koipepo - Tumblr blog

[koipepo]

i hate being on my corny shit but sometimes mass movements and protest movements can be very beautiful. they bring out the worst and best in humanity. during the arab spring, when people were camped out in tents in tahrir square, there were so many beautiful moments that it convinced a whole nation to believe in a better future. i find it difficult to talk about now but it was the collective sense of community—the feeling of being responsible for everyone, for living on principle instead of self-preservation for once in your life. many people risked their lives for other people during the protests. people died for strangers who were no longer strangers. sometimes it was also small things: funny signs, doctors volunteering medical aid, people giving out food and water, muslims protecting churches, christians protecting muslims while they're praying. things like that. and i've seen a lot of people and countries have protest movements since then and i think everyone feels the same way, when you're within a mass movement, there is a sense of hope and determination that is so much stronger than fear. everyone falls in love with their country, everyone falls in love with their people, suddenly a country you hate is a country you're willing to die for

these kind of protest movements were easy to call beautiful and easy to call powerful bc they were so obviously against a tyrannical force. and yes while the regimes did call the protestors everything from spoiled kids to infiltrators to traitors, the world usually saw it for what it was. and the protestors had a sense of pride about it. the eyes of the world are on us, we matter, we're making a difference

truthfully i think the campus protest movement has escalated so suddenly and is so maligned that nobody is taking a moment to call it what it is. it is very brave and it is very beautiful. in some ways i find it more touching than protest movements for your own country and your own future, because while the protests for palestine are also about what it means to be a citizen of a nation complicit in genocide, many of these protestors are just there because they care about palestinians. some of them are there against their better interests; risking their academic careers, their personal safety, their future. in the case of anti-zionist jews many are risking their communities and their familial relationships. i just saw a video of a USC student in the middle of a literal police riot where her classmates are being brutalized by cops being asked if she's scared and she said "no, i think the children in gaza are more scared than i am." on a human level, this is so moving. it's truly the best and bravest of america there, and it's so sad to me that some people can't see that.

last week speaking out for palestine was risky, but this week it has taken personal and physical bravery to show up, and people (mainly young people of color) have absolutely shown up. this is no small thing. it really isn't. its a historic thing. and i promise you if you think i'm exaggerating by comparing US campus protests to arab spring protests—a lot of arab spring students are on US campuses right now and they see the parallels too. the response to the protests has been american in the way america was in the 60s and 70s, but it is starting to take the shape of a broader and much more global crackdown, where militarized police brutality is the norm. this is familiar to everyone in sudan, in egypt, in palestine. university campuses and students go from safe havens to targets for punishment overnight. things are changing very rapidly right now; a lot of the things said about college campuses last week don't apply as of today.

there is a sense that these protests are full of spoiled and innocent kids and that is transparently not true. these are people (including grad students, faculty, etc) who have also experienced upheaval across the world and in their own communities. the fact that they're receiving the same treatment on university campuses now as protestors did in ferguson, as people have on their streets, means that while US colleges are profit-oriented neoliberal institutions and their administrators are fascists, their student bodies are on the forefront of history once again.

[koipepo]

[koipepo]

I mean, we all knew, but thanks for admitting that you wanna surpress freedom of speech and the spread of information?

[koipepo]

It's not the first time that has happened

[koipepo]

there’s a website where you put in two musicians/artists and it makes a playlist that slowly transitions from one musician’s style of music to the other’s

it’s really fun

[koipepo]

i’m going to kdxjdhdjhddjjdhs

[koipepo]

A significant portion of the western "left", especially online, are shocked or even offended that global south people not only know about politics in the united states but have opinions about them. They think that, because they live in the first world, that that's all there is and thus events beyond the border rarely register as a blip lest it got blown into the limelight like with Palestine. They project their own ignorance onto the global south.

But of course the global south would be intimately familiar with the politics of the first world! What gets decided in washington or brussels or london or paris or berlin gets exported the world over. The Palestinian cars about the arms deals of the united states. The Nigerian cares about the "strategic resource" policies of france. The people of the global south are at the whims of the worst policies of the imperial core but who have absolutely no say in it. Like the delian league, the slave colonies most definitely had a stake in the machinations of athens but ehoch they could neither vote nor represent themselves.

[koipepo]

Islamic omegaverse has me thinking abt Islamic thramsay lmao.

That type is a bit too personal for me i think asdfjfkll

[koipepo]

Do you ever forget that you have a gender to most people….. meaning that random people at the grocery store see me as a woman and not just a little internet guy

[koipepo]

This is so fucking disgusting. How DARE you say Jewish-Palestinian joint organizing is a bigger threat than literal neo-Nazis threatening and killing us!

[koipepo]

Me praying every ‘blue no matter who’ person in my mentions gets beat to death with sticks

[koipepo]

[koipepo]

enough about taylor swift already. reblog and tag the smallest, least known artist you listen to

[koipepo]

[koipepo]

[koipepo]

Endlessly diabolical how you can't say words like rape and suicide uncensored without either being criticised by idiots or punished by conglomerates.

[koipepo]

A Palestinian boy taunts a young yet heavily armed Israeli soldier in the West Bank city of Hebron. March 19, 2011. Gabriel Romero