#kind of a metaphor for how capitalism forces us to fight for our own survival and traps us in a cycle while we slowly die

[my-thoughts-and-junk]

thinkibg. ...

[alj4890]

Angst Prompt

Requested follow-up to One Fateful Night

Part 2: The Dark Before the Dawn

A\N Sorry again for One Fateful Night’s angst. This picks up right after and goes a little into the future for Liam and those that survived the earthquake. It gets pretty dark in places and is long, but I think it ends on a hopeful note.  

@gkittylove99 @darley1101 @krsnlove @kingliam2019 @texaskitten30​ @yourmajesty09 @mom2000aggie @ofpixelsandscribbles @twinkleallnight @lodberg @sweatyrysconnoisseur @motorcitymademadame

Masterlist

The rest of the unity tour was canceled. Unable to speak his reasons why he couldn't do it, Liam left that in the hands of his father and Regina. He didn't want to face the people without Riley by his side, without Drake standing steadfast, without Maxwell's unfailing optimism, without Hana's gentle support.

He had simply lost the will to fight.

Olivia had returned with him to the palace. Neville soon followed, insisting that he would do whatever Liam needed him to. Kiara, devastated by Penelope's death had retreated back to her family estate. Rashad was sent to Domvallier to recover from his injuries. Bastien refused to take time off and was doing his duties from a wheelchair.

Liam ignored all of it. He went to his chambers and remained secluded from the world for days. He refused entry to anyone who knocked. He simply sat there staring at the few mementos he had of those he had lost.

He flipped through the photographs Maxwell had insisted on taking of the three of them through the years. He paused at the few his mother was in, wishing she was here now to tell him how to move on from something like this. She had encouraged his friendships with Maxwell and Drake, knowing he would need them to face life in the public eye.

And now he would never have them again.

Setting the old album aside, he reached for the key chain Riley had given him the night of the Coronation. Thinking of that night and their confessions of love only to be so cruelly parted...his head dropped as he carefully set it back on the table. Next he picked up the pearl he had given her. The plans and hopes they had while meeting in secret. It had helped him through every moment he was kept from her side.

He then lifted the photograph Anna had taken of them for their engagement. Liam's fingers trembled as they brushed against the image of Riley. Her smile so warm. Her eyes so filled with joy.

Reaching for a decanter, he attempted to metaphorically drown his sorrows. In one night he had lost everything he had held dear. How was he to go on from this? There was no enemy to slay, no way to find those he loved and rescue them. Nothing. Nothing except funerals to attend. Nothing but giving them to the cold, unforgiving dirt.

All he had ahead of him was visits to graveyards. He knew his father didn't have much longer to live. It would be just one more loss in his already devastated heart.

Death was what his life had become. He had feared that when his mother was poisoned. Many a night he would wake up crying at the thought of being completely and utterly alone. This long forgotten fear rose up within him, showing that it hadn't been a nightmare. It had been a premonition.

Dropping his head in his hands, he sobbed into the void that had become his only companion.

*****************

Armed with a key, Olivia forced her way into Liam's room. With the first of the many funerals coming up, she knew she needed to get him prepared. The public would be looking toward their king, needing to see him standing against the worst life could throw at him.

Her steps faltered when she saw him. He was slumped over in a chair. Empty decanters sat in front of him, a few tipped over on the table with drops of whiskey spilled out.

The tumbler he had been using had fallen to the floor. The remnants of his drink had stained the Persian rug. His clothes were rumpled. Nearly a week's growth of beard had darkened his sunken cheeks. Dark circles under his eyes completed the look of a man trying to escape his tormented thoughts.

Olivia had to harden her heart. There had always been something about Liam that brought out an unusual softness in her. But that was not what he needed. He needed order. A purpose. Something to get him to step back out in the world.

Grabbing his shoulder she shook him hard.

"Liam!" She snapped in a louder than usual tone. "Wake up!"

He opened his bloodshot eyes with a slight groan. He weakly raised a hand to his head while trying to escape her unyielding grip.

"Get ready." She ordered. "We've got things to do."

"What things?" His hoarse voice cracked.

She ignored his question.

He forced himself to focus on her bustling about gathering his clothes before going into his bathroom. He could hear her starting a shower.

She returned with a determined set to her chin. "Hurry up." She pulled him out of his chair. "We don't have all day."

He stumbled forward, catching himself against a dresser.

Olivia bit her lip as she watched him painstakingly retreat into the bathroom.

Taking a deep breath, she bent to the task of straightening his room. Her gaze fell on the objects he had been using for his only source of company. Tears sparked her eyes when she noticed the photographs.

It wasn't fair. Liam might think he was the only one to suffer with his losses, but she was just as deeply affected. They had been her friends too. A family of sorts, one of her choosing after losing her own at such a young age. She couldn't help but depend on them. Maxwell had been the chipper, up for anything brother she wouldn't have thought she needed. Drake had been her sparring partner, always keeping her wit sharp for any upcoming altercation. Riley...

How had the one she never could quite see completely as her enemy become an actual friend? She had won Liam from Olivia, and yet...and yet Olivia had been grateful. If there was anyone in this world who saw and loved Liam like she herself had, then it was Riley.

And how could she not care for someone who did as Liam deserved?

It was all for nothing. Olivia was left alone once more. Perhaps even more so than when her parents had died. At least then she had been able to lean on Liam. Now he could barely function. It was now her turn to be the one he could depend on in their friendship.

He stepped out, pulling her from her thoughts. He stood there as if at a loss of what to do, whether he should even bother putting forth an effort.

Olivia brought him a jacket and held it for him to slip on.

"We'll eat on the road." She told him, giving him a push out the door.

"Where are we going?" He asked.

"A few places." She told him. She glanced back behind her where Regina had remained out of sight. The worry on the Queen Mother's face eased some at seeing Liam out of his room. She nodded gratefully to Olivia before retreating in the shadows to report this small success to Constantine.

****************

Liam stared out the window as Olivia drove him through the capital. He ignored the people going about their day as if the world had not stopped. He didn't bother to focus as he used to on the state of the roads or on some of the older, historical buildings.

He simply didn't care. He figured it was only a matter of time before these things were taken from him too. The terrorists were probably lying in wait for when they could destroy the last of what had once meant something to him.

"I don't suppose you've spoken to anyone at the hospital." Olivia said, cutting through the oppressive silence.

Liam merely shook his head.

She waited in the hopes he would ask about Hana and Madeleine. She needed to see that the old, kind to a fault Liam was still there, only buried amongst his immense sorrow.

The silence stretched once more between them.

"I have." She said, fighting against tears of frustration.

He didn't move. He simply stared out the passenger window.

Her grip on the steering wheel tightened. "Madeleine's recovery is slow yet steady. The doctors believe though that her fair skin will always be marked with scars."

Liam didn't even blink.

Olivia grit her teeth. "Hana though has not been having an easy time."

Liam stiffened somewhat at that.

Olivia pressed on. She was determined to get him talking. Hopefully once he started he could get rid of the despair that was destroying him.

"Her parents want to take her home to Singapore but the doctors don't believe she is strong enough yet." She swallowed down her own lump of emotion. "When she was told of...of..."

Liam finally face forward. "Told of everyone dying on us? Told that I had failed in saving anyone?" His bitterness slashed across Olivia's stuttered denial at that last one. "Told that her life would never be the same again?"

"Liam, you--"

"I don't want to hear it." He responded.

"You must!" She yelled, hitting her steering wheel in her anger.

Liam didn't flinch. He didn't act like he had even heard her.

"Hana needs you! Madeleine does too." She turned into the hospital parking lot. "We all need you to--"

"To what?" He roared. "Give more empty promises that we will get through this? That we will find our way back?" He jerked his seatbelt off. "I respect them too much to lie to them. The last thing they need is a broken man trying to rally their spirits." He opened the door. "Find someone else, Olivia. I'm not the man they need."

"You are!" She scrambled out, tears falling down her cheeks unheeded. "Liam, we all need you right now. Friday is the first set of funerals. We need you there to help us say goodbye."

Liam walked off without a word.

"Liam, please!" She pleaded, chasing after him. "Even if you can't speak during the service, let those of us who love you help you."

He paused before gently pulling his arm out of her grip. "I'm sorry, but I can't do what you ask of me." His bright blue eyes were filled with tears as he raised them to hers. "I'm done, Olivia."

"Liam, you're allowed to grieve." She reached for his hands. "Take as long as you need. But your friends and country need to grieve with you."

"They won't after I inform them of my decision." He took a deep breath. "I'm giving it up."

"Giving what up?" She asked.

"Everything. The crown. The throne." He looked about. "I'm leaving this country and moving somewhere that isn't filled with memories."

"You can't!" Olivia grabbed the lapels of his jacket, shaking him in desperation. "You can't let the terrorists win! We--"

"Why not?" He bit out. "They might be the right rulers for Cordonia. My legacy has been nothing but death. My brother gave it all up because the pressures were slowly killing him. My mother died trying to do what was right. My father gave up the crown because he is dying. I've done nothing but bring death and destruction to those I love the most." He gripped her wrists and wrenched them from his jacket. "I can't do it anymore."

"Yes, you can." She followed him when he walked off again. "Just try a little longer."

He laughed bitterly. "Try? Why? My reign is already marked with uncertainty. I'm a king without a queen or heir." He released a deep frustrated breath. "What's the point, Liv? Every time I try, I get knocked down. Losing...losing Riley, Drake, and Maxwell..." He shook his head. “It is too much.”

"Promise me you won't decide anything today." Olivia pleaded. "Please?"

He ran his hands over his face. He looked up as if for divine intervention before nodding. "I won't hold the press conference today."

"Good." She relaxed some. She knew now that she would have to fight him these next few weeks over his decision. The last thing she wanted to see was his giving up on his destiny in the midst of his grief.

Slipping her arm into the bend of his she tugged him toward the hospital.

*******************

"Come in." Hana called out.

She didn't want anymore visits from her parents but couldn't bring herself to tell them. Hearing that her marriage prospects were now completely gone due to her injury had done nothing but bring her further into depression. Did they not see that what she had lost was so much worse than the lower half of her left leg?

Her dearest friends, her best friends, those that knew her better than anyone on earth were gone.

And I didn't get to say goodbye. I didn't get a chance to save them. Nothing.

Olivia smiled softly at Hana. "I brought a surprise."

Hana sat up straighter when she saw Liam sheepishly appear.

A sob burst from her lips as she reached for him to hug.

Liam's Adam's apple bounced a few times as he struggled to swallow his sorrow. He couldn't ignore her need for comfort and hurried over to hug her. Olivia quietly stepped out so they could grieve in privacy.

"Oh Liam!" Hana cried against his shoulder. "I'm so sorry." She clutched the material of his leather jacket, wishing they would all wake up and realize this was nothing but a dream. 

"I'm sorry." He choked out. "I couldn't save them." His tears began to fall freely. "I failed them, Hana. I failed you. I failed everyone!"

She pulled back and gently cupped his face. Blinking through her tears she shook her head. "You didn't fail any of us, Liam. You saved me and Madeleine. Bastien. Rashad and--"

He clung to her. "What am I to do now? Hana, you know I can't face life without Riley. How can I go on after this?"

"I don't know." Hana hugged him again. "But you know Riley wouldn't want us giving up on life." She glanced down at her legs under the blankets. "No matter how hard it is, she would encourage us to keep fighting."

"Hana, Riley was my life. My heart." He lowered his head into his hands. "She was my strength to keep moving forward no matter what was thrown at us."

Hana reached from some tissues, sharing a few with him. "I know. She gave me the bravery I needed to tell my parents that I was more than a marriage prospect for some noble. Now..." Her breath hitched. "Now I don't know what I am or what to do."

Liam moved off her bed and collapsed in one of the chairs by her bed. "What are we going to do?"

Her hand found his. "We help each other. Isn't that what we would hope Riley, Maxwell, and Drake would do if they had lived and you and I had died?"

He wished that had been the case. Not Hana, but that he had been the one Death had come for. He would gladly switch places with them, anything to escape this unending ache in his heart.

He felt Hana's hand squeeze his.

He looked up and saw her trying to be brave for his sake.

Liam didn't know if he could. "I've been thinking of abdicating."

Her lips parted in shock. "Abdicating!"

"Everywhere I turn there is a memory of them." He explained. "I..." He gave up speaking.

"They wouldn't want you doing that, Liam." She reminded him.

He knew she was right, but he couldn't think of moving on as if his very heart had not been ripped from his chest.

"They say when a person loses a loved one that they should wait a year before making a big decision." Hana said, lacing her fingers with his. "Maybe that is what we both should do. My parents want me to go back to Singapore, and I've been tempted to so I won't be reminded of everything."

Liam slowly nodded. "I wouldn't blame you if you did move back home."

"I think what I need is to be with you. Olivia. Madeleine. All of those we still have." She tried to explain. "I need those memories, no matter how much they hurt, to help me heal."

Seeing that he didn't know how to take her advice she gently squeezed his hand again. "Why don't we wait on any decision and just try to get through these next few days."

He eyed her suspiciously. "Did Olivia tell you to say something like that?"

Hana felt her first laugh in over a week burst out. It sounded hollow, as if her body had forgotten how to make the joyful sound. "She might intimidate me at times, but no, she didn't put me up to this."

His lips curved somewhat before settling once more into a thin line. He knew from her words and Olivia's that no one would accept his abdication.

*****************

Madeleine did her best to look presentable. She picked up the small mirror she had insisted be left on the small bedside table. Her eyes touched on the angry, red scars gracing her face and head. Her arm and legs bore others that were long and jagged.

Taking a deep breath, she fluffed the hair that had not been lost in the deep gashes to her scalp. Refusing to give in to the need to cry over something she had no control over, she smoothed her covers and waited to greet her king.

Olivia had shared with her what he wanted to do. Madeleine knew what the fiery duchess wanted her to say and act when she saw him. But she thought she knew how best to respond.

With plan in place, she looked up when she heard a knock to her door.

Liam came in at her bidding him to do so.

He didn't pause in his walk to her bedside like so many did when they first saw the extent of her injuries. She felt her proud façade crack at that. Only Liam would be kind enough to pretend there was nothing unusual about her current hideous state.

Her own parents had handled it horribly. Her mother had been unable to look directly at her without bursting into tears. Her father had bemoaned the fact that she hadn't been able to trap either prince or any other well standing noble before her looks were destroyed.

Just what any young woman needed to hear when awakening from a near death experience.

Liam bowed over her hand while placing a kiss upon her scarred knuckles. "My lady, forgive me for not checking on you sooner."

Madeleine swallowed before asking him to sit. "How have you been?"

His red eyes lifted to hers. "How do you think I've been? I've lost three people I loved. The country lost them along with Penelope and her family. Portivira is destroyed. The Sons of the Earth burned the royal orchard." He slumped in his seat. "I've lost everything, Madeleine."

"Not everything." She corrected. "I know I'm not Riley or Drake or Maxwell." She grimaced at trying to find the right words. "But I am here for you in whatever capacity you need."

"Thank you." He replied automatically. "Your dedication to Cordonia is to be commended."

"It's not--what I meant--" Madeleine closed her eyes briefly when tears pricked her eyes. "Liam, I meant I will be there for you. As a friend." Her nose wrinkled. "As odd as that sounds, I am sincere."

He nodded once more. "Thank you."

They both sat there lost in thought.

"Do you," he cleared his throat, "do you think I should abdicate?"

Madeleine's eyes narrowed in thought. She knew her next words could possibly be the most important of her life.

"Have you done something that could or has harmed Cordonia?"

His eyes widened some. "No."

"Do you no longer care for our people?" She asked.

"No, of course not." He muttered.

"Do you not wish to help them?"

"It isn't anything like that."

"So, your reason is something more selfish." Her green eyes hardened when they met his. "Like Leo, you decide to walk away when ruling becomes too much work."

Liam got to his feet. "It isn't like Leo's reasons! I lost the woman I was to marry. My best friends! Everywhere I turn I am haunted by what was and what could have been. How can I possibly fight Cordonia's enemies when I've lost my sources of strength?"

Madeleine sniffed dismissively. "Every person has lost someone that was their support. If everyone gave up when that happens then this world would crumble to dust."

Liam took a step back from her cold tone. "Madeleine, don't you--"

"Don't I what? Miss any of them? Are saddened by their deaths?" She allowed her sorrow to show. "Of course I do. I might not have been thrilled to be tossed over for Riley, but I would have had to be a blind fool to not notice what she did for you and Cordonia. The same for Maxwell and Drake."

Liam sat back down. "Then what do you think I should do?" He looked down while his bottom lip trembled. "Riley made me a better king."

"Then by all means think of her when you must make a decision." Madeleine told him. "Liam, for whatever reason, fate has placed you as King of Cordonia. You." She stressed. "We've all known you were the better ruler when Leo was our crown prince. It is a great burden, but one that you've never hesitated to carry."

He ran a hand over his eyes. "I wanted to do what I could for the country."

Her lips eased into an approving smile. "As all rulers should be." Reaching over, she patted his shoulder. "I know it won't be easy, but I can't think of anyone better to guide us into the future."

"I feel so lost." He admitted to her. "How can I guide anyone when I no longer have the ones who were my own compass?"

"You'll find a way." She said with certainty. "It may take time, but you will."

He sighed before running his hands through his hair. "I'm so sorry, Madeleine."

"For what?" She asked. "The earthquake was something no one could stop."

"I know." He stood up. "But I'm still sorry."

She nodded in acceptance.

Liam kissed her hand once more and promised to do better checking on her and Hana as he left her room.

Madeleine slumped back against her pillows when her door clicked shut. Tears trickled down her cheeks as she hoped she had somehow said the right thing to him.

Turning to bury her face in her pillows, she allowed the tears to be for herself, Liam, and those they had lost.

******************

That afternoon, Liam departed from Olivia and insisted taking a walk by himself. He went to the private beach and slipped out of his shoes and socks. Rolling up the cuffs of his pants, he began to walk slowly along the shore, allowing the waves to roll over his feet.

He flipped his collar up when the early fall breeze blew by, hinting at an incoming cold spell. He thought it served his mood perfectly. The summer that had once been his world had ended, bringing the cold cruel reality to crash down upon him.

His happily ever after had truly been a dream not meant for the real world. He should have known that he couldn't bring a fairy tale to life. It couldn't survive the cruelness of fate.

He continued his stroll while thinking of his visits with Olivia, Hana, and Madeleine. His conversations with them had only paused his decision. Even if he were to wait as long as Hana suggested before abdicating, what good would it do? He would still be unable to regain what he had lost.

"Liam?"

He paused and turned to see his father walking towards him.

"May I join you?" Constantine asked.

Liam gave a brisk nod before focusing once more on the waves lapping at his feet.

They walked on in silence for a spell. Constantine glanced every so often at Liam’s face, searching for any word that could possibly help his son.

"Who is next in line to the throne?"

Constantine stopped in his tracks. "Who is next in line?" His eyes narrowed in concern. "Why do you ask?"

Liam shrugged. "Shouldn't an unmarried, childless ruler know these things?"

"Son, you have your whole life stretched before you. Give yourself time to grieve and heal. Then--"

"My enemies are at the door." Liam snapped. "Even if I somehow survive them and whatever next hell Cordonia thrusts me into, I will still be without a wife or heir."

Constantine gestured weakly toward a set of lounging chairs. "Sit with me for a moment."

Liam's brief burst of anger turned to resignation when he noticed his father's trembles. Placing an arm around him, he helped ease Constantine down.

Liam took the chair next to his and focused on the ocean. He wondered how he could still find such beauty in it when it had been the final place Riley and Drake had lived.

"I'm going to abdicate, Father." He stated.

Liam was surprised by the silence that followed his declaration. He expected his father to be pleading with him to reconsider or furious for even thinking it.

Instead, he found his father looking more sympathetic than he had ever appeared before.

"I made the same decision when your mother was taken from me." Constantine admitted softly.

Liam's eyes widened. "You did?"

"Yes." He cleared his throat. "Your mother was everything to me." His gaze became distant as he was once again in the past. "She was life itself, my strength." His lips curved into a bitter smile. "She never held back her thoughts and opinions on how we should rule." He met Liam's eyes. "I loved her with my entire heart."

Liam ran his hands down his face. "What," his voice was raspy, "what made you decide to remain king?"

"I'm afraid it wasn't one out of duty or believing anyone needed me." Constantine admitted. "My reasons were purely selfish. I knew the only way to find the ones who took my Eleanor from me was to be in absolute power." His hand balled into a fist at the memories. "For years, vengeance kept me focused on my kingly duties."

"When did it change?" Liam asked.

"It was actually you that opened my eyes."

"Me?" Liam's brow furrowed. "What did I do?"

"You were ten years old." Constantine's lips curved into a tender, proud smile. "Leo was his usual, rebellious self. He had just turned sixteen and was supposed to attend his first official ball. He was trying to get out of it when he found out he would be obligated to dance with every visiting nobles’ daughter, regardless of how attractive they were."

Liam's eyes narrowed as he tried to recall that night.

"As I was walking past the ballroom, I heard your gentle, yet firm correction to his behavior. You were reminding him what a good prince was supposed to do. Be there for his subjects. Kind. Understanding. Sacrificial." He chuckled again. "It was just the slap to the face I needed."

Liam slumped back in his chair. "That ideal is meaningless."

Constantine slowly nodded. "If I had heard it after your mother died, I would have dismissed it too." He reached over and placed his hand on top of his son's. "Time doesn't necessarily heal all wounds, but it does help in how we view them." He swallowed. "There were years where the very thought of your mother brought me to my knees. Her loss was like a festering wound that never eased."

Liam knew that feeling all too well.

"But now, though I miss her just as much as I did before; my memories of her bring me comfort." He squeezed Liam's hand. "They make me grateful for every single second I was allowed with her."

Liam blew out a shaky breath. "Well, unfortunately I can't find and fight the earthquake that took Riley. I don't see the point in being king for revenge."

"True." Constantine nodded. "But Riley, Drake, and Maxwell believed in you. They went on the unity tour for you, for your reign to be successful. Not for themselves. Not for Cordonia. All because they thought you and you alone were worthy to be king."

Liam swallowed a few times as stray tears fell from his blue eyes. "I don't deserve it. I didn't deserve their faith or..." He huffed while wiping his eyes. "I'm not worth it."

"They would say you are." Constantine swung his legs to the side and pushed himself up. "You remaining king is a way to honor them and their efforts to help you be the best one you can be."

Liam pressed his palms to his eyes as a sob tore through him. When he felt his father's arms come around him, he buried his head against his shoulder while shaking with his cries.

Constantine gently rubbed his back while promising he was there for him. That he wouldn't have to go through this alone, that he had him, Regina, and those of his friends that had survived.

Liam clung to him, unable to speak.

Father and son clung to each other as the sun set.

********************

The next few weeks had Liam attending and speaking at the funerals of those that were no longer with them. He didn't bother to try and mask his heartache in front of his people. The nation was touched by his honesty and mourned with their young king.

Constantine and Regina remained by his side. Olivia and Neville traveled with him to each graveyard. Hana and Madeleine were allowed to attend some of the funerals. Rashad stuck by their sides, even helping to push Hana's wheelchair.

Seeing them each time he took the podium reminded him of why he was doing this. His father's words about honoring his beloved and best friends gave him the strength to speak of the type of people they had been.

He didn't know how he got through those first few weeks. Though it took a great effort, he forced himself to get back to his duties. Routine helped him remain focused on what he needed to do and gave him opportunities to continue to grieve.

The rest of the unity tour was canceled. Liam instead spent his efforts in rebuilding Portivira and in replanting the apple orchard. Out of respect and because he couldn't stand the thought of a ball without Riley, he canceled the rest of the year's planned balls and palace events.

With little chance to catch the king in a position that would bring about his downfall, the Sons of the Earth were soon desperate and making foolish decisions to attack during the daylight. Many were rounded up by Bastien's elite task force. Anton was found holed up in a long forgotten Nevarkis stronghold and died in a shootout with the king's guards.

After months of turmoil and uncertainty, Cordonia was once again in a state of peace.

Constantine lived long enough to see it come about. With his sons and wife at his bedside, he quietly passed away after telling them each how much he loved them.

Liam kept working. After two years, he hosted his first ball, an engagement one for Rashad and Hana. He had smiled and gave a sweet toast to the couple, all while remembering his own happiness he had once had with Riley.

As the years went by, he was able to think back on Riley, Drake, and Maxwell with a soft smile on his face.

Then the fifth year as king, he was approached by Madeleine.

"Liam, I think it's time for you to host another social season with potential suitors."

A denial rose to his lips.

She held up her hand to silence it. "I know, but you need an heir."

"There is already an heir. The throne goes to Olivia if I die."

"Liam." She huffed. "The crown needs to be stable. The people want to see you happy with a family." She shrugged her shoulders. "Cordonians are a sentimental bunch."

A family. That had been his heartfelt wish for years. Could he do that? Have one without his Riley?

"I will think about it." He conceded.

Madeleine smiled at him. "Good." She curtsied and left him alone.

Liam rocked back in his desk chair. He lifted his eyes to the ceiling.

"My love," he whispered. "What should I do? You were the only one I could ever picture myself marrying. Mother to my children." His brow creased. "Am I ready to try to find something that can’t possibly compare to what I had with you?"

He closed his eyes, wishing he could find the answer.

"Liam, dear?"

He opened his eyes and looked up at Regina.

She smiled warmly at him. "You fell asleep. Dinner is ready."

He apologized and rose to follow her out.

He halted mid step as the afternoon sun glinted on Regina's silver hair. The answer he needed was right there. He looked back up to the heavens.

His lips curved softly. "I understand. Though no one can ever compare to you, perhaps I can have the kind of luck my father had."

[whoaffle]

Sometimes things that shouldn’t annoy me annoy me anyway because of disproportionate and nearly-irrational, however usually very logical, over-thinking leading to a negative analysis of the given thing.

I’ll leave an example that is what made me rather annoyed now. You can skip this whole thing if you don’t feel like reading about my moody complaints about modern society. Have a nice day anyway. ♥

WARNING: this post is mostly negative, and may trigger you if you are sensitive to a lot of negativity.

Now, about what made me angry today... There’s this add that always plays between my music in Youtube where the woman goes “We are people who don’t like to stop. We don’t have time for pain! That’s why, when it shows up, we need *painkiller name*!” -- and by then I have already skipped it, like... I skip it every time because I hate this first sentence.

“We are people who don’t like to stop” - that is not inherently bad, I mean, there’s no problem in disliking to be idle, to have nothing to do, it could be interpreted as “we dislike boredom” and that’s mostly correct. But still, doesn’t apply to everyone, some people do like to stop sometimes and just stay the whole day doing nothing and looking through the window feeling a cold breeze, some people can’t stand NOT stopping, they hate to do things in a rush and like to have time to breathe and think in between when they have to do a lot of stuff. So yeah, not 100% relatable for everyone, but not a sentence that would piss me off on it’s own.

But “We don’t have time for pain” - oh, baby, you just triggered my “mad at society” mode right now! That part just gives the first sentence a whole new meaning... It’s implying that the fact that we do not have time for pain (which is, in my view, a major flaw on how today’s society works and a disrespect to human health and quality of life) is NOT because we are basically forced to work 24/7 otherwise we literally can’t afford food, or because we are expected to do a billion times more than it would be humanly acceptable in most jobs otherwise we are considered to be “not giving our best” and may be fired... BUT BECAUSE WE DON’T LIKE NOT TO WORK OUR BUTTS AND SOULS OFF! That makes me mad.

The fact that we (in general) ��don’t have time for pain” is not at all because “we don’t like to stop”, which is the connection that the add wants to establish between the two sentences, I suppose. It’s because we ARE NOT ALLOWED to stop! And this is so unhealthy! And this makes me so mad that adds and companies and society in general are promoting surviving through our insane days of work with painkillers and energetic drinks (I’ve already written before about why those make me mad as well) as something not only acceptable, but normal and even good! It’s so common... I see this a lot, I think I’ve actually become sensitive to it, because every time I see something that slightly implies this, I notice and usually feel moody about it.

What I’m saying is that it feels to me that... “Look! Now whenever your body starts warning you that maybe living under that much pressure all the time is not really healthy or tries to show you with a symptom that there MAY be something wrong with your body, you can just IGNORE IT! And keep doing the same unhealthy things you always do, instead of taking it as a warning and taking some time for yourself, to heal mentally, physically and emotionally and check your health with some professionals!” is a SUPER COMMON argument nowadays... Like, we are subtly normalizing the notion that we should “kill the symptoms instead of the disease” as a metaphor for society, not literally (most of the time), and that is, that we should find a way to ignore the consequences of our limitations, instead of rethinking our habit of constantly pushing ourselves to our maximum. We somehow managed to turn “give it your best” into an unhealthy culture!

I agree with giving your best as long as it’s in a healthy way. Because whenever it’s not healthy anymore, that is no longer “your best”, it’s now more than what your best really is. Makes sense right? I mean.. “your” best is not other people’s best! So “your” best is as far as you can go without hurting yourself! If it’s damaging you, then it’s beyond your limits! I mean, ask people who do sports, you shouldn’t force yourself beyond your limits, otherwise you may ruin your body! As an example, a story that runs in my family about a family friend who wanted to be a ballerina. She was in ballet class and couldn’t do the exercise properly because she couldn’t bend down enough. And then her teacher SAT DOWN ON HER BACK, putting her whole weigh on her spine, in order to push her down, and she literally had to go to the hospital! The teacher fucked up her back so badly with that she literally had to stop dancing and could never become a ballerina!

That’s what happens when we don’t respect our limits and the limits of those around us! And I feel like this is almost never taken seriously. Sometimes, if it’s about physical health, it gets some attention, but not as much as it should. Our society keeps expecting each day more and more out of people, not giving anyone the proper conditions to live a healthy life. Society doesn’t respect human limits. And this is not beautiful, this is not an example of “being a fighter” and being awesome and shit! I mean, yes, sometimes we must fight beyond out limits, give it more than we can, to overcome problems and all... And it’s not like this is not inspiring. But we shouldn’t see it as something so positive! The positive thing is not that the person went beyond their limit, but the fact that they survived it. The fact that they had to go beyond their limit should be tragic, it should be seen as a problem. They were in such a big pickle that they had to give it more than they could, good thing it worked! That’s how we should see it! But instead we kinda set those examples as the norm, as the goal. If they did it, you can to it too! Yeah, maybe I can, perhaps, but should I?

Don’t get me wrong, again, this involves reinterpreting several common-place sentences such as 1 “being a fighter“, 2 “give it your best”, 3 “you can do it too”... I’m not saying those are inherently negative, destructive or toxic sentences. Far from that! In fact, used in the proper context, those are great sentences that can be super inspiring and true! But I think we are witnessing some sort of radicalization of those sentences, turning them into unhealthy statements that, instead of saying 1 “we recognize and admire your effort and the fact you overcame such a tough situation”, 2 “don’t hold back for fear or laziness, do the best you are physically, mentally and emotionally able to do right now” and 3 “you should try to do it because I believe in your potential, another person has done it before, so it’s not impossible”, are saying 1 “This person who suffered a lot is better than you for that reason, so you must suffer too and that’s beautiful”, 2 “I don’t care if it’s hurting, keep going! I don’t care if you feel like dying, it’s not good enough yet, you have to do better and better and better” and 3 “If one person made it once, everyone is expected to do it as well, doesn’t matter if you’re a different person with different traits. Just. Do it.” - You see the difference? It’s turning good things and positive messages into destructive and toxic thoughts that can be extremely unhealthy for us.

Yeah I know I’m over-interpreting. I know it’s “just an add for a painkiller”. I know it’s intended for situations like “oh you have a headache at work so you can take it not to feel pain”. I’m not saying that the add or whoever made it is actively trying to transmit the message I criticized above. And I’m totally not saying people should go home every time they have a headache or anything such. I just... I just really can’t disassociate this aspect of our society and how it generally promotes unhealthy practices in the benefit of companies and economy and whatever (capitalism in general) with this kind of speech that is so common in painkiller adds, energetic drinks adds, coffee adds and other adds... As well as in those “beautiful: girl works collecting trash everyday to pay for her mother’s cancer treatment” news we sometimes get...

Also... Nothing against taking painkillers, by the way. Specially because no one really likes feeling pain, and not every pain is serious enough to actually stop you from doing what you want/must. What I really dislike is the way it is put in the add. What I dislike is this weird subtext that seems to be present in this add. I don’t like this association of sentences - we don’t like to stop, we don’t have time for pain - as if they were 1- cause and consequence and 2- universally relatable as cause and consequence.

Anyway. I’m sorry if this whole thing made no sense to you, I know this is over-thinking and I know this is rather negative, so I’m really sorry if you chose to read the text and it somehow made you feel sad or anything. I’ll try to compensate by leaving a cute cat picture! And I hope you can feel better.

I just want to add that the reason why I write those huge texts all the time, often criticizing stuff, is because it’s good for me. It works really well for me to relieve stress and take negativity out of my chest. I just don’t really want to take it out of my chest to put it in someone else’s, so I hope no one feels bad because of this. I really like to write about things when I feel frustrated and mad, it really calms me down and makes me feel better.

Anyways.... Have a lovely cat, please! And I hope you have a good day! (Also take care of your physical, mental and emotional health please)

[classyfoxdestiny]

Interview: Elif Shafak, author, The Island of Missing Trees

Interview: Elif Shafak, author, The Island of Missing Trees

“All around the world, wherever there is, or has ever been, a civil war or an ethnic conflict, come to the trees for clues, because we will be the ones that sit silently in communion with human remains,” remarks the talking fig tree in Elif Shafak’s new novel, The Island of Missing Trees, a deeply moving tale of love, grief, eco-consciousness, migration, exile and regeneration set in Cyprus and London, that alternates between the first-person voice of the tree and the third-person narrative woven around the lives of Greek Cypriot Kostas and Turkish Cypriot Defne Kazantzakis, and their daughter Ada.

368pp, ₹699; Penguin Viking

The Island of Missing Trees, as enchanting and magical as most of your novels, is a forbidden love story set against the backdrop of a civil war; the love between Greek Cypriot Kostas and Turkish Cypriot Defne rises above the ordinary and acquires a spiritual, transcendental dimension. Was this love story, marked by distance and division, central to the novel when you conceived it? Did it come to you along with its setting — Cyprus, the island, and Nicosia, the only divided capital in the world?

We live in a world that constantly puts us into boxes, categories, tribes, clashing certainties. Can you love someone who is not of your tribe, your religion, your ethnic background? Yes, you can. Love was central to the story from the beginning, but so was war, conflict, trauma, memory, displacement, partition. How can you tell the story of a divided land? It wasn’t easy. Love gave me a door into the story. There are two types of love in this novel, the first one is the love between humans, and then there is the love between humans and trees, the love humans feel for their land, for their roots, their memories, the love immigrants feel for lost homelands.

The novel shows Kostas and Defne to be an unlikely couple not because she is Turkish and he is Greek, but because their personalities are strikingly dissimilar: Defne considers human suffering as paramount and justice as the ultimate aim, but for Kostas — who carves an island for himself inside an island and retreats into silence — human existence has no special priority in the ecological chain. However, they are both the products of a common culture. Do you see their story as one of commonalities and contradictions, of togetherness forged out of conflicting nationalisms and religious identities?

I believe there is something utterly beautiful and moving when people from different backgrounds, races, religions and/or personalities manage to build a loving, caring and compassionate relationship together, despite all the odds. Love can triumph over hatred. Just like solidarity and sisterhood can triumph over polarisation and extremism. But I am also aware that none of this is easy to achieve. And yet we must keep trying. Especially now, more than ever before. Our planet is burning, our only home, this earth, is burning. We have massive global challenges ahead, from climate crisis to pandemics. Neither ultranationalism nor religious fundamentalism are the answer. Any ideology that takes us away from critical thinking and divides humans into boxes and tells them to hate “the Other” is misleading, wrong. We have entered a new era when we need global sisterhood, international solidarity and cooperation, a new kind of egalitarian, inclusive humanism that respects diversity and basic human dignity. We must all work together to save our planet and our common humanity.

The novel is structured around the act of burying and unburying of the fig tree and is rooted in eco-consciousness; it explores our relationship with nature at a time when ecological concerns are at the centre of global discourse. The pandemic has also forced us to reconsider how we engage with nature. Kostas, a botanist, is in constant communion with plants. The novel, which is narrated in parts by the sagacious fig tree that remains a witness to the trials and tumults of Kostas and Defne’s story, reflects on what nature does to death — it transforms “abrupt endings into a thousand new beginnings”, tending even to those who would never be found after the war. How did you settle on the structure and the narrative device that alternates between the authorial third person and the voice of the fig tree and what did the latter allow you to do in the novel?

I have been wanting to write about Cyprus for many years now but I could never dare because I knew it was not an easy story to tell. This is such a beautiful island. And yet, there is a lot of pain — accumulated pain, intergenerational trauma, loss and distrust, and ethnic partition. The wounds are still open, unhealed. I could not find a voice. How do you tell the story of a divided land without falling into the trap of nationalism? Only when I found the voice of the fig tree, only then, I could dare to start writing. A Ficus carica. The idea of the fig tree came to me during the pandemic and the lockdowns. I had been reading about nature and ecology for a while, but it was the pandemic that really encouraged me to walk firmly in this direction. Like many of us, I felt the need, almost the urgency, to reconnect with nature, to rethink about environment and especially, about trees and forests. Also, trees were important to me in a metaphorical sense. As an immigrant myself, I think about roots a lot. What does it mean to be rooted or uprooted or rerooted? Roots are important throughout my writing. I care about issues like belonging, non-belonging, motherland, adopted land, exile.

Ficus carica; a fig tree. (Shutterstock)

As I was reading The Island of Missing Trees, the wildfires in Turkey raged on, which made the book’s eco-consciousness and environmental concerns even more immediate and urgent. What has been your assessment of the devastating wildfires? Where do you think Turkey has gone wrong with regard to ecology?

The wildfires are utterly heartbreaking. It is devastating. Entire villages, forests, natural habitats have been destroyed. There is a photograph that is imprinted on my mind. It is incredibly sad. The photo of an elderly Turkish woman in Manavgat who has advanced Alzheimer’s. She does not know and understand that she lost everything to the wildfires, her village, her home, her trees. Her family cannot explain or tell her. And there is this innocent woman sleeping on the street, suddenly a refugee in her own land. Climate crisis is happening in front of our eyes, every day, every moment. This is not something that will take place at some vague point in the future. As the recent UN report made it very clear, human-caused climate emergency is unequivocal, widespread and accelerating. That said, in the case of Turkey, there was an additional element that made things worse: the government’s incompetence. Lack of proper infrastructure and coordination to fight the fires. Turkish government spends so much money on building palaces for themselves but no money to invest in protecting forests, no planes to put out the fires. But when you say this out loud they will automatically call you a ‘traitor’. There is no freedom of speech. Zero. Intellectuals, journalists, writers are prosecuted. Even people who have tweeted using the hashtag Turkey needs help have been sued. It is mind-blowing, but this is what happens when democracy is completely lost and civil society is shattered.

Wildfires in Turkey (Shutterstock)

You have written of Istanbul as a ‘She-city’ likening it to an old woman with a young heart, eternally hungry for new stories and new loves. The fig tree is also referred to as female and is equally invested in the act of storytelling; it’s also a memory keeper, a reservoir of stories since it’s a constant in the life of humans and the animal kingdom: “Tangled beneath our roots, hidden inside our trunks, are the sinews of history, the ruins of wars nobody came to win, the bones of the missing.” Do you see it mirroring your own voice and preoccupations?

Such a beautiful question! As a writer my own voice and preoccupations will, from time to time, seep into the book. However, the truth is, for me, writing fiction is not necessarily autobiographical. I have always believed there is something irrational, transcendental, almost mystical, about the art of storytelling. In novels, you journey into other people’s lives and into their minds and hearts, you go beyond the limits of the “self”, even if for a few hours, days. I am interested in those unexpected human connections. I believe you can, both, be attached to your own cultural roots, and feel connected to all humanity at the same time. I do not believe in singular, static identity. I think, as human beings, we all have multiple belongings, or like Walt Whitman used to say, we all contain multitudes.

The novel also deals with the shadows that the past casts on us as well as the possibility of renewal and regeneration. It shows how silences shroud family secrets and trauma runs across generations. Ada, the 16-year-old daughter, who lives in London with her father Kostas, is oblivious to the ordeal her parents went through in the past, how the war tore them apart. What makes you write about people and their difficult struggles of living with the past and, at times, their attempts to survive without one?

Families are composed of stories — and silences, too. I have always believed in the existence of inherited pain. We do not only inherit our noses or cheeks or hair colour from our parents or great-grandparents. We also inherit sorrow and melancholy, even if we might not know their stories in full, even then, we are shaped by silences. Especially within immigrant families, exiled families, or families that come from divided lands, complex histories, there are many such silences. The first generation are the ones who have experienced the biggest hardships and obstacles, but they don’t exactly have a language to talk about their pain. The second generation does not usually want to dig into the past because they are busy adopting, belonging, finding their feet. They would rather focus on this present moment or the future. But then there is the third or fourth generation, the youngest in the families who today are asking the most important questions about the trajectory of their ancestors, questions about identity. They want to know. So, interestingly, you can come across young people who carry the stories of their grandparents, young people with old memories.

There is always a heartbreaking sorrow that runs as an undercurrent in the lives of most of your characters. The fig tree has this melancholy in its genes that it can never quite shake off. Similarly, Ada carries within her a sadness that is not quite her own but part of her DNA, passed down to her by her parents. What draws you to grief and melancholy?

I come from a land of pessimism. The Balkans, Anatolia, the Levant… we are not very optimistic people in general, you know. There is a lot of sorrow in our history, there is melancholy or duende. So the stories that I write reflect the culture where I come from. However, I have always believed there is also a strong element of humour in my writing. I really love and respect humour, especially the compassionate kind. Not the kind of humour that looks down upon people, not like that, but the kind that understands both the weakness and resilience, the complexity and simplicity of being human. So I guess in a nutshell what I am really drawn to is the dance of humour and sorrow, the dialectical relationship between melancholy and hope, between pessimism and optimism.

Attuned to the landscape of the island and the patterns of life of the islanders, the novel is rich in imagery and atmospherics. How did you craft this particular element in the novel? Did you visit Cyprus while working on the novel or did you draw on your memory of the island?

I read across the board, both fiction and non fiction. Fiction is where my heart beats, of course, but I love interdisciplinary studies. I read anything and everything that speaks to me, from political philosophy to botanical sciences to cookbooks and graphic novels. Unlike “information”, “knowledge” takes time to accumulate; it is much slower, interdisciplinary. It requires an inner garden to grow. I have visited Cyprus many times in the past, not during the pandemic. I have met beautiful people from this beautiful island, and I listened to them with respect. What I like best is to bridge the written culture with the oral culture. So there is a lot of research behind this novel, but there is also a genuine interest in oral cultures, superstitions, myths, legends, the things that are not necessarily found in books.

In what ways has your peripatetic life and your diverse identities as an activist, a migrant, a nomad, a cosmopolite, an agnostic, a heterodox mystic and a humanist — a “wandering, independent, carefree spirit” as you wrote in Black Milk — shaped your writing?

James Baldwin was fond of using a word to describe himself, a word that stayed with me: commuter. He commuted between continents, cultures, cities. But he was also aware of how painful or lonely this could be. When I look at my journeys, I have learned so much from multiple cultures. When you travel, you not only learn from differences, you also get a chance to take another look at where you are coming from, perhaps you attain a new cognitive flexibility. I think in this life we learn most from diversity, from people who are “different” than us at first glance, we don’t learn much from sameness. But you don’t have to physically be travelling all the time. Books also help us travel. Stories take us everywhere, across centuries and geographies. Through journeys we learn. We need to be “intellectual nomads” and refuse to settle down in any address, any fixed abode, once and for all.

You have been a traveller between Turkish and English languages. What kind of relationship do you share with language? And then there is a distinct vocabulary of silence manifest in most of your novels. Where does silence figure in your writing and what is your relationship with it? Do you consciously work on it?

Turkish is mother tongue. English for me is an acquired language. I did not grow up in a bilingual house. I started learning English at the age of 10 when I was in Spain. At the time, Spanish was my second language. But English never abandoned me. It gave me a sense of mobility, another zone of freedom. I feel attached to each language in a different way. My connection with Turkish is very emotional, and I am an emotional person, so writing in English, which is more cerebral, gives a different balance, a cognitive distance that I need. If my writing has melancholy, sadness, I find these things easier to express in Turkish, however. But humour, and especially irony, are much easier in English.

The divided city: Nicosia, capital of Cyprus. (Shutterstock)

As a writer and an activist, you have been eminently brave and outspoken, telling gritty and unflinching stories. At some point in this novel, Defne says: “There are moments in life when everyone has to become a warrior of some kind. If you are a poet, you fight with your words; if you are an artist, you fight with your paintings… But you can’t say, “Sorry, I’m a poet, I’ll pass.” Ali Smith recently reiterated how all novels are political even if they do not intend to be so. Do you see the need to speak up against the injustice and oppression of the world or against the curtailments of rights, individual liberty and freedom in countries around the world, especially Turkey, as central to your enterprise as a writer? In a world falling apart all around, where do you derive your inspiration and courage from?

I appreciate your words, but I am not a brave person. I am just a curious person. I love the art of storytelling. I believe literature can rehumanise people who have been systematically dehumanised, pushed to the margins, silenced, forgotten. I am drawn to the periphery rather than the centre. I don’t think a writer’s job is to give answers, to dictate or teach or preach. I find a lot of that off-putting. I believe a writer’s job is to ask questions, including difficult questions. The novel is one of our last remaining democratic spaces. In my novels, I want to create open spaces where questions can be raised, a plurality of opinions and voices can be heard, and then you must always leave the answers to the reader. Because every reader will come up with their own answers. I know couples who read the same book and they don’t read it in the same way. Good friends who read the same novel, but each in their own way. Why? Because each reader’s reading is unique like their fingerprints. That said, as a writer, if you happen to come from a wounded democracy, like Turkey or Brazil or Egypt and so on, you do not have the luxury of being apolitical. Also I am a feminist. I believe the personal is also political. You can write about gender and sexuality, that too, is political.

You write in the note to the reader in The Island of Missing Trees how you drew on historical facts and events for several strands in the novel, including the mysterious deaths of British babies and the illegal hunting of songbirds. You write that while you honour local folklore and oral traditions in the novel, it remains a work of fiction — “a mixture of wonder, dreams, love, sorrow and imagination”. Could one use this to describe most of your writing?

A blend of mind and heart, knowledge and intuition, ruins and remnants, past and present, mysticism and politics, written culture and oral culture, East and West, melancholy and humour… I think I like this hybridity. Because I come from Istanbul you see, and I carry the city with me, and Istanbul herself is exactly like that.

Nawaid Anjum is a Delhi-based freelance feature writer, translator and poet.

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[rustandyearnings]

Calling In, Take 2: Power, Accountability, Movement, and the State

In the winter of 2013, I wrote a piece titled, “Calling IN: A Less Disposable Way of Holding Each Other Accountable.” Over the next four years or so, this piece would become the bane of my existence. Let me explain.

This piece sort of exploded – I was receiving emails and messages that the piece was really resonating with folks doing justice work across all types of communities. It was true and probably is still true how tired we all are of the constant worry that we cannot make mistakes – not even among those who we call friends, family, and/or comrades.

There have been numerous challenges that have arisen since the publication of this piece. The first is that it was so wildly appropriated by white people to rationalize or justify their own racist behavior. It’s been wildly appropriated to push away valid critique of racist or otherwise oppressive behavior. I remember as Ani DiFranco was being called out for playing music at a slave plantation, that white lesbians were quoting “Calling In” to tell Black women and women of color that they shouldn’t be critiquing Ani (or other white people) in such a harsh way. I don’t think I need to offer any more examples on how this piece or this concept has been misconstrued to mean, “I can do whatever I want and you have to be nice to me.”

The second challenge actually has a lot more to do with my own political development than external factors—how it was being read by my community or how it was being used by those inside and outside of my community. In the four years since writing this piece, I regret to some extent not writing more about the relationship we have to each other in movement versus our relationship to each other and that relationship to the state – the apparatus which seeks to and often succeeds at dividing, repressing, and conquering (literally and metaphorically) us.

I have become regularly frustrated by some of the contexts in which “calling in” has been used or named. It’s less about people annoying me (because people annoy me a lot) or some idea that I am the arbitrator of what “calling in” as an accountability practice or process actually means. It is actually more about the individualistic ways we think of accountability, power, and our relationships to each other. In many ways it is not surprising that we conceptualize ourselves as simply individuals. We are born into this world by ourselves (unless we’re a twin or a triplet, or something, but you get my point), we experience much of the world with only ourselves (even if many of our experiences involve others), at night we fall asleep and wander into the dream world on our own, and when we die – and we all die – we die alone.

We take the reality of the human experience as being both terrifyingly and rewardingly lonely and compound it with the deadliest economic, political, and social system in existence, capitalism, and most of us end up having a lot of shit to unpack around our individualism, and specific to this context, our understanding of harm and repair.

So what does it mean to hold each other accountable in a world that is incredibly messy? In a world where we don’t have much to rely on but the reality that things are incredibly messiness? That isn’t to say that there aren’t topics or issues where we are capable of drawing a clear line. We know how to do that – that’s why we have vibrant social movements.

But we have to start figuring out the space that exists between ourselves and our communities, our communities and the movement, and the movement and the state. Not only do we have to start figuring out that space, we have to do this in a way that is honest, transformative, and real.

I don’t think that I can say this enough: we are human beings and we have our shit. We carry with us the traumas we experience from early ages, that we don’t start developing different coping mechanisms for until later in life. For some of us, it is much later in life or it is never actually dealt with at all.

Being in movement has taught me that movement brings together the maladjusted weirdos of society who have decided or have been led to doing something about their own and others’ maladjustment. When I say “maladjusted” I am capturing a pretty broad stroke of people who are, by the standards of this system and society, not fit to be a part of this system and society. We are rightfully upset, uncomfortable, and angry. In most aspects of our lives – at our jobs, in our classrooms, in our neighborhoods, and most public spaces, including those that are allegedly democratically elected to represent us, we do not belong nor do we have power.

Movement is where we have power. Movement is where those of us who have seen the most fucked up shit; have made a whole lot out of the nothing slapped to us by capitalism; have had to endure the incredulous crimes against humanity, whether it be gentrification or police brutality, homelessness or addiction, incarceration or unemployment; have once believed that we might not survive another day have managed to find others, to find a way, and to fight for our right to life every day.

The power we have in movement spaces is beautiful, transformative, and sometimes (and increasingly so) threatening to those who have power over us. But the power we have can sometimes fuck us up. Let’s be real. Sometimes we get power and suddenly no one is a friend, it’s only foes. And it’s especially foes if not everyone agrees with us. Sometimes we get power and we become stagnant, we start operating in the interest of preserving our own power, instead of remembering why people’s power means anything to begin with: we have to build with other people to win. Our fingers tight as a fist are much stronger than they are a part. Our arms linked are a much stronger barricade than our shoulders alone in the cold. The harmony of many voices is much louder than just one.

The movement gives us power and we start acting like calling out greedy politicians and corporate profiteers or politicians who want to rid the world of queer and trans people is the same as calling out our cousin who makes sexist jokes at the family reunion or even a fellow organizer who takes up a lot of space as a white person. These are fundamentally different relationships. Our relationships to capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy as pillars holding up a destructive and deadly system is fundamentally different than our relationships to the human beings who have to survive these systems. 

The state is an oppressive force that seeks to cultivate division and thrives on our disconnection and alienation from each other. Let’s try our best to not feed it with our harms and grievances as if it could help us resolve them.

Our movement is, in many ways, fighting to confront the state. We are disrupting the institutions and systems harming our people. Our movement is not mechanized with an oppressive ideology; we are not weaponizing ourselves toward profit; we are not propping up fake democracy to make the rich more comfortable; we are not fighting to dispose of our people, leave our people behind or for dead. If we are truly building our movement to confront the state, we’ve got to stop treating each other like the mistakes we commit are the same heinous crimes that the state commits against our people. We are all capable of causing harm but we can’t operate as if the harm we cause to each other is the same as what we experience from the state. Often, the harm we cause to each other happens in the process of trying to build a different world.

Somewhere along the lines, the idea of “calling in” was put in opposition to “calling out.” I don’t believe that such dichotomy exists, since I think that our accountability should be more rooted in our understanding of power, to each other and to the forces that seek to exert power over us, than rooted in our individualism and selfishness about who gets to be right and who is wrong.

But ultimately, whether you want to call in or call out, let’s all try to be on the same page about who our shared enemy is – and it is not each other. I stick by a lot of what I originally wrote in that piece in 2013. Movement building is about relationship building. And it’s also about nuance. In the piece I elaborated on how we use our relationships as the basis for determining whether we "call in" or "call out." I’m still less interested in how we label our processes for holding each other accountable and more interested in the process itself. Some questions that I would pose to folks when they are deciding how they want to deal with an oppressive situation are: what is the depth of the relationship I have with this person? Are they someone I consider an acquaintance? A friend? A comrade? What values do we share (if any) and what are they? 

There are deeper political questions that should inform how to hold people accountable, too -- because everything is political and more importantly, because everything requires us to think of ourselves within the context of a broader society. Our society necessitates harm in order to thrive and it can either continue to thrive or be delegitimized based on our responses to harm. We live in a real society of disposability. We talk about it a lot but I think sometimes we forget how entrenched we are in it. When we talk about the prison industrial complex, we are talking about a world that puts people in cages for the rest of their lives because of an accountability system where the state arbitrates who gets to make mistakes and who doesn't. The structural violence carried out by the state shapes and informs how we relate to each other interpersonally.

Lately I’ve been returning to the fact that we are human beings. This kind of statement is obviously a little oversimplifying. We are human beings who are greedy, selfish, cruel, unforgiving, vengeful and also deeply feeling, compassionate, remorseful, creative, apologetic, loving, and caring. Some of the human beings on this earth commit viler nastiness than just being human – we know that this shows up in our communities and in the broader world as sexual, emotional, and physical violence, all tied and connected to capitalist exploitation and oppression: white supremacy and anti-blackness, transmisogyny and homophobia, islamophobia and xenophobia, Zionism and anti-Semitism and more.

I'm not saying that there is never harm nor that we should martyrize ourselves to minimize the harm we experience. I'm saying we should remember we have all caused harm, have the propensity to cause harm and if causing harm or making mistakes were the basis for whether or not we maintain community with each other instead of our humanity, our dignity, our aptitude for change, and our belief in a radically different and better world, we'd have no community. And probably just as scary, if not more, we’d have no movement.

There is no perfect way to deal with harm or conflict. We are trying our best to maintain our relationship to each other and ourselves in a world that is routinely dehumanizing, under a system that doesn’t care about what we mean to each other. But we should care about what we mean to each other.

As a queer and gender non-conforming person of color, a migrant from Viet Nam, and a communist, what keeps me alive is the fact that everything changes – that in fact, everything must change. When something has stopped changing, it’s dead. If there’s nothing that is useful from this piece, any of my (largely unoriginal) musings on power, accountability, movement, and the state – I hope at least that we can all remember and respect that everything changes. That this be a gift we do not take for granted, that this be a gift we give to each other in service of a better world, a world where not only are we capable of transforming but one that our transformation made possible.

In the spirit of change, I acknowledge that four years from now I might write a totally different piece, depending on where the forces of this gruesome planet are, depending on the tenacity and resilience of humanity, I might write a take three. But for now, I hope that I’ve done some justice to those who I am fighting alongside with each and every day, whose mistakes I share in, whose vision I believe in and co-create, whose wisdom, commitment, and revolutionary optimism reminds me that healing, being free, and almost anything is possible.

[antoniasteffens]

MANUALIS IN VACUO ( part 1: November 2019)

(intro with a soft hysteric undertone that you can skip but it offers a moody ambient as an entrance): 

We don’t need to kick our own ass if we are peaceful beings. Sometimes in masked peace we will encounter situations that kick our ass in such ways, that we will necessarily respond. So the notion of ass kicking is not to take for granted as a necessary “lesson of life” itself ( oh how poetic ) but an implicit byproduct of  (mh.. maybe ..?) Capitalism-  for those of us that can’t help but being sensitive. 

SO NO, these lesson are not meant to produce another product that masks and embodies the masked and embodied violence of a capitalist society. 

That would mean to become the provider of a placebo of a lack. Rather TRY (and fail a million times since you swim against the stream to ) to respond to violence, by attempting to demask your environment. 

Capitalist realism could also be called:

Me dying from you, you dying from me.

 Is it a responsibility? Is there no alternative?

Is it a duty to provide for killing the other? 

A force of nature of universe ☀️☀️☀️ that pretends to romanticise ONLY

Fake gardeners ( since they intervene in the virgin eco system), fake trees (since they pretend to be generous air recycler, but grow only high to overthrow their neighbour tree) , fake sunlight (since without light there would be no brain, but it provides skin cancer in exchange and depressive thoughts)- it seems to me that some basics of capitalism were never and option but always a rule. Seems we have to deal with some basics of being then:  

May Darwin win. WIN WIN.

ONLY REAL COMPETITION.

Perma culture is another word for eternal life. Eternal life another word for paradise. Paradise another word for death. Let the middle age fetichism come back. Put your money on the after life.

Since you know better. You extinct.

FOR THOSE STILL ALIVE

When I encountered the void few years ago I made temporary peace with my sexual organ and declared infinite war to each and everyone maintaining psychological intactness in my direct environment. If you look closely, of course, there are not many left, to truly have an upright fight with anyhow ( most of us suffer anxiety, sleep disorder, depression already or still). But there are a lot of those, that for many apparent reasons keep up pretending to maintain psychological intactness. I may call this a coping mechanism.

All of you depressed, suicidal, frustrated, rebelling, confused- all of you are still standing (if you have not died yet) and all of you that did not give in yet even if deformed, distorted, disfigured by us- I love you and it is you I believe in - your depression is a poetic response to the madness around - your tears are thunders releasing tension within a field of human consciousness, completely corrupted in a cloud of dense ignorance of daily inattentiveness. 

You are the absolute absolute absolute reason I can be hopeful. Every and each of your doubt is a holy grail, a guideline to paradise. Even if that means we won’t survive this, which we anyhow won’t.

When knifes smile to your wrist, balconies invite you to fall off from them, waters seduce you to drown, dreams are your only refuge, but sleep starts to become harder to reach, I have a single one and only solution!!!!!

1st. chapter:

Stay with your environment! STAY STAY STAY.

The remains of a sandwich lie on the ground of a public space. You can see the traces of the teeth that bit of the toast bread, ham and cheese in between. The quality is this cheap paper like bread that cannot really be called bread but is the dutch joke for nutrition. Still, the bread is not responsible for its own ridiculousness- I pity it for being such bread without any pride and respect for the history of bread. But as in pity lies always love, I cannot help but love it. I sincerely honour it for revealing to me the dishonour of those that are in charge of producing it, along side so many other breads, equally dishonoured. 

The humiliated bread has its own pride because it is transparently showing to me all that is left of its former idea. And that is indeed very complex, validating and demasking a history of bread and capitalism, nutrition and mass production. 

It has dignity by itself because each and every detail of the cosmos has dignity and respect, as long as being attended. It has dignity because it is. And it really is. It truly lies there on the ground, with its whole pride of being. 

Some cheese and ham rest inside, or if you want, the elaboration of an idea of value of a cow in our un loyal society, hostile to animals, humans and plants, now presented in a sliced format that can fit perfectly the two bread pieces. Cutting edge technology towards how stupid one should become to grasp ones own nutrition in the manual sense and in the metaphorical one.

They became a temporary company of their own. They ended up being a small family of textures tracing history, half eaten and then thrown on the ground. There, on the ground that is a public space and supposed to be held clean by someone. 

Here, someone else, that is not the cleaning personal, disrupted the order. We know the toast should not be there. But here it is, singing silently a song about hope. 

Why and how to be hopeful about that sandwich?

Look at the details of the grains, the cheese, the bite trace. Look at what it wants to tell you. It becomes slightly comical, this revelation of dysfunctionality. 

It is more than that, it is a real trace, that within the urban habitat, hints towards the fact, that there has been life here. A living thing, a prey for the hunter, which is the human. But first you have to understand what you are looking for, hunting. While looking at the bread, you may hunt for another kind of sense of nutrition. A nutrition, that goes beyond the functionality the bread stands for, which is to feed. Now halfway eaten, halfway used and thrown on the ground its obvious function got dishonoured as it is put into a place where it is deprived from meaning. As it does not invite to be eaten and do its task for nurturing, maybe you that you are looking at it, maybe you look for another kind of nurture, that it has to offer to you. The nurture that lies within the bread on the ground may be in experiencing its functionality by listening to what it has to tell you, in relation to its direct and indirect context.

Yes I know, the context of the public space can seem pretty empty, so scheduled and untouchable, that all you feel is being alienated from any source of nutrition. 

You are a hunter deprived from your prey, and instead capitalism gives you a placebo effect that temporary stills and steals your desire to encounter your world by letting you buy sandwiches in supermarkets. That you may then half way eaten, throw on the ground. Here they become a true trace for an alternative nutrition, an alternative prey. 

Think about this kind of prey as a prayer. When praying, you might be led to a sense of hope, a nutrition that grants you with a sensation of crating mechanisms of belonging to this world. In the toast bread case, before it becoming your prayer, you need to learn to read the language of the traces, otherwise you cannot become a hunter of the prayer. 

So read the bread well. Can you figure, that this trace can bring you out of a labyrinth of mechanisms operating on the appearance of “for grantedness” in a world where nothing ever was for granted and therefore everything is precious. Even that toast? In days where you had to read your environment in order to survive, the world revealed itself as a speaking scenario, with present, history and future, with character and humour, with multilayered and playful pathways of things and beings ending up and meeting each other. A toast bread would be a curiosity and not a default. It was a place where things could be touched and felt, smelled and seen, interpreted and misunderstood. We were in a speaking world. Not a muted, ignorant one that pretends to be overthrown by algorithms, have clean public spaces, where people eat perfectly packed sandwiches, that disappear in their stomachs as if eating is nothing else but an oiling of the machinery, that has to happen in the meantime of one metro line and another. 

The algorithm failed, the toast lies on the floor. Let’s start by the hope that the algorithm fails constantly. In minor and major gestures. People will throw the bread on the ground for you to read and at the same time trash the algorithm. Thanks GOD! Or whoever. 

So, This is just an example. Look at your world. The toast can speak. It can tell you about its history in just one slightly elongated blink of an eye, where you recognise the toast and what brought it there. Become a listener, a friend to the toast. Half way eaten, humiliated on the ground. And never ever take it for granted for what it is and became since it came there by a complexity of relations.

This is how you learn the language of loyalty with your environment- do that with trees, animals, buildings, empty bottles, rain drops, trash, clothing, packages, super market signs - do that with the back of the neighbour you never talk to, see how it is hunched or maybe in perfect upright position of a spine. but ask yourself if that speaks necessarily for the metaphorical dimension of this person actually having a spine, however.

Stay with your environment. And let it reveal itself to you. Love every message and let it linger and resonate before thinking you know how things have to be, should be, if they have relevance or importance or not. Read your traces as messages from the environment. Let them speak their poetry, songs, their stories and just listen. But you must stay. Stay stay stay stay stay. Reading traces is still the only way to survive.

Why life can always be a gift if you are not totally fucked up, dead sick, traumatised and a victim of mayor relational conflicts of humans and their environment, such as war, crisis, violence and situation where the gift of life is impossible to elaborate on itself 

When you let the traces of your world speak to you, the house wall, lid by daylight, every single brick, the trash on the ground, the colour of the clothes of people in the street, the rattling of the leafs of the trees, the giggling of the water in the rivers, the song of the nightingale in the absurd cold night of November, the weird sound of people using language and laughing about their jokes, will become aware of you, they will start to flirt with your perception, and thank you in showing you how complex, masterfully weird, intense, jolly, annoying but cute, rewarding they can be. When you let those traces reveal how they came into the world in a long and precise development of steps that made love to each other, merged and accumulated, excavated and fought, went through the hole range of whatever their expression and impression of emotionality may be in order to come to being, then you can see each gesture of life as a powerful gift elaborating itself to you. Almost like a daily choir of encounters and things singing and reflecting upon its own sometimes sad, sometimes funny, sometimes beautiful existence. That what seems mundane becomes a playground of sensations telling their own story through you, being the perceiving human. If you perceive you make yourself available to receive. If you are able to receive life on a level of such profanity you will encounter richness. Abundance of a sort, that is so mystical, complex, useless in a sense of beyond capital utility, lonely, collective, temporary and fleeting, that you might feel glad to be alive. Not juts glad you will vibrate a sense of aliveness that can connect you to your environment as an intrinsic experience of itself. And you will not feel that alone any longer. Try it for a bit.

More of will you see, lonely drives, defaults and mistakes implemented in a world, that is not perfect. A world that tries to push through its ideologies, desires, ideas, that has a crazy, malicious and fascinating drive of being. Since it loves being so much, and so too much that all that it can think of is to be, All the time. A narcissist choice of an imperative of being that reveals itself in the defaults of relations. Birds fighting for food, cars fighting for space, humans that stop connecting with love, but talk in between the lines, anxiousness of being left to die, disgust towards decomposing materials or toast breads on the ground and so on. There again, is also space for humour, to lean back and discover how decisions are being made, reactions are hysterical ticks, things will be postponed by fear, fear will be clumsily integrated in the bigger picture of traces, organising our life and being and its dramaturgy.

Cynicism in a neoliberal embrace

At some point in the story we have been encountering a desire for organisation and form. The expressing world, the traces that changed in the course of time and locality wanted to get fixed, to hold on to them. With symbols emerged language, as writings, gestures as ambitions for creating, cave drawings, into memoirs, into Torahs, Bibles, practices, into constitutions into positions in between humans in relations to agreements, animals, plants, into functions defining what the drive strives towards. And those into ideas of what serves who and who serves what, into a system we are dying from right now that is not called life only but now also capitalism.

A brand of capitalism behaves as Neo liberalism. As I become a neo liberal being, with every breath I take I immerse myself into the logics of those ropes holding my hands into place, my thoughts on track, my feelings in a rhythm of its metronome, steadily accelerating. It seems an economical structure is embracing me, keeping me alive, and making others die, or vice versa, with every toast bread I buy, every plastic bottle of water I consume, every job I say yes to, as a contribution to a bigger picture. An annoy of my own voice rages inside me, comes to judge upon my feeling, saying: we know that. Bring me solutions, bring me answers. Or shut up. I know this annoy is a byproduct of my fear of being submitted to the structure. A byproduct of a history of separating content and form. I am the content that holds the form, I think. The form indoctrinates me with content, with what I am, I think. Very Brecht. This idea of the product of environment.

As I choose to shut up, to not bother myself, the other or the ideology, what expresses in me is an alternative of some cynical sort. So cynical that tears show up to resist the bitterness of a system that entered us in our most private and intimate encounters of our world, our friends, our steps, our relations and choose to corporate anything and anyone’s effort to make sense of their own being. A system that tries to keep us away from making use of our ability to read our world, to talk to our world, to listen to our world. There it comes dark and sad. Cynicism.. it feels toxic but at the same time it measures my engagement simply in a cryptical way, diminishing a message underneath that might be coming from a true desire to express. Letting it revolt my fake humbleness of shutting up and showing me the face I carry out while facing a mask of a world.

The cynicism is a form of hope. So don’t you disguise it when it comes your way. And its only way of being operative is by choosing to customise itself in the form of a dark joke. But again, if you were to read your traces well you would not ignore the cynical dimension of life and try to read its origin, so keep in mind my hint: STAY with it. When it comes our way. Stay.

So here it comes:

The handbook for spineless beings in post somatic realism. For dancers  and non dancers and people that lack a sort of directionality or have terrible back pain. How to live without loyalty.  

The era of centre is over. There is no central authority, giving direction to the system. There is no central exchange. Emerging decentralised markets are connecting sellers to buyers by peer-to-peer trading. Exchange is not a meeting point of different interests but an operative chain of motion, weaving a web through gigantesque and sensible systems of advertisement and promotions, connecting the “(a)like” minded in a market philosophy that works through confirmation rather than communication. We congratulate each other and shake hands. The perpetuation of the 20th century ontologies, that are based on the idea of use and abuse, implode in an infinite chain of copy-paste algorithms, that completely deprive anything and anyone from being worthy enough to be seen on a distinctive expressive level of being a being, that can speak and move, humans, animals, plants, objects, matter in its singularity and in its encounter with matter. Capitalism has led us into a world where we can only think in quantities, in masses, in fragmentation against a sum of things, where this equals and unequals that. On the other side, waves of identity politics emerge, calls from perspectives that are over jumped, overran by those that cannot make sense or money out of the perspective of difference, or those that are simply “riding a ( for some king of reason mysteriously unquestioned) wave“ of a career. As Bracha Ettinger describes it well, the phallocentric psychoanalyst world view is a binary one. It is you or the other in the oedipal conflict, marked by the fear of castration. And the other side of that thought is indeed the naive idea of eternal and infinite symbiosis. In both cases “difference” cannot be acknowledged. Neoliberal societies then throw identity politics back into the machinery, where they become a distributable good in the decentralised organism of production and consumption. When everything can be consumed, nothing matters. Matter is just there to be strategically dispersed, organised, being made available, demystified, objectified and distributed. No one sees the matter crying, dying, being compressed into toast bread, being compressed into depression. An idea of matter has triumphed over spirit, like the tarot card of the 5 of swords:

Geburah(Severity on the Tree of Life) always supplies disruption. In the 5 of Swords, Venus rules Aquarius which implies weakness rather than excess of strength. Hence, weakness is the cause of the disaster. Here, one has succumbed to the body's fear of discomfort, and losses the will to "fight on". If you're still breathing, you can't be defeated, for the Soul is the one who provides the breath in the body. So your immortal "secret lover", is still within you. However, if you are not in communication with your soul, because your identity is controlled by "fear of rejection" and/or the survival mind of the material world, whom you have made as Foundation/ Master of your own body, you'll be defeated by your own fear of death, which translates into all other fears. 

To deprive matter but also to deprive the moment when something matters, from its own sensibility is the ignorant core of a capitalist and neoliberal society. What is deeply connected to this ignorance, is the fear of meaninglessness “that nothing matters” once the system of value collapses. The idea of being or having to encounter a sort of nothingness is still the core believe driving the binary of “to be or not to be”. 

Once the sneaky mask, identifying and distributing our values ( good, thoughts, relations) for the favour of that binary, which means giving value to only parts of the environment and the inhabitants while devaluing others parts of the environment and exploiting their inhabitants as unworthy of being- once this mask was to slide down- what could it mean for our goods, thoughts, relations, how could they bloom, flourish, express what they always had to say? Could that maybe happen if one was to give up- And then what is to truly give up? Is it just to give away? How to give up even? 

I say it is about reanimating our perception towards an intelligence, sensibility and spirit of the forms we encounter and let them express what they do, can do, could do. To understand that these forms are never fixed and always in vibration through communication. Even the toast bread wants to communicate. It is a form that wants to have a form of conversation with its environment, one could say. 

A form of conversation means that conversation is a form. A form of something that can livingly exchange and express itself through an architecture or a system, incorporating different expressions that encounter one another. So if capitalism itself could be seen as such a conversation could we think of altering the way how we speak and listen to one another within that relation. If we were doomed to capitulate to that form, as the only possible way of living, we truly had no alternative. We were truly speechless and in ourselves unintelligible to exchange. We were to make an important mistake, as Negarestani explains in Intelligence and Spirit:

if concepts themselves are absorbed by capitalism, then the very idea of capitalism becomes ineffable.Talking about capitalism and diagnosing its pathologies will then be little more than exercises in producing subjective and arbitrary narratives about something that is, in truth, unintelligible.

What does that mean? It may mean that by capitulating capitalism, we cut off ourselves from our own ability to converse in intelligible manner. Intelligence here means maybe not the driving force of creation in a product orientated sense, but a creation of a movement, or of many movements. Movements that can vibrate and alter the form and course of beings. Therefore one has to start to see forms as beings and beings as flexible, elastic encounters of vibrating matter, with frequencies that have a temporal appearance and structure but which are always fragile, malleable as they are always in relation to a synergy of a conversation. That synergy, that conversation our forms are taking part into, can alter the forms, can change their vibration. Synergy is the idea that a conversation is a meeting of energies that can alter each others frequency and therefore no form ever can be considered as something fixed. Not a thought, not a stone, not an idea, not a foundation. Let us step back further and further from the form as a fixed encounter towards forms as fluid, intelligent moments of exchange.

As our intelligence creates movement, our perception renders into our attention the intelligence of our environment. Through relation we are able to create thoughts, ideas, an attempt to express our poetics into the space we inhabit. Which means we attempt to attend that space. Again, these attempts to attend are not to be confused with fixed views, but rather temporal spirits and inspirations that chant towards and in the meeting with our environment. The meetings become tangible as movement traces, incorporating the reflection of past events and the hope or desire for future vibrations.

Here and very important when elaborating those, we need to make sure that the creations of those movement traces, which can be our identity politics, our socio-political ambitions, our dreams and hopes won’t be eaten up and incorporated as ready-made sellable products within the neoliberal ideology of a corpus itself. 

Going back to the neoliberal decentralised market, one might recognise that wether by default or strategy, this market is often targeting our most intimate and private relations and takes our goods, that is sometimes all that we have, in order to feed it ideology of movement and finally product orientated organisation. How those encounters are being capitalised upon is mostly more easily felt for, let’s say, a freelancer working within a small community, than a worker in a big company. But what is urgent to understand by all of us, is that the system we operate inside of, where each and every gesture we place into, has a real effect and creates a direct reality to the world we inhabit and thus, right back at us. 

Acknowledging the intimate conversation at the threshold of each encounter with the neoliberal system is a first step towards altering the communication we can have with and inside of it. SO again STAY STAY STAY.

Let me dare to make an analogy. If we see the loss of centre as having psychological and physical consequences within our bodies or body-beings, what would it mean to us as individuals and our way of moving and being moved within a neoliberal, decentralised fluctuation. Instead of one centre, we encounter a couple of centres that take over the conversation around value, on different levels of existence. Being doomed to being, being doomed to survive, the body-being will experience a certain stream or locomotion that it has to follow up with and feed such being fed by. True critic is suicide, as it appears that a true critic will only catapult you out of what seems to be the only choice in the 21st century.

I dare to say, that as we are pulled and pushed around and against this mechanism of decentralisation, we become deprived from directing our own intelligence to make conversations with our environment. As the era of centre is over, the era of conversation and direction as well. What is masked in the idea of “decentralisation” is not that power truly exists and operates, that is pretty obvious and smoothly functioning. Whats is masked instead is rather the notion that someone’s actions and motion can be held responsible, that someone can enter a conversation and their activity can leave a trace in the environment to reveal what brought it there, for what reason, with which agenda and default mechanism. That trace that leads into communicating with the environment is what is masked by the operation of decentralisation. The only loyal environment to hold on to is one that is in a complete state of flux with a constant alteration of “what a front” is and “what it means to confront something or someone”, and thus multi-directionality acting upon the directions of the body-being and its attempt to receive and direct expressions from its environment. 

One could also say that attention will be all the time distracted producing a sort of soccer play, where the eye of the mass is focused on the ball and not on the environment and in a hypnotic survival exctacy the bigger picture will have to be left out. The focus is permanent but what to focus on is forever exchangeable. 

When the social being, the human being is deprived from its way of directing conversations and attending its environment, by such manner the physical and psychological experience results ultimately in a loss of communication finally resulting in a general “loss of spine”, as the delicate arrangements of vertebras collapse inside the speed of a vortex and the stretch of a hyper elastic moral, being twisted and intertwined, for whatever reason may sell us further. Spineless beings. Spineless beings that cannot attend one another.

This happens not just in the human bound body but also in the body that binds humans to generate bigger corporations, as in communities, collectives, scenes. And here is where intimacy get corrupted into a game, that I am not sure who wants to really play it in the end.

[edgedestroyspt2-blog]

NITW THOUGHTS: THE TERROR OF BANALITY [SPOILERS, DUH]

SO. THIS GAME GAVE ME A LOT OF THOUGHTS AND I’M TRYING TO ORGANIZE THEM. Couldn’t log into my old tumblr so I literally made this one just to do this haha. (you can catch me on twitter at just edgedestroys)

I’m gonna get spoiler heavy here with some theories so if you haven’t played yet, you’ve been thoroughly warned. Lets get into this.

My thoughts are probably going to be really stream of consciousness and messy here so bare with me but WHEW. NITW. Let’s talk. Upon finishing the game I was left very [??????????] about it, a LOT of questions and I hate uncertainty, I hate loose ends and my brain does moon-gravity-only tony hawk’s pro skater combos to try to make sense of uncertainty. When I exit a game like NITW and feel like “what the heck just happened wait what” I look for theories to help me sort what I’ve seen out but here I’ve kinda had to work a lot out on my own. NITW towards the end felt very A and B, not A to B with the supernatural but before I get to that let me back up and say the Young Adult Existential Dread Terror Of Growing Up Collapse Of Small Town Idealism Generational Gap Decay Horror Simulator parts of the game were so well written. SO. Well written, the writing and dialog of this game freaking SHINES with such lived-in relatable personality. If you want to skip reading about my thoughts on the real life stuff and go right to my thoughts on the supernatural stuff, just go to the *****

I felt myself painfully drawn to Gregg as a character and his relationship with Angus. The talk Mae and Gregg have after the knife fight really hit home with me. Much of Gregg’s fears I still have even though I’m almost 6 years older than him. It feels to me for sure like my boyfriend takes the mundaness of adult life in stride, doing the Real Job, being responsible, having his shit together (not to say he’s boring, just better at adulting than me), while I’m still being dragged kicking and screaming into that mature life even at 26 years old. Sure I manage to pay my bills but it’s in spite of still hanging on to naive and frankly childish ideals for a more free/fun life. I’ve faced very real panic of being afraid that I’d screw things up with my boyfriend (also like Angus, his butt is nice).

Mae obviously is incredibly relatable too, the money problems, the anxiety and depression and dropping out of college, feeling like you should be the one to be that success story for your family, the uncertainty of adulthood, hell even at 26 that shit freaks me out especially with our current sociopolitical climate. My mom has helped me a lot in the past, both in morale and financially. The game didn’t specifically talk about this (at least in my current playthrough experience) but the generational gap themes definitely leave it open to discussion, I’ve spent a lot of time in the past thinking things like “when will I get my shit together, she won’t always be there to catch me when I fall, I can’t keep doing this to her, I can’t keep her afraid that I can’t stand on my own when she’s gone”. Bridging that gap is scary as hell, I find myself depending on illustrative commission work because honestly I never manage to keep retail jobs, I have a ton of social anxiety and there’s a barrier there for me in the “here just convince strangers to buy shit” role and considering I never finished getting my BFA in graphic design which is already an already oversaturated market... I have a pretty solid recipe for uncertainty in the Future Financial Stability department. I’ve never really publicly talked about this before but good lord this game is ruthless and earnest in picking open those wounds and making you think about them.

At this point if you’ve played the game though, you probably already know about all that, the terror of being a young(ish?) adult, the gen gap, the discord between baby boomers and millennials, the metaphors of society and capitalism and the small town idealization leading to community decay, the futile sacrifice of xenophobic paranoid dads to try to maintain a halcyon lifestyle built on a collapsing foundation... etc etc, we know how that goes at this point, what I REALLY wanted to talk about is the supernatural stuff... or what felt to me like a lack thereof and what took me a few hours of thinking to really grasp.

*****

So when I finished NITW that ?????????? feeling stemmed a lot from feeling like I didn’t think the dots for the supernatural elements were really connected, the dreams, the dusk constellations, the ghost musicians, the huge spirits you encounter when you assemble the ghost band in the dreams, the cat god, the lovecraftian elder god creatures, the eldritch horror that both was at the bottom of the hole and in Mae’s mind, standing as metaphors for mental illness and socioeconomic decay, all of that felt so “how did I get here, how do these tie together???” to me. I had a pretty rushed playthrough so I know I’ve missed some story elements that I already know about but still. I didn’t miss the news article about the hallucinogenic fumes from the mines so I know the theory is floating that Mae hallucinated a lot of the supernatural but let’s operate under suspension of disbelief for a second. 

Throughout the game I felt like it was preparing me for some Huge Paranormal Showdown™, like some kind of fusion of The Legend Of Korra and Final Fantasy. I’d pieced together this narrative in my mind that I was learning about all these Dusk Constellations with my old teacher because I’d go into the Spirit World and summon those spirits I was experiencing in my dreams to fight a very literal Apocalyptic end of the world that the DadCult was helping facilitate in tandem with the mechanizations of a void left in the wake of a god figure leaving us behind to figure our shit out ourselves. But in the end you just find a bunch of paranoid middle aged community members in robes afraid of change, trying to preserve their idyllic vision for Possum Springs through their sacrifices which, depending on how you think those hallucinogenic fumes and Mae’s mental illness may shape her perception of the world, may be the realest weird thing that happens in the game. I didn’t get the big Armageddon Ghost World Summon Spirit Battle For The Fate Of The Universe, just some old assholes in a mine my friends and I buried alive (Not to downplay the importance of Mae coming to grips with her mental illness and the whole “maybe I don’t need to survive forever but I will for now” moment there) and that left me, I don’t want to say disappointed, but definitely not sated. 

After a lot of thought, something started to emerge to me about all of this, a lot of people talk about how this game’s mythos and plot all are a metaphor for how scary being an adult is, suburban collapse, the very real terror of mental illness, the economic and social ruin of generational divides, etc. But one thing I haven’t seen people talk about yet is I think this also is meant to make you think about how scary The Mundaneness Of Life is. If you really think about it, people thrive on escapism and fantasy, being “normal” is scary as hell to people, the idea of living an “unextraordinary” life. Banality is freaking TERRIFYING to most people I think. And I think the ending of this game really forces you to just sit with that discomfort. Here’s this generation that was raised to have a wild imagination, you spend the game getting deeper and deeper into this supernatural world while still clinging onto childhood and irresponsibility and it brings reality crashing the heck down on you. You don’t get Mae becoming this vivid magical JRPG hero glowing with overlimit powers battling The Void Of The Cosmos for the fate of the world, you just bury some old assholes in a mine then go have band practice and pizza with your friends. The cognitive dissonance of the comedown from this imagined grandiose hero role into real life is visceral as hell and coming to grips with how bland real life is compared to the fantastical visions we like to imagine for ourselves actually kind of hurts. Like, pretty bad depending on how into that kind of stuff you are. And I think despite initially being disappointed by this Wild Ass Spirit Battle not happening (tbh I still am a little because damn it’s set up for that so freaking well), it exposes the brilliance of the writing for this game. I’m in the goddamn furry fandom haha, I know a thing or two about how hard people thrive in escapism and living in an imagined world more interesting than the banality of real life. If you think about it, one of the most devastating coming of age stories you could tell is “no kid, you have to grow up and you’re not going to be a magical warrior saving the universe from unspoken evil, real life is boring as hell”. That shit is thick and scary as heck. 

I recently read a behind the scenes article for Lost Constellation where the creators talk a lot about loss as a theme in the sense of finding that “something” to hold onto when you lose faith in religion and I think that makes the idea of being mundane is scary as a plot device all the bigger in NITW. You basically meet god in Mae’s dreams and he says “peace out assholes I’m sick of you asking me questions, you figure it out” and you think, “oh shit, what now?” You bury the dadcult, go play music with your friends and after having this perception that you’re on the brink of fighting a huge supernatural battle you just go back to normie life in your rundown town falling apart on a decaying foundation of social norms and economics that are on life support that isn’t effective. You’re thrust out of the fantasy of childhood, into the reality of adulthood and you have to find that “something” to cope with just being a dang average ass not magical boring ass person. “At the end of everything, hold on to anything”; everything isn’t literally the world or universe, it’s the shift in your perception of it and the death of the idea that you’re greater than yourself in a fantastical way; anything is whatever you can hold onto in your average ass life that makes you happy despite being forced to acknowledge you aren’t a magical hero that will fight evil instead of filling out your tax returns and knowing your dead end job won’t merit you the legacy of a mystic warrior. 

Yeah, I would’ve loved that spirit world summon battle for sure but if you think about it, that’s probably the easy way out of the woods. There’s a soul crushing heaviness to facing reality and despite my beefs with the pacing at the end and the connection of the supernatural dots not being spelled out for my idiot ass, I can’t do anything but praise the hell out of the NITW team for making the sacrifice of not holding my hand and babying me through what I wanted to experience to feel something, but rather shoving me into what I didn’t realize I maybe needed to really feel something. Being mundane is freaking scary as hell and the way they force you to grow up into it and face it leaves you feeling something deep deep down few other games I’ve played have made me feel. I think maybe the most spiritual/supernatural thing about NITW is how it asks you how you will cope with the void left when you leave the supernatural behind.

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Flags Quotes

Official Website: Flags Quotes

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• A lot of folks are still demanding more evidence before they actually consider Iraq a threat. For example, France wants more evidence. And you know I’m thinking, the last time France wanted more evidence they rolled right through Paris with the German flag. – David Letterman • A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation’s flag, sees not the flag, but the nation itself. – Henry Ward Beecher • A thoughtful mind, when it sees a Nation’s flag, sees not the flag only, but the Nation itself; and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the Government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the Nation that sets it forth. – Henry Ward Beecher • After I left D.C. to join Black Flag, I felt I was in a band. – Henry Rollins • America has an almost obscene infatuation with itself. Has there ever been a big, powerful country that is as patriotic as America? And patriotic in the tinniest way, with so much flag waving? You’d really think we were some poor little republic, and that if one person lost his religion for one hour, the whole thing would crumble. America is the real religion in this country. – Norman Mailer • America is the only country in the world where you can burn the flag but can’t tear the tag off the mattress. – Jackie Mason • And the word is capitalism. We are too mealy-mouthed. We fear the word capitalism is unpopular. So we talk about the free enterprise system and run to cover in the folds of the flag and talk about the American Way of Life. – Eric Johnston • And when we view a flag, which to the eye is beautiful, and to contemplate its rise and origin inspires a sensation of sublime delight, our national honor must unite with our interests to prevent injury to the one, or insult to the other. – Thomas Paine • Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by power and by force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual. – Albert Einstein • As Conservatives, We Don’t Care About The Color of Your Skin, We Care About The Color of Our Flag – Allen West • As long as I live, I will never forget that day 21 years ago when I raised my hand and took the oath of citizenship. Do you know how proud I was? I was so proud that I walked around with an American flag around my shoulders all day long. – Arnold Schwarzenegger • As National Socialists we see our program in our flag. In the red we see the social idea of the movement. – Adolf Hitler • Ashcroft vowed to] spare no effort to preserve the rights of all our citizens to pledge allegiance to the American flag. – John Ashcroft • At least in my country, we have come to accept the flags burning, but what we cannot accept is violence, burning of embassies and intimidations, and there is no excuse for that. – Daniel Fried

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'flag', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_flag').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_flag img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Bastard Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves. – Thomas Moore • Behold a republic standing erect while empires all around are bowed beneath the weight of their own armaments – a republic whose flag is loved while other flags are only feared. – William Jennings Bryan • But didn’t you say you were satisfied with your life?” “Word games,” I dismissed. “Every army needs a flag. – Haruki Murakami • By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • By the way, I don’t mean to pick nits here, but Obama has just ordered the flag at half-mast for 10 days for Mandela. He did not order the flag at half-mast at all for Lady Thatcher. – Rush Limbaugh • Call it ‘nationalism’ when you affix a flag to your car, and leave the word ‘patriotism’ for your efforts to make this country a kinder, more egalitarian place, and one that is less dangerous to the rest of the world. – Barbara Ehrenreich • Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there?- Jose Saramago • Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn’t you? Look harder. It’s where someone got axed in the snow. – Margaret Atwood • Democratic Rep. Charles Schumer of New York made a plea to Livingston, the incoming speaker. These new hearings, these new subpoenas wave a red flag that common sense and common wisdom are not welcome here, .. Mr. Livingston, this may be the first and most important task you will ever face as speaker. Lead us out of this abyss. – Charles Schumer • Donald Trump appears to be searching for an enemy. Is it flag burners, recounts, the press, the popular vote? Trump has gone after them all at times, using wild experience theories even as president-elect to do it. – Chuck Todd • Emblem: the carapace of the great crowned snail is painted with all the flags of the United Nations. – Mason Cooley • Even if only one guerilla cub survives the prolonged struggle, I am confident that he will raise the flag of Palestine overJerusalem… Jerusalem is destined to be the eternal capital of our sovereign, independent Palestinian state under the P.L.O. leadership. – Yasser Arafat • Even if the flag burning amendment does become law, the larger problem will remain of how to respectfully dispose of older, tattered flags. Well, fortunately the U.S. official Flag Code has a suggestion about this. “The flag, when it is in such a condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem of display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.” Owwwwcchh. In response, the House Republicans are calling for tattered flags to be kept alive via a feeding tube. – Jon Stewart • Every man that tried to destroy the Government, every man that shot at the holy flag in heaven, every man that starved our soldiers… every man that wanted to burn the negro, every one that wanted to scatter yellow fever in the North, every man that opposed human liberty, that regarded the auction-block as an altar and the howling of the bloodhound as the music of the Union, every man who wept over the corpse of slavery, that thought lashes on the naked back were a legal tender for labour performed, every one willing to rob a mother of her child – every solitary one was a Democrat. – Robert Green Ingersoll • Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. – H. L. Mencken • Every time a colony wants independence, the questions on the agenda are: a) how do you get the imperialists out, and b) what kind of society do you build? There are usually the bourgeois nationalists who say, ‘Let’s just change the flag and keep everything as it was.’ Then there are the revolutionaries who say, ‘Let’s change the property laws.’ It’s always a critical moment. – Ken Loach • Every time I hit a shot, I feel like I am shaking hands with the flag stick. – Moe Norman • Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink – for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.- Honore de Balzac • Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag. – Sinclair Lewis • Flag desecration is not a constitutional issue for the courts. It is a political one that belongs to the people. – Larry Craig • Flag of the free heart’s hope and home! By angel hands to valour given, Thy stars have lit the welkin dome; And all thy hues were born in heaven. – Joseph Rodman Drake • Flags are bits of colored cloth used first to shrinkwrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. – Arundhati Roy • For black folks, the Confederate flag represents the same thing that the Nazi flag represents to the Jews. There is absolutely no difference when we look at it. Now, white folks try to explain it away like, ‘Oh, it’s OK.’ But when you’re black, it is not OK. It represents oppression and murder. – Ken Page • For me, I’m just trying to be the best at what I do. I’ll wave an Asian American flag if I get that opportunity. I’m not hiding or trying to discredit my background or anything, I just haven’t had the opportunity. – Chad Hugo • Ford used to come to work in a big car with two Admiral’s flags, on each side of the car. His assistant would be there with his accordion, playing, Hail to the Chief. – Richard Widmark • Getting that audience approval is always a question mark, and it’s always that flag that flutters in front of you. – William Shatner • Growth at an exceptional rate is a red flag in banking. It is hard enough to manage an ordinary bank; to control a sprouting weed is well-nigh impossible. If loans are expanding too quickly, the lending officers have probably been saying ‘yes’ too frequently. – James Grant • Haul up the flag, you mourners, Not half-mast but all the way; The funeral is done and disbanded; The devil’s had the final say. – Karl Shapiro • Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows’ meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen? – Thomas Carlyle • He is a poor patriot whose patriotism does not enable him to understand how all men everywhere feel about their altars and their hearthstones, their flag and their fatherland. – Harry Emerson Fosdick • I always carried a small American flag red white and blue with me so people would know I was from America. – George Foreman • I am not the flag: not at all. I am but its shadow. – Franklin Knight Lane • I believe in America. I’m one of those silly flag wavers. – Paul Prudhomme • I believe our flag is more than just cloth and ink. It is a universally recognized symbol that stands for liberty, and freedom. It is the history of our nation, and it’s marked by the blood of those who died defending it. – John Thune • I believe that movements to suppress wrongs can be carried out under the protection of our flag. – Mother Jones • I came to the resolve that the attempt was not only worth trying, but should be tried in the very near future if we wanted at all to keep our flag flying; for I was sure as of my own existence that if another decade was allowed to pass without an endeavour of some kind or another to shake off an unjust yoke, the Irish people would sink into lethargy from which it would be impossible for any patriot . . . to arouse them . . . – James Stephens • I can train a monkey to wave an American flag. That does not make the monkey patriotic. – Scott Ritter • I can’t fly a flag for monogamy or whatever the opposite is; it depends on the person and on the situation. – Sting • I consider that 9/11 was the day when war was started against my own work and against myself. Even though we are not sure of the links, Iraq was one of the countries that did not lower its flags in mourning on 9/11. – Adam Michnik • I don’t judge others. I say if you feel good with what you’re doing, let your freak flag fly. – Sarah Jessica Parker • I don’t want the news to be patriotic. I don’t want to see flags on the lapels of the anchors. I don’t want any of that. – Aaron McGruder • I expect the Republicans will enjoy a large bounce out of their convention. They’re here wrapping themselves in the 9/11 flag, which I think is inappropriate in many ways, but it’s their choice. – Harold Ford, Jr. • I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me. – H. P. Lovecraft • I feel like I’m waving the flag for musicianship, trying to bring back bands that can play. – Jonathan Davis • I feel there should have been some recognition of the Spice Girls at this year’s 25th anniversary. We flew the flag for Britain around the globe in the 1990s and we achieved a hell of a lot. – Melanie Chisholm • I had an encyclopedia with a list of flags in the back, so I would look at all these flags of China and Liberia and England and Denmark and whatever, and I learned all the different flags and I tried to imagine what it would be like to be voyaging on some of these ships. – George R. R. Martin • I have a great respect for the flag, (but) if the government passed a law saying that I had to pledge allegiance to the flag, I don’t think I would do it. I’ve always felt that I lived in a country…where if I wanted to worship God as a Baptist, I could do so. If I were an atheist, I could be one. If I wanted to be a Catholic but was born a Jew, there’s no condemnation…from a government authority. – Jimmy Carter • I intend to talk about race during this election in the South because the Republicans have been talking about it since 1968 in order to divide us. And I’m going to bring us together. Because you know what? You know what? White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back ought to be voting with us and not them, because their kids don’t have health insurance either and their kids need better schools too. – Howard Dean • I learned this a long time ago. If you call a guy into your office and shut the door, if there’s media around, it sends up a red flag. I never wanted to embarrass a player. – Jim Leyland • I look for the entrepreneur to capture my attention. If you don’t come out with a great presentation, you’re dead. That’s a big red flag. – Robert Herjavec • I mean Black Flag happened. I was lucky. I don’t think I could have put together something with one percent of that oomph on my own. – Henry Rollins • I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior, for whose Kingdom it stands, one Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe. – Dan Quayle • I prefer a man who will burn the flag and then wrap himself in the constitution to a man who will burn the constitution and then wrap himself in the flag. – Craig Washington • I savored my time on top of the podium by watching the American flag rise up out of the crowd as the anthem played, thinking about how every single second of training I’ve done was for this minute and how many people played a role in my achievement. – Hannah Kearney • I stand fearlessly for small dogs, the American Flag, motherhood and the Bible. That’s why people love me. – Art Linkletter • I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.- Howard Dean • I think love is blind. I hate to use that cliched statement, but people, when they love somebody, they seem to be able to somehow to put aside red flags. – Eric Close • I would warn Orlando that you’re right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don’t think I’d be waving those flags [gay pride flags] in God’s face if I were you, This is not a message of hate , this is a message of redemption. But a condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It’ll bring about terrorist bombs; it’ll bring earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor. – Pat Robertson • I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten. – Francis Ford Coppola • I’d buy myself a cabin on the beach, I’d put some glue in my navel, and I’d stick a flag in there. Then I’d wait to see which way the wind was blowing. – Albert Camus • If a jerk burns the flag, America is not threatened, democracy is not under siege, freedom is not at risk. – Gary Ackerman • If I fall, pick up the flag, kiss it, and keep on going. – Omar Torrijos • If one, then, asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him, It means just what Concord and Lexington meant, what Bunker Hill meant; it means the whole glorious Revolutionary War, which was, in short, the rising up of a valiant young people against an old tyranny, to establish the most momentous doctrine that the world had ever known – the right of men to their own selves and to their liberties. – Henry Ward Beecher • If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist. – Amiri Baraka • If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, not democracy… But the American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country. – Michael Parenti • If you buy the flag it’s yours to burn. – Jesse Ventura • If you start studying history closer, you’ll find that most all wars are based on false flag operations to get people – to convince the people that they’re under attack in some way so that they will support the wars. – Jesse Ventura • If you want a symbolic gesture, don’t burn the flag, wash it. – Norman Thomas • If you wave a flag, make it an American Flag. – Antonio Villaraigosa • I’m about as far from being a flag-waver – you won’t find any American flag pins in my drawer – as someone can be. – Tom Peters • I’m beginning to wonder if the symbol of the United States pretty soon isn’t going to be an ambassador with a flag under his arm climbing into an escape helicopter. – Ronald Reagan • Im in love with red. I think its such a passionate color. Every flag of every country pretty much has red it it. Its power, theres no fence sitting with red. Either you love it or you dont. I think its blood and strength and life. I do love red. I love all colors. Great shades of blue, you find them in nature. Theyre all magic. – Bryan Batt • I’m just always learning lines. I’ve learned to flag the really crucial scenes, and I start figuring them out and committing them to memory as soon as I get them. – Claire Danes • I’m proud of the U.S.A. We’ve done some amazing things. To wear our flag in the Olympics is an honor. – Shaun White • In prosperous times I have sometimes felt my fancy and powers of language flag, but adversity is to me at least a tonic and bracer. – Walter Scott • In the middle of the cavernous cargo hold was a simple, aluminum coffin with a small American flag draped over it. We were bringing another American soldier, just killed, home to his family and final resting place. The starkness of his coffin in the center of the hold, the silence except for the din of the engines, was a real time cold reminder of the consequences of decisions for which we Senators share responsibility. – John F. Kerry • In uniform patriotism can salute one flag only, embrace but the first circle of life – one’s own land and tribe. In war that is necessary, in peace it is not enough. – Bill Moyers • Invention flags, his brain goes muddy, And black despair succeeds brown study. – William Congreve • Israel’s capital will never again be a divided city, a city with a wall at its center, a city in which two flags fly. This city, will, in its entirety, absorb immigrants, welcome pilgrims and be the eternal capital of Israel forever. – Yitzhak Shamir • It is a dangerous day when we can take the cross out of the church more easily than the flag. No wonder it is hard for seekers to find God nowadays. – Shane Claiborne • It is said that peace is the basic tenet of all religion. Yet it is in the name of religion that there has been so much disturbance, bloodshed and persecution. It is indeed a pity that even at the close of the twentieth century we’ve had to witness such atrocities because of religion. Flying the flag of religion has always proved the easiest way to crush to nothingness human beings as well as the spirit of humanity. – Taslima Nasrin • It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness. They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in Watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird. – Boris Johnson • It is the will of the American people that we have a right to protect our flag and this can only be accomplished by passing a Constitutional amendment. – Adrian Cronauer • I’ve got one Aussie flag on my car. It would be nice to have two. – Tom Lehman • Japanese-owned cargo ship Tsimtsum, flying Panamanian flag, sank July 2nd, 1977, in Pacific, four days out of Manila. Am in lifeboat. Pi Patel my name. Have some food, some water, but Bengal tiger a serious problem. Please advise family in Winnepeg, Canada. Any help very much appreciated. Thank you. – Yann Martel • Laws protecting the United States flag do not cut away at the freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment… Congress made this position clear upon passage of the Flag Protection Act of 1989, which prohibited desecration of the flag. – Larry Craig • Let it be borne on the flag under which we rally in every exigency, that we have one country, one constitution, one destiny. – Daniel Webster • Liberals hate America, they hate “flag-wavers”, they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam (post 9/11). Even Islamic terrorists don’t hate America like liberals do. They don’t have the energy. If they had that much energy, they’d have indoor plumbing by now. – Ann Coulter • Life is not fair. And you have to choose your battles, because there are some that you cannot win. If you’re passionate about something, then you should pick up your flag and run with it.- Bette Midler • Long live Germany. Long live Austria. Long live Argentina. These are the countries with which I have been most closely associated and I shall not forget them. I had to obey the rules of war and my flag. I am ready. – Adolf Eichmann • Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity. – William Manchester • Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer. – Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. • My dad has totally taken my Cat Stevens T-shirt, but it’s OK; I have his Black Flag one, and that’s amazing. – Zoe Kravitz • My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. – Katha Pollitt • My goal is people associate November with COPD awareness month as much as they notice October with breast cancer and pink. That’d be a great thing if it happened. The fact that COPD kills more people than breast cancer and diabetes put together should raise some red flags. – Danica Patrick • My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls. – James Broughton • My version, of course, is not this flag-waving, let’s all get on the Jesus train and ride out of hell. I’m not that kind of guy. It’s an embrace that life is good, worth living and yeah, it’s not easy, but there are more pluses than minuses. – Billy Corgan • Nationalism is just racism with a flag. – Peter Joseph • Not another flag has such an errand, carrying everywhere, the world around, such hope for freedom such glorious tidings. – Henry Ward Beecher • Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself. – Ken Kesey • Obama’s a nice person, he’s very articulate this is what’s been used against him, but he couldn’t sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.- Dan Rather • Of all the names Polygamy went by (so as not to exasperate the Gentile population and even some of the wives of the members’ own bosoms any more than necessary) — such as Pluralism, Plural or Celestial Wedlock, the Principle, the Doctrine, the New Covenant and the Gospel Dispensation of the Meridian of Consummate Time — the latter was thought to be the least like waving a red flag in front of a bull. But as it was hard to remember and did not make instant or any other kind of sense, it was not much used. – Ardyth Kennelly • Of course, Mr. Hannity was outraged that any American would not cross her hand over her heart and repeat the hypocritical words, one nation. Whenever we come up on the Fourth of You Lie, I think of Frederick Douglas and his masterful oration, The meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro. Pledge the flag? I think not! – Julianne Malveaux • Off with your hat, as the flag goes by! And let the heart have its say; you’re man enough for a tear in your eye that you will not wipe away. – Henry Cuyler Bunner • Oh, it’s home again and home again, America for me! I want a ship that’s westward bound to plough the rolling sea To the blessed land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars, Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars. – Henry Van Dyke • Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light What so proudly we hailed as the twilight’s last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight O’er the ramplarts we watched were so gallantly streaming? And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? – Francis Scott Key • On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or the owner would be dragged to a police station and be fined twenty-five rubles. – Mary Antin • On no further occasion present a flag or medal to an Indian. – Zebulon Pike • On the field of battle, the spoken word does not carry far enough; hence the institution of gongs and drums… banners and flags. Gongs and drums, banners and flags, are means whereby the ears and eyes of the host may be focused on one particular point. – Sun Tzu • On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they [the Colonies] raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome in the height of her glory is not to be compared,-a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England. – Daniel Webster • Ostentation is the signal flag of hypocrisy. – Edwin Hubbel Chapin • Our flag honors those who have fought to protect it, and is a reminder of the sacrifice of our nation’s founders and heroes. As the ultimate icon of America’s storied history, the Stars and Stripes represents the very best of this nation. – Joe Barton • Our flag is a proud flag, and it stands for liberty and civilization. Where it has once floated, there must be no return to tyranny. – Theodore Roosevelt • Our flag is not just one of many political points of view. Rather, the flag is a symbol of our national unity. – Adrian Cronauer • Our flag is read, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbown-red, yellow, brown, black and white – and we’re all precious in God’s sight. – Jesse Jackson • Our flag means all that our fathers meant in the Revolutionary War. It means all that the Declaration of Independence meant. It means justice. It means liberty. It means happiness…. Every color means liberty. Every thread means liberty. Every star and stripe means liberty. – Henry Ward Beecher • Our flag represents every American and it should not be hidden away as a result of property agreements. – Mike Fitzpatrick • Our great modern Republic. May those who seek the blessings of its institutions and the protection of its flag remember the obligations they impose. – Ulysses S. Grant • Our moneyed men have ruled us for the past thirty years. Under the flag of the slaveholder they hoped to destroy our liberty. – Denis Kearney • Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.- James Bryce • Patriotism has become a mere national self assertion, a sentimentality of flag-cheering with no constructive duties. – H. G. Wells • Patriotism threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders and pleas for peace. It despises people of foreign birth. It has specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists and the American Civil Liberties Union. In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder. Whom are we calling terrorists here? – Barbara Kingsolver • People from major labels were afraid to go to Black Flag gigs throughout most of the bands existence. They treated our gigs as something threatening. Im sure that it probably was. They probably had reasons to be scared. – Greg Ginn • Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered. – William J. Brennan • Queen’s University flies the flag for the arts in Northern Ireland and beyond. – Liam Neeson • Red flag of the eating disorder: the muffin. Keep your eye on the ladies with the muffins… and sometimes I’ll just eat the muffin top. – Janeane Garofalo • Remember the hours after September 11th when we came together as one to answer the attack against our homeland. We drew strength when our firefighters ran upstairs and risked their lives so that others might live; when rescuers rushed into smoke and fire at the Pentagon; when the men and women of Flight 93 sacrificed themselves to save our nation’s Capitol; when flags were hanging from front porches all across America, and strangers became friends. It was the worst day we have ever seen, but it brought out the best in all of us. – John F. Kerry • Roger Ebert was the last mammoth alive who was holding the flag for real movies and moviemakers. – Werner Herzog • Saying you are a patriot does not make you one; wearing a flag pin does not in itself mean anything at all. – Viggo Mortensen • Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused. – Woodrow Wilson • So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. -Wendell Berry • SST was formed to put out the first Black Flag record. Basically, there wasn’t anyone else to do it. I felt that what I was doing with Black Flag was very worthwhile, and I wanted to get it out there. – Greg Ginn • Sure I wave the American flag. Do you know a better flag to wave? Sure I love my country with all her faults. I’m not ashamed of that, never have been, never will be. – John Wayne • Sure I wave the American flag. Do you know a better flag to wave?- John Wayne • That one flag encircles us with its folds today, the unrivaled object of our loyal love. – Benjamin Harrison • The American flag is the most recognized symbol of freedom and democracy in the world. – Virginia Foxx • The American flag is the symbol of our freedom, national pride and history. – Mike Fitzpatrick • The American flag represents all of us and all the values we hold sacred. – Adrian Cronauer • The American flag, Old Glory, standing tall and flying free over American soil for 228 years is the symbol of our beloved country. It is recognized from near and afar, and many lives have been lost defending it. – Jeff Miller • The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet, in much the same way the Koran, Torah, and Pali Canon offer guidance to people of other religions. If you and I could dig up documentation that contradicted the holy stories of Islamic belief, Judaic belief, Buddhist belief, pagan belief, should we do that? Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical. – Dan Brown • The few took advantage of the ignorant many. They pretended to have received messages from the Unknown. They stood between the helpless multitude and the gods. They were the carriers of flags of truce. At the court of heaven they presented the cause of man, and upon the labor of the deceived they lived. – Robert Green Ingersoll • The flag is a symbol of the fact that man is still a herd animal. – Albert Einstein • The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history. – Woodrow Wilson • The flag of racialism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen. – Tony Benn • The flag of the United States has not been created by rhetorical sentences in declarations of independence and in bills of rights. It has been created by the experience of a great people, and nothing is written upon it that has not been written by their life. It is the embodiment, not of a sentiment, but of a history. – Woodrow Wilson • The flag of your nation – wave it! Begin to separate your nation from whatever covenant your forefathers must have had. Break the covenant of corruption/ stealing/ killing/ destruction/ idolatry – break it right now! – T. B. Joshua • The flag represents all the values and the liberties Americans have and enjoy everyday. – Bill Shuster • The flag still stands for freedom and they can’t take that away.- Lee Greenwood • The flag that was the symbol of slavery on the high seas for a long time was not the Confederate battle flag, it was sadly the Stars and Stripes. – Alan Keyes • The headline is the ‘ticket on the meat.’ Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising. – David Ogilvy • The less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag. – Kin Hubbard • The meteor flag of England Shall yet terrific burn, Till danger’s troubled night depart, And the star of peace return. – Thomas Campbell • The Minutemen were seen as more of an art thing than Black Flag, although I didn’t see them that way. It confused people when we put out Saccharine Trust, too. – Greg Ginn • The mother condemned for a witch and burnt with dry wood, and her children gazing on;The hounded slave that flags in the race and leans by the fence, blowing and covered with sweat, The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, The murderous buckshot and the bullets, All these I feel or am. – Walt Whitman • The Palestinian state is within our grasp. Soon the Palestinian flag will fly on the walls, the minarets and the cathedrals of Jerusalem. – Yasser Arafat • The people are urged to be patriotic … by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegience to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister. – Emma Goldman • The Royal family to me are not England, and they are not the flag. – Steven Morrissey • The stuff that I got in trouble for, the casting for The Godfather or the flag scene in Patton, was the stuff that was remembered, and was considered the good work. – Francis Ford Coppola • The things that the flag stands for were created by the experiences of a great people. Everything that it stands for was written by their lives. The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history. – Woodrow Wilson • The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. – Smedley Butler • The victory march will continue until the Palestinian flag flies in Jerusalem and in all of Palestine. – Yasser Arafat • The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature. – John Steinbeck • Then finally I said, ‘Okay, well, I want to know all the details. I want creative input. I want to be consulted. I want to know what they’re doing and who’s involved. And I want to see the space.’ So they took me to see it, and then I realized it was major! All these red flags on the Rue de Rivoli with my name on them right by the Louvre! – Kate Moss • There are some pop songs I hate but I can’t get them out of my head. Our songs also have the standard pop format: Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, bad solo. All in all, I think we sound like The Knack and the Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath. – Kurt Cobain • There are those who wrap themselves in flags and blow the tinny trumpet of patriotism as a means of fooling the people. – George Galloway • There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag…We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language…and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people. – Theodore Roosevelt • There is a strong tendency in the United States to rally round the flag and their troops, no matter how mistaken the war. – George McGovern • There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. – Arthur C. Clarke • There is much more to being a patriot and a citizen than reciting the pledge or raising a flag. – Jesse Ventura • There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people. – Howard Zinn • There is no rule in the pink-triangle guide to coming out that you must wear a rainbow flag cap and organise a full band parade. – Beth Ditto • There’s a certain elitism that has crept into the attitudes of some in journalism, and it played out perfectly over the issue of these little [American flag] lapel pins. – Brit Hume • There’s a principle here and I’m hoping the court will uphold this principle so that we can finally go back and have every American want to stand up, face the flag, place their hand over their heart and pledge to one nation, indivisible, not divided by religion, with liberty and justice for all. – Michael Newdow • There’s an enduring American compulsion to be on the side of the angels. Expediency alone has never been an adequate American reason for doing anything. When actions are judged, they go before the bar of God, where Mom and the Flag closely flank His presence. – Jonathan Raban • There’s one beneficial effect of going to Moscow. You come home waving the American flag with all your might. – Mary Tyler Moore • This flag .. is raised not without costs, .. without the costs of having struggled for many years, without the costs of having lost so many lives in order to have a free and sovereign and good Afghanistan. – Hamid Karzai • To secure respect to a neutral flag requires a naval force organized and ready to vindicate it from insult or aggression. – George Washington • To survive in peace and harmony, united and strong, we must have one people, one nation, one flag. – Pauline Hanson • Tonight the American flag floats from yonder hill or Molly Stark sleeps a widow. – John Stark • Tony Stewart — Broke out a new chassis at Pocono Raceway last June and raced to the checkered flag for his first victory of 2003; has finished among the top 10 in all but two of his 10 career starts here; Turn one is probably the easiest of the three, but you’ve got the challenge of having to downshift in the middle of the corner, .. You go down the backstretch and into the tunnel turn and it’s basically one lane. – Tony Stewart • Tree of Liberty: A tree set up by the people, hung with flags and devices, and crowned with a cap of liberty. The Americans of the United States planted poplars and other trees during the war of independence, “as symbols of growing freedom.” The Jacobins in Paris planted their first tree of liberty in 1790. The symbols used in France to decorate their trees of liberty were tricoloured ribbons, circles to indicate unity, triangles to signify equality, and a cap of liberty. Trees of liberty were planted by the Italians in the revolution of 1848. – E. Cobham Brewer • Under this flag may our youth find new inspiration for loyalty to Canada; for a patriotism based not on any mean or narrow nationalism, but on the deep and equal pride that all Canadians will feel for every part of this good land. – Lester B. Pearson • Unfortunately a Constitutional amendment that would have empowered Congress to make desecration of the United States flag illegal failed to pass by one vote. – Kenny Marchant • United States, your banner wears Two emblems–one of fame; Alas! the other that it bears Reminds us of your shame. Your banner’s constellation types White freedom with its stars, But what’s the meaning of the stripes? They mean your negroes’ scars. – Thomas Campbell • Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red flag to a bu… was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it. – Terry Pratchett • War is the spectacular and bloody projection of our everyday living. We precipitate war out of our daily lives; and without a transformation in ourselves, there are bound to be national and racial antagonisms, the childish quarreling over ideologies, the multiplication of soldiers, the saluting of flags, and all the many brutalities that go to create organized murder. – Jiddu Krishnamurti • We Americans are the most lavish and showiest and most luxury loving people on the earth; and at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen. – Mark Twain • We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams. – Peter S. Beagle • We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • We cannot allow the American flag to be shot at anywhere on earth if we are to retain our respect and prestige – Barry Goldwater • We considered ourselves Jordanian until the Jews returned to Jerusalem. Then all of the sudden we were Palestinians – they removed the star from the Jordanian flag and all at once we had a Palestinian flag. – Walid Shoebat • We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so, we dilute the freedom this cherished emblem represents. – William J. Brennan • We have but one flag, one country; let us stand together. We may differ in color, but not in sentiment. – Nathan Bedford Forrest • We have room in this country for but one flag, the Stars and Stripes! – Theodore Roosevelt • We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy. – Henry Miller • We identify the flag with almost everything we hold dear on earth, peace, security, liberty, our family, our friends, our home. . .But when we look at our flag and behold it emblazoned with all our rights we must remember that it is equally a symbol of our duties. Every glory that we associate with it is the result of duty done. – Calvin Coolidge • We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag and I keep step to the music of the Union. – Rufus Choate • Well, start waving and yelling, because it is the so-called Oxford comma and it is a lot more dangerous than its exclusive, ivory-tower moniker might suggest. There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don’t, and I’ll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken. Oh, the Oxford comma. Here, in case you don’t know what it is yet, is the perennial example, as espoused by Harold Ross: “The flag is red, white, and blue.” So what do you think of it? Are you for or against it? Do you hover in between? – Lynne Truss • What does one plant who plants a tree? One plants the friend of sun and sky; One plants the flag of breezes free; The shaft of beauty towering high. – Henry Cuyler Bunner • What if the invasion forces will not leave our lands? What if the U.S. forces and others stay in our beloved lands? What if their companies and embassy headquarters will continue to exist with the American flags hoisted on them? Will you be silent? Will you overlook this? – Muqtada al Sadr • What I’m trying to do is to at least raise a flag to the blinding light of technology. – Godfrey Reggio • When a war ends, what does that look like exactly? do the cells in the body stop detonating themselves? does the orphanage stop screaming for its mother? when the sand in the desert has been melted down to glass and our reflection is not something we can stand to look at does the white flag make for a perfect blindfold? yesterday i was told a story about this little girl in Iraq, six-years-old, who cannot fall asleep because when she does she dreams of nothing but the day she watched her dog eat her neighbor’s corpse. if you told her war is over do you think she can sleep? – Andrea Gibson • When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag. – Sinclair Lewis • When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism – Sinclair Lewis • When Freedom from her mountain height Unfurled her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night, And set the stars of glory there. – Joseph Rodman Drake • When Freedom from her mountain-height Unfurled her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night, And set the stars of glory there. She mingled with its gorgeous dyes The milky baldric of the skies, And striped its pure, celestial white With streakings of the morning light. Flag of the free heart’s hope and home! By angel hands to valour given! Thy stars have lit the welkin dome, And all thy hues were born in heaven. Forever float that standard sheet! Where breathes the foe but falls before us, With Freedom’s soil beneath our feet, And Freedom’s banner streaming o’er us? – Joseph Rodman Drake • When I see the American flag, I go, ‘Oh my God, you’re insulting me.’ – Janeane Garofalo • When I was in college there was a girls’ flag football league. The girls were extremely aggressive. – Lynn Swann • When somebody say no, it’s a red flag to a bull to me. – Duncan Roy • When the wheel was accepted as part of the national flag, it was surely implied that the spinning wheel would hum in every household. – Mahatma Gandhi • When you go to plant a flag on the visiting team’s field, it’s a form of taunting, .. What message are you sending when you spear it into the turf of your defeated opponent?. – Brad Davis • When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot? – George Orwell • While the rest of the country waves the flag of Americana, we understand we are not part of that. We don’t owe America anything – America owes us. – Al Sharpton • Words are some of the most powerful and important things I know….Language is the tool of love and the weapon of hatred. It’s the bright red warning flag of danger–and the stone foundation of diplomacy and peace. – Ani DiFranco • Worrying that banning flag desecration would inhibit free speech reveals a misunderstanding of the flag’s fundamental nature. – Adrian Cronauer • Ye mariners of England! That guard our native seas; Whose flag has braved a thousand years, The battle and the breeze! – Thomas Campbell • Yes, I’m a patriotic person. For these people who disgrace the American way and burn our flag and do all of these things… I say, don’t live here and disgrace my country. Go live in the Middle East and see how you like it. – Payne Stewart • Yonder are the Hessians. They were bought for seven pounds and tenpence a man. Are you worth more? Prove it. Tonight the American flag floats from yonder hill or Molly Stark sleeps a widow! – John Stark • You are the generation that will reach the sea and hoist the flag of Palestine over Tel Aviv. – Yasser Arafat • You are the makers of the flag and it is well that you glory in the making. – Franklin Knight Lane • You cannot have companies where many of the largest ones lose money indefinitely without someone finally waving the white flag, and IBM is the most recent example of that. – Kevin B. Rollins • You don’t defend national sovereignty with flags, cheap election rhetoric, and advertising campaigns. – Stephen Harper • You have to eat before you train. Otherwise, that really intense training, after about 40 minutes you start to flag. – Hugh Jackman • You the devil in drag. You can burn your cross, Well, I’ll burn your flag. – Ice Cube • You’re a grand old flag! You’re a high-flying flag, And forever in peace may you wave. You’re the emblem of the land I love, The home of the free and the brave. Ev’ry heart beats true ‘Neath the Red, White and Blue,’ Where there’s never a boast or brag. But should auld acquaintance be forgot, Keep your eye on the grand old flag. – George M. Cohan

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Flags Quotes

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• A lot of folks are still demanding more evidence before they actually consider Iraq a threat. For example, France wants more evidence. And you know I’m thinking, the last time France wanted more evidence they rolled right through Paris with the German flag. – David Letterman • A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation’s flag, sees not the flag, but the nation itself. – Henry Ward Beecher • A thoughtful mind, when it sees a Nation’s flag, sees not the flag only, but the Nation itself; and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the Government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the Nation that sets it forth. – Henry Ward Beecher • After I left D.C. to join Black Flag, I felt I was in a band. – Henry Rollins • America has an almost obscene infatuation with itself. Has there ever been a big, powerful country that is as patriotic as America? And patriotic in the tinniest way, with so much flag waving? You’d really think we were some poor little republic, and that if one person lost his religion for one hour, the whole thing would crumble. America is the real religion in this country. – Norman Mailer • America is the only country in the world where you can burn the flag but can’t tear the tag off the mattress. – Jackie Mason • And the word is capitalism. We are too mealy-mouthed. We fear the word capitalism is unpopular. So we talk about the free enterprise system and run to cover in the folds of the flag and talk about the American Way of Life. – Eric Johnston • And when we view a flag, which to the eye is beautiful, and to contemplate its rise and origin inspires a sensation of sublime delight, our national honor must unite with our interests to prevent injury to the one, or insult to the other. – Thomas Paine • Any power must be an enemy of mankind which enslaves the individual by power and by force, whether it arises under the Fascist or the Communist flag. All that is valuable in human society depends upon the opportunity for development accorded to the individual. – Albert Einstein • As Conservatives, We Don’t Care About The Color of Your Skin, We Care About The Color of Our Flag – Allen West • As long as I live, I will never forget that day 21 years ago when I raised my hand and took the oath of citizenship. Do you know how proud I was? I was so proud that I walked around with an American flag around my shoulders all day long. – Arnold Schwarzenegger • As National Socialists we see our program in our flag. In the red we see the social idea of the movement. – Adolf Hitler • Ashcroft vowed to] spare no effort to preserve the rights of all our citizens to pledge allegiance to the American flag. – John Ashcroft • At least in my country, we have come to accept the flags burning, but what we cannot accept is violence, burning of embassies and intimidations, and there is no excuse for that. – Daniel Fried

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'flag', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_flag').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_flag img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Bastard Freedom waves Her fustian flag in mockery over slaves. – Thomas Moore • Behold a republic standing erect while empires all around are bowed beneath the weight of their own armaments – a republic whose flag is loved while other flags are only feared. – William Jennings Bryan • But didn’t you say you were satisfied with your life?” “Word games,” I dismissed. “Every army needs a flag. – Haruki Murakami • By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. – Ralph Waldo Emerson • By the way, I don’t mean to pick nits here, but Obama has just ordered the flag at half-mast for 10 days for Mandela. He did not order the flag at half-mast at all for Lady Thatcher. – Rush Limbaugh • Call it ‘nationalism’ when you affix a flag to your car, and leave the word ‘patriotism’ for your efforts to make this country a kinder, more egalitarian place, and one that is less dangerous to the rest of the world. – Barbara Ehrenreich • Can you imagine what Bush would say if someone like Hugo Chavez asked him for a little piece of land to install a military base, and he only wanted to plant a Venezuelan flag there?- Jose Saramago • Canadians are fond of a good disaster, especially if it has ice, water, or snow in it. You thought the national flag was about a leaf, didn’t you? Look harder. It’s where someone got axed in the snow. – Margaret Atwood • Democratic Rep. Charles Schumer of New York made a plea to Livingston, the incoming speaker. These new hearings, these new subpoenas wave a red flag that common sense and common wisdom are not welcome here, .. Mr. Livingston, this may be the first and most important task you will ever face as speaker. Lead us out of this abyss. – Charles Schumer • Donald Trump appears to be searching for an enemy. Is it flag burners, recounts, the press, the popular vote? Trump has gone after them all at times, using wild experience theories even as president-elect to do it. – Chuck Todd • Emblem: the carapace of the great crowned snail is painted with all the flags of the United Nations. – Mason Cooley • Even if only one guerilla cub survives the prolonged struggle, I am confident that he will raise the flag of Palestine overJerusalem… Jerusalem is destined to be the eternal capital of our sovereign, independent Palestinian state under the P.L.O. leadership. – Yasser Arafat • Even if the flag burning amendment does become law, the larger problem will remain of how to respectfully dispose of older, tattered flags. Well, fortunately the U.S. official Flag Code has a suggestion about this. “The flag, when it is in such a condition that it is no longer a fitting emblem of display, should be destroyed in a dignified way, preferably by burning.” Owwwwcchh. In response, the House Republicans are calling for tattered flags to be kept alive via a feeding tube. – Jon Stewart • Every man that tried to destroy the Government, every man that shot at the holy flag in heaven, every man that starved our soldiers… every man that wanted to burn the negro, every one that wanted to scatter yellow fever in the North, every man that opposed human liberty, that regarded the auction-block as an altar and the howling of the bloodhound as the music of the Union, every man who wept over the corpse of slavery, that thought lashes on the naked back were a legal tender for labour performed, every one willing to rob a mother of her child – every solitary one was a Democrat. – Robert Green Ingersoll • Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit on his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats. – H. L. Mencken • Every time a colony wants independence, the questions on the agenda are: a) how do you get the imperialists out, and b) what kind of society do you build? There are usually the bourgeois nationalists who say, ‘Let’s just change the flag and keep everything as it was.’ Then there are the revolutionaries who say, ‘Let’s change the property laws.’ It’s always a critical moment. – Ken Loach • Every time I hit a shot, I feel like I am shaking hands with the flag stick. – Moe Norman • Everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination’s orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink – for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.- Honore de Balzac • Fascism will come to America wrapped in a flag. – Sinclair Lewis • Flag desecration is not a constitutional issue for the courts. It is a political one that belongs to the people. – Larry Craig • Flag of the free heart’s hope and home! By angel hands to valour given, Thy stars have lit the welkin dome; And all thy hues were born in heaven. – Joseph Rodman Drake • Flags are bits of colored cloth used first to shrinkwrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead. – Arundhati Roy • For black folks, the Confederate flag represents the same thing that the Nazi flag represents to the Jews. There is absolutely no difference when we look at it. Now, white folks try to explain it away like, ‘Oh, it’s OK.’ But when you’re black, it is not OK. It represents oppression and murder. – Ken Page • For me, I’m just trying to be the best at what I do. I’ll wave an Asian American flag if I get that opportunity. I’m not hiding or trying to discredit my background or anything, I just haven’t had the opportunity. – Chad Hugo • Ford used to come to work in a big car with two Admiral’s flags, on each side of the car. His assistant would be there with his accordion, playing, Hail to the Chief. – Richard Widmark • Getting that audience approval is always a question mark, and it’s always that flag that flutters in front of you. – William Shatner • Growth at an exceptional rate is a red flag in banking. It is hard enough to manage an ordinary bank; to control a sprouting weed is well-nigh impossible. If loans are expanding too quickly, the lending officers have probably been saying ‘yes’ too frequently. – James Grant • Haul up the flag, you mourners, Not half-mast but all the way; The funeral is done and disbanded; The devil’s had the final say. – Karl Shapiro • Have not I myself known five hundred living soldiers sabred into crows’ meat for a piece of glazed cotton, which they call their flag; which had you sold it at any market-cross, would not have brought above three groschen? – Thomas Carlyle • He is a poor patriot whose patriotism does not enable him to understand how all men everywhere feel about their altars and their hearthstones, their flag and their fatherland. – Harry Emerson Fosdick • I always carried a small American flag red white and blue with me so people would know I was from America. – George Foreman • I am not the flag: not at all. I am but its shadow. – Franklin Knight Lane • I believe in America. I’m one of those silly flag wavers. – Paul Prudhomme • I believe our flag is more than just cloth and ink. It is a universally recognized symbol that stands for liberty, and freedom. It is the history of our nation, and it’s marked by the blood of those who died defending it. – John Thune • I believe that movements to suppress wrongs can be carried out under the protection of our flag. – Mother Jones • I came to the resolve that the attempt was not only worth trying, but should be tried in the very near future if we wanted at all to keep our flag flying; for I was sure as of my own existence that if another decade was allowed to pass without an endeavour of some kind or another to shake off an unjust yoke, the Irish people would sink into lethargy from which it would be impossible for any patriot . . . to arouse them . . . – James Stephens • I can train a monkey to wave an American flag. That does not make the monkey patriotic. – Scott Ritter • I can’t fly a flag for monogamy or whatever the opposite is; it depends on the person and on the situation. – Sting • I consider that 9/11 was the day when war was started against my own work and against myself. Even though we are not sure of the links, Iraq was one of the countries that did not lower its flags in mourning on 9/11. – Adam Michnik • I don’t judge others. I say if you feel good with what you’re doing, let your freak flag fly. – Sarah Jessica Parker • I don’t want the news to be patriotic. I don’t want to see flags on the lapels of the anchors. I don’t want any of that. – Aaron McGruder • I expect the Republicans will enjoy a large bounce out of their convention. They’re here wrapping themselves in the 9/11 flag, which I think is inappropriate in many ways, but it’s their choice. – Harold Ford, Jr. • I fear my enthusiasm flags when real work is demanded of me. – H. P. Lovecraft • I feel like I’m waving the flag for musicianship, trying to bring back bands that can play. – Jonathan Davis • I feel there should have been some recognition of the Spice Girls at this year’s 25th anniversary. We flew the flag for Britain around the globe in the 1990s and we achieved a hell of a lot. – Melanie Chisholm • I had an encyclopedia with a list of flags in the back, so I would look at all these flags of China and Liberia and England and Denmark and whatever, and I learned all the different flags and I tried to imagine what it would be like to be voyaging on some of these ships. – George R. R. Martin • I have a great respect for the flag, (but) if the government passed a law saying that I had to pledge allegiance to the flag, I don’t think I would do it. I’ve always felt that I lived in a country…where if I wanted to worship God as a Baptist, I could do so. If I were an atheist, I could be one. If I wanted to be a Catholic but was born a Jew, there’s no condemnation…from a government authority. – Jimmy Carter • I intend to talk about race during this election in the South because the Republicans have been talking about it since 1968 in order to divide us. And I’m going to bring us together. Because you know what? You know what? White folks in the South who drive pickup trucks with Confederate flag decals in the back ought to be voting with us and not them, because their kids don’t have health insurance either and their kids need better schools too. – Howard Dean • I learned this a long time ago. If you call a guy into your office and shut the door, if there’s media around, it sends up a red flag. I never wanted to embarrass a player. – Jim Leyland • I look for the entrepreneur to capture my attention. If you don’t come out with a great presentation, you’re dead. That’s a big red flag. – Robert Herjavec • I mean Black Flag happened. I was lucky. I don’t think I could have put together something with one percent of that oomph on my own. – Henry Rollins • I pledge allegiance to the Christian flag, and to the Savior, for whose Kingdom it stands, one Savior, crucified, risen, and coming again, with life and liberty for all who believe. – Dan Quayle • I prefer a man who will burn the flag and then wrap himself in the constitution to a man who will burn the constitution and then wrap himself in the flag. – Craig Washington • I savored my time on top of the podium by watching the American flag rise up out of the crowd as the anthem played, thinking about how every single second of training I’ve done was for this minute and how many people played a role in my achievement. – Hannah Kearney • I stand fearlessly for small dogs, the American Flag, motherhood and the Bible. That’s why people love me. – Art Linkletter • I still want to be the candidate for guys with Confederate flags in their pickup trucks.- Howard Dean • I think love is blind. I hate to use that cliched statement, but people, when they love somebody, they seem to be able to somehow to put aside red flags. – Eric Close • I would warn Orlando that you’re right in the way of some serious hurricanes, and I don’t think I’d be waving those flags [gay pride flags] in God’s face if I were you, This is not a message of hate , this is a message of redemption. But a condition like this will bring about the destruction of your nation. It’ll bring about terrorist bombs; it’ll bring earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor. – Pat Robertson • I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten. – Francis Ford Coppola • I’d buy myself a cabin on the beach, I’d put some glue in my navel, and I’d stick a flag in there. Then I’d wait to see which way the wind was blowing. – Albert Camus • If a jerk burns the flag, America is not threatened, democracy is not under siege, freedom is not at risk. – Gary Ackerman • If I fall, pick up the flag, kiss it, and keep on going. – Omar Torrijos • If one, then, asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him, It means just what Concord and Lexington meant, what Bunker Hill meant; it means the whole glorious Revolutionary War, which was, in short, the rising up of a valiant young people against an old tyranny, to establish the most momentous doctrine that the world had ever known – the right of men to their own selves and to their liberties. – Henry Ward Beecher • If the flag of an armed enemy of the U.S. is allowed to fly over government buildings, then it implies that slavery, or at least the threat of slavery, is sanctioned by that government and can still legally exist. – Amiri Baraka • If the test of patriotism comes only by reflexively falling into lockstep behind the leader whenever the flag is waved, then what we have is a formula for dictatorship, not democracy… But the American way is to criticize and debate openly, not to accept unthinkingly the doings of government officials of this or any other country. – Michael Parenti • If you buy the flag it’s yours to burn. – Jesse Ventura • If you start studying history closer, you’ll find that most all wars are based on false flag operations to get people – to convince the people that they’re under attack in some way so that they will support the wars. – Jesse Ventura • If you want a symbolic gesture, don’t burn the flag, wash it. – Norman Thomas • If you wave a flag, make it an American Flag. – Antonio Villaraigosa • I’m about as far from being a flag-waver – you won’t find any American flag pins in my drawer – as someone can be. – Tom Peters • I’m beginning to wonder if the symbol of the United States pretty soon isn’t going to be an ambassador with a flag under his arm climbing into an escape helicopter. – Ronald Reagan • Im in love with red. I think its such a passionate color. Every flag of every country pretty much has red it it. Its power, theres no fence sitting with red. Either you love it or you dont. I think its blood and strength and life. I do love red. I love all colors. Great shades of blue, you find them in nature. Theyre all magic. – Bryan Batt • I’m just always learning lines. I’ve learned to flag the really crucial scenes, and I start figuring them out and committing them to memory as soon as I get them. – Claire Danes • I’m proud of the U.S.A. We’ve done some amazing things. To wear our flag in the Olympics is an honor. – Shaun White • In prosperous times I have sometimes felt my fancy and powers of language flag, but adversity is to me at least a tonic and bracer. – Walter Scott • In the middle of the cavernous cargo hold was a simple, aluminum coffin with a small American flag draped over it. We were bringing another American soldier, just killed, home to his family and final resting place. The starkness of his coffin in the center of the hold, the silence except for the din of the engines, was a real time cold reminder of the consequences of decisions for which we Senators share responsibility. – John F. Kerry • In uniform patriotism can salute one flag only, embrace but the first circle of life – one’s own land and tribe. In war that is necessary, in peace it is not enough. – Bill Moyers • Invention flags, his brain goes muddy, And black despair succeeds brown study. – William Congreve • Israel’s capital will never again be a divided city, a city with a wall at its center, a city in which two flags fly. This city, will, in its entirety, absorb immigrants, welcome pilgrims and be the eternal capital of Israel forever. – Yitzhak Shamir • It is a dangerous day when we can take the cross out of the church more easily than the flag. No wonder it is hard for seekers to find God nowadays. – Shane Claiborne • It is said that peace is the basic tenet of all religion. Yet it is in the name of religion that there has been so much disturbance, bloodshed and persecution. It is indeed a pity that even at the close of the twentieth century we’ve had to witness such atrocities because of religion. Flying the flag of religion has always proved the easiest way to crush to nothingness human beings as well as the spirit of humanity. – Taslima Nasrin • It is said that the Queen has come to love the Commonwealth, partly because it supplies her with regular cheering crowds of flag-waving picaninnies; and one can imagine that Blair, twice victor abroad but enmired at home, is similarly seduced by foreign politeness. They say he is shortly off to the Congo. No doubt the AK47s will fall silent, and the pangas will stop their hacking of human flesh, and the tribal warriors will all break out in Watermelon smiles to see the big white chief touch down in his big white British taxpayer-funded bird. – Boris Johnson • It is the will of the American people that we have a right to protect our flag and this can only be accomplished by passing a Constitutional amendment. – Adrian Cronauer • I’ve got one Aussie flag on my car. It would be nice to have two. – Tom Lehman • Japanese-owned cargo ship Tsimtsum, flying Panamanian flag, sank July 2nd, 1977, in Pacific, four days out of Manila. Am in lifeboat. Pi Patel my name. Have some food, some water, but Bengal tiger a serious problem. Please advise family in Winnepeg, Canada. Any help very much appreciated. Thank you. – Yann Martel • Laws protecting the United States flag do not cut away at the freedom of speech guaranteed in the First Amendment… Congress made this position clear upon passage of the Flag Protection Act of 1989, which prohibited desecration of the flag. – Larry Craig • Let it be borne on the flag under which we rally in every exigency, that we have one country, one constitution, one destiny. – Daniel Webster • Liberals hate America, they hate “flag-wavers”, they hate abortion opponents, they hate all religions except Islam (post 9/11). Even Islamic terrorists don’t hate America like liberals do. They don’t have the energy. If they had that much energy, they’d have indoor plumbing by now. – Ann Coulter • Life is not fair. And you have to choose your battles, because there are some that you cannot win. If you’re passionate about something, then you should pick up your flag and run with it.- Bette Midler • Long live Germany. Long live Austria. Long live Argentina. These are the countries with which I have been most closely associated and I shall not forget them. I had to obey the rules of war and my flag. I am ready. – Adolf Eichmann • Men do not fight for flag or country, for the Marine Corps or glory or any other abstraction. They fight for one another. And if you came through this ordeal, you would age with dignity. – William Manchester • Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer. – Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. • My dad has totally taken my Cat Stevens T-shirt, but it’s OK; I have his Black Flag one, and that’s amazing. – Zoe Kravitz • My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. – Katha Pollitt • My goal is people associate November with COPD awareness month as much as they notice October with breast cancer and pink. That’d be a great thing if it happened. The fact that COPD kills more people than breast cancer and diabetes put together should raise some red flags. – Danica Patrick • My major aim in writing is to set out flags and issue wake-up calls. – James Broughton • My version, of course, is not this flag-waving, let’s all get on the Jesus train and ride out of hell. I’m not that kind of guy. It’s an embrace that life is good, worth living and yeah, it’s not easy, but there are more pluses than minuses. – Billy Corgan • Nationalism is just racism with a flag. – Peter Joseph • Not another flag has such an errand, carrying everywhere, the world around, such hope for freedom such glorious tidings. – Henry Ward Beecher • Nowhere else in history has there ever been a flag that stands for the right to burn itself. This is the fractal of our flag. It stands for the right to destroy itself. – Ken Kesey • Obama’s a nice person, he’s very articulate this is what’s been used against him, but he couldn’t sell watermelons if it, you gave him the state troopers to flag down the traffic.- Dan Rather • Of all the names Polygamy went by (so as not to exasperate the Gentile population and even some of the wives of the members’ own bosoms any more than necessary) — such as Pluralism, Plural or Celestial Wedlock, the Principle, the Doctrine, the New Covenant and the Gospel Dispensation of the Meridian of Consummate Time — the latter was thought to be the least like waving a red flag in front of a bull. But as it was hard to remember and did not make instant or any other kind of sense, it was not much used. – Ardyth Kennelly • Of course, Mr. Hannity was outraged that any American would not cross her hand over her heart and repeat the hypocritical words, one nation. Whenever we come up on the Fourth of You Lie, I think of Frederick Douglas and his masterful oration, The meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro. Pledge the flag? I think not! – Julianne Malveaux • Off with your hat, as the flag goes by! And let the heart have its say; you’re man enough for a tear in your eye that you will not wipe away. – Henry Cuyler Bunner • Oh, it’s home again and home again, America for me! I want a ship that’s westward bound to plough the rolling sea To the blessed land of Room Enough beyond the ocean bars, Where the air is full of sunlight and the flag is full of stars. – Henry Van Dyke • Oh, say can you see by the dawn’s early light What so proudly we hailed as the twilight’s last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars thru the perilous fight O’er the ramplarts we watched were so gallantly streaming? And the rocket’s red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave? – Francis Scott Key • On a royal birthday every house must fly a flag, or the owner would be dragged to a police station and be fined twenty-five rubles. – Mary Antin • On no further occasion present a flag or medal to an Indian. – Zebulon Pike • On the field of battle, the spoken word does not carry far enough; hence the institution of gongs and drums… banners and flags. Gongs and drums, banners and flags, are means whereby the ears and eyes of the host may be focused on one particular point. – Sun Tzu • On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they [the Colonies] raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome in the height of her glory is not to be compared,-a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England. – Daniel Webster • Ostentation is the signal flag of hypocrisy. – Edwin Hubbel Chapin • Our flag honors those who have fought to protect it, and is a reminder of the sacrifice of our nation’s founders and heroes. As the ultimate icon of America’s storied history, the Stars and Stripes represents the very best of this nation. – Joe Barton • Our flag is a proud flag, and it stands for liberty and civilization. Where it has once floated, there must be no return to tyranny. – Theodore Roosevelt • Our flag is not just one of many political points of view. Rather, the flag is a symbol of our national unity. – Adrian Cronauer • Our flag is read, white and blue, but our nation is a rainbown-red, yellow, brown, black and white – and we’re all precious in God’s sight. – Jesse Jackson • Our flag means all that our fathers meant in the Revolutionary War. It means all that the Declaration of Independence meant. It means justice. It means liberty. It means happiness…. Every color means liberty. Every thread means liberty. Every star and stripe means liberty. – Henry Ward Beecher • Our flag represents every American and it should not be hidden away as a result of property agreements. – Mike Fitzpatrick • Our great modern Republic. May those who seek the blessings of its institutions and the protection of its flag remember the obligations they impose. – Ulysses S. Grant • Our moneyed men have ruled us for the past thirty years. Under the flag of the slaveholder they hoped to destroy our liberty. – Denis Kearney • Patriotism consists not in waving the flag, but in striving that our country shall be righteous as well as strong.- James Bryce • Patriotism has become a mere national self assertion, a sentimentality of flag-cheering with no constructive duties. – H. G. Wells • Patriotism threatens free speech with death. It is infuriated by thoughtful hesitation, constructive criticism of our leaders and pleas for peace. It despises people of foreign birth. It has specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists and the American Civil Liberties Union. In other words, the American flag stands for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder. Whom are we calling terrorists here? – Barbara Kingsolver • People from major labels were afraid to go to Black Flag gigs throughout most of the bands existence. They treated our gigs as something threatening. Im sure that it probably was. They probably had reasons to be scared. – Greg Ginn • Punishing desecration of the flag dilutes the very freedom that makes this emblem so revered. – William J. Brennan • Queen’s University flies the flag for the arts in Northern Ireland and beyond. – Liam Neeson • Red flag of the eating disorder: the muffin. Keep your eye on the ladies with the muffins… and sometimes I’ll just eat the muffin top. – Janeane Garofalo • Remember the hours after September 11th when we came together as one to answer the attack against our homeland. We drew strength when our firefighters ran upstairs and risked their lives so that others might live; when rescuers rushed into smoke and fire at the Pentagon; when the men and women of Flight 93 sacrificed themselves to save our nation’s Capitol; when flags were hanging from front porches all across America, and strangers became friends. It was the worst day we have ever seen, but it brought out the best in all of us. – John F. Kerry • Roger Ebert was the last mammoth alive who was holding the flag for real movies and moviemakers. – Werner Herzog • Saying you are a patriot does not make you one; wearing a flag pin does not in itself mean anything at all. – Viggo Mortensen • Since trade ignores national boundaries and the manufacturer insists on having the world as a market, the flag of his nation must follow him, and the doors of the nations which are closed against him must be battered down. Concessions obtained by financiers must be safeguarded by ministers of state, even if the sovereignty of unwilling nations be outraged in the process. Colonies must be obtained or planted, in order that no useful corner of the world may be overlooked or left unused. – Woodrow Wilson • So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute. Love the Lord. Love the world. Work for nothing. Take all that you have and be poor. Love someone who does not deserve it. Denounce the government and embrace the flag. Hope to live in that free republic for which it stands. -Wendell Berry • SST was formed to put out the first Black Flag record. Basically, there wasn’t anyone else to do it. I felt that what I was doing with Black Flag was very worthwhile, and I wanted to get it out there. – Greg Ginn • Sure I wave the American flag. Do you know a better flag to wave? Sure I love my country with all her faults. I’m not ashamed of that, never have been, never will be. – John Wayne • Sure I wave the American flag. Do you know a better flag to wave?- John Wayne • That one flag encircles us with its folds today, the unrivaled object of our loyal love. – Benjamin Harrison • The American flag is the most recognized symbol of freedom and democracy in the world. – Virginia Foxx • The American flag is the symbol of our freedom, national pride and history. – Mike Fitzpatrick • The American flag represents all of us and all the values we hold sacred. – Adrian Cronauer • The American flag, Old Glory, standing tall and flying free over American soil for 228 years is the symbol of our beloved country. It is recognized from near and afar, and many lives have been lost defending it. – Jeff Miller • The Bible represents a fundamental guidepost for millions of people on the planet, in much the same way the Koran, Torah, and Pali Canon offer guidance to people of other religions. If you and I could dig up documentation that contradicted the holy stories of Islamic belief, Judaic belief, Buddhist belief, pagan belief, should we do that? Should we wave a flag and tell the Buddhists that the Buddha did not come from a lotus blossom? Or that Jesus was not born of a literal virgin birth? Those who truly understand their faiths understand the stories are metaphorical. – Dan Brown • The few took advantage of the ignorant many. They pretended to have received messages from the Unknown. They stood between the helpless multitude and the gods. They were the carriers of flags of truce. At the court of heaven they presented the cause of man, and upon the labor of the deceived they lived. – Robert Green Ingersoll • The flag is a symbol of the fact that man is still a herd animal. – Albert Einstein • The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history. – Woodrow Wilson • The flag of racialism which has been hoisted in Wolverhampton is beginning to look like the one that fluttered 25 years ago over Dachau and Belsen. – Tony Benn • The flag of the United States has not been created by rhetorical sentences in declarations of independence and in bills of rights. It has been created by the experience of a great people, and nothing is written upon it that has not been written by their life. It is the embodiment, not of a sentiment, but of a history. – Woodrow Wilson • The flag of your nation – wave it! Begin to separate your nation from whatever covenant your forefathers must have had. Break the covenant of corruption/ stealing/ killing/ destruction/ idolatry – break it right now! – T. B. Joshua • The flag represents all the values and the liberties Americans have and enjoy everyday. – Bill Shuster • The flag still stands for freedom and they can’t take that away.- Lee Greenwood • The flag that was the symbol of slavery on the high seas for a long time was not the Confederate battle flag, it was sadly the Stars and Stripes. – Alan Keyes • The headline is the ‘ticket on the meat.’ Use it to flag down readers who are prospects for the kind of product you are advertising. – David Ogilvy • The less a statesman amounts to, the more he loves the flag. – Kin Hubbard • The meteor flag of England Shall yet terrific burn, Till danger’s troubled night depart, And the star of peace return. – Thomas Campbell • The Minutemen were seen as more of an art thing than Black Flag, although I didn’t see them that way. It confused people when we put out Saccharine Trust, too. – Greg Ginn • The mother condemned for a witch and burnt with dry wood, and her children gazing on;The hounded slave that flags in the race and leans by the fence, blowing and covered with sweat, The twinges that sting like needles his legs and neck, The murderous buckshot and the bullets, All these I feel or am. – Walt Whitman • The Palestinian state is within our grasp. Soon the Palestinian flag will fly on the walls, the minarets and the cathedrals of Jerusalem. – Yasser Arafat • The people are urged to be patriotic … by sacrificing their own children. Patriotism requires allegience to the flag, which means obedience and readiness to kill father, mother, brother, sister. – Emma Goldman • The Royal family to me are not England, and they are not the flag. – Steven Morrissey • The stuff that I got in trouble for, the casting for The Godfather or the flag scene in Patton, was the stuff that was remembered, and was considered the good work. – Francis Ford Coppola • The things that the flag stands for were created by the experiences of a great people. Everything that it stands for was written by their lives. The flag is the embodiment, not of sentiment, but of history. – Woodrow Wilson • The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag. – Smedley Butler • The victory march will continue until the Palestinian flag flies in Jerusalem and in all of Palestine. – Yasser Arafat • The writer is delegated to declare and to celebrate man’s proven capacity for greatness of heart and spirit—for gallantry in defeat, for courage, compassion and love. In the endless war against weakness and despair, these are the bright rally flags of hope and of emulation. I hold that a writer who does not believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature. – John Steinbeck • Then finally I said, ‘Okay, well, I want to know all the details. I want creative input. I want to be consulted. I want to know what they’re doing and who’s involved. And I want to see the space.’ So they took me to see it, and then I realized it was major! All these red flags on the Rue de Rivoli with my name on them right by the Louvre! – Kate Moss • There are some pop songs I hate but I can’t get them out of my head. Our songs also have the standard pop format: Verse, chorus, verse, chorus, solo, bad solo. All in all, I think we sound like The Knack and the Bay City Rollers being molested by Black Flag and Black Sabbath. – Kurt Cobain • There are those who wrap themselves in flags and blow the tinny trumpet of patriotism as a means of fooling the people. – George Galloway • There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag…We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language…and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people. – Theodore Roosevelt • There is a strong tendency in the United States to rally round the flag and their troops, no matter how mistaken the war. – George McGovern • There is hopeful symbolism in the fact that flags do not wave in a vacuum. – Arthur C. Clarke • There is much more to being a patriot and a citizen than reciting the pledge or raising a flag. – Jesse Ventura • There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people. – Howard Zinn • There is no rule in the pink-triangle guide to coming out that you must wear a rainbow flag cap and organise a full band parade. – Beth Ditto • There’s a certain elitism that has crept into the attitudes of some in journalism, and it played out perfectly over the issue of these little [American flag] lapel pins. – Brit Hume • There’s a principle here and I’m hoping the court will uphold this principle so that we can finally go back and have every American want to stand up, face the flag, place their hand over their heart and pledge to one nation, indivisible, not divided by religion, with liberty and justice for all. – Michael Newdow • There’s an enduring American compulsion to be on the side of the angels. Expediency alone has never been an adequate American reason for doing anything. When actions are judged, they go before the bar of God, where Mom and the Flag closely flank His presence. – Jonathan Raban • There’s one beneficial effect of going to Moscow. You come home waving the American flag with all your might. – Mary Tyler Moore • This flag .. is raised not without costs, .. without the costs of having struggled for many years, without the costs of having lost so many lives in order to have a free and sovereign and good Afghanistan. – Hamid Karzai • To secure respect to a neutral flag requires a naval force organized and ready to vindicate it from insult or aggression. – George Washington • To survive in peace and harmony, united and strong, we must have one people, one nation, one flag. – Pauline Hanson • Tonight the American flag floats from yonder hill or Molly Stark sleeps a widow. – John Stark • Tony Stewart — Broke out a new chassis at Pocono Raceway last June and raced to the checkered flag for his first victory of 2003; has finished among the top 10 in all but two of his 10 career starts here; Turn one is probably the easiest of the three, but you’ve got the challenge of having to downshift in the middle of the corner, .. You go down the backstretch and into the tunnel turn and it’s basically one lane. – Tony Stewart • Tree of Liberty: A tree set up by the people, hung with flags and devices, and crowned with a cap of liberty. The Americans of the United States planted poplars and other trees during the war of independence, “as symbols of growing freedom.” The Jacobins in Paris planted their first tree of liberty in 1790. The symbols used in France to decorate their trees of liberty were tricoloured ribbons, circles to indicate unity, triangles to signify equality, and a cap of liberty. Trees of liberty were planted by the Italians in the revolution of 1848. – E. Cobham Brewer • Under this flag may our youth find new inspiration for loyalty to Canada; for a patriotism based not on any mean or narrow nationalism, but on the deep and equal pride that all Canadians will feel for every part of this good land. – Lester B. Pearson • Unfortunately a Constitutional amendment that would have empowered Congress to make desecration of the United States flag illegal failed to pass by one vote. – Kenny Marchant • United States, your banner wears Two emblems–one of fame; Alas! the other that it bears Reminds us of your shame. Your banner’s constellation types White freedom with its stars, But what’s the meaning of the stripes? They mean your negroes’ scars. – Thomas Campbell • Using a metaphor in front of a man as unimaginative as Ridcully was like a red flag to a bu… was like putting something very annoying in front of someone who was annoyed by it. – Terry Pratchett • War is the spectacular and bloody projection of our everyday living. We precipitate war out of our daily lives; and without a transformation in ourselves, there are bound to be national and racial antagonisms, the childish quarreling over ideologies, the multiplication of soldiers, the saluting of flags, and all the many brutalities that go to create organized murder. – Jiddu Krishnamurti • We Americans are the most lavish and showiest and most luxury loving people on the earth; and at our masthead we fly one true and honest symbol, the gaudiest flag the world has ever seen. – Mark Twain • We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams. – Peter S. Beagle • We are to regard existence as a raid or great adventure; it is to be judged, therefore, not by what calamities it encounters, but by what flag it follows and what high town it assaults. The most dangerous thing in the world is to be alive; one is always in danger of one’s life. But anyone who shrinks from that is a traitor to the great scheme and experiment of being. – Gilbert K. Chesterton • We cannot allow the American flag to be shot at anywhere on earth if we are to retain our respect and prestige – Barry Goldwater • We considered ourselves Jordanian until the Jews returned to Jerusalem. Then all of the sudden we were Palestinians – they removed the star from the Jordanian flag and all at once we had a Palestinian flag. – Walid Shoebat • We do not consecrate the flag by punishing its desecration, for in doing so, we dilute the freedom this cherished emblem represents. – William J. Brennan • We have but one flag, one country; let us stand together. We may differ in color, but not in sentiment. – Nathan Bedford Forrest • We have room in this country for but one flag, the Stars and Stripes! – Theodore Roosevelt • We have two American flags always: one for the rich and one for the poor. When the rich fly it means that things are under control; when the poor fly it means danger, revolution, anarchy. – Henry Miller • We identify the flag with almost everything we hold dear on earth, peace, security, liberty, our family, our friends, our home. . .But when we look at our flag and behold it emblazoned with all our rights we must remember that it is equally a symbol of our duties. Every glory that we associate with it is the result of duty done. – Calvin Coolidge • We join ourselves to no party that does not carry the flag and I keep step to the music of the Union. – Rufus Choate • Well, start waving and yelling, because it is the so-called Oxford comma and it is a lot more dangerous than its exclusive, ivory-tower moniker might suggest. There are people who embrace the Oxford comma and people who don’t, and I’ll just say this: never get between these people when drink has been taken. Oh, the Oxford comma. Here, in case you don’t know what it is yet, is the perennial example, as espoused by Harold Ross: “The flag is red, white, and blue.” So what do you think of it? Are you for or against it? Do you hover in between? – Lynne Truss • What does one plant who plants a tree? One plants the friend of sun and sky; One plants the flag of breezes free; The shaft of beauty towering high. – Henry Cuyler Bunner • What if the invasion forces will not leave our lands? What if the U.S. forces and others stay in our beloved lands? What if their companies and embassy headquarters will continue to exist with the American flags hoisted on them? Will you be silent? Will you overlook this? – Muqtada al Sadr • What I’m trying to do is to at least raise a flag to the blinding light of technology. – Godfrey Reggio • When a war ends, what does that look like exactly? do the cells in the body stop detonating themselves? does the orphanage stop screaming for its mother? when the sand in the desert has been melted down to glass and our reflection is not something we can stand to look at does the white flag make for a perfect blindfold? yesterday i was told a story about this little girl in Iraq, six-years-old, who cannot fall asleep because when she does she dreams of nothing but the day she watched her dog eat her neighbor’s corpse. if you told her war is over do you think she can sleep? – Andrea Gibson • When facism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the American flag. – Sinclair Lewis • When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism – Sinclair Lewis • When Freedom from her mountain height Unfurled her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night, And set the stars of glory there. – Joseph Rodman Drake • When Freedom from her mountain-height Unfurled her standard to the air, She tore the azure robe of night, And set the stars of glory there. She mingled with its gorgeous dyes The milky baldric of the skies, And striped its pure, celestial white With streakings of the morning light. Flag of the free heart’s hope and home! By angel hands to valour given! Thy stars have lit the welkin dome, And all thy hues were born in heaven. Forever float that standard sheet! Where breathes the foe but falls before us, With Freedom’s soil beneath our feet, And Freedom’s banner streaming o’er us? – Joseph Rodman Drake • When I see the American flag, I go, ‘Oh my God, you’re insulting me.’ – Janeane Garofalo • When I was in college there was a girls’ flag football league. The girls were extremely aggressive. – Lynn Swann • When somebody say no, it’s a red flag to a bull to me. – Duncan Roy • When the wheel was accepted as part of the national flag, it was surely implied that the spinning wheel would hum in every household. – Mahatma Gandhi • When you go to plant a flag on the visiting team’s field, it’s a form of taunting, .. What message are you sending when you spear it into the turf of your defeated opponent?. – Brad Davis • When you make love you’re using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don’t give a damn for anything. They can’t bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you’re happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot? – George Orwell • While the rest of the country waves the flag of Americana, we understand we are not part of that. We don’t owe America anything – America owes us. – Al Sharpton • Words are some of the most powerful and important things I know….Language is the tool of love and the weapon of hatred. It’s the bright red warning flag of danger–and the stone foundation of diplomacy and peace. – Ani DiFranco • Worrying that banning flag desecration would inhibit free speech reveals a misunderstanding of the flag’s fundamental nature. – Adrian Cronauer • Ye mariners of England! That guard our native seas; Whose flag has braved a thousand years, The battle and the breeze! – Thomas Campbell • Yes, I’m a patriotic person. For these people who disgrace the American way and burn our flag and do all of these things… I say, don’t live here and disgrace my country. Go live in the Middle East and see how you like it. – Payne Stewart • Yonder are the Hessians. They were bought for seven pounds and tenpence a man. Are you worth more? Prove it. Tonight the American flag floats from yonder hill or Molly Stark sleeps a widow! – John Stark • You are the generation that will reach the sea and hoist the flag of Palestine over Tel Aviv. – Yasser Arafat • You are the makers of the flag and it is well that you glory in the making. – Franklin Knight Lane • You cannot have companies where many of the largest ones lose money indefinitely without someone finally waving the white flag, and IBM is the most recent example of that. – Kevin B. Rollins • You don’t defend national sovereignty with flags, cheap election rhetoric, and advertising campaigns. – Stephen Harper • You have to eat before you train. Otherwise, that really intense training, after about 40 minutes you start to flag. – Hugh Jackman • You the devil in drag. You can burn your cross, Well, I’ll burn your flag. – Ice Cube • You’re a grand old flag! You’re a high-flying flag, And forever in peace may you wave. You’re the emblem of the land I love, The home of the free and the brave. Ev’ry heart beats true ‘Neath the Red, White and Blue,’ Where there’s never a boast or brag. But should auld acquaintance be forgot, Keep your eye on the grand old flag. – George M. Cohan

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[cyanpeacock]

I’m in a stage of conscious conflict with myself again.

It makes it kind of hard to focus on the work I want to be doing, but I guess I’m focusing on the work I need to be doing, which is... establishing security. 

It’s a bit of a fight in my head with my younger parts. Grown-up me is trying to write a post about toxaemia. Younger mes are... arguing. I gotta stop and sort it out, while I have the time. 

What is the argument about? Uh, well, a whole bunch. Why certain actions were inappropriate. Why certain needs were not met. 

It’s been pretty savage in here, parts trying to kill other parts. Doesn’t work. Right now it’s more yelling, and interfering, and getting in the way.

Broadly, all this thrashing and fighting and biting and snapping goes on for a while, we all look around again in a moment of exhaustion, and clock that while my mother has done unforgivable things, she’s not an unforgivable person. Meanwhile, the top dog is laughing in his £100,000 suit, and placing bets on our survival.

I’m speaking in metaphors again. Anyway, what I mean is, the primary source of human suffering is rooted in the inequality of the distribution of wealth, and I’m very, very angry about this.

I’m very angry about the methods and times at which my mother tried to communicate with me about this. At least we can agree that capitalism is world-destroying, and not world-cooperating. I’ll take that.

I guess she’s been trying to say sorry this whole time, at least where I raise that she’s done something harmful to me, and I didn’t know how good I was at hiding.

I now realize I am so good at hiding that I can disappear from everyone and everything. 

I thought very seriously when I was younger about running into the forest. I knew how to construct shelter, and a good deal about what could and could not be eaten, but there were problems. 

The water is too dirty to drink, if you plan on living close enough to a metropolitan center to steal food/leftovers. The animals are accumulating toxins, and we shouldn’t really be eating them any more, and we’re still poisoning the rest of the ecosphere in the name of “human development.”  

Anyway, back to me mum. Apparently, I need to talk to her.

I don’t want to talk to her.

I need to talk to her. 

This is a pain in the ass, but I guess family is, until it’s all sunshine and roses.

I’m very angry. Very, very angry.

Can I be polite about anger? I think so, but I’m going to sound like a rude and snappy young academic for a while, which I guess I can’t avoid, ~given the circumstances~.

And I guess she couldn’t avoid sounding like she was completely fucking out of touch with the rest of the world when I was young, because she was, and later, like she was... well, how to describe it? Like she was a five year old that had learned big words, and not how to use them. 

(looks at my grandmother, suspiciously.)

(looks at myself, suspiciously.)

Proper fucking odd family, this. Made my counsellor hiss through his teeth.

For fuck’s sake.

She was very, very right about some things. Unfortunate, because they are very intellectual social matters, that I’d hazard a guess most people my age don’t have to consider in such personal depth, especially not without a broad range of healthy emotional regulation skills.

Hmm. But then, I guess learning compulsively was a coping mechanism of mine, and she acknowledged that, and tried to work with it. 

Ugh, fuck, I’m angry because it’s boiling down to... I’m gonna see her again, and I’m going to try to improve the relationship, because while there’s a lot of shit that hurts me about it, at least she’s willing to talk to me about it?

I do feel peripheral to the family. I suppose I always will, because I took the worst of the physical and psychological fallout. Did that protect my siblings? I hope it did at the time, but I know the repercussions of that pain on my actions later hurt them too.

Do I want to keep perpetuating actions that damage relationships?

No.

How do I interpret cutting off my mother?

I interpret it as destroying a relationship, with a person who’s been extremely fucking toxic to me, but who has made visible efforts to change her behaviour. 

Is she toxic enough to me to justify lifelong no-contact?

I don’t think so. I think I’ve needed some long fucking breaks from her. I think I’ve been back to her at times that weren’t good for me, because she hadn’t taught me self-worth and self-respect.

If I’m valuing and respecting myself now, I’d like to share what I’ve learned with her, because I appreciate that she had good intentions, and terrible fucking methods, and it’s all her mum’s fault, and her mum’s fault, and her mum’s fault... etc etc. 

I’d also prefer not to transmit any more pain of loss to her and my siblings, because... well, karmic forces suck when they’re punching and not brushing, man. I felt all that pain, it’s come back on them, I’m acknowledging my pain, and if I can acknowledge it “in the moment”... the relationship will flow more smoothly? And people learn by observation, so they’re going to just... see that my communication style has changed, and maybe pick some things up from it theirselves, if they like them?

It’s taken hard fucking work to feel this secure in my own opinions, and how they change over time, given new information.

Isolation and introspection has been my route of choice. Now I guess I need... connection and extrospection? If that’s even a word? Well, it’s a neologism now. 

So, what’s my Plan for Life(tm)?

I persist, but take it easier, on the academia. I’m part time right now. I’ve gone hard as hell on this my entire life, because it was all that got me significant approval. At least I was strong enough to develop the skill enough to carry me through all the garbage. I kind of see what mother was getting at there. It’s fucked up, nonetheless. 

I connect with some of my peers. This is going to be difficult, because my physical body still associates human proximity with oncoming psychological and/or physical pain. I’ve gained enough control of my physical responses to try now. I enjoy what I have left of my youth. 

I work on feeding my physical body and working it out at the right times. These are necessary things for healthy human life. I have a lot of opportunity to get into great shape. I want to start taking it. 

I maintain my creative pursuits. I continue to consume media I like. 

I carefully re-establish and maintain contact with my family. I try and be gentle in my language and actions. I gotta not push myself if I find it does hurt me in ways I can’t be living with at the moment. 

Uhhh... end up a part of the capitalist machine, and try to disassemble it, because if the majority of us work together, we can build something brand new that will last a lot longer?

Eh, some kind of shit. I need a fag. Want to quit those, actually. Better if I start while I’m young, eh?

OK. Yeah though. That’s enough on this. I need a smoke.

[vampireadamooc]

As Always: text is provided only in the event of access expiration or post deletions from the hosting site. Whenever possible, always read the article at the link.

Vampires exist! A spooky Halloween post

From the Berkeley Blog, by Wadim Strielkowski | OCTOBER 29, 2018

Is everyone looking forward to the forthcoming Halloween? The “All Hallows Evening” is at our doorstep and everyone is preparing for trick-or-treating, brushing off their scary costumes, renting horror movies, carving pumpkins and generally intending to have fun.

Halloween is the holiday that originated from the Celtic rituals in Ireland and the United Kingdom only to be brought by the migrants to the United States to become an event that can now only be compared to Christmas when it comes to its business potential, overall sales, as well as its economic significance. Last year, American consumers spent about $9.1 billion on Halloween festivities. A paper published in 2017 claimed that the share of more “consumer-focused” Halloween products gradually increased over the years in relation to the share of more “traditional” products. And the most popular Halloween activity is wearing a spooky costume.

Vampires and Halloween

One of the most popular Halloween costumes is to dress up as a vampire. For some reason, people just love Dracula and others of his kind. There are many films, comics and popular literature on and about vampires. And you would be probably surprised to find out that vampires can actually exist and their existence does not contradict modern science!

Well, there are plenty blood-sucking animals found in nature, and even humans need to drink the blood from their own spices sometimes to survive. So, why cannot vampires (the creatures from the myths and legends, as we tend to think of them) exist too? Most scientists use simple math to prove that the existence of vampires is not possible. Their line of argumentation is the following: assume that a vampire needs to feed only once a month (we ignore the mortality rate, since it is irrelevant here). When this process occurs, another vampire is created. If the countdown starts in 1600 AD or some other time around that (on the 1st of January 1600 the world’s population was 536 870 911), then by February 1600 there would be two vampires (one who turned a human into vampire to start with and another one who was a human but became a vampire after the encounter with a vampire). In March 1600 there would be four vampires in existence, and in April 1600 – eight vampires. Therefore, some scientists say, each month the number of vampires doubles and after n months there are 2^n vampires which gives us a geometric progression with ratio 2.

As most of you might know, the geometric progression is increases at a very quick pace and if you sit with a pencil and paper and calculate it for our vampires example, you will arrive to the conclusion that after 30 months there would be no humans left – everyone would be turned into a vampire and the humanity would be wiped out by June 1602. Even if human birth rate is included into our calculations, it remains a very small fraction deaths caused by the vampires and would have prolonged the extinction of human race by just one month. Therefore, some scientists conclude, vampires cannot exist, since their existence contradicts the existence of human beings. This logical proof is of a type known “as reductio ad absurdum”, that is, reduction to the absurd.

However, if one starts digging dipper, everything is not that straightforward. Some works of fiction, Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight series”, Charlaine Harris’s “Sookie Stockhouse (Southern Vampire) series”, “True Blood” (TV series) as well as Elizabeth Kostova’s “The Historian”, show the world where vampires peacefully co-exist with humans.

In Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight series” vampires can tolerate the sunlight, interact with humans (even fall in love with them) and drink animals’ blood to survive. Of course, they have to live in secrecy and pretend to be human beings. In “True Blood” TV series, however, a world is shown where vampires and humans live side-by-side and are aware of each other. Vampires can buy synthetic blood of different blood types that is sold in bottles and can be bought in every grocery store, bar or gas station. They cannot walk during daytime, so they usually come out at night. Humans also find use of vampires’ essence – vampires’ blood (called “V”) is a powerful hallucinogenic drug that is sought by humans and traded on the black market (sometimes humans capture vampires with the help of silver chains or harnesses and then kill them by draining their blood). Some humans even seek sex with vampires (vampires are stronger and faster than humans and can provide superb erotic experience). There is a possibility to turn a human being into a vampire, but it takes time and effort.

Let us assume that at the time of the events described in the first book of the series, “Dead Until Dark” (2001), the world’s vampire hypothetical population was around five million (the population of the state of Louisiana in 2001 we arbitrarily use in our calculations). The initial conditions of what I call “a Harris-Meyer-Kostova model” are the following: five million vampires, 6 159 million people, there are organized groups of vampire “drainers”.

Simple calculations yield that the human population will be growing until 2046 when it reaches its peak of 9.6 billion people, whereupon it will be declining until 2065 until it reaches its bottom at 6.12 billion people. This process will repeat itself continuously. The vampire population will be declining until 2023 when it reaches its minimum of 289 thousand vampires, whereupon it will be growing until 2055 until it reaches its peak at 397 million vampires. This process will also repeat itself continuously and we will end up with a cyclical system of human-vampire co-existence.

Under certain conditions, the Harris-Meyer-Kostova model seems plausible and allows for the existence of vampires in our world. Peaceful co-existence of two spices is a reality. However, this symbiosis is very fragile and whenever the growth rate of human population slows down, the blood thirst of vampires accelerates, or vampire drainers become too greedy, the whole system lies in ruins with just one population remaining.

There are more interesting implications to this study: consider for example the organized groups of vampire hunters (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer”) or superhero vampire hunters (“Blade”). The results seem even more interesting and all clues lead to the one simple fact – vampires might co-habituate with humans and modern science cannot refute their existence! Here, you can download a poster explaining my research on this topic and covering different models of vampires and humans co-existence: Poster Vampires exist

Karl Marx, a vampire hunter

You would be surprised to learn that the works of Karl Marx are full of mentioning of vampires (Marx used the vampire metaphor at least three times in Capital). For example, in one of the cases Marx describes British industry as “vampire-like” which “could but live by sucking blood, and children’s blood too”. Here is another quote:““Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks”. Marx’s colleague and long-time sponsor Frederick Engels also used the vampire metaphor in his works and public addresses. In one of his works entitled The Condition of the Working Class in England, Engels identifies and blames the “vampire property-holding class” as the source of “all the social troubles”.

Marx described vampires’ habits, their greediness and their lounging for blood in such a detail that in many cases it crossed the boundaries of the mere metaphor. Although many researchers perceive Marx’s vampires as metaphoric abstract bourgeois bloodsuckers feeding on working people, his knowledge of vampires is very peculiar. In one particular case, when describing Wallachian peasants performing forced labour for their boyars, Marx refers to one specific “boyar” who was “drunk with victory” and who might have been no one but Wallachian prince Vlad (called “The Impaler”) – or Count Dracula himself!

All this is very interesting because the best-known novel of vampiric genre, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, did not see the daylight until 1897, 14 years after Marx’s death. Surely, one can place the Marx’s metaphor in the wider context of nineteenth-century Gothic horror stories which were abundant these days, and of which Marx was a huge fan. On the other hand, one might assume that some of the vampire legends were true and Marx and his contemporaries were aware of that!

Till the last drop!

My research on vampires and humans co-existence (that has been going on for almost 10 years now) is thoroughly described in a popular science book Till the last drop! by “Emily Welkins (my pen name and pseudonym) that shows how vampires became a part of the popular culture. The book also analyzes all possible models of humans-vampires coexistence using mathematical calculations. For the shorter version of the whole story, you can read a paper entitled “How to Stop a Vampiric Infection? Using Mathematical Modeling to Fight Infectious Diseases” (available here). You can also find more on interesting scientific facts about vampires, werewolves, demons (and other spooky topics) in my blog called “Supernaturaleconomics“.

Have a spooky Halloween!!!

[bookmark-it]

Plot Upheaval?

A little historical context:

The Karstlanders/Karstlandic Kings were a group of Viking-like people who sailed from the North (Karstland, specifically which, duh) out to the Wider Seas basically looking for places to conquer and colonize (assholes). Eventually, they arrived at the northern tip of the continent once known as Timur.

Northern Timur was made up of three to five distinct civilizations (depending on the time period and who you asked. The Karstlanders took over the region and divided it into three “states” - New Westmoreland, Gettonsgate & Yaduru (later shortened to Gettons & Yaduru), and St. Galbert’s Island.

New Westmoreland was originally home to the Pagatowar people (who called the land Umnepo). Gettons & Yaduru was originally just Yaduru. The Karstlanders invaded, but couldn’t completely defeat the Da-rai warrior tribes, which is how Yaduru exists as an independent city-state to this day. St. Galbert’s (originally called Nilam by its native peoples, the Orang batu) is an island mostly used for agriculture and has remained so even in modern times.

The Karstlanders unified these states into a single nation, called Trinnea, nearly 213 years ago, but they’re still often refereed to as the Karstland States or the Karstlandic Triadica.

In Karstland itself, they’re derogatorily called the Leftover States.

Why does all that history bullshit matter?

Part of the Karstlanders’ motivation for conquest (besides the usual), was the search for untapped sources of viv, their word for naturally occurring, raw/unrefined magical energy. Basically, viv is to magic what crude oil is to petroleum.

The Karstlanders found plenty of viv, and opened several large Ley Lines (the term for stores of refined viv/usable Magic) across Trinnea.

But they wanted more.

So the Karstland Kings broke a huge taboo, one that existed across every culture of the world: they pierced the Veil, broke the Boundary, and sailed over the Last Horizon and into the Realm of the Other Folk, the Hidden People, The Fae...in hopes of finding more Magic.

Three Karstlandic ships sailed into Faerie Territory: the Alchemist, the Archbishop, and the Artificer.

Only the Artificer survived to see landfall.

How do Humans survive in Faerie Land?

Terrible, unnatural storms battered the ships for three days straight. And even more strangely, once the sun set on that first night on the Otherside, it never rose again. There in Faerie Land, it was eternally night. The Karstlanders didn’t recognize any stars/constellations in the sky and, even more disconcertingly, there was no moon.

Finally, the relentless storms calmed. The Artificer’s captain, Sir Yancy Harken Toddleburr, recalled the moment in his ship’s log in a passage that is now famous, and a popular recitation piece in finishing schools back home in Karstland.

He writes:

“The water of this cursed, endless sea is wholly unnatural. The foreign sky above meets it [the water] at the horizon and is devoured by its  waves....no lite [sic] reflects from its surface, like the eyes of a dead man...not even our bespelled torches can pierce its depths...this an evil place, and no man belongs here.”

Land, ho!

After an indeterminate time adrift, land was sighted, but it was a strange ass sight. The land literally glowed, a bright, undeniable orange, a beacon above the light-less waves.  The orange color is why the Karstlanders named the new land Meteoria. Modern science has determined that the soil in Meteoria is highly ferrous (lots of iron molecules) and contains high concentrations of meteoric iron. (Rebekah says: This ties into the fact that iron is a useful ward against fae kind, in the soil it is not harmful to them, but when extracted, refined, and wielded by humans i.e. taken from its natural state, it is harmful to fairy folk).

The Karstlanders disembarked and began their exploration. They didn’t have to look very hard - the land was brimming with viv.  It was also brimming with Otherfolk: Seelie, Unseelie, Demons, Monsters, Ghosts, Spirits, all kinds of non-humans.

So what did the humans do? Well...they just did what they’d always done of course: conquer, fragment, destabilize, colonize. They began a systemic destruction of the native Fae populations using techniques they’d “perfected” with the native Pagatowar of New Westmoreland, the Da-rai of Yaduru, and the Orang batu of Nilam.

Over hundreds of years of colonization, only a small area of Meteoria was left for the Fae, a bit of land to the North that the Karstlanders couldn’t tame. The Humans called it The Wildness, but the Fae knew it as the lair of the Wilder Queen, Land Spirit of the faerie realm.

The Wildness was under her direct protection, because within its depths, beat her Heart, the very kernel of the earth. If the Karstlanders ever got a hold of it, they could "tame” her, the Wilder Queen, and finally claim the once Fae-owned land completely for themselves. They haven’t managed it...yet.

Despite the Wilder Queen’s protection, the Wildness is not a Fae paradise.

Destruction of Fae habitats and relocation of all different kinds of Fae has forced long-feuding factions to co-exist. Seelie and Unseelie, Trouping and Solitary, Friendly and Malicious, Night and Day...all together in a small area. The Wildness isn’t just dangerous for Humans, but for Faekind as well.

Okay? Why do I care?

Shortly after its founding, Meteoria was used as a penal colony for the Karstland States. It was a dangerous place to settle, what with Fae running all about, as well as a LITERALLY hostile environment (The Wilder Queen wasn’t going to relinquish her control easily). The Karstland Kings figured it’d be better if Prisoner-workers died fighting to settle the colony rather than “real” people/citizens.

Modern day Meteoria is a colony in flux. Ninety-eight percent of the land is "civilized”, with human!free-settlers and human!prisoner-workers living in relative peace. It is still in use as a penal colony for the Karstland states, though now, about 40% of the prisoner-workers aren’t “shipped in” but residents of Meteoria, themselves. The current royal governor, Niveus Borscheid, is determined to be the one that finally fully “civilizes” Meteoria so it can elevate itself from penal colony to economical powerhouse, maybe one that could even challenge it’s mother country.

But that’s easier said than done because the 2% of Uncivilized Meteoria is a bitch of a place. It’s comprised of the Fringes and the Wildness itself. The Fringes are where the Human and Fae populations are most likely to mingle. It is an extremely dangerous place for Humans (and Fae). Its the considered the front lines of the battle for the Wilder Queen’s heart, a battle that’s been going on for nearly 120 years (by human measurements).

 The Fringe is also home to a few “Weird Towns” where Humans and Fae co-exist. There’s even ghastly rumors in the civilized world of some Humans breeding with Fae to create...Halfmen.

It is known that such things happened in Meteoria’s past, as a way to breed some civility into the Fae. But it was an uncouth time then. Besides, back in the day such couplings were highly regulated. Humans only interbred with the Fair Folk, the Good Neighbors as they were sometimes called; the Fae who were beautiful, kind, benevolent - those who fell in line with Humanity’s standards of beauty and morality.

Now, in modern times, such couplings are considered about as charitably as interracial marriages are in our world. Every pretty human girl knows that the best way to get “revenge” on her family, is to bring home some Fae boy or girl. 

A map of “civilized” Meteoria...

The capital is Port Grace. This is where prisoner-workers first arrive in country. It is also where their labor is sold at the famous/infamous Hipplethwaite Square (Labor) Market.

 Besides Port Grace, there are several other medium to large cities in Meteoria. In the southern marshlands (where Port Grace is located), there is Iron Station to the northeast, and in the west are the "princess cities" of Ernestine and Rohesia.

The middle part of the island is predominantly agrarian. It's mostly farming villages, but there is one town larger than the rest, Crossings, where a huge farmers' market/agricultural festival is held every full moon. Crossings is large enough that it crosses the Needle River in three places (hence the name): once in Slurry near the Midland Ley Line, once in the Old Town, right across from Halyard's Chapel, and then again near Southgate.

 Between Crossings and the west coast are several towns: Ralston, Moss Fenning, and Badwater. There are two notable ports along the western shoreline: St. Winston and Kettlesbottom Shoals.

The eastern part of Meteoria is taken up by the craggy Mossbacks, a range of green mountains known for their rugged terrain/viv mining industry. The biggest mine in all Meteoria is in the Mossback town of Jubilee. Other mining settlements include Little Holler, Travers, and Compromise. The biggest "city" out east is Asheton, named for frontiersman/explorer, Barnabas Ashe. Asheton sits at the bottom of the Salter-Erskine Escarpment, and is known as the "grand foyer" of the Mossbacks.

 The northern most tip of Meteoria is taken up by the Wildness, a completely uninhabitable swath of land overrun with magical beings.

The biggest permanent settlement out that way is a Fringe town called Last Stop because that's where the Shooting Star Line (name of the only transcontinental railway) ends. Its the terminus for all train traffic in Meteoria.

Between Last Stop and the Wildness is the Fringe Land.

 So how does this new information change things?

It makes the Gauntlet more concrete: the Human challengers will have to fight off hostile fae and the Wilder Queen

Owusu and Nona (J.J.’s new name, which I will explain in more detail in a separate post) are still human. I chose to do this because it seems shitty to have Fae be a metaphor for native populations but, like, not include (Fictional) native humans. The Karstlanders screwed over everybody, humans and Fae.

Taufan has Fae heritage. She is Orang bunian (basically the Southeast Asian version of Elves). Her ancestors intermarried with humans as part of the “Civilization Programs” in which “acceptable fae” and humans intermarried to create Halfmen, hopefully easing relations between the humans and the Fae. As a Bunian, Taufan has a natural affinity for all types of magic, unnatural beauty, and innate healing abilities.

Rafi is a “brute” or “mongrel” - a mix of human and several “unsavory” Fae. Specifically, Rafi is a quarter human, a quarter giant, a quarter ogre, and a quarter Duende (Hispanic gnome-like peoples). Her “bad”/”muddy” heritage is blamed for her issues with reading/using Sigils. It’s also why she’s encouraged to join the army. She’s big and strong (6′4′‘ and jacked as shit) and dumb and not fully human, so if she dies, it’s not that big of a deal (according to popular thought).