#god american politics literally makes me physically ill

[gorgeousgreymatter-x]

"GenOcIdE JoE is thE BesT PresiDEnt OF MY LifETimE!!!!oneone!¡!!!!! 😭😭😭😭"

[violexides]

the clip makes me nauseous and i don't want this post to blow up because i've had to block enough people as is on this site and grit my teeth through some of the things i've seen people i love reblog (like holy shit guys) but all i have to say is: you're not going to act like Harris is good for Palestine right now. i don't care if you're voting blue, or third, or if you're not voting, you are NOT going to act like Harris is good for Palestine. if you want to vote for her look to all those other reasons that you think Democrats are good or whatever but you're not going to fucking gaslight people into thinking that because Harris said she wanted a ceasefire like twice, disregarding her recent statement at a Detroit event AND how she called protestors pro-Hamas, that she's going to be good for Palestine. not to mention her silence in the last months during Biden's administration (you guys flip flop fast as to whether you think elected officials are able to launch america into tyranny in under a year or if they are unable to do literally anything ever in politics and just have to sit there sadly). you are ALSO not going to act like this is the best we can do in American politics. the lack of political imagination is absurd. i'm not even saying don't vote for Harris because God knows i get it but at the very fucking LEAST start applying pressure for her to be more explicit in calling for an end to the genocide. contact her office, or raise awareness. i am genuinely physically ill over the fact that so many people are saying "what more do you want for her? this is the best we're going to get for Palestine!'" NO political imagination. How can you mansplain the basics of American politics to everyone by saying "third parties aren't going to win you fucking idiot" but you can't understand that you should at least TRY. TO LEVERAGE YOUR VOTE. INSTEAD OF UNCONDITIONALLY VOWING YOUR SUPPORT. There is always going to be a big bad candidate. There is always going to be an unsavory republican versus a tolerable democrat (this should be deeply terrifying to you). there, too, is always going to be a mass of people who can use the power of their voice, or something something "civics" if you need a buzzword here, to DEMAND better out of our officials & that process starts before they get in office. I'm glad you guys are so anti trump that you're saying Harris and Waltz are like BRAT mom and dad or whatever the fuck but I need you guys to give a shit about Palestinians for two seconds and stop memeing them with some white Brit woman's song. The genocide is still going on. footage was released of a Palestinian man getting gang raped by Israeli soldiers and there were riots demanding the release of the soldiers. the Israeli media is upset that this got leaked, not outraged that a man was brutalized in that way. NOBODY in western media is talking about this, they want it to blow over. but they still purport the claims that have been debunked about Hamas.

i don't know who this might upset but you don't just twiddle your thumbs and wait for politics to change once you get a Democrat. you're supposed to demand things, you're supposed to express yourselves. leftists have done a lot of legwork since the start of the genocide across college campuses but it's not even a fraction of the amount that we need to get justice for our brothers and sisters and siblings over the seas. elected officials are accountable to you when they want your vote. Harris is not going to do anything if you guys just keep acting like she could kill a man in front of you and you're still 100% willing to jump into her arms. She clearly does not know how to navigate this pressure if she's saying stupid fucking shit like she did in Detroit so put on pressure. and unfortunately i dont have the capacity to baby you through how to do that pressure because brown folks are already trying to tell you and you're ignoring it, and if you know enough about american politics to try to mansplain it to the PEOPLE WHO ARE GETTING GENOCIDED BY AMERICAN TAX DOLLARS, you can surely figure out how to send a fucking email.

im not Palestinian i am an insanely privileged teenager living in America so i cannot even comprehend a fraction of the pain being suffered by the Palestinian people & the diaspora but what i will say is none of you "vote blue no matter what, this is the best we're going to get" folks are ever going to help my close friend's treatment prices lower. None of y'all are ever going to take a stand to keep my best friend from risking going to prison just for standing outside. None of y'all would have said SHIT when my people were getting killed in the Iraq war. And if you think "no that's wrong, i did or i would or i think i might have-" then start saying shit now. Keep saying shit. I'm sorry if this doesn't feel easy to you, I'm sorry if it feels uncomfortable to shake away the idea that Harris is going to save politics and save Palestine just autonomously. But you don't have to take care of her. and maybe you could afford to take care of your own comfort a lot less. she's a woman with immense privilege and you are a person with privilege and the Palestinian people are still being killed. Sorry if this is ineloquent or whatever i don't fucking care. I just need you guys - mostly the people who follow me - to know where im at with this. Because yall keep rbing shit like "if u dont vote for Kamala u vote for trump" as if your white asses are at risk when the uncommitted movement LARGELY COMPOSED OF FOLKS OF COLOR are actually just demanding that their people dont die. Nobody wants trump. nobody wants genocide either. maybe you don't see how Kamala can ruin your life if she continues with her current rhetoric but i can see it crystal clear. Ive been seeing it for months. A lto of us have.

[weebsinstash]

the overturning of Roe v Wade happened and pregnancy felt disgusting and a physical threat to be defeated

I felt that. I an asexual person with zero intention of getting married or having a baby but seeing Roe v Wade, I just... feel the need to have my tubes tied? Which should not even be a thing I consider since I have no plans to have sex. Those radical religious/misogynisitc views that are popping up nowadays just make me feel very disgusted at things that are... Really not horrible. Nothing wrong about being a housewife, or getting pregnant, but the way those incels with a mic talk about women in their podcasts just create very unhealthy relationships between women and "womanhood"/traditionally feminine things.

What's so fucked up is like the exact same people saying shit like "oh these gross LGBTQRSTUV alphabet mafia freaks are trying to groom and molest our kids! How dare they try to say kids need to learn about safe sex and periods and not to send nudes or address sex in any way other than abstinence!" will then turn around say "wow, asexuals? How UNNATURAL. You aren't PROCREATING like GOD INTENDED. You're ALSO somehow grooming our kids" and it's just like. Fuck. Leave people alone about their fucking sexuality and gender presentation.

And then sometimes I try to discuss this with my mom because like we discuss politics a lot and she's, you know, a woman and has raised me and ill seek her perspective as my mom and a woman and an adult, and sometimes she'll just be "oh don't read all that, youre getting upset over trolls, people are just stupid" ok well these stupid people can VOTE and sometimes these stupid people ARE the ones we're voting for!!! Like! I'm so tired of seeing bullshit like Americans saying "haha good on Country XYZ for making it legal to beat those t slurs in public, this is just MODERN WESTERN PROPAGANDA" and I want to scream shit like "India has recognized trans people for over 3000 years you fucking bigoted moron"

Like!!! Ugh!! Should I be furious or sad!!! (Putting the rest under a rm because this gets a little long and I also discuss abortion/miscarriage)

Fucking idiots saying shit like "oh just use birth control there's like 30 kinds" and guess what motherfucker literally the only 100% effective ones involve SURGERY. Even my OWN MOTHER got pregnant on a diaphragm. Fuck you! Fuck you! You think abortions are being used as birth control? I know at least two people who've had them and they can be ABSOLUTELY EXCRUCIATING, I am talking SCREAMING TO STOP THE PROCEDURE KINDS OF PAIN. "Oh women just want to avoid accountability" bitch some of them don't want to DIE, some of them can't raise a disabled child, some of them have diseases and conditions that can't be passed on

I... may have had some risky sex a while back with, minor precautions, ok I'll be the dumb irresponsible slut and say the pull out method was used, and while nothing came of that, obviously, literally my game plan after it happened and post nut clarity hit was "ok well I know if I need an abortion there are people who literally terrorize you outside the clinics so maybe I'll just kill myself". And you know what, I wasn't even intending to do that kind of thing, the unsafe sex, it was just, you know, happened fast and in the heat of the moment, and it happened briefly. Even I, as someone who has never wanted children and FEARED motherhood all my life, made that kind of mistake. And I spent the following three weeks in absolute TERROR waiting for my period, thinking of all the people who would happily force me to carry a child that would no doubt inherit my physical disability, my genetic disorders, and wouldn't be wanted by me or the father (and im not saying that as anything against him we are both very anti kid lol)

It's so upsetting because like, people have different opinions, and in some cases can you really say if an opinion is right or wrong? But so often do I see things that are inhumane, grotesque even. I was reading a story of a woman who was forced to carry a malformed fetus to a full pregnancy where it passed that same day. Here you have a woman who was forced to deliver what was essentially a corpse, the trauma that must have caused her, not just in mind but also in body. 9 months, 9 months of knowing it was being born just to die. And. People were legitimately replying "better that than to be ripped limb from limb inside the womb" that's a specific form of third trimester abortion which wasn't even what she was asking for you fucking idiot. "Better for the baby to know its mother's touch" it literally didn't have a properly formed brain and we don't even know if it could have even SENSED anything besides agony. "I would have wanted to hold my baby before it passed" you would have let a fetus which had abnormalities discovered in the first trimester to fully develop into a child so it could die in horrible pain just for your moral closure?

I read a comment just a few days ago that was legitimately one of the most disgusting things I had ever read and dear God I hope this person was lying but they said "I know a catholic woman who was pregnant and found out her baby would be born terminal and die shortly after birth. She carried it the full pregnancy so she could baptize it" THAT'S ABHORRENT. For you non religious folk, which I am too but I have some secondhand knowledge, the point of baptism is the idea that we are all born into sin and must be like cleansed to be children of God or something like that. And to be blunt I consider this woman an absolute monster and I replied as such.

"She let a newborn baby suffer in agony just so she could dip it in her magic fairy water? And she thinks she's the GOOD GUY?"

It's just. Ugh. I don't even know. I use culture and country as an excuse for religious freedom and sexual and gender expression (ie. Banning trans people from being visible is prejudiced to Indians, Native Americans, Samoans, Judaism, etc) but then people turn around and say "but it's my culture or religion to be homophobic/not allow abortion" and then I just want to say "well you're just an idiot who can't think for themselves then and you need to get with the fucking times :)" like obviously I am not perfect but I believe basic human rights transcends borders and beliefs. Like for example, similar but different, Malaysia is about to literally hang a man just for having a kilo of weed and people are happily saying "don't do the crime if you can't do the time" and its like do you understand it's inherently problematic to just say "their country, their rules" right. Like some places use that as an excuse to keep forms of slavery. Like to circle the argument back around states rights was an argument to try and keep slavery and now states rights is being used as an argument to criminalize abortion?

Like I try not to bring the vibe here down too often but these conversations are important. We as human beings should be helping and protecting each other and I feel a legitimate fear of society approaching some sort of social collapse or civil war. Like even if you're opposed to abortion you should actually still be voting in favor of keeping abortion because, if abortion is outlawed on moral and religious grounds, it will start the ball rolling for banning other medical procedures out of opinion and not fact. You know we already let the insurance companies do that right? Tell people their life savinf treatment isn't covered because they don't deem it medically necessary even though insurance agents arent doctors? Even on my main blog I boosted a post about a person with severe endometriosis who is being denied a hysterectomy because of their weight by the NHS but a private clinic will save them for a price, and meanwhile the endo is impacting organs outside their reproductive system

It's just. God. I'm sorry I guess I went all over the place in this post but everything is so scary now. Transphobia is on the rise, homophobia, racism, gun violence, they keep finding horrible child labor shit like 15 year olds cleaning slaughterhouses, even in my current blue state, red senators are arguing we should let young teens do construction, they're changing legislation on healthcare, on the internet, on student loans, inflation is HUGE NOW, rent is skyrocketing, homelessness is rising, just

It can be hard to keep your head up you know? I try not to be a doom and gloomer but there's legitimately scary shit happening? Like I didn't even touch on climate change and how all of these issues are going to intersect and snowball until our entire species is fucked. I know what I'm voting in 2024 but, it doesn't make anything less terrifying. If we weren't protected before, if we still really aren't now, can we really trust it to happen in the future?

[tottymatsuno]

Requests FAQ NO MINORS ALLOWED!

im sick of tumblrs text editors so im just gonna link to tiny urls.

https://abiesfir.tumblr.com/post/674702675586236416/updated-info-minors-and-blmtsuproshpper-dni

Everyone has been very polite to me, and I apologize because I'm writing this in a frazzled and agitated state so if it comes off as rude I'm sorry. I'll update with more questions as they come.

MINORS DNI

The Basics!

Who are you?/What's your age/What's your race?/How much free-time do you have?

I'm Robin, I am 26 and I am a black transmasc/genderfluid adult. I have mental illness and talk about it a lot, this blog is literally my healthy coping mechanism because I am currently unmedicated. I will not disclose anything else further on the matter. I am also physically disabled so a lot of my stories are unbeta'd bc of it.

I have a small baby and a wife so my time is very divided. I can't spend a ton of time editing and fixing things up perfectly and I don't actually have a beta editor. I do this to destress and as self care. So me enjoying the requests is important. Don't make me feel obligated to do these free requests bc I will get pressured and won't do them anymore.

Will You block me for being under 18?

YES, LEAVE, GO, DO NOT COME HERE, I DONT WANT ANY MINORS INTERACTING WITH MY POSTS! Leave!!! Don't fucking come in here!!! Don't bother, please just for the love of fucking God this is my one thing, minors and 18 year olds, GO HOME!

I HAVE WRITTEN MULTIPLE TIMES FOR MINORS TO LEAVE ME ALONE! I DONT WANT YOU HERE!

Can you do a request for X non African American culture?

No, I like to write for black american girls. Whatever I write would be culturally insensitive and would be solely based off of the stereotypes I know of. I wouldn't try to be racist or malicious, but I do this for fun and am not going to research a culture for a request. Not trying to be funny but there's also the fact that black girls are thoroughly under represented in self inserting/fics so I'm doing my part <3

You should def write your own though and link it back to me!! I would loooove to read it! I highly recommend and encourage for people to make the content they'd like to see!

What race are the Readers? Can I imagine myself or my own cultural/ethnic background?

All black! Every request, every reader, every story is written with a black woman in mind. All of them! And yeah go ahead! I try to avoid major character descriptions but yeah I don't mind! Have fun!

Why don't you write more trans fics if you're not cis and hc Totty as trans?

Hmmm, that's complicated but mostly because I struggle with gender issues involving being perceived as attractive and I deal with a lot of shame bc of it. If I'm a man and I like a woman, in my head I'm not allowed to be interested in her bc I'm not passing or presenting masculine. If she's a lesbian then I feel guilty because I'm a man. If she's bi I worry she'll think of me as a woman. Annd the same with men!

And I headcanon Todomatsu as trans and I do not want to come off as a chaser or being solely interested in him for being a woman. I wouldn't feel comfortable writing trans Totty sexually either bc I don't want to be offensive or weird. annnd I don't wanna base his trans status off of my experiences with my wife so. yea

Is this a requests blog?

No! This is a Todomatsu blog that DOES requests for fun! And not only is it a Todomatsu blog, its my self insert ship blog for Todomatsu. This is all for fun beloveds and I have the most fun making content for Totty.

Are you comfortable with like/reblog sprees?

GO AHEAD! Not gonna lie tho, it is kinda funny but does hurt my feelings when I see some of yall doing that and then not follow me...I have a couple regulars who show up everyday for like 2 weeks and then don't follow me. Follow me???

And gimme comments and laugh at my jokes and let me know I'm being funny and praise me???????? pls?

Can I DM you/Be your friend/Talk to you?

GO AHEAD!!!! I want friends!! If you wanna specific anon name you can have one, but feel free to be my friend! I'm not really anybody but that guy who doesnt stfu. i dont see myself really as a content creator or writer i literally am possessed and when I say this is mental illness baby you better believe my therapist knows all about Todomatsu and has heard half the shit I say on here.

Don't feel intimidated, I wanna be your friend more than you wanna be mine! Let's talk!

Requests!

How should we ask for requests

Preferably indicating if you want a bullet hc list, a minific (with your matsuno of choice or all brothers), your pronouns and the scenario.

If it's an art request please say so! If it's an art request from a meme link me the meme as well?

Are you still working on my request?

Unless I replied to the request itself and said no, then yeah. If I make a post referencing the request saying "I'll alter the prompt" its usually for my own comfort. But yeah, unless I answer the request without any text than yeah I'm still workin on it.

Some might take time because I have a very active life outside of this blog. My baby is high needs, I have lots of doctors appoints, I get hospitalized a lot, there's family emergencies, there's IRL obligations. I'm an adult, ik it might seem like it bc I'm glued to my phone but I have an adult's life.

It's taking a while, why is that?

Did you request a scenario with ALL six of the brothers, was it detailed, was it kinda just vague, did I make a text post saying I was working on it and it'll be a minific?

If so please know I'm working on it! Most minifics takes me a few hours to mentally map out - I'm doing SIX of them btw. Then I need to make an outline, SIX of them again. Then I need to actually write all SIX of them.

You answered my Todomatsu request right away but not my all boys request?

Because I'm a Totty blog! I don't hate the others and I love the requests I get but Todomatsu is my favorite I'm in love with him clinically and he is the current target of my diagnosed erotomania soooo I'm dropping everything to answer, draw, write, obsess and lust after him. Thank u send more requests of him specifically if u want a fast turnaround.

What makes you do a bullet list vs a mini fic?

if the request leads into a mini fic I'll do one. It's actually harder for me to think of bullet lists than mini fics so I kinda prefer mini fics.

Can request 18!matsu? Or a scenarios where the Matsunos have a SO that thinks of his brothers like their own?

No. The short of it is just NO. The long of it is: I have PTSD. My fear of interacting with children - especially little boys stems from deep seated childhood trauma. The most painful aspect of this of this trauma involves my step brother and several younger cousins. I will not further elaborate but I'm sure y'all catch my drift. Don't do it.

In my personal real life I am so terrified of men and boys younger than me that I refuse to think about men six months younger than me as attractive.

Do not ask me for anything involving the 18 vers of them that isn't strictly platonic.

And when I write I usually in some way or another imagine myself so if you want a request about the reader viewing the others as brother you must request only ONE brother and that's it. Do not ask me to write switching POVs from a reader who sees Oso-Ichi + Todo as little brothers while dating Jyushimatsu to a POV of Karamatsu being the love interest and the rest brothers.

I will shut down requests for a week if anybody asks for Todomatsu being seen as the reader's younger brother or Todomatsu under the age of 25. If it happens more than once I will no longer take requests indefinitely.

I sent a funny nonsensical joke and you didn't get it/I sent an anon and you didn't understand it?

I like things that I understand and with a context. I'm not ontop of all the latest memes and it's very hard for me to grasp when things are jokes.

What NSFW are you comfortable with?

https://tinyurl.com/whatwillyouwrite

Do you take Whump requests?

No is the short answer. No because I find the genre and fetish very uncomfortable as a disabled person. I don't like the idea of romanticizing people's suffering. I don't like the fact the genre is about kissing someone's pain better and then causing them more pain.

If someone was getting off to me crying or having a panic attack or my chest hurting or me getting taken to the ER or me fainting or me being physically dependent on them I would actually be very upset. I don't want to write about that because recovery is painful, yes but it's not a smut genre to me at least. Ik some whump isn't a fetish but it's so tied together. Anyways uh, no. Don't submit anything like that.

If you do and it slips through just know I probably didn't interpret it in the way you'd like and it'd be a serious piece and completely tonally unsexy and unfluffy. So save us both the heart ache.

[gallagherwitt]

Parents, don't let your babies grow up to be soldiers.

I've debated for a long time about posting this, and after some of the things I've read this past week, it's time.

To be clear, I have nothing but respect for people who serve. Whether your reason for joining the military is to serve your country, to gain access to the GI bill, to escape a bad situation, or any other reason -- respect. I'm also only speaking out the US military, as I don't know enough about other countries' forces to comment one way or the other.

So.

People sometimes come to me and ask for advice for themselves or for their high school age child who is considering military service. Which branch should they choose? Should they enlist or become an officer? Do a four-year stint or go for the 20-year career?

And it's hard to have those conversations because the answer I want to give is "Don't do it."

The suicide rate in the military is on the rise, and the powers that be keep wringing their hands and wondering why. Anyone who's paying attention can clearly see why.

Toxic command climates. Multiple year-long combat tours. Financial stress (food stamps are not uncommon in military families). Separation from loved ones for months or years at a stretch (either to remote duty stations or on deployment). Long periods of severe sleep deprivation. Untreated addiction, mental illness, and PTSD. Untreated or maltreated injuries or illnesses. Sexual assault is taken even less seriously than it is in the civilian world. Domestic violence is rampant.

The military has resources available for all of these things, and channels that service members can use to report problems. On paper, the support network is strong and present.

On paper.

In practice, it's a very, very different story.

The simple act of asking for help for depression, anxiety, burnout, PTSD, suicidal thoughts, sexual assault, harassment, etc, can literally end a person's career. At best, it can seriously derail it, diverting even the most promising upward trajectory. At worst, it can lead to a person being deemed unable to do their job, being stripped of security clearances, railroaded into dead-end rates, etc.

People are unofficially and indirectly punished for whistle blowing. Report sexual assault or harassment? Well, they'll need to separate you from the other person... which means you're probably going to wind up behind a desk in a promotion blind spot, and whether anything happens to the perpetrator or not (spoiler: it probably won't), you're not getting promoted. If you don't get promoted, you don't get to reenlist.  Snitches get stitches.

If you're a dependent of an abusive service member, it's even more complicated and intimidating to get help than it is in the civilian world. You're told -- sometimes directly, sometimes not -- that reporting this can end your spouse's career, so you'd better be *real* sure you want to open that Pandora's box. After all, if you end their career, then you have financial stress *and* your spouse has yet *another* reason to be angry with you. Couple that with the difficulty spouses have holding down careers with multiple moves, and you have abused spouses with no means of supporting themselves if they leave.

Got a knee that hasn't been the same since that training exercise last year? You can go to Medical and get some Motrin, but if you can't PT, it's going to hinder your ability to get promoted. Physical readiness is a job requirement, and the doctor says it's fine, so just keep knuckling through. Then when you fail a couple of physical readiness tests and finally get booted out, you can go see a civilian doctor and find out how badly you actually injured your knee and how much damage you've done by continuing to stand and run on it. The VA might take care of you, but don't hold your breath. After all, the military doesn't maintain equipment it's no longer using. Once you're off active duty, you're no longer a priority. Not that you or your health are much of a priority on active duty -- all that matters is your physical readiness.

It's not just *your* health that's compromised either. If you're in a rate where overseas duty stations are necessary to move up the ranks, your family needs to be -- at least on paper -- in tiptop health. You can lose overseas orders if one of your dependents has a medical condition -- even something like depression or if they're in need of dental work.  Alternatively, you can go unaccompanied and live apart from your dependents for the duration of your orders, which is spectacular for morale and families.

I could go on and on, but you get the idea.

Except no one expects the military life to be easy. After all, those are the sacrifices people make to serve their country and defend our freedom, right? Let's be real: No one has fought for the safety and freedom of Americans since World War II. Vietnam, Gulf War I, Afghanistan, Iraq -- those were over politics and oil. Now we're sending troops to defend oil in Saudi Arabia.

We're not allowed to say all that out loud because we're supposed to support our troops. And I do support our troops. I'm married to a service member, for God's sake. It's because of that support that I AM saying this out loud:

Our service members are fighting for politics and oil.

Not freedom. Not America. Not democracy.

Politics. Oil. Other people's promotions.

Service members deserve support, and they deserve better than the top-down failures from leadership that have been rampant in the military for decades. It's considered noble to serve because by enlisting, you're handing the United States a blank check to be cashed in the amount of up to and including your health, your sanity, or your life.

We're just not supposed to pay attention to what's in the memo line on that check:

Politics. Oil. Other people's promotions.

And in the end, when you've served your time, and you've either reached the end of your contract or the end of your usefulness -- whichever comes first -- then you'll be expected to transition to a normal life as a productive citizen who hasn't seen and done things few can imagine in exchange for a handful of benefits. No one wants to hear about the horrors you've lived and the nightmares you have even when you're awake. They want you to be a dignified veteran so they can thank you for your service.

So if you come to me and ask for advice regarding you or your child joining the military, I'm going to be honest. I'm going to say the only thing I can, in good conscience, say after watching service members get chewed up and spit out one after the other:

Parents, don't let your babies grow up to be soldiers.

[goose-books]

darklingverse & magic

as promised! a look at the magical system in my speculative fiction loose-retelling-of-king-lear WIP, which you can find out more about here and here! this is a terribly, terribly long post, so i’m sticking most of it under a cut, but i can guarantee there are at least a few fun diagrams in there. (all character images used are from this picrew by cinnasmores!)

shoutout to waya @harehearts​ for helping me work out some of the kinks in this by asking incredibly helpful questions... waya i will untag you if you want i just wanted to appreciate your contribution. also going to tag @suits-of-woe​ because you mentioned wanting to see this!

Jasper’s dad talks about it like oil. Petroleum has to be refined before you can put it in your car. Unrefined, it’ll just as soon kill you as anything else. The natural clock ticks. A mage hits twelve, or thirteen, or fourteen. And then it’s roaring under their skin, like an electric volt, like a fever, burning in them, fighting tooth and nail to get out.

It always gets out. You pick the route. Or you don’t.

The first thing Vee ever learned was duplication. Small objects only. Jasper was crawling through stacks of post-it notes for weeks. It was like an illness: Vee would get too itchy, his magic nipping at his neck, and he’d clench his fists and then they’d have another goddamn stack of stickies. “He has to get it out somehow,” Dad had admonished Jasper, when he’d complained. “Otherwise it’ll hurt him. I do it, too. The difference is I’m useful.” And he had demonstrated by snapping his fingers and cleaning all the house’s dishes at once.

Jasper is loath to give his father props for anything. But he was, on that particular occasion, right. Within a year Vee could flick his hands and shut windows, heat leftovers, unlock doors, send laundry skittering across the floor into the hamper.

It makes sense; Vee’s an infuriatingly quick study, magically and academically. And he inherited their dad’s style of magic. Easygoing. Quiet. Unobtrusive. Less explosive, more creative. Nowadays the worst that happens when he gets hot under the collar is that he spawns another houseplant and Jasper has to brush the leaves off the kitchen table.

Because Vee followed Dad’s instructions. He annotated all of his textbooks. He mastered it early, by seventeen, because of-fucking-course he did, but he was already in control by fifteen. Everyone learns to control their magic eventually.

Most people do eventually.

— darkling, segment iv: control

okay so let’s get into this!!!

isn’t darkling a modern king lear retelling? what do you mean, “the magic system?”

great question! darkling is, in fact, a modern king lear retelling (well, very loosely; it’s my city now and i reserve the right to do what i want). it takes place entirely in and around a city called dovermorry, an extremely isolated place secluded in the mountains, surrounded by wilderness for hundreds of miles, and only reachable via a single train through the mountains. dovermorry is loosely in the american northwest, sort of, i guess. by which i mean that’s kind of where i’m picturing it, but also it’s incredibly vague and honestly i don’t really know. dovermorry is, like, you know… [gesturing] it’s around. [kicking any kind of definable map under the rug]

the plot is set in the modern day with modern technology. the magic that exists is woven into daily life alongside said modern technology, which is the primary reason i’m calling darkling speculative fiction. most people in darklingverse aren’t actually heavily affected by magic (for reasons i’ll get into but which basically boil down to “they don’t have much”); however, dovermorry as a city is mostly known for being The Place Where Mages Go. most of the families in the city have been there for a long time; they’re old money families with powerful magic who use their inheritances to study increasingly esoteric forms of magic that aren’t very helpful in praxis. this is because dovermorry is home to the large and powerful Mage’s Guild, which is in charge of setting the laws around what kind of magic can be practiced in the city and by who. if you want to study magic at a scholarly level, you’d better pay your dues to the guild, otherwise you’re gonna get the boot.

every large city has a guild, but dovermorry’s in specific is Really Big and, unusually, has more political power than the actual mayor / government of the city. partially because leovald stayer, the guild’s president, is just… ughghhebwfbefbdsbfbdsfsd. That Way. in dovermorry if you’re not getting the boot you’re licking it

“wait, slow down. what is a mage anyway?”

well, technically, anyone! everyone in darklingverse has at least a little bit of natural magic (though it might be very little) that develops during puberty/adolescence! so by its literal definition, A Person Who Does Magic, everyone is a mage. that said, in colloquial terms, the word mage has taken on a connotation that basically means… exactly the kind of people who live in dovermorry. like i just said: scholarly, probably rich, probably a little elitist. so your average working-class person is TECHNICALLY a mage, but if you asked they’d say something like, “oh, mages are those hoity-toity folks who join guilds and stuff, WE’RE just regular folks over here.”

“you keep saying magic. what are you talking about. magic is a word that means so many things”

don’t worry, in darkling it just means [gestures vaguely]. re: everyone has magic, it develops in puberty, and there aren’t really specifications - it isn’t like some folks get fire magic and others get shapeshifting magic or etc. it’s more like everyone has a certain amount of raw energy inside them that can be drawn out and funneled into different tasks/spells. some ground rules:

1. you can’t change the amount of magic you have. your magic develops naturally, and maybe you get a lot of raw energy, or maybe you only get a little, but that’s what you’re stuck with and no amount of practicing is gonna give you more.

2. that said, magic is hard to control when it first develops - and practicing WILL help you get better at controlling it. so while you’ll always have the same base amount, you’ll get faster and more efficient about concentrating it into tasks.

3. re: amount of raw energy: that shit isn’t limitless. whether you have a lot or a little, it will eventually run out and you’ll have to wait for your juice to recharge. like a battery. you are a battery. how long this recharge period takes depends on how much magic you have, how fast you used it all up (if you push your limits to do something Really Big, you’re gonna be wiped), and also just how you’re doing physically in general? if you use up all of your magic in one go and you haven’t slept in a while, you might want to, like, sit down. drink a juice box. take a nap

4. while magic isn’t limitless, you can’t just NOT use it, either. when you aren’t using your magic, that raw magical energy builds up in you. and builds up. and builds up. and it does not particularly want to be in you. it wants to be out in the world, actually, and by god your fragile human meatsack is not going to stop it. so if you don’t choose a task to funnel your magical energy into (eg, i use my built-up energy to send my socks scuttling across the floor of their own accord to get into the laundry basket), that energy will eventually decide to just come out on its own. more on this later.

5. like i said, the mage’s guild of any particular city sets the rules, but there’s generally one core rule and that’s “don’t do necromancy.” like, obviously you’re not allowed to kill someone magically, but you’re also not allowed to kill someone NONMAGICALLY, so that’s kind of a given? but necromancy is something only a few very powerful mages can do and it is a BIG no-no. don’t fuck around with death, man. people don’t come back right, but also, just, like, let them rest, all right? let the dead rest.

[image description: the “society if X” meme, showing a futuristic “ideal” society full of green landscapes, smooth silver buildings, and flying cars. the text on the top reads “society if no one did necromancy.” the text on the bottom reads “this post made by the official mage’s guild don’t do necromancy you freaks bottom text.” in the corner you can see the imgflip.com watermark that i could have erased were i less lazy.]

“so what CAN you do with magic?”

the average joe? not much. again, there aren’t specific categories of magic; there aren’t any ATLA-style bending divisions. if you and i have the same raw amount of energy, there’s no reason we can’t both learn the same spells.

that said, the average person doesn’t have a lot of magic! it is much less dramatic than i’ve made it sound. there are not big magical firefights happening marvel-movie-style on every city street. if you want to talk to your friend, you use your iphone, not some kind of distance-speaking spell (which would be hard to maintain anyway and oh my god the phone lines are right there). the average person, on a daily basis, will use their small amounts of magic to heat their coffee up, or to wipe up a mess or spill, or to clean their floor re: the socks i mentioned earlier. (while writing this post, i had to begrudgingly admit that the socks were not going to scuttle anywhere, and i was forced to pick them up with my hands, manually. tragic, i know.)

again. dovermorry is the exception to this rule. most of the people in dovermorry have a little too much money and a little too much magic and not nearly enough chill. but dovermorry has also been festering like a petri dish alone up in the mountains for decades so what can you do.

“hold on, are you telling me that people in darklingverse didn’t immediately start wielding innate magic quantities as a tool of classism? sounds fake”

regretfully i cannot retcon classism out of darklingverse as it is relevant to the plot. this is because the plot is “Incredible: This Rich White Guy Has Never Been Told No And Doesn’t Know How To Handle It Without Crytyping!”

[image description: a picrew of leovald stayer, a pale-skinned man with short blond hair and an angry-looking frown, plus tears that i drew onto him with the paint tool in paint.net. beside his head is red crytyping text reading “ii’mm sso; so..rryy i didn’t[ mme  a nit wwhy . are yu,,o suiiicdee .bai,,it,ing MMe gr;;acen im yuour da[d,,,”]

the general implicit belief across the country, but especially in highly stratified cities like dovermorry, is that upper-class people from distinguished noble families are just naturally born with more magic, and lower-class people are born with progressively less as we trip down the social ladder. is this kind of true, demographically? yeah but everyone’s got their cause-and-effect turned around. class doesn’t dictate natural magic so much as natural magic dictates class. the people on top like to be on top. and having jacked-up magic is a nice way to stay on top. so rip to the rich kids born with piddly little amounts of raw magic, because your family probably is not going to help you get places. and rip to everyone else born with piddly little amounts of magic, too, because unless you’re REALLY good at something nonmagical, you probably are not going to Strike It Big because those in power are gonna keep you down. and if you DO make it to the top you’ll be viewed as an exception that proves the rule.

there is some magic that is genuinely naturally harder to work with. the upper classes are personally really invested in making sure that kind of magic is painted as rough and lower-class. this is because it is threatening to them! and they do not want to be threatened. unless, of course, it’s them with the hard-to-handle magic. and then they’re fine with it.

“but didn’t you say everyone’s magic is basically the same?”

everyone’s magic can be wielded to do basically the same things. you can’t control how much flows through you. you CAN control where/how it gets out. and everyone’s pathways for how to let it out are basically the same (see the examples i mentioned above!). but some magic is a lot easier to control than other magic.

you can’t just not use magic, because if you don’t use it, it will use itself. it will Do Shit On Its Own. and that’s where this gets sticky.

so let’s get into that.

active vs. passive magic

now with fun diagrams!

[image description: a rainbow spectrum stretching from blue to red. the leftmost end (blue) is labeled “’passive’ magic” and “way down here you can mostly do fun party tricks.” the rightmost end (red) is labeled “’active’ magic” and “way down here you’re officially a ‘witch’ lol.”]

when i say active vs. passive magic, i should specify that this is not a strict binary! i’m about to use the terms in a sort of binary way to simplify this post down, but magic exists on a spectrum.* generally the less raw magic energy you have, the more “passive” your magic will be, but that’s not a hard and fast rule! characters vee and rory, for example, both have comparatively passive magic; however, rory’s is smaller and generally good for party tricks, illusions, and sleight of hand, while vee has more magic that he finds is really good for things like Growing Plants Really Fast and Making The Plants Do What You Want.

*i know this looks like some kind of metaphor for gender but i swear it’s not. you can trans your gender no matter WHAT your magic looks like i promise <3

i mentioned that if it builds up for too long unused, magic will Do Shit On Its Own. with passive magic, the Shit It Does is, like, accidentally growing a plant where plants shouldn’t grow, or changing your hair color when you aren’t looking. slow seeping magic that just kind of oozes out of you until you notice, “wait, shit, my hair didn’t used to be blue.” with active magic, if you don’t control it, it will Break Shit and it will not be nice about it.

active magic is - if we simplify both the magic binary and human genetics until they’re really really blurry - the dominant trait. if you made a middle school biology punnet square, active magic would be the dominant allele and passive the recessive allele. (i haven’t taken a bio class in two years no one get my ass for this analogy.) the child’s magic will take after whichever parent has more active magic. so, to illustrate that, let’s look at a normal family with a normal non-scandalous family tree. by which of course i mean the greenwoods. [canned laugh track playing in the studio]

here are ara, griffin, and medea (parents) charted by how active their magic is:

[image description: the same spectrum, now featuring three picrews of characters. ara, a dark-skinned woman with wavy black hair, freckles, and glasses, is placed leftmost, closest to the blue/passive end. griffin, a dark-skinned man with short black hair and glasses, is placed near the middle of the spectrum, slightly to the left. medea, a pale-skinned woman with spiky white hair, freckles, and gold hoop earrings, is placed rightmost, at the very edge of the red/active end.]

...and here’s how that went for them, progeny-wise:

[image description: a little family tree. ara and griffin’s child, vee, a dark-skinned person with wavy black hair, a worried look, and band-aids on his face, is labeled “quiet unobtrusive plant-based magic” in green text. medea and griffin’s child, jasper, a lighter-skinned person with spiky brown hair and freckles, is labeled “once accidentally shattered 50 champagne glasses at his dad’s birthday party” in red text.]

(yes, i know i said there aren’t any ATLA-esque magical divisions; that’s still true; vee just happens to get on really, really well with plants. much like jasper gets on really really well with entropy and causing problems on purpose.)

so the thing about “active” magic is that it’s usually more powerful, but if it’s too powerful it gets incredibly destructive. like i said earlier - if you’re part of the upper class, it shakes out fine; otherwise not so much. your choices with this kind of dangerous magic are to either fight it and keep it tamped down, or to lean completely into it and embrace your massive amounts of dangerous power. if you are rich, you can do that second thing! that’s what leovald stayer does, and he’s the president of the mage’s guild! good for him! [i say, through gritted teeth.] but if you aren’t rich, you had better try to keep that shit on lockdown, unless you want to be branded a reckless uncultured social deviant and - in most cases - a witch.

mages vs. witches

everyone with magic is a mage. only a few mages are witches. it’s like squares and rectangles, you know? you can hear gracen talk about that here in nice prose (plus baby cressida!), but the bottom line is that “witch” is shorthand for “woman* who has magic so powerful it’s unsafe, who uses it to break shit and be reckless,” and anyone with the “wrong” type of magic who doesn’t have a trust fund to back them up is getting tarred with that brush. they’re nothing like those elegant learned mages casting down benevolent laws from their ivory towers, you see.

*this isn’t a gender specific thing but usually women are the ones who get called witches because Women Should Know How To Control Themselves But Men Are Just Like That. god we love misogyny <3

tl;dr: misogyny and classism real. if you have hard-to-control magic that breaks shit then you’re destined to be a pariah UNLESS of course you’re rich and powerful and then it’s COOL that if you got too out-of-control you could collapse a building or cause a monumental storm or something. you know. cool.

[image description: the same magic spectrum. medea is still there, placed exactly where she was before. leovald’s face is also there, right above hers; in terms of magic, they are equally placed on the spectrum. leovald is labeled “runs the whole city” and medea is labeled “lives in a cave in the woods,” both in white text. there are three thinking emojis at the very top of the image.]

funny how these things work out.

in conclusion

in conclusion, if you’ve read all of this, you’re braver than the marines and have my undying love. if you’re down here for a tl;dr: magic is a natural force everyone is born with; some magic is comparatively harder to control; classism & other social structures affect the way a person’s magic is viewed (there are a lot of double standards); i really enjoy making little oc diagrams.

if you have questions, comments, etc, about this post or darkling in general, my ask box is always open! thank you for reading! [blowing you a kiss]

[cardinaldaughter]

Good Omens Changed My Life. Twice.

Bear with me. This is super long, and super personal. But I figured, on the 30th anniversary of the book, I’d share with you all just how important Good Omens is to me, even if I didn’t fully understand how much until recently.

A thirty-year-long tale under the cut.

(mentions of death, homophobia, religion and politics)

I was born 30 years ago in the American South. While not exactly actively political, my parents were conservative, as was basically everyone I knew. And so I grew up exposed to Fox News and Glenn Beck and the NRA and conservative view points. I remember telling my father I couldn’t wait to grow up so I could be in the NRA with him. I remember thinking how I was going to vote for a republican when I was old enough to vote. What little I understood about the world, I understood from a conservative perspective, and because I was a child, I trusted the adults around me and believed what they said was sincere and trusted that their beliefs and intentions were honest.

During my childhood, I spent a great deal of time with one of my aunts. She was like a second mother to me, and I think, in some ways, I was probably her “second chance” at motherhood, considering she didn’t have a great relationship with her son. I spent most of my Saturday’s with my aunt. We went on all kinds of adventures together, and I loved her probably more than anyone in the world, my parents included.

When I was 10, she lost her battle to cancer. It was the second major death I’d experienced as a child, but this one struck harder and hurt much deeper. If it weren’t for the fact that this post is about Good Omens (I’m getting there, I promise) I would spend the rest of my time trying to express to you how much I loved this woman, and how deeply her death impacted me. But that’s another story for another time.

My aunt, during her last few years of life, started going to a church. And when she died, those people showed up to the funeral. And by showed up, I mean physically and emotionally. They sang songs. They helped my mom with arrangements (she was in charge). They brought us food. They loved on me, even though I didn’t know them. They clearly loved my aunt, and that love carried over to her family. And my parents- who weren’t exactly Christians and didn’t attend church- were extremely moved. So my mom decided to go to that church the following Sunday to thank them for their kindness. We never left.

That church became home. I met people there who changed my life. These people became brothers, sisters, mentors, friends. They helped fill the gap my aunt’s death had left, and though I was struggling and unable to properly mourn (which I wouldn’t understand for another decade or more) I felt better. I felt loved. I felt accepted. As I grew up there, attending the academy run through the church and getting more involved in ministry, I began paying more and more attention to what the adults around me were saying. And like most conservatives, they lamented over the evils of abortion and homosexuality and liberal ideology. And because I loved these adults, trusted them, respected them, believed them, I adopted the same beliefs. I was a child; they were adults. They couldn’t be wrong, right? I attended a community college for two years, then transferred to a close by university that was far enough away that I needed to move to an apartment in another city, but close enough that I could still come home frequently. But it meant leaving the church. I promised my friends I’d be back every Sunday I could make it. I didn’t want to leave, because all my friends were at that church, and it was home. But I wanted to get my bachelor’s, so I packed my things and I moved with the determination that I would come running home as soon as I was able. Before I left, I was told by a couple people in the church: “Now when you get to college, don’t open your mind so much that your brain falls out!” I thought that was an incredibly stupid thing to say, because it was in itself ridiculous- having an open mind was not a bad thing- but also because I was secure in my beliefs. I wasn’t going to change. Once at university- despite being incredibly shy and introverted, I managed to make a few friends. One was a Jewish atheist, and another was a girl from India who practiced Hinduism. Both were so far out of my understanding of life that I was fascinated, but rather than trying to “save them” (something I’d NEVER been comfortable with, so I just used my shyness as an excuse not to “witness” to people) I listened. Their stories were fascinating. And I am so grateful they were willing to share their experiences with me, and for a time I was very close to them both.

Okay. Now for the part you’ve been waiting for.

During this time at college, I, through a roundabout way, discovered Good Omens. After some major difficulty in hunting down the book, I got my hands on a copy- where an angel and demon reject everything they’ve been told they should be in order to help save the world. I didn’t understand why at the time, but I identified with Crowley. I felt a kinship with him I wasn’t qualified to fully appreciate, but I absolutely loved him. This demon who deep down didn’t want to be evil; who’s only real crime had been asking questions- something about that resonated with me.

“Why would asking questions be considered a bad thing?” I wondered.

It was during this time that, thanks to friends who were so different than me, and professors who had a much broader sense of the world, and thanks to some inspiration from a wily serpent, I found myself doing something I’d never done before:

I started questioning everything I’d ever been told.

Because, if I was honest with myself, I genuinely didn’t understand why two men or two women couldn’t get married. I didn’t understand why a woman was forced to have a baby she didn’t want or couldn’t care for. I didn’t actually want to join the NRA because I didn’t actually like guns. They made me uncomfortable, and I thought there should be more regulations on them. I read about and agreed with the tenants of feminism. I began learning about the LGBT community and realized that once I stopped being told over and over again that these people were evil sinners bound for hell, I realized that they were just normal people like me trying to find their place in the world and love with dignity and freedom. What was evil about that? “Oh god,” I said my senior year of college, when I realized the devastating truth I had been reluctant to face. “I can’t be liberal! I can’t be a feminist! I’m a Christian!” - I said this to myself numerous times, because I had been taught that to be a Democrat or a feminist was fundamentally non-Christian. And I had a years-long identity crisis over this. I struggled with this inner turmoil that I felt- how can I be a liberal feminist AND a Christian? Surely I can’t... 

But I was. This realization caused me to have a full-on identity crisis. I cried. I panicked. I prayed for God to correct my thinking if I was wrong. I only grew more convinced of my convictions.

Finally, I graduated and moved back home. I got married to the love of my life. I resumed going to church. I figured maybe if I just stop asking questions, things will go back to normal, and I won’t go to hell for my spiritual misstep. But everything felt different, somehow. My husband didn’t seem really political, so I never asked his opinions on things. I kept my thoughts to myself, having a completely hidden existential crisis while I sat in the church I’d grown up in with the people I’d once loved and trusted and believed implicitly, and realized I no longer trusted or believed them. Finally, a couple years into our marriage, I broke down and confessed to my husband (who I met at church, by the way) how I was feeling about...well,  everything. In a truly relieving turn of events, he felt the same way I did. I was so relieved to finally speak out about my feelings, about how I wasn’t conservative but was so afraid of that fact. How I was a feminist. How I wanted to vote third party in the 2012 election (because I was too afraid to commit to the sin of voting democrat, which to some people in my church, it would have been.) Political discussions with my husband increased in volume, length, passion, and frustration. We started keeping up with politics more, especially as we realized we were adults now and these things mattered. We talked a lot about our opinions, and how those opinions didn’t exactly line up with the church. I was so conflicted I honestly felt like I was being ripped in half. Finally my husband said he wanted to leave the church. I was a part of a couple ministries within the church, one of which I was very attached to as it allowed me a lot of creative freedom and I had made some very close friendships through. I couldn’t do it. I wanted to leave, I really did, but I literally felt chained to my place. I wouldn’t have phrased it that way then, but I know that’s what it was now. So we kept our mouths shut and stayed at church like good little obedient Christians. He still wanted to leave, and ultimately began going less. Because of my commitments, I needed to be there every week, even though some days, getting up to go to church made me feel like I was suffocating. But surely God would change my heart if I was in the wrong. I begged him to. I tried to adopt old beliefs, but they felt dirty and wrong in a way that made me physically ill. So I began to quietly try to accept I was a Christian who was also a Democrat. The internal war within me raged on. I had so many questions, but I knew better than to ask them. And then 2016 happened. Donald Trump was elected president. And I watched that man espouse racist, harmful, evil things, and I watched as the people I grew up believing and trusting support him. Defend him. Proclaim he was chosen by God. And I felt sick. If that man is what Christians view as a godly man, I wanted no part in Christianity. And I said as much. In an angry post on Facebook the morning after he won the election, I said Trump was not godly. I repeated things he had said. I said you can’t call yourself a Christian and support this man. I got reprimanded by leaders in my church. “You represent the church. You have to be careful what you say,” I was told. “God will take care of us, don’t worry,” others tried to mitigate. I had a family member, someone I trusted and admired with my whole heart- someone I’d gone to for advice countless times- tell me my words were vile. My words. The words challenging a wicked man who made fun of disabled people, and who was sexist and racist and awful... who people falsely believed represented the so-called loving God we were called to follow. Devastated and confused, I took down the post, stayed silent, and continued going to church. But I felt so sick. And that sickness ate at me for the next three years. I wanted to leave, I really did, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. It wasn’t like I was being forced to stay, but I felt glued to my spot, paralyzed and helpless. I’d been in church for 20 years. This place had been so helpful, and hopeful.... but it wasn’t that place to me anymore.

How does one turn their back on their home?

During all that, I turned to fiction for comfort. My existential crisis of faith was making me miserable, so I buried myself in stories, art, video games, shows, movies, fanfiction, to help ease the ache. And then, after months of eager anticipation, May 2019 rolled around, and Good Omens was released on Amazon Prime. I still loved the book. Loved Crowley. I couldn’t wait to watch the show. As before, I adored Crowley, but the more the show went on, the more my heart and soul latched onto Aziraphale. Everything he said and did made me want to hug the poor dear, though it wasn’t until episode four that I realized exactly why I felt such strong kinship to the TV version of the angel. Aziraphale and I were both trapped. He was bound by the rules of Heaven and his angelic duties. I was bound by my connection to the church and the ministry I was now in charge of. “If I could just reach the right people...” Aziraphale said desperately to Crowley, who replied: “That won’t happen!” And then, stubbornly, desperately, Aziraphale reaches out the Metatron, and I watched as the hope in an angel’s eyes died as he was told heaven wasn’t going to change, they wanted their war, and he needed to get up there and do his part. That scene resonated so much with me, because in that moment I wasn’t watching a fictional show- I was reliving my own life. The moment I was told my words saying Trump was not a godly man didn’t represent the church. That look on Aziraphale’s face expressed the despair I felt when I realized the church was fundamentally wrong. I was stuck in an institution I didn’t exactly support, but felt bound to stick with even as I grappled with the fact that perhaps they weren’t quite as good as I’d once believed them to be. I’d been questioning for some time, like Crowley had, but like Aziraphale, I was afraid to really do anything about it. I kept hoping that I’d just... come across the right person and they could alleviate my concerns, but... that never happened. I kept believing, like Aziraphale, that Heaven (the church) were the good guys, and this was all just a massive misunderstanding and surely they’d see reason. I mean, they had too. Right?

What encouraged me the most though, was at end of the story, is that Aziraphale eventually does reject heaven for Crowley/earth/humans, and is still an angel. Is still seen as good. His choice is seen as the right one, and he isn’t punished for standing up to his “good” superiors and saying, “No I will not do what you want”. It meant so much to me, to see him walk away from heaven and end up much happier than he’d ever been. It made me hope that I could achieve that same happy ending. It took a few more months of coming to terms with my feelings on everything. But I finally felt that metaphorical bond to the church snap after one Sunday where our pastor mocked a liberal politician and said some other things that made me so upset I stood up and walked out of church. I got home to my husband- my Crowley, who’d been ready to officially leave for years but was too fast for me- and told him I was ready. He asked if I was sure. I said yes. I wanted to leave. The last Sunday of February was my last Sunday at that church. I don’t think I would have had the courage to do it if not for watching Aziraphale’s struggle, his uncertainty, and his ultimate triumph. Knowing how his story ended gave me the hope that once I walked out of that place for the last time, I’ll be able to heal, and I’ll be able to actually do the good I so long to do and be in this world.

I find it funny, looking back. Reading Good Omens gave me the courage to actually question what I’d always been taught. Ten years later, the show gave me the courage to act on those questions. To know that having them isn’t enough. I need to ask them. And then I need to take a stand when the answers aren’t satisfactory.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the show came out during an extremely important time in my life- when I was trying and failing to find the courage to leave. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when I needed Aziraphale and Crowley the most, they were there, showing me the way and telling me that it will be alright. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, but I do think it’s a little bit ineffable.

Thank you, Neil and Terry, for creating such amazing characters. Thank you David, for being a brilliant Crowley, and thank you Michael, for being able to convey in a single look how hopeless I’d been feeling for years, essentially snapping me out of my emotional stasis, and giving me the courage to do what needed to be done.

Thank you to the GO fandom, whose stories and art and memes have provided me with a great deal of comfort as I adjust to my new reality.

I love you all. To the world.

[theexistentiallyqueer]

"but he murdered people”

This is a post about Goro Akechi, murder, its aftermath, trauma, and two things that are in real short fucking supply around here: critical thinking and empathy.

Listen, I’m a veteran of the Dragon Age fandom. If you want to talk about toxic fandoms, they’re your Bible. As far as your Judas Iscariots and Nebuchadnezzars go, I was one of them. I’ve seen it, I’ve done it, and I’m done with it. It’s exhausting to carry that much rage inside of you, to live it actively every second of every day, and to inflict it on other people and laugh about it. So I’ve been disengaged, largely, for a few years. 

And now I’m in the Persona 5 fandom and find myself enthusiastically appreciating Goro Akechi, because who doesn’t love complex, morally flawed, ambiguously gay-coded characters? Shit, maybe you’re not on board, but I’ll sign right up. I’m a relative newcomer, despite being a longtime Persona fan and playing P5 around when it came out, because I didn’t engage with the fandom then. I jumped back in with the Royal announcement and absolutely saturated myself in this vibrant fan space. Invested in the idea of Akechi being explored as a fully fleshed-out character, I find myself following Goroboys. Which is great! Because so far, they’re all great! Nicest bunch of people you could ever hope to meet!

Except there’s Discourse. There’s always been Discourse, I find, but this is my first exposure to it in this fandom. This weekend was my first week of seeing Goro antis active, seeing people I follow, people I like and appreciate and some I considering genuine friends, actively attacked and harassed because they like a fictional teenage character who killed some other fictional people in a fictional world where you, playing as the main character, have the ability to perform a metaphysical lobotomy on people who literally can’t consent. Here I thought the only people who hated Akechi were white cishet men who saw his rage against a parent and said, “Nah, too bitchy for me,” because they’re too afraid to look in a mirror and see Masayoshi Shido’s fascist, misogynistic mug staring back. 

Are you awake yet? Have I woken you up to the fact that Persona 5′s premise is a wish-fulfillment fantasy of “what if I could make the person who took advantage of me when I was a teenager apologize in front of the entire world by using an alternate fantasy dimension to completely violate their brain”?

I see my friends saying, “Wow, it’s amazing how people who hate Akechi can’t leave people who like Akechi alone,” and within an hour they have replies saying MURDER IS MURDER as if they know what murder actually is.

We’re about to get real personal up in here because maybe, only then, will some of you people take the hint that your behavior borders on actively bullying other people on the internet over a fictional character.

Ready? Here goes.

Murder is your mom picking you up from summer camp three weeks after your ninth birthday, driving you to your grandparents’ house, and telling you that when daddy was at work today, someone tried to steal the money, and they had a gun. Daddy was brave and Daddy died.

Murder is blacking out when you’re nine years old and coming to to yourself two houses away on a neighbor’s swing set with crickets chirping in your ears and the crushing reality of never seeing your father again turning your brain into static.

Murder is asking your mother if she asked for the death penalty, and your mother telling you, in a pleading voice, that she didn’t because he was mentally ill and it didn’t feel right. Murder is feeling angry afterwards because you feel like something was taken away from you, and something should be exchanged for that. Because that’s how fairness works, right? If you steal candy from the store, you have to give up your allowance for the next five months.

Murder is realizing you’re an atheist at fourteen and driving past the cemetery where your father’s remains are interred, and having the gut-punching, soul-suffocating realization of what never ever ever actually means. Murder is building an internal cosmology where forever means my atoms and yours, creating new life in perpetuity as the comfort you drag out of the west’s cold, uncaring atheism that never found its own poetry.

Murder is your first two years in college, when you discover social justice and realize the world is bigger than your own life experiences, and that violence at the bottom is a reactionary symptom against violence at the top. Murder is understanding the fact that the man who killed your father was himself a victim of a racist, ableist, capitalist society with a morally bankrupt healthcare system, and that every single one of those things is in and of itself is more hateful than the act of your father bleeding out in the parking lot, in the ambulance, on the operating table.

Murder is your mother confessing to you in college that your father was physically abusive of her and that she had threatened him, only weeks before he was killed, that she would leave and take her daughters with her if he didn’t change. Murder is knowing that your father ran after an armed robber because he was raised by a Sicilian father in a household overflowing with toxic masculinity, and what killed your father wasn’t a man with a gun: what killed your father was the patriarchy whispering in his ear, This theft emasculates you. 

Murder is looking your own mother in the eye and telling her that one day you want to visit the man who killed your father and open your heart to him, because all you can think is, He didn’t plan this. He can’t have wanted this. What must it feel like to kill someone without intending to and then have to live with that for the rest of your life with no one to help you? Murder is the sound of betrayal in your mother’s voice when she responds, disbelieving.

Murder is spending years wanting to at least write to him, and then forgetting, and then going back, because you are a fluid, impermanent, imperfect person with your own flaws and failures and mental issues that hold you back from being the paragon you want to be. Murder is throwing yourself into the left and embracing prison abolition so hard it hurts, because you know that if the state can lock up someone who doesn’t “matter,” the state can lock up anyone. 

Murder is throwing away or selling every childhood thing you ever possessed because you are not by nature a sentimental person, but never giving up that doll you were gifted, the doll you coveted and wanted more than anything else, three weeks before your father was shot and killed. You have no pictures, no mementos, no nothing, but she sits at the top of your bookshelf to this day, a weighty child goddess, the symbol of your torn and labyrinthine childhood.

Murder is having to see a bunch of petty-ass people using actual trauma that real life people have experienced and continue to experience to directly and repeatedly harass your friends online (and yourself, indirectly, by tagging their hateful shit) because you and your friends like a fictional fucking character who, by nature of being fictional, did not actually murder any real existing people.

Murder is building your entire identity around how you sympathize, deeply, with the person who killed your own father, because that takes hard work and deep empathy and the ability to see past a lot of bullshit just to get to that point, and having some fuck-ass anons act like none of that matters because there is (apparently, I must assume) some omnipotent god of justice saying “Fuck you and everything you’ve been through” that apparently only these bullies can hear.

Murder is seeing fandom moralizers talk about murder like they understand it. Like they’ve read this, plus the last ten-plus paragraphs, and decided they know best anyway because mommy and daddy always told them Criminals Are Bad and walked wide-eyed and innocent into a social network overrun with TERFs, exclusionists, and a rotten segment of the political left that acts like some extras straight out of The Crucible.

I have never once been triggered by anything relating to my father’s murder. I cried at the Resurrection Stone scene in The Deathly Hallows, I cried when I completed when I completed the DA2 DLC Legacy after the end of act 2. When I see a parent die, I have an emotional reaction, because it’s familiar.

But the Akechi antis who all say “but he killed people!”, The Akechi antis who say “murder is still murder”?

The murder of my father is still murder. The man who killed him, his murderer, is still regardless a human being, the man who killed him deserves sympathy and compassion and understanding and respect and, above all, a chance.

I am a living example of what’s left behind when someone is murdered. You can walk into the mausoleum where my father is interred, face his headstone, and let the earth open up beneath you and drop you into hell.

So most sincerely, from someone who lost their father to gun violence, to armed robbery, to murder: Stop fucking using our lived experiences as your justification to harass and bully people online for committing the Grave Moral Sin of just liking a video game character.

Between the fact that the American government is keeping real people in concentration camps and a bunch of strangers on the internet liking a twiggy teenage anime boy who used a fantasy world to kill people who don’t exist, which one is actually important to deserve your moral outrage?

You’ll die eventually; fascism won’t kill itself.

[confrontingbabble-on]

“Mixed messages, repetition, bad fact checking, awkward constructions, inconsistent voice, weak character development, boring tangents, contradictions, passages where nobody can tell what the heck the writer meant to convey.  This doesn’t sound like a book that was dictated by a deity.

A well-written book should be clear and concise, with all factual statements accurate and characters neither two-dimensional nor plagued with multiple personality disorder—unless they actually are. A book written by a god should be some of the best writing ever produced. It should beat Shakespeare on enduring relevance, Stephen Hawking on scientific accuracy, Pablo Neruda on poetry, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn on ethical coherence, and Maya Angelou on sheer lucid beauty—just to name a few.

Why does the Bible so fail to meet this mark? One obvious answer, of course, is that neither the Bible—nor any derivative work like the Quran or Book of Mormon—was actually dictated by the Christian god or other celestial messengers. We humans may yearn for advice that is “god-breathed” but in reality, our sacred texts were written by fallible human beings who, try as they might, fell short of perfection in the ways that we all do.

But why is the Bible so badly written? Falling short of perfection is one thing, but the Bible has been the subject of literally thousands of follow-on books by people who were genuinely trying to figure out what it means. Despite best efforts, their conclusions don’t converge, which is one reason Christianity has fragmented into over 40,000 denominations and non-denominations.

Here are just a few of the reasons for this tangled web of disagreements and the generally terrible quality of much biblical writing (with some notable exceptions) by literary standards.

Too Many Cooks... Far from being a single unified whole, the Bible is actually a collection of texts or text fragments from many authors. We don’t know the number of writers precisely, and—despite the ancient traditions that assigned authorship to famous people such as Moses, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John—we don’t know who most of them were. We do know that the men who inscribed the biblical texts had widely different language skills, cultural and technological surroundings, worldviews and supernatural beliefs—along with varying objectives.

Scholars estimate that the earliest of the Bible’s writers lived and wrote about 800 years before the Christian era, and the most recent lived and wrote around 100 CE. They ranged from tribal nomads to subjects of the Roman Empire. To make matters more complicated, some of them borrowed fragments of even earlier stories and songs that had been handed down via oral tradition from Sumerian cultures and religions. For example, flood myths that predate the Noah story can be found across Mesopotamia, with a boat-building hero named Gilgamesh or Ziusudra or Atrahasis.

Bible writers adapted earlier stories and laws to their own cultural and religious context, but they couldn’t always reconcile differences among handed-down texts, and often may not have known that alternative versions existed. Later, variants got bundled together. This is why the Bible contains two different creation myths, three sets of Ten Commandments, and four contradictory versions of the Easter story.

Forgery and Counter-forgery...  Best-selling Bible scholar Bart Ehrman has written a whole book about forgery in the New Testament, texts written under the names of famous men to make the writings more credible. This practice was so common among early Christians that nearly half of the books of the New Testament make false authorship claims, while others were assigned famous names after the fact. When books claiming to be written by one person were actually written by several, each seeking to elevate his own point of view, we shouldn’t be surprised if the writing styles clash or they espouse contradictory attitudes.

Histories, Poetries, None-of-These...  Christians may treat the Bible as a unified book of divine guidance, but in reality it is a mix of different genres: ancient myths, songs of worship, rule books, poetry, propaganda, gospels (yes, this was a common literary genre), coded political commentary, and mysticism, to name just a few. Translators and church leaders down through the centuries haven’t always known which of these they were reading. Modern comedians sometimes make a living by deliberately garbling genres—for example, by taking statements literally when they are meant figuratively—or distorting things someone else has written or said. Whether they realize it or not, biblical literalists in the pulpit sometimes make a living doing the same thing.

Lost in Translation... The books of the Bible were originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, though not in the modern versions of these languages. (Think of trying to read Chaucer’s Old English.) When Roman Catholic Christianity ascended, church leaders embraced the Hebrew Bible and translated it into then-modern Latin, calling it the Old Testament. They also translated texts from early Jesus-worshipers and voted on which to include in their canon of scripture. These became the New Testament. Ironically, some New Testament writers themselves had already quoted bad translations of Old Testament scriptures. These multi-layered imperfect translations inspired key doctrines of the Christian faith, the most famous being the Virgin Birth.

Most English versions of the Bible have been translated directly from the earliest available manuscripts, but translators have their own biases, some of which were shaped by those early Latin translations and some of which are shaped by more recent theological considerations or cultural trends. After American Protestants pivoted away from supporting abortion in the 1980s, some actually re-translated a troublesome Bible verse that treated the death of a fetus differently from the death of a person. The meaning of the Bible passage changed.

But even when scholars scrupulously try to avoid biases, an enormous amount of information is simply lost in translation. One challenge is that the meanings of a story, or even a single word, depend on what preceded it in the culture at large or a specific conversation, or both. Imagine that a teenager has asked his mom for a specific amount of money for a special night out, and Mom says, “You can have $50.” She is communicating something very different if the kid asked for $20 (Mom is saying splurge a bit) versus if the kid had asked for $100 (Mom is saying rein yourself in).

As the mother opens her wallet, the son scrolls through restaurant options on Yelp and exclaims, “Sick!” Mom blinks, then mentally translates into the slang of her own generation which, her son’s perceptions aside, doesn’t come close to translating across 2000 years of history.

Inside baseball...  A lot changes in 2000 years. As we read the Bible through modern eyes, it helps to remember that we’re getting a glimpse, however imperfectly translated, of the urgent concerns of our Iron Age ancestors. Back then, writing anything was tremendously labor intensive, so we know that information that may seem irrelevant now (because it is) was of acute importance to the men who first carved those words into clay, or inked them on animal skins or papyrus.

Long lists of begats in the Gospels; greetings to this person and that in the Pauline epistles; instructions on how to sacrifice a dove in Leviticus or purify a virgin war captive in Numbers; ‘chosen people’ genealogies; prohibitions against eating creatures that don’t exist; pages of threats against enemies of Israel; coded rants against the Roman Empire. . . As a modern person reading the Bible, one can’t help but think about how the pages might have been better filled. Could none of this have been pared away? Couldn’t the writers have made room instead for a few short sentences that might have changed history Wash your hands after you poop. Don’t have sex with someone who doesn’t want to. Witchcraft isn’t real. Slavery is forbidden. We are all God’s chosen people. Answer: No, they couldn’t have fit these in, even without the begats. Of course there was physical space on papyrus and parchment. But the minds of the writers were fully occupied with other concerns. In their world, who begat who mattered(!) while challenging prevailing Iron Age views of illness or women and children or slaves was simply inconceivable.

It’s Not About You...  The Gospel According to Matthew (not actually authored by Matthew) was written for an audience of Jews. He was a recruiter for the ancient equivalent of Jews for Jesus. That is why, in the Matthew account, the Last Supper is timed as a Passover meal. By contrast, the Gospel According to John was written to persuade pagan Roman prospects, so the author timed the events differently. This is just one of many explicit contradictions between the four Gospel accounts of Jesus’s death and resurrection.The contradictions in the Gospel stories—and many other parts of the Bible, are not there because the writers were confused. Quite the opposite. Each writer knew his own goals and audience, and adapted hand-me-down stories or texts to fit, sometimes changing the meaning in the process. The folks who are confused are those who treat the book as if they were the audience, as if each verse was a timeless and perfect message sent to them by God.  Their yearning for a set of clean answers to life’s messy questions has created a mess.

A good culling might do a lot to improve things. Imagine a version of the Bible containing only that which has enduring beauty or usefulness. Unfortunately, the collection in the Bible has been bound together for so long that Christian authorities (with a few exceptions) don’t trust themselves to unbind it. Maybe the thought of deciding what goes and stays feels overwhelming or even dangerous. Or maybe, deep down, Bible-believing Evangelicals and other fundamentalists suspect that if they started culling, there wouldn’t be a whole lot left. So, they keep it all, in the process binding themselves to the worldview and very human imperfections of our Iron Age ancestors.And that’s what makes the Good Book so bad.”

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington.

https://valerietarico.com/2018/01/28/why-is-the-bible-so-badly-written/

[gospacegay]

LRTIHEW: Part Five

The title stands for “Longest Rusame Thing I Have Ever Written”.

First Chapter: https://gospacegay.tumblr.com/post/165808913233/lrtihew-part-one

Previous Chapter: https://gospacegay.tumblr.com/post/165836008533/lrtihew-part-four

There is swearing, fluff, eventual smut, insanity, and lord knows what else.

It was an early spring day, plants struggling to defy the snow. Several fresh chutes had began poking through the thawing white landscape. Ivan could almost feel the land returning to life, putting a spring in his step.

Perhaps it was the trade deals with America that made him buzz with energy. Alfred's peoples were absolutely addicted to oil. They would trade anything for it, go to any length. Ivan's money starved government was a reasonable seller. It was a capitalist match made in heaven. He even felt happier, for the sudden flush of American dollars overjoyed his poorest citizens.

His phone rang half way through shoveling a path to the front door. He paused to answer the device, cheerfully greeting “Hello!” in his native language. “Greetings Russia.” the stern voice of Germany replied in English. There was never a good reason for him to call Ivan. Sanctions, accusations, reminders of world meetings... nothing worth caring about.

“There vill be a meeting, your attendance is required.” Germany continued to speak when Ivan remained silent. “How does this concern me?” Ivan retorted, not impressed by the European power. “The American president has suddenly died. It concerns the entire vorld, Russia.” the German explained, humorless as always. “I suppose I am coming.” Ivan feigned disinterest, though he was extremely pleased.

Ivan had yet to ask for repayment from Alfred. Initially, he was going to use it to more favorable trade. That seemed to happen on it's own. Later, he planned blackmail his way into the next inaugural party. He received an invitation from Alfred literally an hour after his president's death. That had been almost two days ago. Ivan was honestly at a bit perplexed about what to do with his power over Alfred. Perhaps he could extort a visit out of the young American. His spring weather was so much more pleasant.

Meeting in Berlin three days later, Ivan had a hassle free flight. His pushy boss had discussed at great length plans for whoever the replacement would be. Ivan largely dismissed the manipulative plans, nodding but not really listening. His current leader had no idea Ivan was behind the assassination, with his series of ancient connections. Ignorance was indeed bliss.

The meeting appeared to be small. Canada, Syria, China, India, Israel, and the Philippines were seated around a small table. America was not present in the somewhat intimate setting. Russia took his seat next to India, across from China. Being on good terms with both nations, he attempted small talk.

“What is this meeting about, comrades?” Ivan asked in feigned obliviousness. “I do not know, Mr. Russia.” India replied politely, less afraid to look him in the than the others. The eclectic nation's tropical exports were valuable to the sugar loving Russian, and he knew it. China looked incredibly tense, hands tented in thought. Canada cleared his throat, barely attracting attention. He took a breath to speak, but was interrupted by American stepping into the room, followed by Germany.

Alfred looked genuinely upset, eyes glassy. His posture was less bold than usual, as if stricken by deep sadness. The American was a good actor when he wanted to be. “Trading partners... friends. All of you were in the process of arranging contracts or exports with my government. President James S Selkirk died five days ago. His illness was long hidden, and so painful... It might have pushed him into making bad decisions. Any deals or the like from the past two months is currently being analyzed. A few things are already been reversed. My government apologizes for the inconvenience...” Alfred sniffled once during his speech, sitting after a moment of silence. Very fine acting.

The pragmatic China was first to speak, sounding less than sympathetic. “How did he die?” he asked with narrowed eyes. “His immune system started killing him, it probably started as an infection... We aren't really sure yet. The boss was always so secretive.” Alfred explained solemnly. “Who is the next in command?” Canada asked, barely heard by most.

“Oh... well... Normally my vice president would be taking over, but he's... compromised. So the speaker of the senate is taking over. Seems like a nice enough guy... his name is...” Alfred paused speaking to dab at a crocodile tear and dig a letter out of his pocket. “... Yuri Kozloff? God, am I even saying that right?” he muttered. Ivan was pleased Alfred chose one of his long buried assets. The man was actually a child of Russian spies sent over in the late 1970's. Yuri Kozlov was completely unaware he had been groomed to gain political power, if his parents were still doing as they were trained.

Israel and Syria glanced at Ivan with suspicion, then returned their attention to Alfred. India didn't seem bothered at all. “I didn't know your house of commons was so multicultural.” Canada noted softly in the background. “It's a senate... and I'm trying.” Alfred grumbled darkly. His false mood of grief and irritation seemed to silence possible complaints.

After asking several questions, China seemed satiated and left rather suddenly. Israel and Canada wanted to stay behind and comfort America in his faked time of need. Syria left even earlier than China, cursing in his own language. Ivan remained reserved, speaking rarely, if at all. He was a master of mind games but a somewhat pitiful actor. India stood to leave, then looked to his long time coal and gas provider.

“I though you would be happy a Russian was in charge of USA.” he noted cautiously. “If my own children were happy, they would not leave me for another nation.” Ivan stated flatly, voicing an honest opinion. It was insulting when citizens gave up fixing their own lands and moved away. For living nations, it was rude and occasionally fatal. Prussia, annoying cockroach that he was, provided living proof that belief in a fallen country kept one alive. There was enough pretentious German pricks claiming to be of Prussian heritage that the ex-nation wouldn't simply die.

Put off by Russia's standard behavior, India left the room quickly. Alfred and his fooled companions soon left to help him get over his imagined sorrows. Ivan stood, confronted by Germany. “I do not know how, but you are responsible for America's boss dying.” the formal nation accused, looking Russia in the eyes. How brave, or rather, how foolish of the German.

“Germany, I am flattered. I have little wealth or time. Why would I waste such things on lesser people?” The ash blonde lied smoothly, petting Germany's jaw line in disturbingly close fashion. The strict German shuddered in fearful disgust and stepped several feet away. This physical distraction seemed to pull the suspicious nation from his chain of thought. Smirking in smug fashion, Ivan stood and left.

[jspark3000]

Ugly Asian Male: On Being the Least Attractive Guy in the Room

Statistically, I’m the least attractive person in the dating scene. Alongside black women, the Asian-American male is considered the most ugly and undesirable person in the room.

Take it from Steve Harvey, who won’t eat what he can’t pronounce:

Eddie Huang, creator of the groundbreaking Asian-American sitcom Fresh Off the Boat, responded to Steve Harvey in The New York Times:

“[Every] Asian-American man knows what the dominant culture has to say about us. We count good, we bow well, we are technologically proficient, we’re naturally subordinate, our male anatomy is the size of a thumb drive and we could never in a thousand millenniums be a threat to steal your girl.” 

Asian-American men, like me, know the score. That is, we don’t count at all.

Hollywood won’t bank on me. Think: When was the last time you saw an Asian male kiss a non-Asian female in a movie or TV show? Or when was the last time an Asian-American male was the desired person in a romantic comedy? And more specifically, when where they not Kung Fu practitioners or computer geniuses? I can only think of two examples: Steven Yeun as Glenn from The Walking Dead and John Cho as Harold from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. So it takes either a zombie apocalypse or the munchies to see a fully breathing Asian male lead, or a Photoshop campaign #StarringJohnCho for an Asian protagonist with actual thoughts in his head. 

It’s so rare to see a three-dimensional Asian male character, with actual hopes and dreams, that Steven Yeun remarks in GQ Magazine:

GQ Magazine: When you look back on your long tenure on The Walking Dead, what makes you proudest?

Steven Yeun: Honestly, the privilege that I had to play an Asian-American character that didn’t have to apologize at all for being Asian, or even acknowledge that he was Asian. Obviously, you’re going to address it. It’s real. It’s a thing. I am Asian, and Glenn is Asian. But I was very honored to be able to play somebody that showed multiple sides, and showed depth, and showed a way to relate to everyone. It was quite an honor, in that regard. This didn’t exist when I was a kid. I didn’t get to see Glenn. I didn’t get to see a fully formed Asian-American person on my television, where you could say, “That dude just belongs here.” Kids, growing up now, can see this show and see a face that they recognize. And go, “Oh my god. That’s my face too.”

Growing up, I never had that, either. I can’t help but think of this scene from the biopic, Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, in which Bruce Lee watches the controversial Asian stereotype played by Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany’s to a theater filled with derisive laughter. This moment with Bruce Lee is most likely fictional, but the weight of it is not lost on us:

This was a powerful moment for me as a kid, because I grew up with the same sort of mocking laughter, whether it was watching Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom with my white neighbors, or being assailed by the Bruce Lee wail in the local grocery store. I knew they were laughing at me, and not with.

“But hey wait!”—I’m told, with fervent knowing, “I know some Asian guys who are hot!” and I’m pointed to an infamous Buzzfeed list that shows “the hottest Asian men who will prove you wrong about Asian men,” with zero irony. Yes, I’ve seen the list. And yes, they’re like I expected: hard-rock glistening abs that are impossible for the working Asian dad, with classically European, chiseled faces and surgically-lifted eyes. More than that, it plays into the same creepy objectification of Asians as sexual play-toys.

Perhaps even worse than the portrayal of Asian men is how they’re not. More often, an acting role becomes “whitewashed” to suit a global audience, or an Anglo-American is the audience-avatar as a safety net for box office returns (remember, the last samurai in The Last Samurai was white). 

I know this is a shrill, ill-discussed subject with all kinds of variables, but from the prosthetic slanted eyes in Cloud Atlas to race-bleaching in Ghost in the Shell to the the “Yellow Peril” demonizing of Asian males as evil ninjas and drug dealers in Daredevil and Iron Fist, Asian-Americans—especially males, as females can still literally serve as co-stars—are vastly both mis- and under-represented. We’re used for a footnote joke at the Academy Awards (the same year that there was a campaign called #OscarsSoWhite), an overly loud insane person in raunchy comedies like The Hangover or Saving Silverman, or a “funny foreigners” punchline in the falsely interpreted romantic comedy, 500 Days of Summer.

One of the obvious reasons that Asian-Americans are sidelined in the mainstream is because there’s no money in it. It’s that simple. Freddie Wong, in his parody video of Ghost in the Shell casting Scarlett Johansson, says it best:

“Because, as a studio executive, the immorality of whitewashing a beloved work of Japanese culture is outweighed by my fear that audiences won’t want to watch a movie starring an Asian woman. And I don’t have the balls to take that risk. Besides, whatever political outrage this decision evokes doesn’t materially effect how much money I make.”

In other words, we’re stuck in a Catch-22. There can be no roles for an Asian-American unless it guarantees a profit, but since we’re not portrayed regularly in most media, there’s never a chance for Asian-American leads to draw a profit in the first place. I get the bottom line here, and I’m not so oblivious to consider that investors are all idealistic innovators. The creative risk is too daring. From an executive’s point of view, I can almost painfully understand.

So besides whitewashing an entirely Asian property, the next best thing is to throw in a scrap of representation by using the whole stereotype.  Make the Asian guy the smartest or the martial artist, and there’s your token diversity. It’s why major Hollywood blockbusters have now made shoehorned references to China: because they’re a huge source of box office revenue, and a pandering shout-out to China, no matter how forced or unoriginal, will mean more ticket sales. (It’s even going the other way, with Chinese movies like The Great Wall casting a white role to get more sales in America.)

Yet these roles have little nuance and only serve to further someone else’s plot. I’m the Manic Pixie Dream Girl and the Magical Negro, rolled into a non-threatening sidekick or the meditative Zen master. I will never be the action star or the romantic lead. God forbid that an Asian-American male would ever win against a non-Asian.

In some cases, Asians have capitalized on their own mockery by making fun of themselves in minstrel-like deprecation. I was surprised to find that the first winner of Last Comic Standing was a Vietnamese-American named Dat Phan, until I saw his routine, which went for the lowest hanging fruit possible. If you can’t beat the laughter, why not become the jester? Even other Asians want in on their own sabotage. 

Representation for the Asian-American only seems to happens when it aims for the least common denominator. The cheapest move, of course, is to completely hijack the “exotic quaintness” of Asian culture without going “fully Asian,” in order to boost a pseudo-masculinity. It’s easy: throw in Chinese tattoos or an Asian-type mysticism, and the non-Asian character instantly gains credibility. You can make up an Asian-sounding name, like “David Wong,” actual name Jason Pargin, a white author at Cracked.com, or Michael Derrick Hudson, a white poet who uses pen name “Yi-Fen Chou,” and watch the doors open. All the benefits, none of the fuss. Use my name without the actual struggle.

Of course, Asian-Americans are accused of allowing such undercover racism in the mainstream because we’re silent, passive, and obedient. We’re easy targets. We don’t typically march or cause disruption. We’re not socially involved. It’s why a huge clothing company like Abercrombie & Fitch can make shirts with Asian stereotypes like “Two Wongs Can Make It White.” It’s why Stephen Colbert (whom I love, by the way), can get away with non-apologies when he cracks yet another Asian joke. It’s why Ryo Oyamada, a 24 year old Japanese college student, can get run over by a police car in New York, and the officer goes free and no one chants in the streets.  

If you replaced the race with any other, the response would be louder, with solidarity on every side. Asian? No one cares. Literally and statistically, no one cares. Worst of all, it appears that Asians don’t care, either. It’s always a surprise when we speak up. You can drag an Asian-American off an airplane, and the most noise you’ll hear from other Asians is that they just don’t want to be seen as noisy and displeasing. 

The thing is, there are no shortage of Asian-American men who are physically and intellectually desirable, who could portray themselves as fully living beings with compelling stories and relatable conflicts. Is it possible that the mainstream, for all its talk about diversity, is afraid of encountering a man who is both Asian-American and attractive? Is it simply intolerable to witness an Asian-American switch lanes between the sidekick and the star? Has the Asian-American male been permanently imprinted as comic relief or Karate expert? Is it too culturally explosive to pair an Asian-American male with a non-Asian female? Can we really handle an Asian alpha male who gets the girl at the end? (Much less a non-Asian female lead get an Asian guy at the end?)

I have to admit that some of this is on us. No, I don’t mean that we brought it on ourselves. I would never, ever perpetuate blaming the victim. I mean that we can still fight against the pervasive, seemingly impermeable walls around the identity of the Asian male, by reaching and demanding for more challenging roles in every sphere of media. The shift in perception of the Asian-American male coincides with a shift in self-perception. 

Is it also possible to take a creative risk without guarantees? I know today’s market is less likely to pave new ground, with its risk-averse eye on sequels and reboots and recycling the same tale, but I wonder how we can tell new tales without resorting to the cheapest, easiest cliches, without exploiting Asian culture for “mystical credibility” but celebrating its uniqueness with a thoughtful exploration of both its treasures and its trials.  

I’ll leave you with a quote from Lewis Tan, the half-Asian-American actor who was rejected for the role of Iron Fist. In a recent interview, he says:

“I’ve turned down a couple roles. My agents will tell you when I first signed with them, I turned down the first three or four things that came up. I’ve just turned down roles that were super-stereotypically Asian that I didn’t feel represented me and I didn’t want to do. Not to necessarily say they’re bad roles, but it just wasn’t me. I’m not going to do this dorky Asian accent and just play someone in the background. That’s not why I’m here to act. I’m here to represent and to make stories that I believe in and to achieve new things in the industry.”

[stoweboyd]

Mayor Mitch Landrieu’s Gallier Hall address, 19 May 2017

Immediately before New Orleans removed a statue of Robert E Lee -- the fourth Confederate monument to be removed in recent weeks -- Mayor Mitch Landrieu gave a remarkable speech, one that will have, I hope, a major impact on the US going forward. And, presages what I expect will be a national presence for Mayor Landrieu in the future.

Thank you for coming.

The soul of our beloved City is deeply rooted in a history that has evolved over thousands of years; rooted in a diverse people who have been here together every step of the way – for both good and for ill.

It is a history that holds in its heart the stories of Native Americans: the Choctaw, Houma Nation, the Chitimacha. Of Hernando de Soto, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Acadians, the Islenos, the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Color, the Haitians, the Germans, both the empires of Francexii and Spain. The Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the south and central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more.

You see: New Orleans is truly a city of many nations, a melting pot, a bubbling cauldron of many cultures.

There is no other place quite like it in the world that so eloquently exemplifies the uniquely American motto: e pluribus unum — out of many we are one.

But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were brought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery of rape, of torture.

America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp.

So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth.

And it immediately begs the questions: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame … all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans.

So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission.

There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it. For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth.

As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.”

So today I want to speak about why we chose to remove these four monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, but also how and why this process can move us towards healing and understanding of each other.

So, let’s start with the facts.

The historic record is clear: the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity.

First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy.

It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots.

These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for.

After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city.

Should you have further doubt about the true goals of the Confederacy, in the very weeks before the war broke out, the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made it clear that the Confederate cause was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy.

He said in his now famous ‘Cornerstone speech’ that the Confederacy’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.”

Now, with these shocking words still ringing in your ears, I want to try to gently peel from your hands the grip on a false narrative of our history that I think weakens us and make straight a wrong turn we made many years ago so we can more closely connect with integrity to the founding principles of our nation and forge a clearer and straighter path toward a better city and more perfect union.

Last year, President Barack Obama echoed these sentiments about the need to contextualize and remember all of our history. He recalled a piece of stone, a slave auction block engraved with a marker commemorating a single moment in 1830 when Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay stood and spoke from it.

President Obama said, “Consider what this artifact tells us about history … on a stone where day after day for years, men and women … bound and bought and sold and bid like cattle on a stone worn down by the tragedy of over a thousand bare feet. For a long time the only thing we considered important, the singular thing we once chose to commemorate as history with a plaque were the unmemorable speeches of two powerful men.”

A piece of stone – one stone. Both stories were history. One story told. One story forgotten or maybe even purposefully ignored.

As clear as it is for me today … for a long time, even though I grew up in one of New Orleans’ most diverse neighborhoods, even with my family’s long proud history of fighting for civil rights … I must have passed by those monuments a million times without giving them a second thought.

So I am not judging anybody, I am not judging people. We all take our own journey on race. I just hope people listen like I did when my dear friend Wynton Marsalis helped me see the truth. He asked me to think about all the people who have left New Orleans because of our exclusionary attitudes.

Another friend asked me to consider these four monuments from the perspective of an African American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop of our beautiful city. Can you do it?

Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too?

We all know the answer to these very simple questions.

When you look into this child’s eyes is the moment when the searing truth comes into focus for us. This is the moment when we know what is right and what we must do. We can’t walk away from this truth.

And I knew that taking down the monuments was going to be tough, but you elected me to do the right thing, not the easy thing and this is what that looks like. So relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else. This is not about politics, this is not about blame or retaliation. This is not a naïve quest to solve all our problems at once.

This is, however, about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and, most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves, making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong.

Otherwise, we will continue to pay a price with discord, with division, and yes, with violence.

To literally put the confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, it is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future.

History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong.

And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans — or anyone else — to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse and absurd.

Centuries-old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place.

Here is the essential truth: we are better together than we are apart. Indivisibility is our essence. Isn’t this the gift that the people of New Orleans have given to the world?

We radiate beauty and grace in our food, in our music, in our architecture, in our joy of life, in our celebration of death; in everything that we do. We gave the world this funky thing called jazz; the most uniquely American art form that is developed across the ages from different cultures.

Think about second lines, think about Mardi Gras, think about muffaletta, think about the Saints, gumbo, red beans and rice. By God, just think. All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity.

We are proof that out of many we are one — and better for it! Out of many we are one — and we really do love it!

And yet, we still seem to find so many excuses for not doing the right thing. Again, remember President Bush’s words, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.”

We forget, we deny how much we really depend on each other, how much we need each other. We justify our silence and inaction by manufacturing noble causes that marinate in historical denial. We still find a way to say “wait, not so fast.”

But like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “wait has almost always meant never.”

We can’t wait any longer. We need to change. And we need to change now. No more waiting. This is not just about statues, this is about our attitudes and behavior as well. If we take these statues down and don’t change to become a more open and inclusive society this would have all been in vain.

While some have driven by these monuments every day and either revered their beauty or failed to see them at all, many of our neighbors and fellow Americans see them very clearly. Many are painfully aware of the long shadows their presence casts, not only literally but figuratively. And they clearly receive the message that the Confederacy and the cult of the lost cause intended to deliver.

Earlier this week, as the cult of the lost cause statue of P.G.T Beauregard came down, world renowned musician Terence Blanchard stood watch, his wife Robin and their two beautiful daughters at their side.

Terence went to a high school on the edge of City Park named after one of America’s greatest heroes and patriots, John F. Kennedy. But to get there he had to pass by this monument to a man who fought to deny him his humanity.

He said, “I’ve never looked at them as a source of pride … it’s always made me feel as if they were put there by people who don’t respect us. This is something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. It’s a sign that the world is changing.”

Yes, Terence, it is, and it is long overdue.

Now is the time to send a new message to the next generation of New Orleanians who can follow in Terence and Robin’s remarkable footsteps.

A message about the future, about the next 300 years and beyond; let us not miss this opportunity New Orleans and let us help the rest of the country do the same. Because now is the time for choosing. Now is the time to actually make this the City we always should have been, had we gotten it right in the first place.

We should stop for a moment and ask ourselves — at this point in our history, after Katrina, after Rita, after Ike, after Gustav, after the national recession, after the BP oil catastrophe and after the tornado — if presented with the opportunity to build monuments that told our story or to curate these particular spaces … would these monuments be what we want the world to see? Is this really our story?

We have not erased history; we are becoming part of the city’s history by righting the wrong image these monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future generations.

And unlike when these Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy, we now have a chance to create not only new symbols, but to do it together, as one people.

In our blessed land we all come to the table of democracy as equals.

We have to reaffirm our commitment to a future where each citizen is guaranteed the uniquely American gifts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

That is what really makes America great and today it is more important than ever to hold fast to these values and together say a self-evident truth that out of many we are one. That is why today we reclaim these spaces for the United States of America.

Because we are one nation, not two; indivisible with liberty and justice for all, not some. We all are part of one nation, all pledging allegiance to one flag, the flag of the United States of America. And New Orleanians are in, all of the way.

It is in this union and in this truth that real patriotism is rooted and flourishes.

Instead of revering a 4-year brief historical aberration that was called the Confederacy we can celebrate all 300 years of our rich, diverse history as a place named New Orleans and set the tone for the next 300 years.

After decades of public debate, of anger, of anxiety, of anticipation, of humiliation and of frustration. After public hearings and approvals from three separate community led commissions. After two robust public hearings and a 6-1 vote by the duly elected New Orleans City Council. After review by 13 different federal and state judges. The full weight of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government has been brought to bear and the monuments in accordance with the law have been removed.

So now is the time to come together and heal and focus on our larger task. Not only building new symbols, but making this city a beautiful manifestation of what is possible and what we as a people can become.

Let us remember what the once exiled, imprisoned and now universally loved  Nelson Mandela and what he said after the fall of apartheid. “If the pain has often been unbearable and the revelations shocking to all of us, it  is because they indeed bring us the beginnings of a common understanding of what happened and a steady restoration of the nation’s humanity.”

So before we part let us again state the truth clearly.

The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered.

As a community, we must recognize the significance of removing New Orleans’ Confederate monuments. It is our acknowledgment that now is the time to take stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history. Anything less would render generations of courageous struggle and soul-searching a truly lost cause.

Anything less would fall short of the immortal words of our greatest President Abraham Lincoln, who with an open heart and clarity of purpose calls on us today to unite as one people when he said:

“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to do all which may achieve and cherish: a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.”

Thank you.

[island-delver-go]

Thank you for coming. The soul of our beloved City is deeply rooted in a history that has evolved over thousands of years; rooted in a diverse people who have been here together every step of the way – for both good and for ill. It is a history that holds in its heart the stories of Native Americans: the Choctaw, Houma Nation, the Chitimacha. Of Hernando de Soto, Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, the Acadians, the Islenos, the enslaved people from Senegambia, Free People of Color, the Haitians, the Germans, both the empires of Francexii and Spain. The Italians, the Irish, the Cubans, the south and central Americans, the Vietnamese and so many more. You see: New Orleans is truly a city of many nations, a melting pot, a bubbling cauldron of many cultures. There is no other place quite like it in the world that so eloquently exemplifies the uniquely American motto: e pluribus unum — out of many we are one. But there are also other truths about our city that we must confront. New Orleans was America’s largest slave market: a port where hundreds of thousands of souls were brought, sold and shipped up the Mississippi River to lives of forced labor of misery of rape, of torture. America was the place where nearly 4,000 of our fellow citizens were lynched, 540 alone in Louisiana; where the courts enshrined ‘separate but equal’; where Freedom riders coming to New Orleans were beaten to a bloody pulp. So when people say to me that the monuments in question are history, well what I just described is real history as well, and it is the searing truth. And it immediately begs the questions: why there are no slave ship monuments, no prominent markers on public land to remember the lynchings or the slave blocks; nothing to remember this long chapter of our lives; the pain, the sacrifice, the shame … all of it happening on the soil of New Orleans. So for those self-appointed defenders of history and the monuments, they are eerily silent on what amounts to this historical malfeasance, a lie by omission. There is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence of it. For America and New Orleans, it has been a long, winding road, marked by great tragedy and great triumph. But we cannot be afraid of our truth. As President George W. Bush said at the dedication ceremony for the National Museum of African American History & Culture, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.” So today I want to speak about why we chose to remove these four monuments to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, but also how and why this process can move us towards healing and understanding of each other. So, let’s start with the facts. The historic record is clear: the Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and P.G.T. Beauregard statues were not erected just to honor these men, but as part of the movement which became known as The Cult of the Lost Cause. This ‘cult’ had one goal — through monuments and through other means — to rewrite history to hide the truth, which is that the Confederacy was on the wrong side of humanity. First erected over 166 years after the founding of our city and 19 years after the end of the Civil War, the monuments that we took down were meant to rebrand the history of our city and the ideals of a defeated Confederacy. It is self-evident that these men did not fight for the United States of America, They fought against it. They may have been warriors, but in this cause they were not patriots. These statues are not just stone and metal. They are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. These monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized Confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for. After the Civil War, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about who was still in charge in this city. Should you have further doubt about the true goals of the Confederacy, in the very weeks before the war broke out, the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made it clear that the Confederate cause was about maintaining slavery and white supremacy. He said in his now famous ‘Cornerstone speech’ that the Confederacy’s “cornerstone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” Now, with these shocking words still ringing in your ears, I want to try to gently peel from your hands the grip on a false narrative of our history that I think weakens us and make straight a wrong turn we made many years ago so we can more closely connect with integrity to the founding principles of our nation and forge a clearer and straighter path toward a better city and more perfect union. Last year, President Barack Obama echoed these sentiments about the need to contextualize and remember all of our history. He recalled a piece of stone, a slave auction block engraved with a marker commemorating a single moment in 1830 when Andrew Jackson and Henry Clay stood and spoke from it. President Obama said, “Consider what this artifact tells us about history … on a stone where day after day for years, men and women … bound and bought and sold and bid like cattle on a stone worn down by the tragedy of over a thousand bare feet. For a long time the only thing we considered important, the singular thing we once chose to commemorate as history with a plaque were the unmemorable speeches of two powerful men.” A piece of stone – one stone. Both stories were history. One story told. One story forgotten or maybe even purposefully ignored. As clear as it is for me today … for a long time, even though I grew up in one of New Orleans’ most diverse neighborhoods, even with my family’s long proud history of fighting for civil rights … I must have passed by those monuments a million times without giving them a second thought. So I am not judging anybody, I am not judging people. We all take our own journey on race. I just hope people listen like I did when my dear friend Wynton Marsalis helped me see the truth. He asked me to think about all the people who have left New Orleans because of our exclusionary attitudes. Another friend asked me to consider these four monuments from the perspective of an African American mother or father trying to explain to their fifth grade daughter who Robert E. Lee is and why he stands atop of our beautiful city. Can you do it? Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her? Do you think she will feel inspired and hopeful by that story? Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential? Have you ever thought that if her potential is limited, yours and mine are too? We all know the answer to these very simple questions. When you look into this child’s eyes is the moment when the searing truth comes into focus for us. This is the moment when we know what is right and what we must do. We can’t walk away from this truth. And I knew that taking down the monuments was going to be tough, but you elected me to do the right thing, not the easy thing and this is what that looks like. So relocating these Confederate monuments is not about taking something away from someone else. This is not about politics, this is not about blame or retaliation. This is not a naïve quest to solve all our problems at once. This is, however, about showing the whole world that we as a city and as a people are able to acknowledge, understand, reconcile and, most importantly, choose a better future for ourselves, making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong. Otherwise, we will continue to pay a price with discord, with division, and yes, with violence. To literally put the confederacy on a pedestal in our most prominent places of honor is an inaccurate recitation of our full past, it is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future. History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over, and the Confederacy lost and we are better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong. And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans — or anyone else — to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential statues of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse and absurd. Centuries-old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth: we are better together than we are apart. Indivisibility is our essence. Isn’t this the gift that the people of New Orleans have given to the world? We radiate beauty and grace in our food, in our music, in our architecture, in our joy of life, in our celebration of death; in everything that we do. We gave the world this funky thing called jazz; the most uniquely American art form that is developed across the ages from different cultures. Think about second lines, think about Mardi Gras, think about muffaletta, think about the Saints, gumbo, red beans and rice. By God, just think. All we hold dear is created by throwing everything in the pot; creating, producing something better; everything a product of our historic diversity. We are proof that out of many we are one — and better for it! Out of many we are one — and we really do love it! And yet, we still seem to find so many excuses for not doing the right thing. Again, remember President Bush’s words, “A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.” We forget, we deny how much we really depend on each other, how much we need each other. We justify our silence and inaction by manufacturing noble causes that marinate in historical denial. We still find a way to say “wait, not so fast.” But like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “wait has almost always meant never.” We can’t wait any longer. We need to change. And we need to change now. No more waiting. This is not just about statues, this is about our attitudes and behavior as well. If we take these statues down and don’t change to become a more open and inclusive society this would have all been in vain. While some have driven by these monuments every day and either revered their beauty or failed to see them at all, many of our neighbors and fellow Americans see them very clearly. Many are painfully aware of the long shadows their presence casts, not only literally but figuratively. And they clearly receive the message that the Confederacy and the cult of the lost cause intended to deliver. Earlier this week, as the cult of the lost cause statue of P.G.T Beauregard came down, world renowned musician Terence Blanchard stood watch, his wife Robin and their two beautiful daughters at their side. Terence went to a high school on the edge of City Park named after one of America’s greatest heroes and patriots, John F. Kennedy. But to get there he had to pass by this monument to a man who fought to deny him his humanity. He said, “I’ve never looked at them as a source of pride … it’s always made me feel as if they were put there by people who don’t respect us. This is something I never thought I’d see in my lifetime. It’s a sign that the world is changing.” Yes, Terence, it is, and it is long overdue. Now is the time to send a new message to the next generation of New Orleanians who can follow in Terence and Robin’s remarkable footsteps. A message about the future, about the next 300 years and beyond; let us not miss this opportunity New Orleans and let us help the rest of the country do the same. Because now is the time for choosing. Now is the time to actually make this the City we always should have been, had we gotten it right in the first place. We should stop for a moment and ask ourselves — at this point in our history, after Katrina, after Rita, after Ike, after Gustav, after the national recession, after the BP oil catastrophe and after the tornado — if presented with the opportunity to build monuments that told our story or to curate these particular spaces … would these monuments be what we want the world to see? Is this really our story? We have not erased history; we are becoming part of the city’s history by righting the wrong image these monuments represent and crafting a better, more complete future for all our children and for future generations. And unlike when these Confederate monuments were first erected as symbols of white supremacy, we now have a chance to create not only new symbols, but to do it together, as one people. In our blessed land we all come to the table of democracy as equals. We have to reaffirm our commitment to a future where each citizen is guaranteed the uniquely American gifts of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That is what really makes America great and today it is more important than ever to hold fast to these values and together say a self-evident truth that out of many we are one. That is why today we reclaim these spaces for the United States of America. Because we are one nation, not two; indivisible with liberty and justice for all, not some. We all are part of one nation, all pledging allegiance to one flag, the flag of the United States of America. And New Orleanians are in, all of the way. It is in this union and in this truth that real patriotism is rooted and flourishes. Instead of revering a 4-year brief historical aberration that was called the Confederacy we can celebrate all 300 years of our rich, diverse history as a place named New Orleans and set the tone for the next 300 years. After decades of public debate, of anger, of anxiety, of anticipation, of humiliation and of frustration. After public hearings and approvals from three separate community led commissions. After two robust public hearings and a 6-1 vote by the duly elected New Orleans City Council. After review by 13 different federal and state judges. The full weight of the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government has been brought to bear and the monuments in accordance with the law have been removed. So now is the time to come together and heal and focus on our larger task. Not only building new symbols, but making this city a beautiful manifestation of what is possible and what we as a people can become. Let us remember what the once exiled, imprisoned and now universally loved  Nelson Mandela and what he said after the fall of apartheid. “If the pain has often been unbearable and the revelations shocking to all of us, it  is because they indeed bring us the beginnings of a common understanding of what happened and a steady restoration of the nation’s humanity.” So before we part let us again state the truth clearly. The Confederacy was on the wrong side of history and humanity. It sought to tear apart our nation and subjugate our fellow Americans to slavery. This is the history we should never forget and one that we should never again put on a pedestal to be revered. As a community, we must recognize the significance of removing New Orleans’ Confederate monuments. It is our acknowledgment that now is the time to take stock of, and then move past, a painful part of our history. Anything less would render generations of courageous struggle and soul-searching a truly lost cause. Anything less would fall short of the immortal words of our greatest President Abraham Lincoln, who with an open heart and clarity of purpose calls on us today to unite as one people when he said: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to do all which may achieve and cherish: a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” Thank you.

NOLA Mayor Landrieu via http://pulsegulfcoast.com/2017/05/transcript-of-new-orleans-mayor-landrieus-address-on-confederate-monuments

[bloodbaptisedarchive-blog]

REALLY  LONG  CHARACTER  SURVEY. RULES. repost ,   don’t  reblog !    tag 10 ! good  luck !       TAGGED. @judgmentcast​, holy SHIT.       TAGGING. literally ANYONE who’s up for a bit of a challenge.

BASICS.  FULL  NAME :  Harmon Mallory James.  NICKNAME :  James, Mr. James, Senior Advisor Harmon James.  AGE : Forty-two.  BIRTHDAY :   October 17th, 1998.  ETHNIC  GROUP : Caucasian.  NATIONALITY :  American.  LANGUAGE / S : English.  SEXUAL  ORIENTATION :   Homosexual.            ROMANTIC  ORIENTATION :  Homoromantic.  RELATIONSHIP  STATUS :  In a secret, long-term relationship with Minister Edwidge Owens.  CLASS : Upper class.  HOME  TOWN / AREA :   He was born in Boston, Massachusetts.  CURRENT  HOME : Washington, DC.  PROFESSION : Senior Advisor to the Leader of the New Founding Fathers.

PHYSICAL.  HAIR : Red. Much lighter when he was younger. Wavy.  EYES : Bright blue, sunken.  NOSE : Long with a slight downward hook.  FACE :  Defined smile lines, and other various lines and freckles.  LIPS :   Thin, small, and chapped.  COMPLEXION :  Pale, sickly, with light freckles peppered along his face.  BLEMISHES :  Nothing noticeable.  SCARS : A few on his face, a couple from various other incidents. Burn scars on his hands.  TATTOOS : None.  HEIGHT : 6'6".  WEIGHT : 185 lbs.  BUILD :    Slender, defined muscles in his arms, chest and legs. Sharp shoulders.  FEATURES :  Wide, sunken eyes. Large, gentle hands, folded at his chest. Painted fingernails. Intimidating stature.  ALLERGIES :  N/A.  USUAL  HAIR  STYLE :  Straightens his waves and slicks the whole thing back, parting it to the left.  USUAL  FACE  LOOK :  Expressionless. Ivory makeup still shows the freckles on his face. Though expressionless, he always tends to look alert, on his guard.   USUAL  CLOTHING : A suit, including a vest, ironed to crispness the day before. Suitable colours are grey, black, or beige. Ties, usually blue or red. A silver cross around his neck. Edwidge's promise ring on his middle left finger. Nails painted usually nude shades. Black or brown shoes shined until you can see your face in them.

PSYCHOLOGY.

 FEAR / S :  Fear of imperfection. A slight fear of disappointment. Fear of being outed.  ASPIRATION / S : To purge and purify: to rid the country of those that depend on them, them being the NFFA, the government, the healthcare system, housing, welfare. To make his superiors see that he can one day be as good as any of them. To lead the New Founding Fathers of America.  POSITIVE  TRAITS : Loyal, peaceful, spiritual, efficent, disciplined, aware, calm, intelligent, self-confident.  NEGATIVE  TRAITS :  Hypocritical, overzealous, judgemental, blindly obidient, sadistic, insensitive, remorseless, blunt, withdrawn.  MBTI : ISTJ, the Logistician.  ZODIAC :  Libra.  TEMPERAMENT :  Melancholic.  SOUL  TYPE / S :  Thinker.  ANIMALS :  A wide-eyed owl, constantly observing.  VICE  HABIT / S :   Vanity, a bit more concern about his appearance than most men his age. Overly critical of those in a lower position than him, even though he was once one of them.    FAITH : What the NFFA deems to be Christian.  GHOSTS ? : Yes.  AFTERLIFE ? : Absolutely. He needs to go home sometime.  REINCARNATION ? :  Possibly.  ALIENS ? : No.  POLITICAL  ALIGNMENT :  Right-wing.  ECONOMIC  PREFERENCE :  He has more than he knows what to do with.  SOCIOPOLITICAL  POSITION : One of the 1%.  EDUCATION  LEVEL : University.

FAMILY.  FATHER :   Richard Allen James, the chief communications officer of ARCON and the first press secretary of the New Founding Fathers. Deceased.  MOTHER :  Caroline Ann James, a talented pianist and violinist, with dreams of playing with a famous orchestra. Still living.  SIBLINGS : Seven. Sarah, Mary, Caleb, Lucas, Joanna, Michael & Hannah. Harmon is sixth.  EXTENDED  FAMILY : Aunts, uncles, several cousins, and a total of twenty-seven nieces & nephews.  NAME  MEANING / S : Harmon, "man of the army." Mallory, "ill fated."  HISTORICAL  CONNECTION ? :   Unknown. There is a place named Harmon mentioned in the Bible, but this place name is debatable. It's been thought of that Harmon James is a pun on "harming James," James being a leader of the early Church.

FAVOURITES.  BOOK :  Other than the Bible, specifically the Old Testament, he enjoys a good true crime novel now and again. Also, political biographies.  MOVIE : Dramas, documentaries and psychological thrillers.  5  SONGS :  (these remind me of him, not his own favourites.) The Sisters of Mercy - Driven Like The Snow. Frank Tovey - New Jerusalem. Cloudeater - Hollow. Fad Gadget - Under The Flag II. Nathan Whitehead - The Sacrifice.  DEITY :  A God who encourages a yearly slaughter of His creation.  HOLIDAY :    That blessed night, the one night the country does their bidding.  MONTH :  March.  SEASON :  Winter.  PLACE :  His home, Our Lady of Sorrows, or the NFFA's headquarters.  WEATHER :  Cloudy, foggy; a brisk morning that beckons snowfall.  SOUND : The echo of footsteps walking across a marble floor. A choir of unintelligeble words. Wind whistling through telephone wires. Silence. The scream of a man, strapped down, a knife plunging into his heart. A siren.  SCENT / S :  The smoke from an extinguished flame. Stale. Eau de cologne. Hair gel.  TASTE / S :  Blood. Luxurious foods. Tea. Ice.    FEEL / S :  A shiver running down your spine. The touch of a hand when no one's around. The feeling someone's watching you when you're alone. Blood on your lips. A cold wind. Emptiness.  ANIMAL / S : An owl seems to be the only thing I think of. Maybe an eagle. Harmon seems like a bird.  NUMBER : Six. He's the sixth in his family, he stands at six feet and six inches tall...  COLOUR : Blue, to show his loyalty to the NFFA. Red, the colour staining his hands. White, for the supposed purity of his soul.

EXTRA.  TALENTS :  His intelligence. His written communication skills. Most of his oral communication skills, his stutter stands in his way. Good with weapons. His knowledge of the human anatomy. He's fairly good at ice skating. Singing.  BAD  AT : Having a social life. Drawing. Being an enjoyable person. Smiling.  TURN  ONS :  Men in positions of power. Voices that draw you in. Strong hands. Blood. Twisting a knife inside of a martyr.  TURN  OFFS :   Anyone lower than his class.  HOBBIES :    Choir. Anything that involves assisting the NFFA.  TROPES :   Badass Long Robe. Dissonant Serenity. Giggling Villain.  AESTHETIC  TAGS :  Blurry images. Graveyards. Blood covering hands, covering the Cross. Knives. Pale, trembling hands. Waves of blue.  GPOY  QUOTES :  "You are never here. You are always almost there."

FC INFO.  MAIN  FC / S :  Christopher James Baker.  ALT  FC / S : Mark Strickson (possibly.)  OLDER  FC / S :   Not sure, but Robert Redford currently is a possibility.  YOUNGER  FC / S : Freddie Fox.  VOICE  CLAIM / S : CJB in "True Detective."  GENDERBENT  FC / S :  Lisa Pelikan.

MUN QUESTIONS.  Q1 :   if  you  could  write  your  character  your  way  in  their  own  movie ,   what  would  it  be  called ,  what  style  would  it  be  filmed  in ,  and  what  would  it  be  about ?            A1 : He has a movie, but he's not the focal point. He has his big moments though! I'd like to see more of Harmon in The Purge 4, since that will be more focused around the NFFA. The story of how a man becomes the way he is today, desensitised to death, wanting destruction, yearning for violence. What made him be this way? What would it be called? No idea.  Q2 :   what  would  their  soundtrack / score  sound  like ?            A2 :  Ambient. Echoes where none of the words can be understood. A soft organ playing in the background. Suddenly, the music becomes a bit more intense...  Q3 :   why  did  you  start  writing  this  character ?            A3 :  I watched The Purge: Election Year, and immediately fell in love with him. I knew I had to do something, and this is what I chose to do.  Q4 :   what  first  attracted  you  to  this  character ?            A4: June 30th, 2016. Around 9:00pm. I'm sitting front and centre watching the newest Purge film, a sequel in a franchise I've loved for three years. Charlie Roan is delivered to Our Lady of Sorrows. All of a sudden, this tall, thin, creepy fucker in a long blue robe makes his debut. Just the kind of character I love. I walked home that night, wrote "Harmon James can own my ass, what the fuck" into my phone, and knew this was the beginning of something beautiful.  Q5 :   describe  the  biggest  thing  you  dislike  about  your  muse.            A5 : He's everything I hate in a person. He dislikes everyone who isn't like him. He's almost every -phobic or -ist in the damn book.  Q6 :   what  do  you  have  in  common  with  your  muse ?            A6 : We have blue eyes, and we laugh similarly. That's it.  Q7 :   how  does  your  muse  feel  about  you ?            A7 : Harmon James would want me sacrificed.  Q8 :   what  characters  does  your  muse  have  interesting  interactions  with ?    A8 :  Edwidge Owens. Thomas Roseland. Caleb Warrens. Harlan Coy. Claude Frollo. Richard Miller. Curtis Stafford. Leo Barnes. Charlie Roan. Ambrosia Reynolds. If I could ever actually get to plotting with other people, them as well.  Q9 :   what  gives  you  inspiration  to  write  your  muse ?          A9 :  Watching Harmon's scenes! Listening to songs that remind me of him, like the Election Year soundtrack. Scrolling through the archive on his aesthetic blog. Being outside in the cold.  Q10 :   how  long  did  this  take  you  to  complete ?            A10 : I forgot about this for a good month. So a long time. Thanks, Ocelot. xo

[therisingtithes]

On Punching Nazis

This doesn’t warrant a whole thought, I think--I’d wager the basics are already well intuited by everyone else who has seen the video by now, and again, no matter how strongly I feel it is still lesser than the feelings of actual affected Americans--but I’m going to share the thought anyway. 

The reason it’s important to punch Nazis is also the reason why it is important to denounce violence--namely, that people are more important than ideas, and not all ideas are important. 

I am against violence in general. I’m willing to bet many of the other people who are on the #PunchANazi2K17 train are also generally against violence. 

But they also exist in a world where symbolic and systemic violence already persists, and the people responsible for symbolically and systemically threatening the lives of people of colour, women, LGBT persons, the disabled, the chronically ill, immigrants, etc., don’t have anything to say about that history of violence. About that history of considering entire communities of people lesser than some imagined ‘great’. 

The political space those innocent people inhabit is legitimately threatening them. I don’t mean that it is merely imposing or fearsome. I mean that its members are actually threatening violence. Its leadership has spoken in clear language about politically devaluing their existence, and its congregation has taken clear physical action to intimidate or literally physically abuse them already. It’s already been a thing. It’s been a thing for quite some time now. 

It’s important to note in this instance that, to butcher MLK, the unheard are multilingual.If the space imposes violence upon you, you should defend yourself. In any space that would be this threatening, there is immense value in being as hyper-punk as you can in order to survive. That means punching people who try to kill you. 

People who take offense to this do so on the grounds that violence in general is in opposition to higher, nobler values. I counter that challenging an already violent space by merely offering one’s bodies, by being patient and willing in the face of existing violence, is the kind of naivete that gets your loved ones hurt. It is really easy to be patiently noble when one has nothing to lose. Speaking as an outsider to American politics, I dare say even I still have something to lose: loved ones, friends I’ve made over the years who are freaking the fuck out over the present political state of affairs. People who can point at direct actions that Tr*mp supporters have taken, at the effects of promised political actions, at the effects of multiple important political positions presently still being vacant, at the words and deeds of Tr*mp himself, and observe bafflingly dangerous stupidity at best, or undeniable fascism at worst. Those loved ones of mine already suffer violence. (They have been for a while, of course, but the kinds of violence to come require hypervigilance.) 

If the political state of affairs in a country causing legitimate fear that one will not be considered equally deserving to live, another’s minor discomfort of physical challenge is perhaps not similarly concerning. If you can say that you voted for a man because you believe that this man considers other people inferior to you, and those other people believe that he does consider this, then everyone in the room is on the same page about one thing: that man is in power in large part because some people want other people destroyed. 

People who want other people destroyed are not deserving of patience. 

Just because an idea exists does not mean that it is a legitimate one which is worthy of debate. Lots of shitty ideas exist, on literally every axis of the political plane! Very few shitty ideas in general are worthy of debate! People who, for instance, proffer that creationism is ‘a difference in perspective’ are within their right to personally believe that God created the Heavens and the Earth without any scientific process intervention whatsoever. It’s their right! Go on, be silly! But a line is observably crossed when those people insist that it is also their right to be taken seriously. Because being taken seriously has effects on how we view, interact with, and ultimately perform our stewardship over the world. 

But we’re really good at seeing how dumb it would be to insist that creationism is worthy of debate. To insist that it has equal weight to decades of scientific practice would be colossally ignorant. To insist that the scientific community (including its people of faith) and the educational community (including its people of faith) have it out for ‘different perspectives’ when they insist that you believing it doesn’t make it worthy of undue weight is maliciously untrue--the kind of untruth that misleads and miseducates others. So when people say it isn’t taught in schools for a reason, we get it. It’s because it’s not an education. 

Fascism-in-practice is not a policy statement.  It is not a legitimate idea worthy of debate. 

But ideas, being abstract, can’t really die. They’re really thorny like that; once they’ve existed, they tend to keep existing, even if as a footnote to history. They can constantly be murdered, but someone always resurrects it in their thoughts--which makes the consistent act of murdering illegitimate ideas valuable. Not only on a sociocultural level, but--let’s face it--on a cathartic one, too. 

People are fragile, though. Very easy to hurt, to starve, to abuse, to torture, to murder. 

When ideas objectively threaten people--when they do so in their own words--the people come first. 

So if someone espouses the idea that there are groups of people in the world who are less deserving of their citizenship, their health, their safety, their very life; and if that someone aligns with a political identity which undeniably empowers that idea in no uncertain terms, 

the act of defending that man’s right to possess an idea is not significant from the act of defending the idea itself that other human beings are not worth defense. 

You see the Gordian knot we’re left with? Whether literal threats are more important than others’ lives because you think those others shouldn’t physically challenge threats? 

Oh? Too confusing, okay--let’s rework it: 

people who endorse ethnic cleansing as an idea that would strengthen national cohesion literally place themselves above other human beings.  Insisting that it is their right to believe, and therefore publicly empower the belief, in destroying other people literally places the idea of destroying people above other human beings. 

That idea does not deserve defense. That idea does not deserve debate.  It deserves defenestration. 

And if people are observably living in a space where systemic and symbolic violence festers, responding forcefully is, to me, preferable to patience because the violence will seek to claim innocent bodies. 

If it is wrong to tell people to physically challenge threats to their personhood and security, then the unrepentant evil among us will take advantage of our patience, and those innocent bodies will have been offered up by us. Because we thought we could reason with illegitimate ideas and their proponents. Because we thought bad ideas could merely be killed in debate. 

What is needed in order for bad ideas to not grow is for well-seeming folk to not give its practice any quarter. For hateful people who literally espouse an idea to destroy others’ lives to be directly challenged for what is at its core a threat, an incitement to violence. For well-meaning folk who hear an incitement to violence, and see others repeat or espouse it, and respond by standing up for innocent bodies. 

I do not have more, or even the same, sympathy for those who wish to destroy others as I can have for the marginalized people they wish to destroy. If I can have sympathy for them at all, it is a pity that they’re such spiteful creatures toward people they may largely know nothing about, ignorant about how deep they’ve fallen into ignorance and hatred. 

That doesn’t change the fact that they want to destroy other people. 

Is that what you want to ‘hear out’? 

Give fascism-in-practice no quarter. Don’t fool anyone into thinking it’s an ideology worth their thought. Teach people that human beings are more important than any ideology that wishes to destroy them. Understand that people who endorse ideologies that wish to destroy other people already value their own lives, or their own ideas, more than the lives of others. Be willing to body-check fascism-in-practice at any given opportunity, and possess no shame for it, because it possesses no shame. 

[2libras]

My Body Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It & Want it to Matter Politically, Johanna Hedva

1.

In late 2014, I was sick with a chronic condition that, about every 12 to 18 months, gets bad enough to render me, for about five months each time, unable to walk, drive, do my job, sometimes speak or understand language, take a bath without assistance, and leave the bed. This particular flare coincided with the Black Lives Matter protests, which I would have attended unremittingly, had I been able to. I live one block away from MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, a predominantly Latino neighborhood and one colloquially understood to be the place where many immigrants begin their American lives. The park, then, is not surprisingly one of the most active places of protest in the city.

I listened to the sounds of the marches as they drifted up to my window. Attached to the bed, I rose up my sick woman fist, in solidarity.

I started to think about what modes of protest are afforded to sick people – it seemed to me that many for whom Black Lives Matter is especially in service, might not be able to be present for the marches because they were imprisoned by a job, the threat of being fired from their job if they marched, or literal incarceration, and of course the threat of violence and police brutality – but also because of illness or disability, or because they were caring for someone with an illness or disability.

I thought of all the other invisible bodies, with their fists up, tucked away and out of sight.

If we take Hannah Arendt’s definition of the political – which is still one of the most dominant in mainstream discourse – as being any action that is performed in public, we must contend with the implications of what that excludes. If being present in public is what is required to be political, then whole swathes of the population can be deemed a-political – simply because they are not physically able to get their bodies into the street.

In my graduate program, Arendt was a kind of god, and so I was trained to think that her definition of the political was radically liberating. Of course, I can see that it was, in its own way, in its time (the late 1950s): in one fell swoop she got rid of the need for infrastructures of law, the democratic process of voting, the reliance on individuals who’ve accumulated the power to affect policy – she got rid of the need for policy at all. All of these had been required for an action to be considered political and visible as such. No, Arendt said, just get your body into the street, and bam: political.

There are two failures here, though. The first is her reliance on a “public” – which requires a private, a binary between visible and invisible space. This meant that whatever takes place in private is not political. So, you can beat your wife in private and it doesn’t matter, for instance. You can send private emails containing racial slurs, but since they weren’t “meant for the public,” you are somehow not racist. Arendt was worried that if everything can be considered political, then nothing will be, which is why she divided the space into one that is political and one that is not. But for the sake of this anxiety, she chose to sacrifice whole groups of people, to continue to banish them to invisibility and political irrelevance. She chose to keep them out of the public sphere. I’m not the first to take Arendt to task for this. The failure of Arendt’s political was immediately exposed in the civil rights activism and feminism of the 1960s and 70s. “The personal is political” can also be read as saying “the private is political.” Because of course, everything you do in private is political: who you have sex with, how long your showers are, if you have access to clean water for a shower at all, and so on.

There is another problem too. As Judith Butler put it in her 2015 lecture, “Vulnerability and Resistance,” Arendt failed to account for who is allowed in to the public space, of who’s in charge of the public. Or, more specifically, who’s in charge of who gets in. Butler says that there is always one thing true about a public demonstration: the police are already there, or they are coming. This resonates with frightening force when considering the context of Black Lives Matter. The inevitability of violence at a demonstration – especially a demonstration that emerged to insist upon the importance of bodies who’ve been violently un-cared for – ensures that a certain amount of people won’t, because they can’t, show up. Couple this with physical and mental illnesses and disabilities that keep people in bed and at home, and we must contend with the fact that many whom these protests are for, are not able to participate in them – which means they are not able to be visible as political activists.

There was a Tumblr post that came across my dash during these weeks of protest, that said something to the effect of: “shout out to all the disabled people, sick people, people with PTSD, anxiety, etc., who can’t protest in the streets with us tonight. Your voices are heard and valued, and with us.” Heart. Reblog.

So, as I lay there, unable to march, hold up a sign, shout a slogan that would be heard, or be visible in any traditional capacity as a political being, the central question of Sick Woman Theory formed: How do you throw a brick through the window of a bank if you can’t get out of bed?

2.

I have chronic illness. For those who don’t know what chronic illness means, let me help: the word “chronic” comes from the Latin chronos, which means “of time” (think of “chronology”), and it specifically means “a lifetime.” So, a chronic illness is an illness that lasts a lifetime. In other words, it does not get better. There is no cure.

And think about the weight of time: yes, that means you feel it every day. On very rare occasions, I get caught in a moment, as if something’s plucked me out of the world, where I realize that I haven’t thought about my illnesses for a few minutes, maybe a few precious hours. These blissful moments of oblivion are the closest thing to a miracle that I know. When you have chronic illness, life is reduced to a relentless rationing of energy. It costs you to do anything: to get out of bed, to cook for yourself, to get dressed, to answer an email. For those without chronic illness, you can spend and spend without consequence: the cost is not a problem. For those of us with limited funds, we have to ration, we have a limited supply: we often run out before lunch.

I’ve come to think about chronic illness in other ways.

Ann Cvetkovich writes: “What if depression, in the Americas, at least, could be traced to histories of colonialism, genocide, slavery, legal exclusion, and everyday segregation and isolation that haunt all of our lives, rather than to be biochemical imbalances?” I’d like to change the word “depression” here to be all mental illnesses. Cvetkovich continues: “Most medical literature tends to presume a white and middle-class subject for whom feeling bad is frequently a mystery because it doesn’t fit a life in which privilege and comfort make things seem fine on the surface.” In other words, wellness as it is talked about in America today, is a white and wealthy idea.

Let me quote Starhawk, in the preface to the new edition of her 1982 book Dreaming the Dark: “Psychologists have constructed a myth – that somewhere there exists some state of health which is the norm, meaning that most people presumably are in that state, and those who are anxious, depressed, neurotic, distressed, or generally unhappy are deviant.” I’d here supplant the word “psychologists” with “white supremacy,” “doctors,” “your boss,” “neoliberalism,” “heteronormativity,” and “America.”

There has been a slew of writing in recent years about how “female” pain is treated – or rather, not treated as seriously as men’s in emergency rooms and clinics, by doctors, specialists, insurance companies, families, husbands, friends, the culture at large. In a recent article in The Atlantic, called “How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously,” a husband writes about the experience of his wife Rachel’s long wait in the ER before receiving the medical attention her condition warranted (which was an ovarian torsion, where an ovarian cyst grows so large it falls, twisting the fallopian tube). “Nationwide, men wait an average of 49 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain. Women wait an average of 65 minutes for the same thing. Rachel waited somewhere between 90 minutes and two hours,” he writes. At the end of the ordeal, Rachel had waited nearly fifteen hours before going into the surgery she should have received upon arrival. The article concludes with her physical scars healing, but that “she’s still grappling with the psychic toll – what she calls ‘the trauma of not being seen.’”

What the article does not mention is race – which leads me to believe that the writer and his wife are white. Whiteness is what allows for such oblivious neutrality: it is the premise of blankness, the presumption of the universal. (Studies have shown that white people will listen to other white people when talking about race, far more openly than they will to a person of color. As someone who is white-passing, let me address white people directly: look at my white face and listen up.)

The trauma of not being seen. Again – who is allowed in to the public sphere? Who is allowed to be visible? I don’t mean to diminish Rachel’s horrible experience – I myself once had to wait ten hours in an ER to be diagnosed with a burst ovarian cyst – I only wish to point out the presumptions upon which her horror relies: that our vulnerability should be seen and honored, and that we should all receive care, quickly and in a way that “respects the autonomy of the patient,” as the Four Principles of Biomedical Ethics puts it. Of course, these presumptions are what we all should have. But we must ask the question of who is allowed to have them. In whom does society substantiate such beliefs? And in whom does society enforce the opposite?

Compare Rachel’s experience at the hands of the medical establishment with that of Kam Brock’s. In September 2014, Brock, a 32-year-old black woman, born in Jamaica and living in New York City, was driving a BMW when she was pulled over by the police. They accused her of driving under the influence of marijuana, and though her behavior and their search of her car yielded nothing to support this, they nevertheless impounded her car. According to a lawsuit brought against the City of New York and Harlem Hospital by Brock, when Brock appeared the next day to retrieve her car she was arrested by the police for behaving in a way that she calls “emotional,” and involuntarily hospitalized in the Harlem Hospital psych ward. (As someone who has also been involuntarily hospitalized for behaving “too” emotionally, this story feels like a rip of recognition through my brain.) The doctors thought she was “delusional” and suffering from bipolar disorder, because she claimed that Obama followed her on twitter – which was true, but which the medical staff failed to confirm. She was then held for eight days, forcibly injected with sedatives, made to ingest psychiatric medication, attend group therapy, and stripped. The medical records of the hospital – obtained by her lawyers – bear this out: the “master treatment plan” for Brock’s stay reads, “Objective: Patient will verbalize the importance of education for employment and will state that Obama is not following her on Twitter.” It notes her “inability to test reality.” Upon her release, she was given a bill for $13,637.10.

The question of why the hospital’s doctors thought Brock “delusional” because of her Obama-follow claim is easily answered: Because, according to this society, a young black woman can’t possibly be that important – and for her to insist that she is must mean she’s “sick.”

3.

Before I can speak of the “sick woman” in all of her many guises, I must first speak as an individual, and address you from my particular location.

I am antagonistic to the notion that the Western medical-insurance industrial complex understands me in my entirety, though they seem to think they do. They have attached many words to me over the years, and though some of these have provided articulation that was useful – after all, no matter how much we are working to change the world, we must still find ways of coping with the reality at hand – first I want to suggest some other ways of understanding my “illness.”

Perhaps it can all be explained by the fact that my Moon’s in Cancer in the 8th House, the House of Death, or that my Mars is in the 12th House, the House of Illness, Secrets, Sorrow, and Self-Undoing. Or, that my father’s mother escaped from North Korea in her childhood and hid this fact from the family until a few years ago, when she accidentally let it slip out, and then swiftly, revealingly, denied it. Or, that my mother suffers from undiagnosed mental illness that was actively denied by her family, and was then exasperated by a 40-year-long drug addiction, sexual trauma, and hepatitis from a dirty needle, and to this day remains untreated, as she makes her way in and out of jails, squats, and homelessness. Or, that I was physically and emotionally abused as a child, raised in an environment of poverty, addiction, and violence, and have been estranged from my parents for 13 years. Perhaps it’s because I’m poor – according to the IRS, in 2014, my adjusted gross income was $5,730 (a result of not being well enough to work full-time) – which means that my health insurance is provided by the state of California (Medi-Cal), that my “primary care doctor” is a group of physician’s assistants and nurses in a clinic on the second floor of a strip mall, and that I rely on food stamps to eat. Perhaps it can be encapsulated in the word “trauma.” Perhaps I’ve just got thin skin, and have had some bad luck.

It’s important that I also share the Western medical terminology that’s been attached to me – whether I like it or not, it can provide a common vocabulary: “This is the oppressor’s language,” Adrienne Rich wrote in 1971, “yet I need it to talk to you.” But let me offer another language, too. In the Native American Cree language, the possessive noun and verb of a sentence are structured differently than in English. In Cree, one does not say, “I am sick.” Instead, one says, “The sickness has come to me.” I love that and want to honor it.

So, here is what has come to me:

Endometriosis, which is a disease of the uterus where the uterine lining grows where it shouldn’t – in the pelvic area mostly, but also anywhere, the legs, abdomen, even the head. It causes chronic pain; gastrointestinal chaos; epic, monstrous bleeding; in some cases, cancer; and means that I have miscarried, can’t have children, and have several surgeries to look forward to. When I explained the disease to a friend who didn’t know about it, she exclaimed: “So your whole body is a uterus!” That’s one way of looking at it, yes. (Imagine what the Ancient Greek doctors – the fathers of the theory of the “wandering womb” – would say about that.) It means that every month, those rogue uterine cells that have implanted themselves throughout my body, “obey their nature and bleed,” to quote fellow endo warrior Hilary Mantel. This causes cysts, which eventually burst, leaving behind bundles of dead tissue like the debris of little bombs.

Bipolar disorder, panic disorder, and depersonalization disorder have also come to me. This means that I live between this world and another one, one created by my own brain that has ceased to be contained by a discrete concept of “self.” Because of these “disorders,” I have access to incredibly vivid emotions, flights of thought, and dreamscapes, to the feeling that my mind has been obliterated into stars, to the sensation that I have become nothingness, as well as to intense ecstasies, raptures, sorrows, and nightmarish hallucinations. I have been hospitalized, voluntarily and involuntarily, because of it, and one of the medications I was prescribed once nearly killed me – it produces a rare side effect where one’s skin falls off. Another cost $800 a month – I only took it because my doctor slipped me free samples. If I want to be able to hold a job – which this world has decided I ought to be able to do – I must take an anti-psychotic medication daily that causes short-term memory loss and drooling, among other sexy side effects. These visitors have also brought their friends: nervous breakdowns, mental collapses, or whatever you want to call them, three times in my life. I’m certain they will be guests in my house again. They have motivated attempts at suicide (most of them while dissociated) more than a dozen times, the first one when I was nine years old. That first attempt didn’t work, only because after taking a mouthful of sleeping pills, I somehow woke up the next day and went to school, like nothing had happened. I told no one about it, until my first psychiatric evaluation in my mid 20s.

Finally, an autoimmune disease that continues to baffle all the doctors I’ve seen, has come to me and refuses still to be named. As Carolyn Lazard has written about her experiences with autoimmune diseases: “Autoimmune disorders are difficult to diagnose. For ankylosing spondylitis, the average time between the onset of symptoms and diagnosis is eight to twelve years. I was lucky; I only had to wait one year.” Names like “MS,” “fibromyalgia,” and others that I can’t remember have fallen from the mouths of my doctors – but my insurance won’t cover the tests, nor is there a specialist in my insurance plan within one hundred miles of my home. I don’t have enough space here – will I ever? – to describe what living with an autoimmune disease is like. I can say it brings unimaginable fatigue, pain all over all the time, susceptibility to illnesses, a body that performs its “normal” functions monstrously abnormally. The worst symptom that mine brings is chronic shingles. For ten years I’ve gotten shingles in the same place on my back, so that I now have nerve damage there, which results in a ceaseless, searing pain on the skin and a dull, burning ache in the bones. Despite taking daily medication that is supposed to “suppress” the shingles virus, I still get them – they are my canaries in the coalmine, the harbingers of at least three weeks to be spent in bed.

My acupuncturist described it as a little demon steaming black smoke, frothing around, nestling into my bones.

4.

With all of these visitors, I started writing Sick Woman Theory as a way to survive in a reality that I find unbearable, and as a way to bear witness to a self that does not feel like it can possibly be “mine.”

The early instigation for the project of “Sick Woman Theory,” and how it inherited its name, came from a few sources. One was in response to Audrey Wollen’s “Sad Girl Theory,” which proposes a way of redefining historically feminized pathologies into modes of political protest for girls: I was mainly concerned with the question of what happens to the sad girl when, if, she grows up. Another was incited by reading Kate Zambreno’s fantastic Heroines, and feeling an itch to fuck with the concept of “heroism” at all, and so I wanted to propose a figure with traditionally anti-heroic qualities – namely illness, idleness, and inaction – as capable of being the symbol of a grand Theory. Another was from the 1973 feminist book Complaints and Disorders, which differentiates between the “sick woman” of the white upper class, and the “sickening women” of the non-white working class.

Sick Woman Theory is for those who are faced with their vulnerability and unbearable fragility, every day, and so have to fight for their experience to be not only honored, but first made visible. For those who, in Audre Lorde’s words, were never meant to survive: because this world was built against their survival. It’s for my fellow spoonies. You know who you are, even if you’ve not been attached to a diagnosis: one of the aims of Sick Woman Theory is to resist the notion that one needs to be legitimated by an institution, so that they can try to fix you. You don’t need to be fixed, my queens – it’s the world that needs the fixing.

I offer this as a call to arms and a testimony of recognition. I hope that my thoughts can provide articulation and resonance, as well as tools of survival and resilience.

And for those of you who are not chronically ill or disabled, Sick Woman Theory asks you to stretch your empathy this way. To face us, to listen, to see.

5.

Sick Woman Theory is an insistence that most modes of political protest are internalized, lived, embodied, suffering, and no doubt invisible. Sick Woman Theory redefines existence in a body as something that is primarily and always vulnerable, following from Judith Butler’s work on precarity and resistance. Because the premise insists that a body is defined by its vulnerability, not temporarily affected by it, the implication is that it is continuously reliant on infrastructures of support in order to endure, and so we need to re-shape the world around this fact. Sick Woman Theory maintains that the body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression – particularly our current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy. It is that all of our bodies and minds carry the historical trauma of this, that it is the world itself that is making and keeping us sick.  

To take the term “woman” as the subject-position of this work is a strategic, all-encompassing embrace and dedication to the particular, rather than the universal. Though the identity of “woman” has erased and excluded many (especially women of color and trans and genderfluid people), I choose to use it because it still represents the un-cared for, the secondary, the oppressed, the non-, the un-, the less-than. The problematics of this term will always require critique, and I hope that Sick Woman Theory can help undo those in its own way. But more than anything, I’m inspired to use the word “woman” because I saw this year how it can still be radical to be a woman in the 21st century. I use it to honor a dear friend of mine who came out as genderfluid last year. For her, what mattered the most was to be able to call herself a “woman,” to use the pronouns “she/her.” She didn’t want surgery or hormones; she loved her body and her big dick and didn’t want to change it – she only wanted the word. That the word itself can be an empowerment is the spirit in which Sick Woman Theory is named.

The Sick Woman is an identity and body that can belong to anyone denied the privileged existence – or the cruelly optimistic promise of such an existence – of the white, straight, healthy, neurotypical, upper and middle-class, cis- and able-bodied man who makes his home in a wealthy country, has never not had health insurance, and whose importance to society is everywhere recognized and made explicit by that society; whose importance and care dominates that society, at the expense of everyone else.

The Sick Woman is anyone who does not have this guarantee of care.

The Sick Woman is told that, to this society, her care, even her survival, does not matter.

The Sick Woman is all of the “dysfunctional,” “dangerous” and “in danger,” “badly behaved,” “crazy,” “incurable,” “traumatized,” “disordered,” “diseased,” “chronic,” “uninsurable,” “wretched,” “undesirable” and altogether “dysfunctional” bodies belonging to women, people of color, poor, ill, neuro-atypical, differently abled, queer, trans, and genderfluid people, who have been historically pathologized, hospitalized, institutionalized, brutalized, rendered “unmanageable,” and therefore made culturally illegitimate and politically invisible.

The Sick Woman is a black trans woman having panic attacks while using a public restroom, in fear of the violence awaiting her.

The Sick Woman is the child of parents whose indigenous histories have been erased, who suffers from the trauma of generations of colonization and violence.

The Sick Woman is a homeless person, especially one with any kind of disease and no access to treatment, and whose only access to mental-health care is a 72-hour hold in the county hospital.

The Sick Woman is a mentally ill black woman whose family called the police for help because she was suffering an episode, and who was murdered in police custody, and whose story was denied by everyone operating under white supremacy. Her name is Tanesha Anderson.

The Sick Woman is a 50-year-old gay man who was raped as a teenager and has remained silent and shamed, believing that men can’t be raped.

The Sick Woman is a disabled person who couldn’t go to the lecture on disability rights because it was held in a venue without accessibility.

The Sick Woman is a white woman with chronic illness rooted in sexual trauma who must take painkillers in order to get out of bed.

The Sick Woman is a straight man with depression who’s been medicated (managed) since early adolescence and now struggles to work the 60 hours per week that his job demands.

The Sick Woman is someone diagnosed with a chronic illness, whose family and friends continually tell them they should exercise more.

The Sick Woman is a queer woman of color whose activism, intellect, rage, and depression are seen by white society as unlikeable attributes of her personality.

The Sick Woman is a black man killed in police custody, and officially said to have severed his own spine. His name is Freddie Gray.

The Sick Woman is a veteran suffering from PTSD on the months-long waiting list to see a doctor at the VA.

The Sick Woman is a single mother, illegally emigrated to the “land of the free,” shuffling between three jobs in order to feed her family, and finding it harder and harder to breathe.

The Sick Woman is the refugee.

The Sick Woman is the abused child.

The Sick Woman is the person with autism whom the world is trying to “cure.”

The Sick Woman is the starving.

The Sick Woman is the dying.

And, crucially: The Sick Woman is who capitalism needs to perpetuate itself.

Why?

Because to stay alive, capitalism cannot be responsible for our care – its logic of exploitation requires that some of us die.

“Sickness” as we speak of it today is a capitalist construct, as is its perceived binary opposite, “wellness.” The “well” person is the person well enough to go to work. The “sick” person is the one who can’t. What is so destructive about conceiving of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way.

Care, in this configuration, is only required sometimes. When sickness is temporary, care is not normal.

Here’s an exercise: go to the mirror, look yourself in the face, and say out loud: “To take care of you is not normal. I can only do it temporarily.”

Saying this to yourself will merely be an echo of what the world repeats all the time.    

6.

I used to think that the most anti-capitalist gestures left had to do with love, particularly love poetry: to write a love poem and give it to the one you desired, seemed to me a radical resistance. But now I see I was wrong.

The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care.

Because, once we are all ill and confined to the bed, sharing our stories of therapies and comforts, forming support groups, bearing witness to each other’s tales of trauma, prioritizing the care and love of our sick, pained, expensive, sensitive, fantastic bodies, and there is no one left to go to work, perhaps then, finally, capitalism will screech to its much-needed, long-overdue, and motherfucking glorious halt.

This text is adapted from the lecture, “My Body Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It & Want It to Matter Politically,” delivered at Human Resources, sponsored by the Women’s Center for Creative Work, in Los Angeles, on October 7, 2015. The video is here.​

Recommended Texts

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Berlant, Lauren Gail. Cruel Optimism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

Brown, Stephen Rex. “Woman Held in Psych Ward over Obama Twitter Claim.” NY Daily News. March 23, 2015.

Butler, Judith. “Vulnerability and Resistance.” REDCAT. December 19, 2014.

Cvetkovich, Ann. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Complaints and Disorders; the Sexual Politics of Sickness. Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1973.

Fassler, Joe. “How Doctors Take Women's Pain Less Seriously.” The Atlantic, October 15, 2015.

Federici, Silvia. Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation. New York: Autonomedia, 2003.

Halberstam, Jack. “Zombie Humanism at the End of the World.” Lecture, Weak Resistance: Everyday Struggles and the Politics of Failure, ICI Berlin, May 27, 2015.

Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. New York: Minor Compositions, 2013.

Hedva, Johanna. “My Body Is a Prison of Pain so I Want to Leave It Like a Mystic But I Also Love It & Want It to Matter Politically.” Lecture, Human Resources, Los Angeles, October 7, 2015.

Lazard, Carolyn. “How to Be a Person in the Age of Autoimmunity.” The Cluster Mag. January 16, 2013.

Lorde, Audre. A Burst of Light: Essays. Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1988.

Lorde, Audre. The Cancer Journals. Special ed. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1997.

Mantel, Hilary. “Every Part of My Body Hurt.” The Guardian, June 7, 2004.

Miserandino, Christine. “The Spoon Theory Written by Christine Miserandino.” But You Dont Look Sick: Support for Those with Invisible Illness or Chronic Illness. April 25, 2013.

Rich, Adrienne. “The Burning of Paper Instead of Children.” In Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: Poems, Prose, Reviews, and Criticism, edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi. New York: W.W. Norton, 1993.

Salek, Yasi. “Audrey Wollen on Sad Girl Theory.” CULTIST ZINE. June 19, 2014.

Starhawk. Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, & Politics. 2nd ed. Boston: Beacon Press, 1988.

Thurman, Judith. “A Loss for Words: Can a Dying Language Be Saved?” The New Yorker, March 30, 2015.

Vankin, Jonathan. “Kam Brock: The Reason They Threw Her In A Mental Ward Was Crazy — What Happened Next Was Even Crazier.” The Inquisitr News. March 24, 2015.

Zambreno, Kate. Heroines. Semiotext(e) / Active Agents, 2012.

Watch: Event presented by the Women's Center for Creative Work at Human Resources on October 7, 2015