends. Over 700,000 American citizens live in Mexico City—more than most U.S. cities, including Washington D.C., Boston, and Baltimore. When you compare the number of Americans who protested here to the numbers in those cities it’s a little disheartening. Just a few days after Trump was elected in November, thousands of people took to the streets in Baltimore, for example.

That might be because a lot of immigrants to Mexico City (myself included) come from countries with politics we’d like to escape. And escapism is so, so tempting. And to be fair, I also know a lot of non-Mexican citizens are terrified of being deported as a result of protesting, since there’s an ambiguous law about foreign agents interfering with politics, which can lead to expulsion. None of us want to get banned from Mexico, because we love it, which is a big part of why we’re so anti-wall to begin with! Legal troubles here are scary, but it’s a chance myself and dozens of other foreigners were willing to take.

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