#Immigrants. We get the job done.

[shiveagit]

[Till the world turns upsidedown]

April and Donnie dressed as Lafayette and Hamilton

[the-gay-loser]

[therealgchu]

auntie kamala

i used to be a politics/policy wonk in my younger years. i'm an historian by education, lawyer by training. i've been involved in local politics since my mother used to drag me around to do canvassing when i was a very small kid.

that zeal and fervor grew cold in 2008 with the rise of the likes of the heritage foundation and outright racism against obama. i actually lost friends because they couldn't stand a world where a black man stood above a white man. then when trump was elected, i buried myself away. you can only take so much hate and vitriol hurled at you before it affects your mental health.

during covid, asians faced a >300% rise in racist violence against them, being blamed for covid. or, just general racism being allowed to run rampant. i know of adopted koreans that were deported because their parents didn't do the naturalization properly. my husband has been paranoid for me that i'd get hurt because i work in downtown denver.

i remember in 1984 when geraldine ferraro was nominated as mondale's (also from MN) running mate. my mother turned to me and said that in that world no woman would ever rise that high because sexism was so ingrained in our culture. then, when hillary clinton came on the scene, my mother pointed to her and said that hillary was the epitome of everything conservatives hate.

now, 40 years later, we have a woman of color, from immigrant parents, running for the highest office in, frankly, the world.

the DNC has been schmaltzy, i admit, but i'm a sucker for such things. but, for the first time since 2008, i actually have hope again that we are moving forward again for that more perfect union. i'm terrified of what will happen if trump wins. and, this isn't just, "oh, it's scary/bad." this is a real, existential fear.

let's say that again, a middle-class, brown woman, who didn't go to the ivy leagues, not some rich kid that had everything handed to her (bill clinton joked that kamala is prolly one of the few ppl that has spent more time in a mcdonalds than he), can rise to the highest job in the world.

as someone who was told growing up that because of my race, i could never do what i wanted to do, the symbolism of this for us is momentous.

and, as a middle aged WOC, i am SOOO here for an auntie to clean some goddamned house! cos, as all the brown, yellow, red, and black ppl know, you DO NOT FUCK WITH THE AUNTIES.

[theriverdalereviewer]

everyone jumping to team kamala we will never experience true freedom in this country

[butnoflowersgrow]

Hercules Mulligan is Irish

Hercules Mulligan was frickin Irish

He was an immigrant

But was forgotten

:(

[that-angry-noldo]

also since i'm on my amanyar appreciation spree. the fact that they faced winged dragons, got nearly destroyed, managed to regroup and proceed to victory really tells something. like. those guys had three years of military training, max. most of them never left valinor. their leaders, safe for eönwë, never left valinor. and they mannaged to pull THAT out. just. raise it up for the amanyar because they were some of the most competent soldiers in the history of arda

[darealsaltysam]

OK WE’RE INTO WEEK 3 NOW Y’ALL!!!! FINAL STRETCH!!! REALLY BIG DAY TODAY OKAY HERE WE GO uhmm ummm umm

good job today everyone doing polish/lithuanian/portugese/chinese/hebrew studies/ancient greek/czech/bulgarian/croatian/danish/dutch/estonian/finnish/hungarian/latvian/maltese/modern greek/romanian/slovakian/slovenian OR swedish 

AND!!!!! 

AND!!!!! 

good job to all the agricultural science students too :))

[6twisted6gentleman6]

I was tagged by the very amazing @just-a-poe-girl for the last song I played.

I'm tagging (if you'd like to play. I always like to check out everyones music.) @twiztidvixin, @jesskapenguin, @lies-of-our-lives, @champagne-drip, @dimplezzz23

[yourlocalshapeshifter]

Me as Hamlet: “O God, I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space, were it not that I have no legal rights”

Me as GenZ Hamlet on tumblr: “god made me queer and an immigrant because if my legal status went unchecked I would have bested him in hand to hand combat by age 16”

[cura-te-ipsum]

I have a running theory on why Americans are taught to fear immigrants when over 99% are from other continents ourselves.

See, Australia was populated with "criminals" who had to build a society, but America was populated by white settlers who became criminals. If we are honest about our history as white Americans, we came to a land that was already inhabited by vast societies, mass murdered everyone in our way, and labelled ourselves the Good Guys. European settlers managed to nearly starve while surrounded by woodland maintained by indigenous peoples for centuries. We then stripped away these cultivated woodlands to plant mass mono crops which we literally shipped in slave labor to maintain. Oh, and those mass monocrops are a huge component of what led to the Dust Bowl and Great Depression. We have consistently been behind the rest of the industralized world in regard to social changes (e.g. women's right to vote, abolishing slavery, same sex marriage, public and higher education, child labor laws, care for the elderly, etc.) Instead we celebrate the genocide and erasure of indigenous culture with a huge annual feast.

With such a horrific history we are spoon fed from infancy to ignore, it's no wonder people are terrified of immigrants in the US. I hear the same rhetoric in regards to LGBTQ issues, women's rights, and the Black Lives Matter movement. There is an undercurrent of "What if they do to us what we have done to those who came before us?"

Have I personally murdered indigenous people, owned slaves, employed children, and destroyed entire ecosystems by levelling maintained forests for coal mining? No. Of course not. A vast majority of white Americans living today haven't either.

But if we do not acknowledge our history and the wrongdoing of our own ancestors, we will continue to fall prey to fear mongering. We love our roots. We can love our family. We can even adore our ancestors, but we cannot continue on their path. We cannot become stuck in the ruts of propoganda and call it tradition. That way lies only more death and suffering.

If the questions remains, "What if we are treated the same way our ancestors treated others?" This cycle will never end. I cannot change my ancestors' actions. No one can change the past. What I CAN do NOW is:

Acknowledge the suffering passed down through generations to those around me;

Listen to marginalized communities and, when possible, help amplify their voices;

Work to keep from repeating my ancestors' mistakes; and

Actively listen whenever someone tells me my actions are in error.

I am unlikely to be perfect. Perfection is not my goal. Progress. Growth. Those are my goals. My version of utopia is never set in its ways, but constantly changing and adapting to the needs of the people. Wherever they were born. Whatever they look like. Whatever language we speak.

[starryeyedbitchh]

ik this won’t get any attention but i’m so curious about how other immigrants feel about being immigrants.

like for me it’s fine most of the time even if there are hundreds of people and things i miss from my home country but sometimes i’ll watch tv with an immigrant talking about their struggles and i end up crying every time like it can be SO hard to not speak my native language and not fully understand the culture and i feel like so many people have it infinitely easier than me in ways i don’t understand and like i’m not even dealing with racism of any kind which i can’t imagine on top of being an immigrant but fuck it’s so hard sometimes

[lamajaoscura]

Title 42 puts a spotlight on the ethics of US immigration policy - Vox

[mariacallous]

The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new – and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists have been going after them hard this summer.

Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions – the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have been and continue to be”.

Most voters, he says, “have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy.”

Lamenting the state of the media recently on X, Jeff Jarvis, another former editor and newspaper columnist, said: “What ‘press’? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media?”

These critics are responding to how the behemoths of the industry seem intent on bending the facts to fit their frameworks and agendas. In pursuit of clickbait content centered on conflicts and personalities, they follow each other into informational stampedes and confirmation bubbles.

They pursue the appearance of fairness and balance by treating the true and the false, the normal and the outrageous, as equally valid and by normalizing Republicans, especially Donald Trump, whose gibberish gets translated into English and whose past crimes and present-day lies and threats get glossed over. They neglect, again and again, important stories with real consequences. This is not entirely new – in a scathing analysis of 2016 election coverage, the Columbia Journalism Review noted that “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election” – but it’s gotten worse, and a lot of insiders have gotten sick of it.

In July, ordinary people on social media decided to share information about the rightwing Project 2025 and did a superb job of raising public awareness about it, while the press obsessed about Joe Biden’s age and health. NBC did report on this grassroots education effort, but did so using the “both sides are equally valid” framework often deployed by mainstream media, saying the agenda is “championed by some creators as a guide to less government oversight and slammed by others as a road map to an authoritarian takeover of America”. There is no valid case it brings less government oversight.

In an even more outrageous case, the New York Times ran a story comparing the Democratic and Republican plans to increase the housing supply – which treated Trump’s plans for mass deportation of undocumented immigrants as just another housing-supply strategy that might work or might not. (That it would create massive human rights violations and likely lead to huge civil disturbances was one overlooked factor, though the fact that some of these immigrants are key to the building trades was mentioned.)

Other stories of pressing concern are either picked up and dropped or just neglected overall, as with Trump’s threats to dismantle a huge portion of the climate legislation that is both the Biden administration’s signal achievement and crucial for the fate of the planet. The Washington Post editorial board did offer this risibly feeble critique on 17 August: “It would no doubt be better for the climate if the US president acknowledged the reality of global warming – rather than calling it a scam, as Mr Trump has.”

While the press blamed Biden for failing to communicate his achievements, which is part of his job, it’s their whole job to do so. The Climate Jobs National Resource Center reports that the Inflation Reduction Act has created “a combined potential of over $2tn in investment, 1,091,966 megawatts of clean power, and approximately 3,947,670 jobs”, but few Americans have any sense of what the bill has achieved or even that the economy is by many measures strong.

Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”

Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.

It’s hard to gloat over the decline of these dinosaurs of American media, when a free press and a well-informed electorate are both crucial to democracy. The alternatives to the major news outlets simply don’t reach enough readers and listeners, though the non-profit investigative outfit ProPublica and progressive magazines such as the New Republic and Mother Jones, are doing a lot of the best reporting and commentary.

Earlier this year, when Alabama senator Katie Britt gave her loopy rebuttal to Biden’s State of the Union address, it was an independent journalist, Jonathan Katz, who broke the story on TikTok that her claims about a victim of sex trafficking contained significant falsehoods. The big news outlets picked up the scoop from him, making me wonder what their staffs of hundreds were doing that night.

A host of brilliant journalists young and old, have started independent newsletters, covering tech, the state of the media, politics, climate, reproductive rights and virtually everything else, but their reach is too modest to make them a replacement for the big newspapers and networks. The great exception might be historian Heather Cox Richardson, whose newsletter and Facebook followers give her a readership not much smaller than that of the Washington Post. The tremendous success of her sober, historically grounded (and footnoted!) news summaries and reflections bespeaks a hunger for real news.

[faeriekit]

TODAYBORDAY IS LABOR DAY

Brought to you by your local children's librarian! 😊

The library today is, obviously, closed. Thank goodness. However, we were open earlier this weekend, and I was grateful to have been given a chance to make a labor day display in the children's department!

And Y'ALL. Pickings were SLIM. Believe it or not, but society at large does NOT like teaching children about worker's rights, unionizing, and negotiations! 😭 Never fear, however, because I, under an extreme time crunch (3pm on a friday right before labor day) came up with a short list on kids' books that might help get thoughts flowing on what Labor Day means to us as a country. Good ol' 'Merica or whatever we're saying these days.

Behold: a kid's labor day reading list! ⬇

The candy conspiracy : a tale of sweet victory is classic "boss gets a dollar, I get a dime" story about the power of labor and bargaining. With candy! 🍫🍭🍬 Quick, sweet, and good enough to eat.

Click Clack Moo: Cows that Type is a great story about negotiating for better working conditions. That's right, the barnyard goes on strike for electric blankets and a diving board in the duck pond! A silly, quick read, told largely by the typewritten letters from the cows themselves. Click Clack, Moo!

Hey, remember when children used to have to work countless hours for pennies a day if that just to possibly die or be permanently disfigured on the job? The traveling camera : Lewis Hine and the fight to end child labor is the story of one man's quest to document child labor all across the country in hopes of finally ending it for good— through the work of the National Child Labor Committee. Remember to thank labor laws for the good they've done in your life!

Every student in the country ought to learn about exactly how many people died unnecessary deaths in the industries before workplace safety laws were implemented nationwide. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire : core events of an industrial disaster is a nonfiction title about the how and whys of this horrific event. The most famous of its kind, we should not forget the people lost due to casual workplace cruelty and the demands of overwork.

Teach children to respect blue collar and working class heroes in Real Superheroes: a celebration of essential workers! From the people who keep our towns and cities free of debris and contaminants to healthcare professionals to emergency services, every down and dirty job is held by someone who keeps our towns up and running. Thanks, everyone! (I also recommend Night Job for the same reasons; very sweet, very good at portraying what a school janitor does as their work.)

I was going to add a book on the Mine Wars in West Virginia, since one recently published for a younger age group, but it was more teen than kid friendly unfortunately so I ended up cutting it. I was able to find another book on a different circumstance, however:

The real history of the transcontinental railroad covers a bevvy of relevant topics from the displacement of Native people in the west, the exploitation of Chinese immigrants, worker's rights, and the lingering ghost of Manifest Destiny that haunts this country to this day. Not every kid is ready for intersectional thinking on racism, xenophobia, and colonization, but at the very least, kids are very good at recognizing when a situation is "fair" or "unfair". Let them chew on this for a little bit and see what conversations come out of it.

Happy Labor Day, everyone! Be safe, be strong, and work in groups!