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certain kind of tragedy i think in still following your childhood best friends online. like once upon a time you knew me better than anyone. i thought we would be friends forever. now we are Adults and Different and even despite that I so badly wish we could still Talk like we were 13. i dont know who you are. I miss you.

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“i have a nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?” - Vincent Van Gogh

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In love

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𝔞𝔡𝔪𝔦𝔯𝔦𝔫𝔤 𝔶𝔬𝔲, 𝔞𝔩𝔴𝔞𝔶𝔰

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[talking shit about a guy] he could not earn the trust of a horse

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— Franz Kafka, Letters to Milena

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boyfriends who hate your friends should be shot on sight in the national interest. friends who hate your boyfriend are a necessary part of the ecosystem. this is called symbiosis

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There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

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oh, to be a woman

I grew up not knowing what womanhood was beyond pink bows and fluttering ribbons. I did not become a woman upon the date of my first period but rather when I learned what could happen to me when I walk alone at night. I so desperately want to be something beyond prey. I want a touch that burns everyone that comes near. But God help me, for I want to be gentle. No, I am made to be gentle, nothing else will do. I want to speak, I want to write, but my mouth is sewn shut with uneven stitches and my hands are carved to hold tiny fingers, not a pen. He asks me what it’s like to be a woman and I tell him he should ask me what it’s like to be a doll. God, it kills me inside, this endless mediocrity that comes from my sex. I will remain two steps behind no matter how fast I run. Give me a knife and I will cut out the womb that marks me as inferior. What difference will it make? The pain of biting my tongue cuts deeper.

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Megan Nolan, from her novel titled "Acts of Desperation," originally published in March 2021

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sleep is the first house

(excerpt) Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name

Ferdinand Hodler, "Night" (detail) // Pierre Jahan, Nu Plain-chant (1947)

(excerpt) Eileen Myles, "Universal Cycle", The Importance of Being Iceland

Sara Stout, "Paris Bed" // Alex Venezia

(excerpt) Adrienne Rich, Twenty One Love Poems ("Poem XII")

Mark English, "Couple" (1933) // Kenney Mencher, "A Married Couple"

(excerpt) Walt Whitman, "When I Heard at the Close of Day"

Łukasz Stokłosa, "Untitled" (2014) // Matt Lambert for Dazed

(excerpt) Jeanette Wintersion, "Disappearance I", The World and Other Places

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@gangseygang‘s 12 Days of Christmas          ↳ day five: richard gansey

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the thing is that tolkien was right trees really are that great