#i am too high for this but my point is that white supremacy is evil & must be stopped in all its forms & also jax the rabbit is fine so far

[giantkillerjack]

12 hours after the amazing digital circus episode 2 airs, I see a video on youtube entitled "THEY RUINED JAX!!! 😡"

Like, chill! They literally haven't even finished SHOWING US Jax!! 😂 He's still only had a few dozen lines! I'm sorry about the Jax in your headcanon that you've been growing in the space between episodes, but I don't think there's been enough time to ruin that rabbit yet! 😅

[himynameisjackie]

a perhaps unpopular thought that has been in my brain since brennan tweeted that sklonda might leave Elmville PD and then has really been festering since Aguefort had a tremendous amount of student debt in the college visit one-shot:

I am a staunch police abolitionist, because I believe the institution of policing in the US is built on white supremacy and exists to protect the property of (some) white Americans over the safety and bodily autonomy of black and indigenous folks and that is unequivocally bad!  But I do think a fair and restorative justice system is important – I want to abolish our system but I’m not an anarchist, I do want to have a justice system and I believe it is possible to build a fair and just one.  Perhaps that’s misguided!  perhaps it’s untrue.  But there is something sort of sad to me about defunding the Elmville PD, because it means that even in a fantasy world, societies have failed to realize equal and equitable justice!  I like the Elmville PD – as we have seen them, they are mostly harmless and incompetent, a source of comic relief.  Sklonda trying to turn them into an actual capable force of security to protect residents of Elmville from evil – especially when the threats of evil in the community are so heightened and potentially world-ending – is very funny to me.  It is cathartic to imagine a police force that is not a source of violence and suffering in its community.

I am not sure, maybe it’s a negative and selfish instinct to want Solace to be a country that doesn’t know violent colonization and a racial social caste system like the US.  Because I can see how it would be important to reflect that essential part of reality in the experiences of fantasy characters.  But I also really like when fantasy racism and discrimination is unique to its world – Riz and Fig trying to be heroes despite descending from evil-aligned races is really interesting to me, and the way it impacts their willingness to trust their family members is really interesting.  I don’t know that I’m as interested in discovering what the Solace equivalent of white supremacy is.  (Human supremacy?)  It’s interesting, I guess, because Fallinel is an elven state, and the relationship between the wood elves and the gnomes in Arborly is interesting.  So idk I guess I trust Brennan to build a compelling landscape of inequality in his fantasy worlds.

anyhoo idk what the point of this post is, I think it just makes me kind of sad to see things like the US’s deeply flawed management of higher ed and our deeply racist system of policing reflected in fantasy worlds that don’t share our history and circumstances... i think it feels sort of hopeless to me, like it posits a belief that the worst parts of our society are also inevitable and so even in a world where teenagers can slay a dragon in their freshman year of high school ordinary people are still saddled with suffocating student debt and the police are a weapon of the state used to protect institutional racism.  it makes me less excited to spend my time and energy in that world!

okay well goodbye that’s my thought! excited for junior year even if the Elmville PD kills an unarmed halfling. (although the halflings in elmville are often armed with molotov cocktails and also the police fire their weapons willy nilly in the precinct and clock out early with no issue so i guess that won’t be too unexpected.)

[forsetti]

On Racial Justice: Time For Action

When I was in high school, a young girl went missing. There was a rumor she had been abducted. This was years before cell phones and then internet. Word spread through phone trees, in diners, at the gas station, in the barbershop and hair salon. The entire county became quickly invested into finding her. It was as if someone took a big stick and beat the hell out of our little beehive.

She was found, later that day, up one of the canyons that bordered the rural valley where we lived. She had been killed. I know this because my father was the county coroner, as well as the local mortician. As the news of her murder spread as quickly her abduction had earlier in the day, a wave of anger and fear blanketed the valley. Anger because of what had happened to “one of their own.” Fear because there was an existential threat to their own children out there, somewhere, still at large. The beehive was whipped up into a frenzy.

I can't remember if it was later that same day or the next but the local police soon found and arrested what they described as “a drifter from California,” for the young girl's abduction and murder. They locked the man up in the little jail that was located in our town hall.

Once news of the arrest and jailing hit the hive, the emotions that had been building over the past couple of days began to boil over. By that evening, after a number of drinks at one of the local watering holes, a number of men had worked themselves up into a frenzy over what had happened. At some point, one of the men suggested they drag that “mother fucker” out of the jail and administer some “good ol' country justice.” Before you could say, “vigilante justice,” a number of armed men in pickup trucks were parked in front of the town hall ready to reenact their own personal version of “Death Wish.”

With all respect to the local police force, the few officers on duty were able to talk the inebriated, heavily armed group off the ledge. The men eventually drove off to their respective homes, no one was lynched, and a crisis was averted. A few hours later, in the middle of the night, the police transferred the prisoner to a larger jail a hundred miles away.

The reason I bring up this story is because I am reminded of it every time I hear white people lecture black people on how to behave after one of their unarmed sons and daughters is killed by the police. I watched, in real time, an entire community get worked up to a fever, murderous pitch over the course of a couple of days over the murder of one of their own. Yet, people just like those I grew up around who, within a few hours, rationalized a lynching over one unjust death, cannot imagine the release of pent-up fear and anger many black communities feel that has been building for generations.

The reason Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the National Anthem wasn't because of the killing of one person. The reason there were riots in Ferguson MO in 2015 wasn't just because of the death of Michael Brown. The reason there are protests and riots in all fifty states right now isn't just because of the deaths of George Floyd or Breonna Taylor. The reason for all of these is the centuries-old, systemic practice of viewing and treating black bodies as expendable.

When citizens do this like we've recently seen with the murder of Ahmaud Arbery, it is horrible and deserves moral outrage and legal repercussions. When this happens at the hands of those entrusted to serve and protect the very people it kills, without consequences, it is evil. When this happens over and over and over and over....again, it is a moral failure not just of the law enforcement officers who do this but of our society because we've turned a blind eye to the deaths, pain, and suffering of our own.

It doesn't take a lot of thought to imagine what would happen if it was unarmed white people being killed by the police. One of the turning points in how the nation viewed of the way our government was handling the Vietnam War was shooting deaths of four young, unarmed students at Kent State in 1970. Like the rural area where I grew up, white America doesn't tolerate the killing of their own by agents of the government. Not for one fucking second.

Yet, a whole lot of white America can't seem to understand why Black Americans get so worked up whenever one of their own is murdered by the police. I've seen more video of white people screaming at police for pulling them over or for asking them to obey safe practices during a pandemic than over the killing of their fellow, unarmed citizens.

I know there are a host of hot takes as to why white America doesn't really give a damn about the killing of unarmed minorities. If the analysis doesn't begin and end with, “as a whole, white America views minorities as inferior and expendable,” it isn't worth a damn. This doesn't mean all of white America is racist. It means that, as a group, white America doesn't care enough to change the status quo. This shouldn't be a revelation to anyone who pays attention to the world around them. White America hasn't given a damn about minorities since, forever. They have really never cared about Native Americans. They've only given a half-assed care about blacks and that was only after seeing images of church-dressed men, women, and children being attacked by police dogs and brutalized with batons and fire hoses at the hands of racist, Southern police. Once the Civil Rights Act passed, White America pretty much went back to not giving a damn about black people. It almost seems like giving blacks the right to vote was all the care White America could muster and a lot of them couldn't (and still can't) do that. The fear and anger the people in my community felt over the course of a few days back in the late 70s led them to be willing to break whatever laws they deemed necessary to get the justice they felt they deserved. Imagine this same fear and anger not building up over a few days but a few centuries. Imagine not one member of your community being unjustly killed but dozens and dozens each and every year. Imagine the fear and anger not that these deaths were the result of some random person but by the very people hired and entrusted to protect your community.

The surprising thing isn't that black Americas are angry. The surprising thing is they've kept their anger in control as well as they have. White Americans protest and riot over their favorite sports team winning or losing. They protest and riot over a beloved football coach being fired. They protest and riot over having their favorite drink being taxed. They protest and riot over not being able to get their hair cut and flower beds properly tended. Black Americans are protesting over the killings of their loved ones.

I cannot imagine what it is like to fear for your life every time you encounter the police, regardless of the circumstances. I cannot imagine worrying about any of my children being harmed, let alone killed by the police. I cannot imagine being punished more harshly by the police and courts for doing the same things that others have done. I cannot imagine being viewed as “violent,” “lazy,” “a thug,” “a threat,”... , no matter how wealthy or successful I am, by a good portion of society, just because of the color of my skin. I cannot imagine my water supply being poisoned with lead and no one with any power gives a damn. There are thousands of things about being black in America I cannot even imagine.

Just because I can't imagine these things doesn't make them not real. It doesn't make them not important. That I cannot imagine these things just means I've been fortunate enough to be on the other side of the systemic racism in our country. As I watch the current protests over the latest police killings of unarmed blacks, I'm hopeful and afraid. Hopeful because the number of protests not just in big cities but around the country in towns large and small means, like the images on tv from the 60s of the Civil Rights marches, are having a real impact on white America. Fearful because I know the history of this country when it comes to the levels it will go to protect the white patriarchy.

Within the past few years, I watched the election of someone who is the personification of white supremacy as a backlash to the first black president. Trump won the election because the majority of white men and women voted for him. They may not do the same next time around but that they did the first time tells you all you need to know about where White America stands when it comes to racial justice and equality.

When it comes to the deaths of unarmed blacks by police, to the overpopulation of our prison system, to the gross wealth disparity of whites and blacks, to too many issues to list here, to my fellow White Americans, I quote Pogo, “We have met the enemy and he is us.” You know damn well you wouldn't tolerate being treated how blacks our in our country. You know damn well you wouldn't tolerate the killing of your sons and daughters by anyone, especially the police.

It is time to stop pretending the problem isn't systemic and it is the responsibility of minorities to fix. White America built the system. White America has and still does, to a great extent, support it. White America, all of it, benefits from it. It is up to us to dismantle it. We can either go down as the ones who did what was necessary to live up to the promises of our Constitution and Bill of Rights, or we can go down in history as just another era that made promises it never intended to live up to. This isn't something that could or should wait another day to happen. It is centuries behind schedule. Trying is no longer enough. To quote a Jedi Master, “Do or do not, there is no try.” We owe it ourselves but, much more importantly, we owe it to Black Americans past and present.

[revlyncox]

Prayers for This Threshold

This homily was given to the UU Church of Silver Spring on June 7, 2020. A video version is available at https://youtu.be/_KXZ0SGpaGk 

John O’Donohue (in “To Bless the Space Between Us”) writes that a phase of life that is passing away “intensifies toward the end into a real frontier that cannot be crossed without the heart being passionately engaged and woken up.” I hope that is true. I hope it is true that the intensity we are now feeling -- the anger at police violence and other forms of white supremacy, the deep grief over lives lost, the disgust at blatant appeals toward fascism -- I hope that intensity means we are heading into a mass awakening of the mind, heart, and soul that will settle for nothing less that collective liberation.

We are, indeed, surrounded by and filled with complex and overwhelming emotion. I don’t know about you, but I can barely contain my rage and sadness. I have a hard time concentrating. And I can only imagine what my beloveds who are Black, Indigenous, and/or People of Color are feeling, how being both used to the persistence of white supremacy and yet being traumatized anew by recent events weigh on these friends and family. I am praying with and for you, for your safety, for your families, for you to be held in love. As I said in my pastoral letter last Sunday, A white supremacist system is working through humans to rob our beloveds of the breath of life. It is our moral and spiritual responsibility to respond to the deadly evil of racism.

In the midst of this violence, in the midst of racist rhetoric, in the midst of peaceful medics and clergy being driven away from a church so that the occupant of the White House can pose for a photo that makes a mockery of faith, in the midst of militarized response to people exercising their right to protest, in the midst of our own Governor sending National Guard troops to DC to attack their fellow citizens, we keep moving across other thresholds.

This year’s graduates from high schools, colleges, and other institutions find themselves marking the occasion like no other class in history, and they face challenges that echo but are not quite like any other class in history. I wish those of us who graduated some time ago could have prepared a more hospitable world by now, but I am glad this year’s class is here, ready for the world as it is and will be, already involved in the struggle for a just and sustainable society.

So many among us and around us keep adapting to changes in our calling, our vocation, our ways of paying the bills and getting by. I am thinking of hospital workers - nurses, doctors, techs, custodians, everyone who creates an environment for healing - and how they have patched together personal protective equipment from wherever they can find it, workers who know that they won’t get a raise or a bonus for their heroic work and may even be laid off thanks to our for-profit healthcare system. And then we look at the tax money being fired out of tear gas canisters and rubber bullet launchers, a seemingly endless supply of resources when the purpose is repression rather than health and well-being. The way medical staff go to work has changed. They are on the brink of something new, too. The way we do our jobs has changed for so many people, and has not changed enough for some of the most vulnerable workers. And who has a job has changed a lot in the last five months. These passages deserve noticing. Major thresholds should involve some ritual.

People keep moving, some people many miles away. Veronika spoke about her upcoming move to Florida, and how she will need to find new ways of saying goodbye, new ways of staying connected, new ways of creating a life for herself. She reminds us to keep an eye out for people who might need a friend, to ask “when can I drop off these groceries” instead of “let me know if there’s anything I can do.” Worship services may be online for some time; it is important to consider as a community what it means to welcome the stranger, what it would mean to harbor someone, how to be a place of hope and healing when a new person enters in a new way during this time of doing everything differently. As you prepare to welcome Rev. Kristin in August, the beginning of that relationship is another one that will require new rituals, new ways of marking thresholds.

Through all of this, loved ones are dying. Tanya spoke about the loss of her uncle, a revered elder in her family and in her community. According to the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, we have lost over 110,000 Americans to the virus. That is 110,000 uncles, aunts, parents, children, spouses, people who were loved and valued, people who probably did not get a chance to say goodbye to their loved ones in person before they crossed the threshold. Families are finding ways to mark the passage, finding ways to connect with loved ones around the globe in their grief and to honor the life that has passed. We need these rituals, and we also need national rituals of mourning. We need to commit to each other’s well-being in solidarity with the families who grieve, and to prevent as many future deaths as possible.

Many of us are not covering a lot of distance these days in terms of miles (some of us are), but all of us are travelers. Some of us have rougher terrain than others, especially in this time of blatantly violent white supremacy, this time of undisguised ableism, this time when property gets more respect than people. Our journeys are not equal, yet they have in common the need for our attention.

We are gathered on a threshold. The voice that calls to us will ask something different of each person. We may not have chosen to be at a turning point. We do have some choices about how to understand and act on our response. The voice that is calling us forward asks us to live by our values. Let us engage and awaken our passionate hearts. The time has come to cross.

So be it. Blessed be. Amen.

[ask-de-writer]

WEREWOLVE'S WEDDING : MLP Fan Fiction : Tales to read AFTER the lights are OUT!

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WEREWOLVE'S WEDDING

by

De Writer (Glen Ten-Eyck)

2678 words

© 2019 by Glen Ten-Eyck

Writing begun 10/21/19

All rights reserved.  This document may not be copied or distributed on or to any medium or placed in any mass storage system except by the express written consent of the author.

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Copyright fair use rules for Tumblr users

Users of Tumblr.com are specifically granted the following rights.  They may reblog the story provided that all author and copyright information remains intact.  They may use the characters or original characters in my settings for fan fiction, fan art works, cosplay, or fan musical compositions.

All sorts of fan art, cosplay, music or fiction is actively encouraged.

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Nightmare Night was fast approaching.  Blue Bell and her mother Shooting Star were busy preparing for their celebration, two days before that special night.  They were not alone in their preparations, either. Ponyville's open thestrals, Sugar Maple and her Grandmare had come to their cottage in the edge of the Everfree, just past the banks of Falmire creek.  They did not bother with using the stepping stones, though.  They simply glided down into the yard and folded their bat like wings.

As they entered the cottage they called happily, “We brought spreads and preserves for your breads and buns!”

Sugar Maple joked, “It was easy to find your cottage!  We just followed the wonderful scent of baking breads and pies!”

She looked about and asked, “I thought that there were going to be more here.  Where are they?”

Shooting Star replied indulgently, “There will be!  I had word by Magic Net that Caramel and Fangrin are bringing ice cream and some other treats!  They may be bringing some other guests, too!  If rumor is right, they have got the Stone Ridge Pack to accept Fangrin back and they may be here for the wedding!  In any case, they are bringing Grumpeter Goat!”

True to her prediction, the huge Everfree Ridgeback wolf that was Caramel Treat and a second, only slightly smaller one, that was Fangrin, came trotting up the path from Ponyville.  Each had bulging saddlebags! They also did not bother with the stepping stones.  They simply leaped across the creek!

The rest of the party goers gleefully stripped them of the panniers and started laying out the contents along big trestle tables, to join all the rest of the assorted goodies already there!

Caramel, in high good spirits, told the others, “They are coming!  The Stone Ridge pack is just waiting for our howl.  Fangrin and I have been looking forward to this day since we met!  Shooting Star, I am so happy that you have agreed to officiate our wedding.  I know that Reverend Smallflower would have been happy to do it, because I asked him.

“With all of those fool Celestian Church idiots around bothering everypony, and accusing us of being vile creatures of Luna and worse, I just could not resist having you do it.  I mean, you are a direct descendant in unbroken line from General Dark Star of the Nightmare's Witch brigade!  I had that Rom donkey, Marchhare, look it up.  His library has original documents from the Fortress of Nightmare!”

“I am more than happy to do it for you.  I do have Princess Luna's formal commission as a Nightmare's Witch Brigade officer.  Please invite your guests.”

Caramel and Fangrin sat and, tails wagging, lifted their muzzles to the sky and set free a melodious howl.  The howl was answered from different points all about the cleared area around the cottage.  That was followed by a nearly continuous soft rustle of leaves as big Everfree Ridgeback wolves converged on the clearing openly, not attempting to be stealthy.

From across the stream came a polite call of, “I heard that there was a wedding here.  Am I welcome?”  All eyes turned to the spare white pegasus in a flat black hat.

Caramel replied, “Of course, Reverend Smallflower, but the ceremony is to be officiated by Lieutenant Major Shooting Star, of the Nightmare's Witch Brigade.”

He nodded agreeably, “Such was my understanding.  I came to watch, congratulate the happy couple and partake of the feast.  I brought a small contribution.  I have two substantial slices of cured ham for the celebrants and a pair of frostberry pies for the rest.”

Shooting Star invited, “Be welcome, Reverend!  Are you afraid of the wolves?”

“Should I be?  None of the rest of you seem to be.”

“Not really.  Most ponies are anyway.”

With that, Reverend Smallflower simply walked across on the stepping stones and surveyed the table.  He set two packages at one end and a large package at the other.

A second late comer called out, “Hi, Caramel!  Hi, Fangrin!  Sorry that I'm late.  Ran into three Celestian priests on the road.  That's where I left them.  On the road, I mean.  I had to dodge into the brush and work my way around them.  They were spewing their usual garbage about me being a Lesser Sort, and a Vile Creature of the Accursed Evil Twin.

“Anyway, I brought a big clover top scramble for us and a big omelet.  Hope that it will do for the carnivore side of this feast.”

Fangrin romped over to the piebald black, tan, and white goat.  “Grumpy! We were waiting for you!  Did the Celestians give you some more trouble? How are your studies going?  Can we have another checkers tournament soon?”

Grumpy giggled under the physical and verbal assault!  Gently pushing away the big werewolf, he replied, “No, the Celestians really didn't give me much trouble.  Just blocked the road so that I had to go into the brush to get around them.  Other than that it was just the usual verbal idiocy that their so called faith requires of them.

“As for my studies, they are going great!  I finally qualified for Abnormal Psych 666!  Only one more semester to go and I have my degree!  I can't wait for the Non-Equine University to send me my text books.

“Is Wednesday next good for you?  I can have the checker board and refreshments out.”

Fangrin happily helped Grumpy to set out his dishes.  “This all looks so good, Grumpy!  I can't wait for our wedding to be over and the party starts!”

Shooting Star emerged from her cottage, wearing a dark blue uniform with a polished silver emblem of a thestral with spread wings clutching a pair of bars mounted to each shoulder.  Floating in air to the right of  her head was a stout and intricately carved wand of dark wood with silver tips.  It was being casually held at the moment.

Grumpy blinked about three times when he saw her.  Turning to Caramel, disbelief in his voice, he asked, “A Lieutenant-Major in Nightmare's Witch Brigade?  Really?  In this day and age?  I thought that they were disbanded at the end of the Second Nightmare War.”

With a twinkle in her eye, Caramel replied, “Yes she is, and a direct descendant of General Dark Star of the Nightmare's Council and battle leader of the Witch Brigade.  As for being disbanded, they turned in false wands for destruction and went right on meeting and training in secret.”

Grumpy chuckled at the thought and then pointed excitedly.  “She is starting!”

Indeed, Shooting Star had gone to a formal parade stance and her wand was now being held at a still and formal position, tilted slightly toward her guests.  She paced forward and stopped halfway to Falmire Creek.  She raised her wand and, chanting, swept it in a circle three times.  As it swept about, it trailed a tenuous looking glowing sheet the color of thin cirrus clouds lit by moonlight.  The sheets settled into a visible circle, encompassing the house and the party, reaching across the creek at the stepping stones.  The circle faded from visibility.

She ended by pronouncing, “The Circle of the Moon protects all within from any harm by deed or intent.  The wedding parties will now take their places.”

Caramel took a place to the right end of the feasting table, Fangrin to the left.  The Stone Ridge pack formed two rows parallel to the table, with Shooting Star at the center.  They added another aisle from her down to the creek.  The rest of the guests were divided into two groups by the formation.

Loud stomping announced the arrival of the same three Celestian priests that Grumpy had run into earlier.  The one in the lead bawled, “This blasphemous gathering of the vile creatures of the Evil Luna must disperse at once, by the order of High Priest Hortimer!”

Shooting Star sauntered insultingly slowly down the aisle of wolves toward the creek.  At the bank, by her stepping stones, she replied, “No.  We will not disburse.  

“Equestria is not a theocracy run by that worthless high priest Hortimer or any other.  Our gathering is specifically allowed by the same religious freedom law that allows your so called church to exist.  You claim to worship Celestia but you ignore what she herself writes about you and your church.  She detests you and all that you stand for, especially your vile doctrine of Unicorn Supremacy.

“You are trespassing on my property.  It is properly fenced and posted private, so you know that you are trespassing.  Go.”

They responded by rearing up, gathering magic about their horns impressively.  Shooting Star casually covered her yawn with a hoof as they let fly.

Their powerful magic hit the presently invisible ward!  There was a flare of light from each place that the ward was hit!  Their magic rebounded straight back at each of them, knocking them from their hind hooves, right onto their backs and shoving them about five meters across the ground in a wild tangle of hooves and priestly robes!

As they scrambled to their hooves, their leader demanded, “What did you do to us!?  Just for that insolence, we are going to use far greater force!”

Shooting Star replied mildly, “I did nothing to you.  According to the law of WHATSO YOU DO COMES BACK TO YOU, your own evil returned to you. What you gave, you got.  I repeat, you are trespassing.  Go.  Leave my land, home and guests.”

Grumpy confided his worry to Grandmare, the black thestral, “Shouldn't she be doing something to run them off?”

Grandmare replied with some humor, “She is.  She is being a focus to draw their attacks.  That invisible ward?  Not weak at all and carefully tuned to unicorn magic.  Right now, she is trying to get rid of them by using non-equine magic to turn their own magic against them.  She does not want bloodshed to mar the wedding.”

“Non-equine magic?  I thought that the secret of that was lost when Baratted the Goat disappeared at the end of the Second Nightmare War.”

“No, Grumpy.  There are many kinds of magic in the world besides the Equine magic of unicorns.  That is what they are learning right now, if they are smart enough to learn, that is.”

A large flash of light from another frustrated attack interrupted their conversation!  Excited, Grumpy exclaimed, “Look at them flop back! That must have been a real strong try!”

Chuckling, Grandmare pointed out, “Their pretty white robes are getting all stained and torn!  They need to quit while they are still able to walk!”

They heard Shooting Star say, “You have been repeatedly told to leave. Your persistent attacks leave me no choice.  Go, or I shall be violent to you.”

Scrambling to his feet, one of the junior priests demanded, “Violent?  What do you call this?  You have been striking us down!  Our robes are ruined!”

She sighed.  “If you listened at all, you know why that all happened. Your own evil has been returning to you, that is all.  Now, GO.”

Their leader reared up defiant.  Before he could do anything, Shooting Star's wand leveled at him!  His big priest's Celestian medallion suddenly glowed red and fell from the ornate chain, a molten glob of metal!  The chain, no longer a loop, slithered off his neck and fell in an untidy heap beside the congealing remains of the medallion.

While he was screaming his pain at the burned fur and skin on his chest, the same happened to the other two!  Their screams joined his!  One of them panicked and started to run for the gate!  That triggered the stampede!  In only moments, all that was left of their presence was trampled and torn sod and the remains of their necklaces.

Shooting Star paced quietly back up the aisle of wolves to her place. Glancing about to be sure that all were where they needed to be, she began in a calm voice, “We are here to wed two excellent Werewolf ponies, Fangrin and Caramel Treat.  

“In Ponyville, mostly as ponies, they run a well received restaurant. Rarely turning away any in need, they are a refuge for the needy and hungry.  More, they defend any who come to them from all sorts of persecution.  They feed all sorts, whether vegetarian, omnivore or carnivore.

“Besides this goodness, they also hunt with the Stone Ridge pack of Everfree Ridgeback wolves.  By helping the hunt and freely sharing the kill, they assist their friends of the forest.  Through their good offices, peace and friendship have grown between those who live in or close to the Everfree forest and the Stone Ridge pack.

“In that regard, the Duchess of Red Hoof and her heart kept husband the Baron of Drandale, send their warmest regards but Royal obligations have required their presence in Canterlot.

“Caramel and Fangrin now seek to complete a long standing promise and, as the culmination of their goodness and generosity, marry each other and live mated for life.

“Caramel, Fangrin, come before me now.”

As Ponies, both came forward through an aisle of wolves, and met in front of Shooting Star.  “If you both still wish to be joined in marriage, mated for life, please raise your left forehooves so that they touch side by side, neither one higher than the other.”

Fangrin's gray and black hoof was raised beside Caramel's candy tan one. Shooting Star's wand, acting like it had a life of its own, laid across both hooves.  The same moonlight colored magic that had created such a solid defensive circle, flowed from its tip and enmeshed both hooves.

Leaving her wand in place, Shooting Star quietly commanded, “Now, leaving your feet together, transform before us all to show that no matter the form, you twain are together as one.”

The wand balanced between the two did not move in the slightest as the couple transformed into the physically largest wolves there.  

Shooting Star recovered her wand to what Grumpy now recognized as a formal parade rest position.  “Now, side by side, neither leading or following, go to the pool of the stream and there drink the water of life together.”

They paced down the aisle of their friends, the Stone Ridge pack, to the pool and, lowering their heads together, lapped up some of the water. Shooting Star's wand shot up a big starburst of moonlike light. Joyously, she called, “By the authority granted me by Luna, the Nightmare, I pronounce you mated for life!”

Caramel and Fangrin made their way back to the table, surrounded by cavorting wolves.  They lifted a sheet off of a large haunch that still had coarse yellow fur on part of it.  The haunch ended in a heavily clawed paw.  Each of them took one end of the big hindquarter and lifted it down to the ground for the pack!  While the wolves closed in on it, they did no fighting or squabbling, but took turns grabbing a chunk and making room for the next.

Caramel and Fangrin opened the box that Reverand Smallflower had brought and helped themselves to the ham slices in it.  Grumpy, watching the carnivores go for their part of the feast, was a bit green around the gills, as they say.  Nevertheless, he was pleased to see Grandmare and Sugar Maple, the thestrals, happily eating up his big omelet.

Blue Bell, Shooting Star's filly, noticed his condition and suggested, “Just come down here, Mister Goat, and concentrate on the pies, cakes and that lovely clover top scramble that you made.”

As he was nibbling up his second slice, Grumpy commented, “Thanks, Blue Bell.  Got to admit that this is the first wedding done by witch ponies that I have ever been to.  It has been fascinating.  And you are right, frostberry pie seems to cure almost anything!

~THE END~

Return to the Master Story Index

Return to MLP Fan Fiction

Return to Tales to Read AFTER the Lights are OUT!

[arcticdementor]

Please watch this 25-second video. It took place yesterday in the middle of the day in midtown Manhattan:

…

Did you watch it until the very end? Did you see the building’s security guard slowly close the door as this 65-year-old woman struggled to get up from the sidewalk?

There are two kinds of evil captured in this clip. One is the evil of the alleged attacker:

…

The other is the evil of the bystanders.

The second kind makes even sicker. The apathy, the indifference, the nonchalance, the passivity in the face of human suffering — as if such an attack is a casual occurrence; as if she is a figure in a video game and not a real human being shoved and kicked and stomped on— says something very disturbing about what’s happening in our culture.

Some on social media have pointed out that the guard would have lost his job if he’d gotten involved. That private security guards are strictly barred from intervening in such situations because of liability. I’m sure that’s right. (According to the building’s management company, the staff who witnessed the attack “have been suspended pending an investigation in conjunction with their union.”)

I’d also say: Imagine that this woman is your mother. Really picture her, as I am my own mom, who is about the same age as the woman in the video. Now picture her beaten to the point of hospitalization in broad daylight in the middle of Manhattan. And imagine that grown adult men several feet away watched that happen to her. If your answer is still “but liability,” I’m really not sure what to say.

…

But maybe there is another evil, beyond the monstrousness of the the attackers and the cruelty of the bystanders. And that is the evil of lying about — or purposefully misdiagnosing — the problem to fit The Narrative.

As Zaid Jilani explained last week, the official media story about these anti-Asian hate crimes is that they are instances of white supremacy. “If you thumb through news articles from the past few days or read over statements from leading politicians, you’d imagine that the Ku Klux Klan is responsible for the spree of robberies, assaults and murders of Asian-Americans across the nation. The phrase ‘white supremacy’ is used repeatedly,” he wrote. “This narrative is pervasive, but it bears no relationship to the evidence before us. Not only are none of the high-profile attackers over the past few months white supremacists, many of them aren’t even white.”

Should a person’s life matter more to us if they are attacked by someone of one race, rather than another? Because that is exactly the calculus we are seeing.

…

For years now, this has been the case with antisemitic hate crimes. When it came to the massacre at Tree of Life, carried out in October 2018 by a white supremacist who hated Jews for loving immigrants, the response was clear and unified. The massacre at the Chabad of Poway, California, in that same year also —rightly — earned the attention of the national press and lawmakers. It, too, was carried out by a white supremacist.

I had Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, who survived the attack, write this op-ed in the Times two days after he was shot. In it he warned: “Over the years people I know have been harassed and assaulted by thugs in the neighborhood where I grew up, Crown Heights, Brooklyn, in incidents that typically go unreported by the press.”

Indeed, when I tell people I’m from Pittsburgh they flash with recognition and sympathy. But I highly doubt one would elicit the same response if you told a group of strangers you were from Jersey City, where a kosher grocery was shot up in 2019 by attackers linked to the hate group known as the Black Hebrew Israelites. Or if you told them you were from Monsey, New York, where, that same year, a machete-wielding fanatic stormed a Hanukkah gathering at a rabbi’s home. Or if you said you were from Crown Heights or Borough Park, where street crimes against Orthodox Jews have become a regular feature of life.

The value of a victim should not be dependent on the identity of their victimizer.

[nopingitoutme]

I would like to preface this by saying that I love my brother. 

He is not a good person. Not in the evil way, not in the I hurt people, or I bully people kind of way, but in the - I have never critically thought about my privilege and general existence kind of way. I’ll slow down and start from the beginning.

I am Canadian but my parents are Asian, South Asian to be precise. My dad was born and raised in India while my mother is Pakistani. From there my parents made their way to the US where they met and got married. My dad studied mechanical engineering at University of Oklahoma. He was accepted into Princeton but the tuition was too high, University of Oklahoma was the only university that afforded him with a full ride scholarship. So he made do and studied. What you have to understand here is that my dad was poor like extremely poor. He used to tell us how he would steal packets of ketchup to eat because they had a high sugar content and he couldn’t afford actual food. He didn’t have a choice when it came to studying, he had to get his degree so he could find a job. If he didn’t he was a short, Indian, Muslim brown man with no family, no support system and no credentials.

My mom actually got her degree in nursing in Pakistan but because the credits did not transfer she was not a nurse in Virginia, she worked as a lab tech. Eventually my parents met and got married then had my oldest brother.

Here’s the thing, my mom’s immigration story is murky. While her “nanny visa” isn’t exactly illegal, the fact that the only “children” she was taking care of were her cousins. The rest of her family trickled in using farming visas. I’ll be frank it was definitely fraud in some way but done just carefully enough that the government was willing to overlook it. My mom’s a Canadian citizen now so I don’t have to be worried that she could be deported. 

But anyway my parents met, got married and procreated twice. I have two older brothers who were born in New Jersey and have American citizenships. At this point we were poor. My dad was barely making anything with his engineering degree and my mom had two kids under the age of five, she was basically supporting the family with her job as a lab tech. Then my mom found out she was pregnant with me. My dad being a financially responsible man asked my mom to terminate the pregnancy (she was on birth control, I was very much a whoops baby) but she declined. I am not going to turn this into an anti-abortian argument, I am very much pro-choice, I was just giving context to the situation my parents were in. A few days after I was detected(?) my dad got a job offer in Alberta and accepted it. It turned out to change our lives entirely. My dad started making more and more until he was making six figures a year. This is the type of life I grew up living, moreover this is the life my brother grew up living.

Since I have two brothers, I’ll name them, the ok one will be O and the not-okay one will be U.

U has never known, or remembered financial stress. He is two years older then me so can’t remember his life in New Jersey but he can remember his life in Canada. I won’t insult him by saying his life in Canada is easy, he is lives in an Asian household and my parents are typical Asian parents. They are strict and overbearing, they meddle too much in our lives and they do not get along with each other. Growing up was stressful, my dad definitely has an untreated mental disorder that results in a violent temper and tension in the house for days on end. None of us have healthy coping mechanisms. O is going to get married in the next year, he is terrified that his wife will rely on him to be the sole breadwinner and through that he will become abusive towards her. U, well I’ll get to that. I ignore everything and avoid conflict like a sport. My eventual plan is to get my degree and fuck off and never come back. So, not the healthiest environment to say the least. But I do have to say that it affected U the most. 

He became fanatical. He became obsessed with judging people. He would continuously ask me why I was, “everyone’s lawyer” for having the audacity for saying that unless we understand someone’s circumstances we cannot judge them for it. The best example of his confusingly conservative personality is the fact that he agrees with the Vietnam War.

Today we decided to watch the Chicago 7. He didn’t want to. His first complaint was that it got bad reviews, we showed him the reviews which were overwhelmingly positive (he considers himself a film expert, you can tell by the way that he uses the words “film” instead of movie and “cinematography” and “we shouldn’t focus on diversity in Hollywood, we should just pick the best actor for the job”) the truth came out he did not like the fact that it was about people fighting against the government. He agreed with the conscription and said that he would gladly give his portion of the inheritance to the Canadian military since it was his civic duty to support them, never mind that we pay taxes to support them so they really don’t need more. More and more pieces fit together. His easy spending of money, his virulent defence of conservative policies, his anti-immigration stance. He’s a piece of shit and it took me nineteen years to figure that out. He’s just genuinely a piece of shit.

And  I don’t know where it came from. No one in my family has such extreme views, we are a family of immigrants. I mean the only vaguely conservative thing we do is be rich. And before anyone comes for me I am aware of my incredible privilege. I am also aware that we embody the American Dream to the T and I am aware that the American Dream is a lie fed to us by the rich and no one becomes rich because you worked hard. You become rich because you had connections or in our case we were extremely lucky.  But U is not aware of his privilege as a wealthy person. He doesn’t seem to grasp that he didn’t make good choices, he had good choices (peep the reference), choices that allowed him to get a tutor so he could write the MCAT, choices that allowed to spend months studying and not be worried about money, choices that give him connections to med students and doctors, choices that he only got because he was rich. In fact he is so unaware of it, that it’s like he believes he deserves it. It’s like he believes that it is his God-given right to not have to pay his own tuition, his cell phone plan, his fucking life is paid for and this bitch thinks he deserves it. He spends money like it’s water, he believes transgender people are just mentally ill, he’s anti-immigration (which is hypocrisy of the highest degree, where do he think he came from? He’s darker then I am!), he’s a white posh British man in a twenty-two year old brown body. 

And then I realized, he wants to be that British man, he craves it. It’s why he wants to send his future child to an English boarding school so he (the child will be a boy and named Alistair, apparently. I can’t make this shit up. I wish I was making this shit up) can become a cricket star. He is creating a fantasy, one where he isn’t in this stressful tension-filled house, one where he is the hero, the saviour, the one who is right and rational. He can’t stand the fact that he was born in the family, a family where my mother still speaks with an accent and wears traditional clothing. A family that eschews normal society conventions of being white and Christian and conservative. He hates that he can’t be one of them. And because of that he ignores the immense amount of privilege he has been given. He doesn’t believe in white privilege, believes that affirmative action is reverse racism, believes that immigrants are obligated to give up their heritage to become functioning members of society. What’s that Futurama quote, “don’t insult billionaires, you’re insulting my feelings towards being able to be a billionaire someday” (I don’t know I’ve never watched Futurama, I’ve only seen that quote in a gif). My point is, is that my brother is ashamed. He is so deeply ashamed that he repressed all of his empathy and humanity to beg at the alter of capitalism and classism. He cannot reach the inherent privilege that being white affords you so he makes up for it by being the poster child of white supremacy in other ways. And all of that makes me sad.

Because after all, I love my brother.   

[jeanjauthor]

So I saw the impeach trump thing on my local news and I thought, Ms (mrs? Your imperial highness?)Johnson will be posting this soon, and I was right.

Ms is fine, lol…and yeah.  I knew the moment Trump called for Russia to “find her emails” back during the campaign, in that moment I knew he was colluding with Russia.  Trump telegraphs his moves.  How so?  Several factors.

First, there’s a saying:  You see most often in others a reflection of what is actually in you.  Trump claims horrible things are being done by others, but they’re mostly things that he is doing himself.  Second, as an apparent narcissistic sociopath, he cannot help but gloat whenever he’s pulling a con on someone.  It’s evident in the way he smirks, the way he drawls…he gloats.  Third, he can’t lie for shit (pardon my language), because his innocence-look is too scripted, too studied, too acted…and fourth, he always tells such big bold-faced lies that he always has to walk them back at some point…but he tells them to conceal the biggest awful truths.

Calling upon a foreign government to hack into his poiltical opponent’s emails IS an act of treason.  Calling publicly for that treasonous act is so outrageously huge, “no one would believe it was true”…except those of us who’ve been studying this guy for years, even for decades.

Now, why have I been studying Trump?  For overblown villain traits, such as narcissism, egomaniac qualities, sociopathy, psychopathy, grifting, conman activities, schmoozing and oozing a trail of slime wherever he goes.  He’s the boldest liar in the world, mixing in fact and fantasy in such overblown quantities that you’d swear he’d be a laughingstock villain on the silver screen…but that’s part of his protective camouflage.  He uses glitter and gilded paint to spruce up the bullshit he sells, making it look attractively solid like gold-leafed concrete…but in the end, it’s just a wall made of shit.

Someone on Twitter pointed out that he sells false images of wealth and prestige to gullible poor folk who desperately want to be seen as “rich folks just having a minor, temporary setback right now.”  No one actually rich would bother buying a Trump Steak, for example. It’s not good enough quality as a meat to even poke a sterling silver fork at in disdain.

But Trump stages everything to make it seem attractive and emulation-worthy, and so you end up paying $40 for a mediocre chunk of meat that shouldn’t even cost you $8.  It’s the ultimate con, convincing you that if you eat his name-branded stuff, wear his name-branded clothes, sleep in his name-branded hotels, you’ll “lead a life just as exciting and wealthy!!” as his seems to be.

His wealth is based on lies, more lies, conning people, shortsheeting people, stiffing almost everyone who ever works with him, claiming all the glory even for the stuff he never touched (which is often why it succeeds) and blaming anyone but himself and his ideas if anything goes wrong, falls through, or winds up terrible in quality, etc.

He’s fascinating as a character study, but absolutely horrific as a leader.  He’s a conman who sold out America for shady deals with foreign enemies…who are so very, very much better at these games than him.

America, “…you in danger, girl.”

…And the really painful part?  The GOP is so wrapped up in trying to push their unwanted kleptocratic oligarchic agendas that they are aiding & abetting him, and thus colluding in his treason by not stopping it cold, hard and fast, right away.  They are so ass-over-heads deep into Party > Patriotism, that they don’t see they are being used horrifically by Trump’s puppetmaster, too.  The longer Trump stays in power, the more control over this nation Putin holds.

I’m deeply worried about the hundreds of mid-level officials that Trump’s Administration has settled into jobs in and around the capital and the Executive Branch, positions that don’t need congressional hearings for approval.  Are they neo-Nazi alt-righters?  Are they Russian spies & plants?  Are they both?  “Heyyy, Donny, we got some guys who’ll do good work for you, they’re solid white supremacists just like you, it’s just that they need some jobs in X and Y and H Departments.  You’ll do us a solid by appointing them, and then we’ll owe you one, right, comrade?”

Am I going overboard in my imagination?  …Maybe.Can we take the chance that this is not true?  …No.

No.  We cannot take that chance.

Do I think the impeachment will go anywhere right away?  No.  The GOP is so deep in the mud of their own wallowings that there’s no way for them to pull out of the slops and get ouf of their sty anytime soon.  They’re ripe for manipulating and for slaughtering by Russia…except Russia wants to keep them there, destroying the American government through partisan politics and neo-conservatism.

Russia’s just now starting to step up the shit-smearing campaigns once again.  Watch.  There’ll be all sorts of claims on the internet, articles and memes trying to sully the truth with the filth of doubt.  The whole “FakeNewsMedia” spiel is part and parcel of it.  All of it is gaslighting, a massive campaign to gaslight the nation’s perceptions of the facts, and thus the truth.

Some of this is frighteningly efficient in the way it’s being done.  I’d say that’s the work of Russian efforts at studying psychological warfare, to couple it with and render more effective their cyberwarfare attacks.  Some of this is unbelievably stupid…such as Trump Junior’s stupidly blatant confession of his intent to commit treason last summer.  Conmen–Trump & kids, save for maybe Barron–tend to trip themselves up at some point.  It’s a rare grifter who can invent the perfect, unassailable…and unimpeachable…lie.

So yes, long story short, I did post it.  Why?  Because if we flood Members of Congress with demands for impeachment, and remind them that their jobs are very much on the line, we might get it done.  Get out Trump, get out his adult kids, get out Mike Pence (who very much is a part of this, even if he’s desperately trying to play the ingenue), get out McConnell (who literally sold the nation to the enemy to secure his wife’s offered Cabinet position, a modern day #30silvercoins Judas), and so on and so forth…including, hopefully, everyone Trump appointed, and everyone they appointed into the government.

By the way, the concept of Marvel’s evil organization, Hydra, is very much alive and real…and the neoNazis are desperate to emulate it, because it is very, very effective.

But I’ll end the speculative ramblings here.  It sucks to be used to finding very uncomfortably plausible connections among seemingly disparate plot threads.  I’ve been a modern-day Cassandra for over a year now, weeping in grief every time my warnings pass by so blatantly ignored.  It’s exhausting finding out my top 10% worst fears are coming true day after day in slow chaotic unravelings.

…And we still have to fight for Net Neutrality, and we still have to fight for adequate healthcare, and we still have to fight for our Constitutional Rights, and we still have to fight for…

To be completely honest?  I’d be even more pissed if it had been HRC colluding with Russia.  I can understand why Trump is doing it.  Thinking about it hurts to think that way, but after studying him, and conmen in general, I understand.  Plus the whole Russia-is-flattering-him and the white-supremacy stuff...  It hurts to think that way, and I am angry about it.  But I’m not surprised he’s doing it.  HRC...would be a betrayal beyond words.  Except, she wouldn’t have done it.  She’s too smart, too savvy, too aware of the ramifications and the consequences...whereas the Trumps are too ignorant of what they’ve gotten themselves into, and too dumb to actually acquire and heed competent help.  And yet, too cunning not to get away with it, thanks to the GOP’s mindless party-over-national-interests.

[theliterateape]

Squaring the Circle: Tips on Managing the Chaos

by Don Hall

“Goddamnit. How do you manage to cope with all of this...chaos in the world and still stay optimistic? I don’t think you’re stupid but maybe you’re just too stupid to see how bad things are getting.”

It’s true. Maybe I am stupid. I’ve certainly been called worse by both political extremes since...well...as long as I can remember. If I am stupid, I’m definitely too dense to recognize it. Managing chaos, living in uncertain times, is just that. Managing and living.

Back in 2015, Alice Kim and I were a dysfunctional couple. That relationship was a constant source of tension and did some damage to both of us. I did, however, learn many things from it and from her. One gift she gave me was the idea of reframing things to see a different angle. I have always been on the outside of things and perpetually looking for that contrarian point of view but that was as much about fueling conflict as it was about the frame.

As a theater artist, my work was inspired by DADAists and the legend of Andy Kaufman. Framing society as a series of ongoing behavioral experiments. Pushing buttons on people to see how they would react. Not so much instigating mean-spirited pranks but close enough to bear that definition.

Alice’s view was that one could gently shift the frame on a given situation. Reframe reality because, for most of us, reality is cemented in our perception of it.

2020 seems to be a real shitshow. Trump is still in office. A pandemic rages throughout the globe. Massive unemployment and the coming of our second Great Depression. A video of George Floyd being murdered by a police officer has been seen 800 million times by one million people. Protests for civil rights. Alt Right terrorists joining the protests to foment the idea that these protests are really riots. While in the back of the queue, we still contend with pending climate disaster, crumbling credibility on the World Stage, an almost maniacally conservative federal court system, and an increasingly powerful and poisonous cancel culture that now seems more like a raging wildfire consuming every and anyone who bothers to even question the orthodoxy of the Extreme Zealots of both White Supremacy and Critical Race Theory.

We’re fucked.

Reframe.

There is actually little evil in the world (if you choose to see things in the binary Good & Evil mode) but metric tons of stupidity and selfish interests. While brutal cops are a problem and the mostly accidental murders of citizens by police are motivated by incompetence driven by lived experience bias, the vast majority of people are merely focused on themselves without much thought put into how their actions affect others. Not evil but certainly fucking annoying.

That guy who parked in two spots isn’t evil, he’s a selfish asshat. The guy who makes a racist joke to make his Black co-workers laugh isn’t evil, he’s just a bigot but one trying to find a way into his 1970’s version of race relations in an increasingly fed up world.

Most people are motivated by what they perceive as good intentions despite their born-in tendency of stupidity and selfishness.

Further, simply looking at the history and progress the world has made gives us a macro-view of things. That more objective scene demonstrates that in the past fifty years we are living longer, healthier lives, literacy is at an all-time high, being gay is no longer stigmatizing in many cases, Black incarceration has declined dramatically, police killing people has declined dramatically, women are more empowered, run more businesses, and are increasingly being elected to public office.

Is there still suffering? Of course. Everyone (even the white people) suffers. The question to ask is not Who suffers more? which invites nothing more than an Olympiad of Victim Status but For what reason are people suffering? Nobody should be insulted, attacked, threatened, etc. but we live in a country of 330 million people and that Shangrala is not realistic in any meaningful way. If we (as in society of free thinking but incredibly stupid and selfish people united by the Grand Experiment in Diverse Democracy) hope to stand up against hateful ideas, we have to be willing to sacrifice a bit.

Uncertainty and chaos are no more bad than good. They simply are.

Most aspects of our lives are completely beyond our control and the attempt to control them is like lighting the candle scented “Frustration” while sipping the “Disappointment” cup of tea. 

Living for thirty years in Chicago was instructive to this point. The weather in Chicago is the perfect incarnation of Chaos at Play. On any given day during any given month there could be thick humidity and stifling heat, pouring rain, sleet, or thirty below zero skin-cracking freeze. If control is your bag, living in Chicago could likely drive you insane just trying to be fully prepared for going outside.

How does one handle it?

The cliché is to Expect the Unexpected which is some fucking feel-good bullshit as it is easy to attribute to wisdom and completely unhelpful. The more substantial answer comes in three parts:

Always have the worst case scenario in mind while simultaneously understanding that the Vegas odds of that same scenario are heavily favored against it.

Actively lower your expectations in keeping with how unrealistic your wants actually are.

Realize that no one owes you anything — not respect, not deference, not politeness — nothing. The world owes no one anything because the world is designed in every way to make it difficult to survive.

Number one is pretty easy. Over the years of reframing, I’ve trained myself to ask that question: What is the absolute worst case possible? 

Take the civil unrest at play right now. The worst case scenario is a full-out war between those protesting for substantial police reform and the police. The police have all the military-grade weapons which would be Kent State meets every school shooting plus some The Purge impunity. That is highly unlikely to happen because while we are stupid and selfish, for the most part, no one really wants to be in a firefight if it can be avoided.

Number two is probably the most taxing. In an age of instant satisfaction — fast food, same day delivery, instant messaging — dialing down our expectations is a pain in the ass. Our emotions dictate so much of how we behave and our emotions are an erratic, messy, impulsive roommate in our head. There’s no shame in feeling the Big Feels but acting upon those feelings is like taking advice from a dude masturbating into his hat while singing nonsense songs about BitCoin conspiracies. Not a great road map to solid decision making.

Number three is kind of an extension of number two. In a democracy, we believe we have rights. Our rights are guaranteed. We feel like we can demand fealty to these rights from everyone around us but the fault in that logic hits the record scratch when we are confronted with everyone demanding their rights at the same time. Adding to that the simple truth that things like pandemics and earthquakes give no fucks whatsoever about your unalienable rights and it just works out better to assume you deserve nothing, are owed nothing, that your rights are as fragile as your credit score.

If there is a fourth reframe to consider it is limit the things you take personally. Most people don’t have much concern for you or your existence as most people in a planet of billions are abstract rather than concrete. George Floyd is concrete because we saw him die on video. Black Lives are abstract because the concept lacks specificity.

Like it or not (and in direct conflict with the notion that there are enemies at every gate) most people are not so much against you as they are for themselves.

Finally, do your level best to explore perspective. Reframing requires looking outside of your lived experience and looking at things from another’s.

Donald Trump is a horror on a daily basis. Stream The Madness of King George and realize that other people have had it worse and survived.

COVID-19 is a scourge that is upending the carefully laid table of society. Go read up on plagues throughout history to gain understanding that these things are simply not the end of all things but the beginning of new things.

Abolishing the Police is a great idea until, like the small neighborhood of well intentioned white liberals in Minneapolis who decided to no longer allow police on their blocks only to suddenly have their public park filled with occupying drug addicts and carjackers, you kind of need someone to call when the shit hits the fan.

Reframe. Relax. Go to sleep and wake up. Eat something. Do something nice for someone without hopes for reward or social media kudos. Drink some water. Make a few bucks. Do it again tomorrow.

[hanzi83]

The Last Blog of the Decade (That you will read in your groupchats but will pretend you did not care enough because of lack of likes or retweets)

This blog was going to be about highlights of the decade, but I can only fit a few of that in my head and I am not good with keeping lists, especially in this era where someone as dumbed down as me, who didn’t know much outside of hip hop and wrestling, getting involved in partaking with pop culture, since I never really got into current events or pop culture when I was younger, and for a bit I had a pretty good grasp at it, but as we close the decade, I ended up not knowing so much because of the different mind frames I have been in, and this is what happens when you begin in this life dumbed down and going along with different narratives, because it was difficult to think for myself and never expecting to be here for that long, but then the fame bug interrupted that completely and give me a lust for life, because I had nothing going on for me and did not care because I did not fit in with this world, and I never wanted to pursue women because I never wanted to put my mental illness on them and have to deal with me daily. I adopted a misogynist personality because I was told in high school by women who were my friends that I was too nice and safe.

I ended last decade with my friendships distancing because I did not deliver enough in 2009 with the fame that people in my life had invested in, and by the beginning of 2010, it was evident most of those people were only staying by me and needed me closing out the last decade because I was supposed to be bigger, and all this time I thought it was just luck, but as this decade kicked off, I became somewhat of a conspiracy theorist, and even though I did not know much, I bought into western media narratives, and even though I was not smart enough to get into geopolitical shit, I knew that there was some good when Bush administration was called out, even if it was done in such a limited way, so when I discovered conspiracies, as an already dumbed down guy, I bought into the beginning of the alt right type of conspiracies, and then afterwards after realizing that the conspiracy world was also compromised, I had to take the brainwashing out through the latter part of the decade, and I used to be ignorant, and still am poisoned by those kind of ignorant tactics, because I feel when fighting the most racist type of people on social media, I have to stoop to their level, and because I spent most of my life thinking the ignorance was hilarious and the ultimate fuck you to these supposed do-gooders, I was gravitating more ignorance, hence how I got caught up on the stern show, and what is interesting I thought the ultimate fuck you was saying some social consciousness type of shit, but sprinkle a little harmless racism, misogyny and homophobia etc into the mix because you buy into that conservative leaning shit, because they call out neoliberals, who will say good talking points about being a decent human being, but since they are surrounded by corporate greed and fiscal oppression, you think anything they say is all wrong.

The last several years I wrote in a journal on my computer, which my trolls and hackers have been able to access, so a lot of my thoughts were tests to see who in my life was partaking and also it has been hard to keep up with what my thoughts were because I can’t remember everything and all the inconsistent thoughts I had, whether I felt that way or if I just wanted to be a contrarian, or whether I interpret shit differently because I see the world in a different view, like people who sold their soul, but then created a new network, and I thought those same public figures would at some point would call out the system, but it seems like it is supposed to be the “people on the leftist side” who are supposed to be the baby faces, while everyone in the establishments have become the heels. The thing is I have become so conspiratorial that, I think we as humans are far more advanced, and that even death is something more, whether people are getting cloned, or people faking their death because we are at the end times of this earth, and people are fleeing the planet, whether you are a political figure, or a wealthy celebrity, or anyone associated with some type of royal blood. I am not saying I am right, but these delusional theories should be reason enough why I should not be allowed in this world.

I think what happened was how targeted I became during my tenure on the Stern Show, and instead of going to the next level, and when I didn’t and wanted to speak out on how people have to compromise themselves sexually or mentally, it doesn’t mean people don’t work hard whatsoever, but there are systemic fraternal rules that I feel exist, and even the conspiracy world has taken it to some next level, and it feels like we are getting closer to finding out about it, but it feels like it is done in an organized fashion, that you have to let traumatic shit to happen to you, and when those parties are going to get canceled, then when these people can profit off the story, then it will become important, so the last part of my Stern Show tenure was me acting like I contributed to more than they let on, and I was getting the airtime and abuse mentally, while it helped the people in my life get the systemic rewards, because all of us freaks on the Stern Show were taken advantage of by the show, and when you speak out, the paid trolls, will tell us how Howard gave us fame and we would not be known, which is completely true, but it does not give him or any person with power the right to abuse their powers.

For the majority of the decade, I had to endure threats of people wanting to kill me, hardcore racism, dismissing of any validity I had because I am a fucking mentally ill person who they prodded into attempting suicide or to harm someone else, and they would push me more and more so they could see how I react. People who would latch on to me from periscope app, who would find out I am famous, because I am so empty on the inside, that my only value is that I used to be famous, and these people will then try to latch on, and if things did not work out well, they would use the same techniques Howard used on me, where I am mentally ill and I am the one who is the problem.

There is too much in my clouded mind, so I decided to just type as I feel, even if it does not make much sense and it goes in a repetitive circle, in which I have expressed throughout the last decade in these blogs, and nothing ever gets accomplished because no matter how well I write down my mentality for people to understand how fucked up I am, the less response, while these people who watch me closely and target me will gossip via group chat and decide how to fuck with me, even if it is people in my life. I guess the latter part of this decade, they let me see my friends, who had already got what they needed, because they figured I was so fucked up from dealing with higher powers who are more evil, I would be crawling back to people in my life and just trust them, even though they are deeply into the establishment, but pretend they are not so if anything big happens to me, they can pretend they never had access to fucking industry people, or being able to partake in doing big things behind the scenes, while I just got the bare minimum of being able to interact with certain people on social media.

I cannot even do what I love, because if I did not kill myself on the time they wanted, they would fuck with my viewership so I could not reach a bigger audience because I was no longer on Stern, I feel Stern has put in effort, and people will say Howard is no longer relevant to the culture, and it is true, but it does not mean that isn’t by design and that people like him or Vince McMahon don’t have more systemic power than they lead on, because the criticism of both of them have been under the limited guise because every established boomer, has to be portrayed as an out of touch asshole, and even though they are evil and crazy, it does not mean they don’t have advanced intelligence.

I even try to show people who are not politically correct the shock jock type of humor is not the way to go, and not because I am PC or anything like that, but that ignorant shit is just as much propaganda as the neoliberal PC shit that analyzes the social and race issues within a certain narrative, and I am supposed to be more tolerant of people who lean right, and I can buy that working class people did actually believe Trump would change it for the better, but if people are still defending him or deflect blame onto others, which is valid, but if you can’t admit Trump is not anti establishment, even if they try to present it that way, and even when Trump is right about the corporate media, it is not because he is a truth  teller, it is because him saying it will label anyone who says that as a Trumpist, but these people want to be associated with systemic white supremacy and align with the oppressive powers but if people don’t like them because of that they are seen as the biggest victim, while they conflate neoliberalism with actual leftist shit, and I don’t agree with leftists on everything, probably most of the on surface shit to defend people being oppressed, but they are designed to be the good guys, just because people are funded on the low, does not mean people are bad, if evil is funded by the powers that be, I can believe people who are supposed to be neoliberal bad guys on the surface, could be playing the role while they know the world has to go more left.

I can talk to someone who is ignorant and has said ignorant things more than I can reason with someone powerful who has used their money to fiscally oppress which is far worse to me than someone jokingly saying a slur, even though it is not funny and you can discuss to change that person’s mind. People don’t do it necessarily because they are racist, but they are in the immature mindset of wanting to be edgy, and as someone who has mimicked people in the industry who have made livings doing that and incorporating into my life, because life was so boring that you wanted to make shit your show, so as a dumbed down guy I would take shit from movies or comedy shows and try to be shocking in my life, because there were always people to counter me, but I didn’t know I was partaking in propaganda.

I don’t know where this blog is going but I should have just taken some notes before so but that isn’t my style and it is probably why I will never amount to much in this world and all I will be known as some Stern Show reject, who did not become bigger, because I did not know what systemic initiations I would have to endure or do to someone, or what propaganda I would be knowingly putting out there, it is one thing when you are dumbed down and don’t have power to know what you are doing, but a lot of people with power and influence, knew what evils they were putting out when they did it, and when it became a time to change, they did but they had to make it seem like they are doing it because of the societal pressure, like there was never pressure to do all the ignorant shit and justify why using the N word was a freedom of speech issue, but it is amazing when someone supposedly becomes more liberal, that is when the sellout moment happens, like embracing right wing talking points was never a sellout moment whatsoever.

I didn’t go to the next level, and the people who prospered most behind my back, and still hold anger at me for being mad at them for this, will never admit any wrongdoing, and it feels like they need more help than I do, because they have been protected by a system where they can act entitled, to advanced knowledge, access to people in the industry and the amount of sexual favors done because that is how things are done behind the scenes, no matter how we tell ourselves that we are in better times because of bringing up social issues, but most people gate keep that shit by making it seem implying that someone had to do something sexual as putting them down and not respecting the work that was put in, but they are protecting the system that still forces people to do that shit. Maybe I could have partake and sold my soul for those kind of perks but I just wanted to be dead so I would never have to realize that I will never look people in the eye the same, and maybe  I am wrong, but it feels my friendships died and I don’t necessarily blame the but I blame the system for being this evil, and people having to kind of do some dirt because it what is required and then when it is a certain person’s turn to get in trouble, then we will know about it. I just resent the money and opportunities I have gotten people systemically will never admit it because Stern has made me such an outcast that, I will always be the bitter miserable person. And that is fine, but why should I be alive, people in my life don’t respect me and have hatred for me, and I will never be close with family members because of all this, so what am I living for? Why can’t I have euthanasia, I have talked to my therapist about it, I feel like I don’t need to be here. No woman likes me, and I don’t blame them, I am a piece of shit. I don’t even think my friends wives like me too much either. I feel like every social situation is done as a way to hide real shit and it is just to make it seem like I am invited but it is the bare minimum.

Even with all the shit people have gotten because of me, they will hate me for having the audacity to still complain about it and guess what because of what Howard and his trolls have allegedly have done to me, and how much fear they put into me, but implying the government has me on lists and my platforms are crowded with the feds to shut me up for speaking out against shit, why would you want me here. This decade has been one of the worst, and even though I am thankful for the last 2 years being better than the earlier years and all the cool people I have become more friendly with, I fear that other people in my life will steal those connections like I feel they stole everything else from me, and I will never be able to get over it. It feels like because I am speaking out, they send certain people to be friends with me and try to latch on and because I am not one of these internet trolls who pay for people’s information and do background checks, I don’t know if it is people who have a deranged past or something more fucked up. This one guy who was doing a Stern Show type of shit and wanted me on his show got into a feud with me because I did not want part of his show, and it turns out he could potentially be a sex offender, and the fact that it was hidden from me when I was on his show, and I was the first to leave, it makes me pissed off. Now I have to be careful, who I interact with. The system clearly has him cosigned because this dude’s behavior has become a lot more dangerous and has been harassing and doxing other people trying to expose him, and the fact the system will not look into him, it is like they cosign people like this and when it is time for them to be sacrificed, they will then expose them.

Also on periscope, I personally believe, and anything I have said on here I have no proof of, but I feel the elites use periscope to peddle their sex trafficking, so I will talk to all sorts of people who are 18 and above and drop Howard Stern name, to see if they react and some of them have, but some of them don’t genuinely know, and they end up being cool, but I try to talk my shit whether is being over the top with my humor or just searching for an adventure, even though I have no desire to pursue anyone, I just have no contact that it makes me feel like a human being able to try to flirt, even though I am horrible at it, but I also name drop because I have no redeeming qualities so by showing I had some fame, it gives me the edge over other dudes, but it really doesn’t.

This blog was a fucking mess. I have not written in my journal in months and all I do is take in more information and I cannot remember who is who and which public figure is an athlete, a civil rights leader, a game of thrones character, a boardwalk empire character or some other shit, and even with events in the past, I cannot even remember anymore and my thoughts have been more scattered than usual. I don’t think I will be able to survive this next decade. I just want to be gone for good. I will always be this troubled human being no one will take seriously and quite honestly I cannot blame any of you. I am a piece of shit,

So let me just end this blog right now before I go to some next level with my theories and my deluded outlook in this life. Happy 2020, the last decade can go to hell and stay there. I hope I don’t last this decade and I can rest peacefully from this planet, or maybe I will have my DNA put into some other advanced clone and that guy will be more of a winner in life and you won’t know any better because you will assume the real me is dead.

To all the people in my past, and if you are reading this, and don’t worry I know you are but you won’t admit it and you might hate me even more, I am sorry our friendships did not work out and I feel left out of all the festivities and milestones that were achieved in this last decade, unless my dreams are some alternate realities and we actually did spend time with each other but the actual real life I am living is supposed to be the decoy, then I take it all back but that is a pretty big if, so I am going to assume that our friendships just became more distanced, and if I knew this is what my “fame” was going to bring, then I would have never even embraced being on the biggest radio show ever. It ruined everything, and I feel like I will never be able to get myself together, even though I have been a lot better the last few years than earlier in the decade when I completely lost it from all the secrecy that went a long with this exploitation. I am sure my trolls will show that they were watching me write this the whole time and post it on reddit before I even post it in my blog, to subtly show me they can hack my shit without a trace, like the last time they did that a couple of years ago.

[trunewsofficial]

President Trump Offers Five-Point Plan to Deal with Mass Shootings

As promised, President Donald Trump has responded to the weekend shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio, offering up a five-point plan he believes will address the underlying problems that lead to mass shootings. After extending his condolences to those who lost loved ones, the president wasted no time calling on Congress to set aside their partisan differences to enact his plan—which raised concerns for infringing upon Americans’ constitutional protections. The plan includes the following points: • legislation to identify potential mass murders on social media, • removing the glorification of violence, such as in video games, from our society, • identification and, if necessary, involuntary confinement of those suffering from mental illness, • “red flag” laws to prevent those deemed a threat to society do not have access to firearms, and imposing the death penalty for all mass shootings. For full context, here is a transcript of the relevant portion of the president’s speech this morning at the White House: “The shooter in El Paso posted a manifesto online consumed by racist hate. In one voice, our nation must condemn racism, bigotry, and white supremacy. These sinister ideologies must be defeated. Hate has no place in America. Hatred warps the mind, ravages the heart, and devours the soul. We have asked the FBI to identify all further resources they need to investigate and disrupt hate crimes and domestic terrorism — whatever they need. “We must recognize that the Internet has provided a dangerous avenue to radicalize disturbed minds and perform demented acts. We must shine light on the dark recesses of the Internet, and stop mass murders before they start. The Internet, likewise, is used for human trafficking, illegal drug distribution, and so many other heinous crimes. The perils of the Internet and social media cannot be ignored, and they will not be ignored. “In the two decades since Columbine, our nation has watched with rising horror and dread as one mass shooting has followed another — over and over again, decade after decade. “We cannot allow ourselves to feel powerless. We can and will stop this evil contagion. In that task, we must honor the sacred memory of those we have lost by acting as one people. Open wounds cannot heal if we are divided. We must seek real, bipartisan solutions. We have to do that in a bipartisan manner. That will truly make America safer and better for all. “First, we must do a better job of identifying and acting on early warning signs. I am directing the Department of Justice to work in partisan — partnership with local, state, and federal agencies, as well as social media companies, to develop tools that can detect mass shooters before they strike. “As an example, the monster in the Parkland high school in Florida had many red flags against him, and yet nobody took decisive action. Nobody did anything. Why not? “Second, we must stop the glorification of violence in our society. This includes the gruesome and grisly video games that are now commonplace. It is too easy today for troubled youth to surround themselves with a culture that celebrates violence. We must stop or substantially reduce this, and it has to begin immediately. Cultural change is hard, but each of us can choose to build a culture that celebrates the inherent worth and dignity of every human life. That’s what we have to do. “Third, we must reform our mental health laws to better identify mentally disturbed individuals who may commit acts of violence and make sure those people not only get treatment, but, when necessary, involuntary confinement. Mental illness and hatred pulls the trigger, not the gun. “Fourth, we must make sure that those judged to pose a grave risk to public safety do not have access to firearms, and that, if they do, those firearms can be taken through rapid due process. That is why I have called for red flag laws, also known as extreme risk protection orders. “Today, I am also directing the Department of Justice to propose legislation ensuring that those who commit hate crimes and mass murders face the death penalty, and that this capital punishment be delivered quickly, decisively, and without years of needless delay. “These are just a few of the areas of cooperation that we can pursue. I am open and ready to listen and discuss all ideas that will actually work and make a very big difference. “Republicans and Democrats have proven that we can join together in a bipartisan fashion to address this plague. Last year, we enacted the STOP School Violence and Fix NICS Acts into law, providing grants to improve school safety and strengthening critical background checks for firearm purchases. At my direction, the Department of Justice banned bump stocks. Last year, we prosecuted a record number of firearms offenses. But there is so much more that we have to do. “Now is the time to set destructive partisanship aside — so destructive — and find the courage to answer hatred with unity, devotion, and love. Our future is in our control. America will rise to the challenge. We will always have and we always will win. The choice is ours and ours alone. It is not up to mentally ill monsters; it is up to us. “If we are able to pass great legislation after all of these years, we will ensure that those who were attacked will not have died in vain.” Democrats have made it clear that they’re only interested in using the tragedies to advance their goal of disarming the American people, including law abiding citizens. Meanwhile, the mainstream media has been pushing a new narrative: “white terrorism.” Headlines around the world, including in the UK and China, are all pushing this idea, even if it contradicts the facts on the ground in El Paso and Dayton. As a matter of fact, we’re now learning a lot more about Dayton shooter Conner Betts—like the fact he was a supporter of 2020 Democrat presidential candidate senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, that he espoused a socialist ideology, that he supported Antifa, and he was a Satanist. Meanwhile, the story of alleged El Paso shooter Patrick Crusius isn’t adding up. That was a subject of today’s TruNews God-cast. (Photo Credit: Joyce Boghosian/The White House) source https://trunews.com/stream/president-trump-offers-five-point-plan-to-deal-with-mass-shootings

[handandbanner]

What if McCain was not a hero and civility is not important? Our anti-colonial struggle for hearts and minds

I'm thinking about the colonial war on hearts and minds that seems to be waged constantly and the psychological impact on regular people who want to practice telling truth in public.  In recent days I observed that even people in my shared spaces who are supportive of anti-colonial values participated in naming McCain as a “war hero”.  There are things that are difficult I imagine about how to reflect on a life soon after death.  Those grieving personally may have a different set considerations and responsibilities to tend to in private mourning than the responsibilities we have in the stories we tell in public about the public career and contributions of public lives - truth has to be possible.  Even as we reflect on the giants of liberation movements who sacrificed life and freedom in the freedom struggle of oppressed people, we have a responsibility to pay attention to issues like patriarchy and misogyny, and point out the problematic in Nelson, Martin or Malcom as examples of towering figures, who especially in two of those cases were largely silent and complicit in the erasure and I would argue oppression of Black women within the liberation struggle and in their private lives.  We do not look for perfect leaders, but we do need to be able to tell the truth about what it is that people’s public lives were about and I would argue  that the measure of goodness in public life is tied to the impact of one’s actions on “the least of these” or the most vulnerable. There might be many ways to talk about a man who enthusiastically participates in a campaign to burn scores of villagers alive and later takes public office and exhibits good manners while championing aggressive disastrous war interventions. People might say for example, that he is “not Trump-like” (because of the manners) and apparently judging from the eulogies and for those still desperately trying to salvage a crumbling globally imposed perception of American moral leadership, it matters very much that there is somebody out there, a high-ranking public servant, but anybody really, any white man in politics with power and a globally recognizable name, who is “not Trump-like” and can take up a week’s cycle of headlines.  But should we give in to the idea that being “not-Trump” is worthy of valorization we will be succumbing once again the historical white-patriarchal ever falling standards of what it means to be good and decent in this world.  

Artist: Carrie Mae Weems

We seldom have a way of quantifying the harm and trauma of lies as a historical and everyday component of colonial harm. I think it's because when people are being killed, and being stolen from, being lied to feels like the lesser of the three constant evils of empire. Today global Indigenous movements are looking at what it means to decolonize institutions of learning as spaces where knowledge is produced and disseminated and spaces where minds are developed.  BIPOC students around the world are resisting having to learn in spaces where the images and names of white male perpetrators and architects of colonial genocide, enslavement and oppression have been upheld for decades and even centuries.  An example is the white supremacist Cecil Rhodes’ statue that South African students mobilized to have removed at the University of Cape Town in the #RhodesMustMall movement that later spread to Oxford University where his statue still stands.  As well as being an explicit white supremacist who called for global domination of the Anglo-Saxon race as the “first-race”, Rhodes’ legacy of racist public policy in Southern Africa included land acts that facilitated the violent dispossession and resource extraction that devastated Indigenous Black African communities as well as set the path towards the racist Apartheid regime. It would require a lot of space to discus all the ways that the dehumanizing aggression of Rhodes still impact communities today.  Same can be said of the legacy of slave-owner Isaac Royal who the Harvard School of Law’s #RoyalMustFall movement sought to raise awareness about or Canada’s John A. Macdonald and Wilfrid Laurier, whose names and images are also upheld in institutions of learning.  While the work of quantifying and documenting the harm that these men have perpetrated on whole cultures and communities around the world is still ongoing, part of the work that impacted communities have been left with is having to address dominant false narratives that have upheld these men as heroes.  This work for those who are forced to or choose to take it up has a cost associated with it that ranges from emotional and psychological suffering, to economic suffering due to loss of status as students or employment opportunities, to political imprisonment.  We also know that historically the work of undoing lies has cost people their lives.  

Artist: Carrie Mae Weems

What I have learned about the ongoing colonial project, is that the enactment of false narratives, just like the killing and the theft, is not just a historic practice but a constant assault. There are false narratives that are birthed constantly, and the empire seems to have more resources for narrative production that continues to wage war on the hearts and minds in all of our communities form the earliest age possible and we are all vulnerable.  I am also observing that false narratives are often introduced into the public consciousness in ways that are palatable and subtle and provide tension resolution.  

With all of these in mind it was disturbing to me to watch in the last couple of weeks for people who would usually be aligned with anti-colonial values, describe John McCain as a “war hero” in what seemed to be an attempt to hold up an alternative-to-Trump version of white male leadership.  

Most would agree that the Trump Age is marked by elevated tension and crisis. Not just for targeted communities who are suffering and dying but also in a different way for white people with colonially attained socio-economic privilege around the world.  With new levels of public discourse about racism and white-supremacy, as well as what I would describe as instances of both eruptive and reflective previously repressed and suppressed expressions of BIPOC colonial trauma, white people whose privileged false identities depended on the silence of BIPOC, are having to come to terms with identity displacement.  The conditions are ripe not just for the production of false narratives but also for a high-social-demand for lies, there is a market for it. People invested in oppression want to be told that who they are culturally and historically are not what the stories that BIPOC trauma are telling every day.  

We also know that whatever its original meanings, the concept of civility has evolved in the Western world as a historical tool for constructing social conditions that make a particular kind of duplicity acceptable.  Fundamentally and strongly oppositional realities, not just minor contractions, but realities that cannot co-exist without rendering each other meaningless are held up as possible.  An example would be the rapist, slave-owning “gentleman”.  It is important for empire to create a new “virtue” because age-old recognizable concepts like love and justice will never be ultimately sustainable under empire.  But civility provides an opportunity for subscribers to engage the human need to be good and virtuous by living out a value that is created by and in service of the empire alone.  

Maybe it did not seem like a significant contradiction to talk about McCain as a “war hero” for those who are sympathetic to anti-colonial liberation movements in the past week.  What could it have looked like for those privately grieving to acknowledge McCain’s humanity and for the truth to also be told in public about the Vietnam War? Does the truth matter? Can McCain be a “war hero” today and Dr. Martin Luther King be a moral leader a few months later in January during annual memorializing rituals, on the same timelines?

Before his death, MLK denounced the Vietnam War as criminal and an expression of American colonialism, shortly after he was assassinated.  McCain at the same time in history was on an aerial mission called Operation Rolling Thunder that killed at least 50,000 civilians and that was just one mission. These are mostly villagers.  There is documentation of McCain complaining that the target list provided to aerial bombers was “too restrictive”.  The bombing attacks by the U.S on South-East Asia were so brutal and severe, the bombing in villages is said to exceed all bombs dropped by all sides involved in World War II. This was time in history when white men who relished in murder would do things just because they could, the documented transcripts from “bombing missions” support this view.   The severity of the attacks would trouble the hearts of a population involved in their own freedom struggle within the America empire, so that Black leaders of faith, members of the Black church, the Black Muslim community and all Black-Liberation traditions made resisting the war a primary focus of their own struggle that was finally making some gains. By speaking out against the war in Vietnam, Black American movement leaders experienced increased backlash and persecution become primary targets of American domestic terror campaigns. 

There are implications for choosing to tell the story of McCain’s public life as a lesson in civility, as has been the practice with figures such as Obama and others.  It sounds virtuous and it meets a need for some members of the dominant culture but there is more at stake. There is a day that telling the fuller story of 20th century American colonialism will be part of the day to day work of surviving cultures around the world.  And it may be that having to dismantle the narrative of McCain as a “war hero” that we passively contribute to today, in the future will cost recovering cultures their health, wellness or liberty.  

Students in various parts of the world today that seek to tell the true story and dismantle false narratives about colonizers have faced a growing backlash.  The movement to decolonize campuses in Canada was met with a counter-movement that is working to centre white supremacy and promote explicit discourse that dehumanizes BIPOC communities under the guise of free speech.  Decolonized learning empowers students to draw attention to and transform curriculums that exclude the histories and realities of their communities.  The struggle to decolonize learning is a struggle for space to shape the minds and hearts of BIPOC students and allies in away that will allow them to effectively serve and give back to their recovering cultures and societies.  The counter movements led by the so-called “alt-right/far-right white supremacist” groups are responses that seek to maintain institutions of learning as part of the capitalist projects that uphold global white supremacy.  It is no surprise that relationships are being built between leaders of these movements and politicians who are hostile to racial and social justice.  These past few days in Ontario the Ford government has mandated that all higher-learning institutions put in place “free-speech policies” by January of 2019 or risk losing public funding.  These “free speech policies” so far are being used to provide mobilizing platform to explicit views that call for racist and violent policies against marginalized groups and communities around the world.  Even so, the work of telling the truth about our collective histories and decolonizing spaces of learning continues, because many students around the world believe that legacies of colonizers must fall as we continue to struggle towards upholding the truth about the past and working our future liberation.

[jtvizion]

The Night America Fell

By: J. R. Torres

The night America fell will forever be seared into the depths of my mind. I was awoken in the dead of night by the harrowing sound of lawlessness. Sirens blared, shots rang, and thousands of distressed voices echoed into the night. It was the sound of America dying.

As I peered out the window of my 3rd story apartment, I witnessed pure chaos in the streets. Flashes, smoke, and people running from their homes. There were militarized police officers firing rounds at masked men who were also heavily armed. I even witnessed a police officer executed by a masked man in cold blood. That was when I realized that if I didn’t hide, I would probably meet the same fate as the slain officer. Without thinking I grabbed what I could and immediately made my way into my attic and once there, I placed my loaded trunk on the attics latching door, and stayed up the whole night listening to the chaos echo into the cold winter night.

It’s been 44 days since America fell. The only reason I know it’s been 44 days is because there are 44 carvings in the floorboard of this dank, bone-chilling attic which has since become home. To this day, I still can’t believe how quickly it all came crashing down.

Everyday I wake up hoping this new reality is just a dream, and everyday I wake up realizing that this living nightmare is reality. ​Everyday I wonder if it will be my last...

As I sit here corroding away in desolation, I will try to find solace by writing out my thoughts and feelings in hopes that maybe someday, someone will read my words and come to some sort of understanding as to how America, the greatest most powerful country in the history of the world, became a war-torn nation.

I remember learning about Anne Frank when I was in Middle School. I remember always wondering how she met the fate she did. How could the people of the world allow innocent people to be rounded up and slaughtered? I, like many others, always demonized Hitler and the Nazi’s because they were the “bad guys”. They were the ones who set the bar for evil in the 20th century, and never had it ever crossed our minds that we would top the heinous evil that was the Holocaust. That was perhaps our biggest mistake...

...

The months and weeks leading up to the fall were unthinkable. It felt like a roller coaster ride to hell. Everyday there was some new hate crime being committed, each more vile than the last. Ghetto’s were starting to look like war zones between militarized police forces and black men. There was also a sharp rise in anti-semitism caused by the resurgence of white supremacy. It had become OK to hate, and it was our newly elected leader who made it OK. Protests against his authoritarian rule turned into riots and then riots turned into chaos. It was as though the seams that kept this chosen land together were starting to stretch and snap caused by this growing suppressed anger that had been festering deep from within since the founding of America in 1776.

The major media outlets were constantly being denigrated by the administration. An administration whose obvious purpose in retrospect, was to promote the welfare of the economic elite. Truth was becoming harder and harder to discern. False stories being propagated on social media networks became more and more common. I truly believe that this brief era of misinformation was one of the cruxes that brought us to where we are now. Another crux was our worship of the almighty dollar. It was the dollars in our pockets that afforded us happiness, the less we had the less happy we were or so it seemed. It wasn’t until the hyperinflation set in that we all began to lose faith in the dollar. We all lost faith in those green pieces of paper that we worked our lives away to acquire. During that loss of faith was when our nation hit terminal velocity.

...

After the fall, I couldn’t sleep for what felt like weeks. If you could only imagine what it’s like to have your mind on a constant state of heightened alert. If you could only understand the damage too much adrenaline will do to you. It permanently alters you, creating some sort of PTSD, where just the littlest things will set you into this pure flight or fight, kill mode. You don’t feel human. And imagine something as simple as the creak in a floorboard being able to put you in that mind set. The simple sounds of a settling house. Howling wind. A roach as it scatters around in darkness. I know I am clinically insane by now, but it’s not like that really matters much anymore.

I remember the first time I was able to somewhat comfortably fall asleep, and it was during the day. A surprisingly warm and bright morning for being in January. There hadn’t been any gun shot’s fired for what felt almost like a full 48 hours. The last thing I remember seeing as I drifted off was the crystal blue sky through a small hole in the attics conjoined ceiling. It was the greatest feeling in the world as a ray from the sun slowly started to creep in, warming my face. That day I dreamed the most vivid dream I’ve ever had in my life.

This dream featured full sensation, and vibrant color and detail. I could clearly see the sweat as it dripped from Alexis’s breast as she rode me like a wild southern cow-girl. The way her breast dangled around as she worked her thick warm squishy hips around and in that motion she knew would extract my seed from deep from within. The ripe aroma of just me and her as we made the kind of love that babies are born from. In that pinnacle moment, I was awoken by the loud deafening boom caused by a nearby explosive that rattled my soul. I was in a state of petrification for days.

...

Starvation is the most peculiar motivation. You’d be surprised at how quickly your fears and priorities change once your stomach has begun to eat itself. I had only heard a few gunshots ring out in the distance throughout the day. It was my plan that once night fell I would venture out of this dreary attic and go down to collect what remained in my apartment. Unfortunately I had not gone shopping before the fall. With the starvation settling in I remembered I should have some stale bread in the pantry and maybe an old box of pasta noodles. As I climbed down, my apartment felt desolate, and it no longer felt like home. When I peered out the window, I was mortified by the the landscape. The once affluent neighborhood full of homes with exotic architecture had been degraded and ruined to look like an abandoned ghost town.

Homes had been hollowed out, some burned. Debris and abandoned cars littered the street. I also no longer could see the steeple of the Lutheran Church that used to sit in the sky only a couple blocks away. This mere glimpse from my window painted a very grim picture of what had become of the world and I could not believe my eyes. I could not believe that Norfolk Virginia, now looked similar to how Syria looked during the height of their recent Civil War.

As I made my way to the kitchen to scavenge what was left, I came to the conclusion that I would soon have to leave the safety of my apartment if I was going to survive. But where would I go? Who could I call? Cell phone and internet service had not worked since the fall. It looked like a war zone outside, and most likely there were still hostile insurgents residing in some of the houses in the neighborhood. The thought of not having anywhere to go was paralyzing. As I made my way up the attic with a can of black beans, a box of cereal dust some mayo and 3 slices of stale bread, I started to hear voices at the back door. Luckily I had just shut the attic door when they kicked in my back door and started sacking my apartment. I nearly passed out from the fear and anxiety as they moved about my place throwing around my belongings. My stomach churned with knots as I heard the hostile voices below. One of the guys swore he saw something... If they had surveillance over my apartment complex so heavy that that they could see me moving about at night, I knew my chances of successfully making any kind of escape were close to none.

13 nights later, driven by a psychosis derived from starvation and acute thirst, I made my way out of my apartment to find any kind of nourishment. I stealthily creeped down the back fire escape checking each busted-in apartment unit for anything edible. You’d be surprised at how good dog food tastes... I’m sure if you had served the meaty paste on some fancy crackers with a garnish at a party, most probably wouldn't even know the difference. My ultimate low point was when I discovered the ultimate source for water. Toilets. With no more running water, toilet reservoirs became a source of life.

A couple days later I attempted to make a run for it, even though I didn’t know where “it” was. Maybe I could make it to my parents house, they only lived 30 minutes away by car, which would only take a few hours by foot. It was so nice to feel the cool wind of the night brush against my face as a trekked through my decimated neighborhood. There was an eerie stillness and a quietness that night. Every little sound effect was amplified with high fidelity. I made it

about 6 miles before I ran into the most horrifying thing I had ever seen. The on-ramp to 264 east from Norfolk to Virginia Beach had been blocked off and partially destroyed. In front of the blockade were several beams interconnected with razor blade barbed wire, and strung up on the beams were bodies, some women, some men, and some children... Ever since that day I’ve never tried leaving again. I have accepted the fact that I will probably die in this dusty attic in Norfolk. It’s only a matter of time now...

...

Crispy fried chicken with stuffed shells, garlic bread, lumpia and a side of peas and jasmine rice with a scoop of fresh guacamole on top and a large cold glass of chocolate milk is what my body yearns for. My hallucinations have gotten so vivid that I can almost taste the thought of real food. Thank god for this newly acquired vivid imagination or else eating roaches would be unbearable. Yes I’ve fallen this low... But I do what I have to do. Contrary to popular belief, roaches actually don’t taste that bad if you eat them properly. If you think you can just chomp into them then you’re going to be greatly disappointed when remnants of the shell get stuck between your teeth like popcorn kernel skin. There’s a proper process, kind of like eating crawfish, except with roaches, you bite the heads off and suck on the bodies.

I’ve been really tired lately. So tired that I slip in and out of consciousness throughout the day. The sleep is very deep and very dark and dreams are few and far between. This may be due to the mental fatigue from the vivid daydreams I’ve been having. While awake, certain moments keep replaying through my mind like an old VHS tape stuck on repeat. One is of my first memory, of me yelling at a news channel 3 anchor on television, angered over the fact she was ignoring me. I remember my first real kiss, and how happy I was, and how for a week straight I would just randomly smile from thinking about it. I also remember the pain from when she left me to be with someone else. I remember our wonderful family reunions in Miami Florida. My cousins and I laughing into the tonight, almost getting kicked out of hotels, and eating authentic puerto rican food til our bellies were the fullest of full. Arroz con gandules and slow roasted pernil with the salty savory skin that tasted like crispy heaven. Usually my mouth would water when thinking these thoughts but now the inside of my mouth is as dry as a desert and my throat feels like sandpaper.

I was skinny before the fall, now my body is an emaciated pile of skin and bones. My knees are knobby and shake when I try to stand. I can barely pull myself up off the floor anymore, but it’s fine. I know that I will probably never leave this attic again. The only thing left for a while was hope, but that hope has eroded away like my mind, body and soul. I’m tired. All of my memories are starting to fade except for one that I can’t stop thinking about. The memory is of me and my mom shopping at the commissary and we stop to get sherbert ice cream. Orange with pink swirls was always my favorite.

[cabiba]

Joseph Goebbels said fascists should not worry about their propaganda being too rough or too mean. ‘It ought not be decent nor ought it be gentle or soft or humble; it ought to lead to success.’

No one could accuse the anti-Semitic propaganda in London’s East End of being ‘soft’. The Los Angeles graffiti artist Kalen Ockerman, who calls himself ‘Mear One’ to sound more street, painted a muralon the side of a house near Brick Lane showing bankers sitting round a monopoly board resting on the backs of suffering humanity.

The bank that crashed the British economy almost a decade ago was the Royal Bank of Scotland. But history shows there’s more of a market for hating the Jews than hating the Scots. Rather than portray Fred Goodwin, Ockerman decided to show a ‘banker group made up of Jewish and white Anglos’. They represented ‘the elite banker cartel known as the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Morgans, the ruling class, elite view, the Wizards of Oz’. It is the ‘Rothschilds’ with their bulging hooked noses and stringy beards who grab the attention. In what was once the heart of Jewish London, they shuffled their monopoly money, beneath the eye-in-the pyramid symbol so beloved of conspiracists wishing to tie the Judaic to the Masonic.

The work reeked of fascism. Oppression was represented by grinding cogs that might have been painted by an Italian futurist circa 1920. The bankers did not have today’s gym-toned bodies and Armani suits. They were hideous old men in stiff collars no financier has worn since the 1930s. Ockerman called his effort ‘freedom for humanity,’ and you did not need acute perception to gather who humanity needed to be free of.

Apart from Ockerman, no one in 2012 tried to pretend that this was anything other than racist art. Even Lutfur Rahman, the then Muslim mayor of Tower Hamlets said it ‘perpetuated anti-Semitic propaganda about conspiratorial Jewish domination of financial and political institutions’.

No one, that is, apart from Jeremy Corbyn, who protested against the mural’s destruction, and compared its shabby creator to the great Diego Rivera.

Many have noticed the difference between the 20th century and now is that today racists rarely admit to being racist. Donald Trump and the Republican Party go to great lengths to stop African Americans voting, and receive the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan. But call them racists and they point to the record which shows they have never asserted white supremacy.

Every denunciation of high finance on the modern left sooner or late invokes ‘the Rothschilds’ rather than ‘the Goodwins’. Meanwhile, ‘Zionist’ has become an all-purpose signifier of evil. Yesterday, I was passed left-wing propaganda urging the removal of the earthy Brummie MP Jess Phillips that has been knocking around for a year now. What can her enemies say against her, I thought. I should have known better. The first charge was that she was a ‘Zionist MP’. Of course it was. It’s now the first charge against every traitor to and deviant from far left orthodoxy.

‘If you are antisemitic, you will be driven out of the Labour Party,’ Owen Jones, who appears to have given up on journalism to become a Labour spin doctor, assured frightened Jews last week. Yet the leader he serves was a member of  a private Facebook group that promoted holocaust deniers, and has endorsed every variety of Arab anti-Semite including one who raised the medieval ‘blood libel’ that Jews baked bread with the blood of Christian children from the grave. When it was forced to explain his support for a mural depicting the a hook-nosed global conspiracy yesterday, Corbyn’s office first claimed that ‘Jeremy’ was defending free speech: a ludicrous statement given that, in 2006, he was at a rally in Trafalgar Square denouncing the Danish cartoons of Muhammad, and has never to my knowledge been on a platform fighting for freedom of speech – and I should know as I have been on most of them. Finally, it admitted that five years after the event, and five years too late, and only when he had finally been cornered, ‘Jeremy’ accepted the work was offensive and he expressed ‘sincere regret’ at failing to look more closely at the mural.

This is the way it goes with Corbyn. His supporters say he has spent his life fighting anti-Semitism, a defence that would seem less spurious if they could supply sceptics with a single example of solidarity with Jewish people. For, and on the contrary, rather than finding examples of Corbyn fighting anti-Semitism all we can find is examples of the leader of the opposition allying with anti-Semites with a thoroughly modern sneakiness.

Just as Trump has never announced in plain language that the white man is superior to the black, so Corbyn has never announced that Jews are conspiring to control the world. Both men give just enough to satisfy the racists in their own ‘base’ then back away denouncing accusations of racism as vile slurs. In both cases, the outside observer sees a slippery operator sending out nods and winks while always being aware of the need for plausible deniability.

You could see the tactic at work with Russia. Corbyn, Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray do not enthusiastically endorse the gangsters in the Kremlin as their predecessors in the communist movement endorsed Lenin and Stalin. Corbyn did not say the Russians were innocent of the charge of using nerve agents to attempt murder in Salisbury. Instead, he gave Russian propagandists and his supporters in the world of Internet cranks just enough to work with when he opined that although Russia might have done it, ‘Russian mafia-like groups that have been allowed to gain a toehold in Britain cannot be excluded’.

A few months ago, a friend who is also a successful stand-up told me that he was one of only four comedians on the circuit who did not support Corbyn. In  universities and the left-wing press those of us who have spoken out against the far left have grown used to being met with – how can I put this mildly? – a cool response from our colleagues. The assumption among right-thinking, left-leaning people is that they are good and wickedness is confined to the right. By this reasoning the worst charge that can be thrown at the far left is that is naively idealistic, a charge which, when you think about it, is no charge at all. By this reasoning, Corbyn is an amiable old buffer rather than a dirty old man.

Such thinking can predominate because, until now, no one in British history has had to confront the reality of the far left in control of the Labour party, and perhaps soon the country. Most comedians have not satirised it, most academics, dramatists and journalists have not exposed it because until now there has been no need to take it seriously; no need to understand that the far left is not merely an extension of the centre left but a malign force that, as Momentum is proving, regards the centre-left as its avowed enemy.

Perhaps as more is revealed about its darkness respectable opinion will change. Whether it will change in time is another matter. Maybe I am being pessimistic but it looks to me that the politics Corbyn represents are ‘the left’ now and will remain so for a generation.

[mdye]

Up until about a year ago, I worked at a historic site in the South that included an old house and a nearby plantation. My job was to lead tours and tell guests about the people who made plantations possible: the slaves.

The site I worked at most frequently had more than 100 enslaved workers associated with it— 27 people serving the household alone, outnumbering the home's three white residents by a factor of nine. Yet many guests who visited the house and took the tour reacted with hostility to hearing a presentation that focused more on the slaves than on the owners.

The first time it happened, I had just finished a tour of the home. People were filing out of their seats, and one man stayed behind to talk to me. He said, "Listen, I just wanted to say that dragging all this slavery stuff up again is bringing down America."

I started to protest, but he interrupted me. "You didn't know. You're young. But America is the greatest country in the world, and these people out there, they'd do anything to make America less great." He was loud and confusing, and I was 22 years old and he seemed like a million feet tall.

Lots of folks who visit historic sites and plantations don't expect to hear too much about slavery while they're there. Their surprise isn't unjustified: Relatively speaking, the move toward inclusive history in museums is fairly recent, and still underway. And as recent debates over Confederate iconography have shown, as a country we're still working through our response to the horrors of slavery, even a century and a half after the end of the Civil War.

Read Margaret Biser’s answers to your questions from her reddit AMA.

The majority of interactions I had with museum guests were positive, and most visitors I encountered weren't as outwardly angry as that man who confronted me early on. (Though some were. One favorite: a 60-ish guy in a black tank top who, annoyed both at having to wait for a tour and at the fact that the next tour focused on slaves, came back at me with, "Yeah, well, Egyptians enslaved the Israelites, so I guess what goes around comes around!")

Still, I'd often meet visitors who had earnest but deep misunderstandings about the nature of American slavery. These folks were usually, but not always, a little older, and almost invariably white. I was often asked if the slaves there got paid, or (less often) whether they had signed up to work there. You could tell from the questions — and, not less importantly, from the body language — that the people asking were genuinely ignorant of this part of the country's history.

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The more overtly negative reactions to hearing about slave history were varied in their levels of subtlety. Sometimes it was as simple as watching a guest's body language go from warm to cold at the mention of slavery in the midst of the historic home tour. I also met guests from all over the country who, by means of suggestive questioning of the "Wouldn't you agree that..." variety, would try to lead me to admit that slavery and slaveholders weren't as bad as they've been made out to be.

On my tours, such moments occurred less frequently if visitors of color were present. Perhaps guests felt more comfortable asking me these questions because I am white, though my African-American coworkers were by no means exempt from such experiences. At any rate, these moments happened often enough that I eventually began writing them down (and, later, tweeting about them).

Taken together, these are the most common misconceptions about American slavery I encountered during my time interpreting history to the public:

1) People think slaveholders "took care" of their slaves out of the goodness of their hearts, rather than out of economic interest

There is a surprisingly prevalent belief out there that slaves' rations and housing were bestowed upon them out of the master's goodwill, rather than handed down as a necessity for their continued labor — and their master's continued profit.

This view was expressed to me often, usually by people asking if the family was "kind" or "benevolent" to their slaves, but at no point was it better encapsulated than by a youngish mom taking the house tour with her 6-year-old daughter a couple of years ago. I had been showing them the inventory to the building, which sets a value on all the high-ticket items in the home, including silver, books, horses, and, of course, actual human people. (Remember that the technical definition of a slave is not just an unpaid worker, but a person considered property.)

For most guests, this is the most emotionally meaningful moment of the tour. I showed the young mother some of the slaves' names and pointed out which people were related to each other. The mom stiffened up, raised her chin, and asked pinchedly, "Did the slaves here appreciate the care they got from their mistress?"

2) People know that field slavery was bad but think household slavery was pretty all right, if not an outright sweet deal

"These were house slaves, so they must have had a pretty all right life, right?" is a phrase I heard again and again. Folks would ask me if members of the enslaved household staff felt "fortunate" that they "got to" sleep in the house or "got to" serve a politically powerful owner.

Relatedly, many guests seemed to think that the only reason to seek liberation from household slavery was if you were being beaten or abused. A large part of the house tours I gave was narratives of men and women who dared to attempt escape from it, and so many museum visitors asked me, in all earnestness and surprise, why those men and women tried to escape: "They lived in a nice house here, and they weren't being beaten. Do we know why they wanted to leave?" These folks were seeing the evil of slavery primarily as a function of the physical environment and the behavior of individual slaveowners, not as inherent to the system itself.

It is worth mentioning that I never, on any tour, said the slaves weren't being beaten -- these visitors simply assumed it. It is also worth mentioning here that the bulk of wanted ads placed in newspapers for fugitive slaves are for house servants, not field workers. Apparently whatever slavery was like in the big house, people were willing to risk their lives to get away from it.

3) People think slavery and poverty are interchangeable

Sometimes in the course of a conversation, guests I spoke with would remark that while being a field slave was indeed difficult, on the whole it was hardly worse than being a humble farmer living off the land. Folks have not always been taught that slavery was much more than just difficult labor: It was violence, assault, family separation, fear.

One important branch of this phenomenon was guests huffily bringing up every disadvantaged group of white people under the sun — the Irish, the Polish, the Jews, indentured servants, regular servants, poor people, white women, Baptists, Catholics, modern-day wage workers, whomever — and say something like, "Well, you know they had it almost as bad as/just as bad as/much worse than slaves did." Within the context of a tour or other interpretation, this behavior had the effect of temporarily pulling sympathy and focus away from African Americans and putting it on whites.

The most extreme example of this occurred in my very last week of work. A gentleman came in to view our replica slave quarter and, upon learning how crowded it was, said, "Well, I've seen taverns where five or six guys had to share a bed!" — thus adding "tavern-goers" to the list of white people who supposedly had it just as bad as slaves.

4) People don't understand how prejudice influenced slaveholders' actions beyond mere economic interest

I was occasionally asked what motivation slaveholders would have had for beating, starving, or otherwise maltreating enslaved workers. This was often phrased as, "If you think about it economically, they don't work as hard if you don't feed 'em!" (The frequent use of the general "you" in this formulation is significant, because it assumes that the archetypal listener is a potential slaveholder —i.e., that the archetypal listener is white.)

Sometimes this question was asked sincerely; at other times the asker was using it to suggest that stories of abuse, suffering, and exploitation under slavery were just outliers or exaggerations.

What this perspective fails to take into account is the racist beliefs that made cruelty to slaves seem ethically permissible. Slaveowners told each other that black workers were stronger than white ones and thus didn't require as much food or rest. They also told each other that black Americans had a higher pain tolerance — literal thick skin — and that therefore physical punishments could be employed with less restraint.

Such beliefs also helped slaveowners feel confident dismissing complaints from enslaved workers as ungrateful whining.

5) People think "loyalty" is a fair term to apply to people held in bondage

One of the few times I actually felt scared of a guest was during a crowded tour a couple of years ago. I was describing a typical dining room service: the table packed with wealthy and influential couples from the surrounding town, and, in the corners of the room, enslaved waiting men watching and serving but unable to speak. The tour was so crowded that not everyone could fit into the room, and a few tourists were listening from the hallway.

As soon as I finished my sentence about the slaves, an expressionless voice behind me intoned, "Were they loyal?" I turned around, and saw a man resting his arms on either side of the door frame behind me, blocking the exit. He looked like he was about to slap me.

I asked him why he would ask that. "They gave 'em food. Gave 'em a place to live," he said. He was just staring into the room, blank in the eyes.

"I think most people would act ‘loyal' to a person who could shoot them for leaving," I said. He and his adult sons keep their arms crossed as they stared at me for the rest of the tour, and I tried to stay toward the middle of the group.

All the misconceptions discussed here serve to prop up one overarching and incorrect belief: that slavery wasn't really all that bad. And if even slavery was supposedly benign, then how bad can the struggles faced by modern day people of color really be?

Why these misconceptions are so prevalent is a fair question. Sometimes guests were just repeating ideas they'd heard in school or from family. They were only somewhat invested in those ideas personally, and they were open to hearing new perspectives (especially when backed up by historical data).

In many other cases, however, justifications of slavery seemed primarily like an attempt by white Americans to avoid feelings of guilt for the past. After all, for many people, beliefs about one's origins reflect one's beliefs about oneself. We don't want our ancestors to have done bad things because we don't want to think of ourselves as being bad people. These slavery apologists were less invested in defending slavery per se than in defending slaveowners, and they weren't defending slaveowners so much as themselves.

Other visitors seemed to find part of their identity in a sense of class victimhood, and they were unwilling to share the sympathy and attention of victimhood with black Americans. As Frank Guan pointed out in the New Republic, explicitness of racism tends to be inversely proportional to social class. Guests who expressed racism most openly to me often appeared to have had recent ancestors who were poor, who were prevented by convention and economics from rising in social status, and who were exploited by the powerful — but who were protected by their whiteness from the extreme oppression visited on African Americans. Regardless of their current wealth level or social status, they still felt that the deck had been stacked against them for generations. Their sense of ancestral victimhood was so personal that the suggestion that any group of people had it worse than their ancestors did was a threat to their sense of self.

And maybe some of these guests were just looking for somewhere to place their anger at their problems, their sense of powerlessness, and their discomfort at social change. They found a scapegoat in black America. I imagine that's what motivated Charleston shooter Dylann Roof, the Unite the Right movement, and others — that feeling of being aggrieved, and wanting someone to blame for it.

Regardless of why they were espoused, all the misconceptions discussed here lead to the same result: the assertion that slavery wasn't really all that bad ("as long as you had a godly master," as one guest put it). And if slavery itself was benign — slavery, a word which in most parlances is a shorthand for unjust hardship and suffering — if even slavery itself was all right, then how bad can the struggles faced by modern-day African Americans really be? Why feel bad for those who complain about racist systems today? The minimization of the unjustness and horror of slavery does more than simply keep the bad feelings of guilt, jealousy, or anger away: It liberates the denier from social responsibility to slaves' descendants.

The question of how to improve this state of affairs is gigantic, and better heads than mine have already said much about it. The tough thing is that racism comes more from the gut than from the mind: You can prove slavery was bad six ways from Sunday, but people can still choose to believe otherwise if they want. Addressing racism isn't just about correcting erroneous beliefs — it's about making people see the humanity in others. We need better education that demonstrates the complexity and dignity of all people; continued efforts from community organizations and faith communities to give justice its due; and better media portraying people of color as people, not caricatures or symbols. Art, public school, faith, entertainment — these are voices that address the subconscious, voices we absorb silently without even noticing. None of these is a complete solution, of course — they are all oblique routes to building compassion.

It's certainly not a bad idea for white Americans to take time to consider the ways in which we may personally have been complicit in oppression, but blame and guilt aren't really the point of telling the histories of enslaved people. The point is to honor those whose tales have not been told.

On the very small scale of leading historic house tours, what helped me combat ahistorical statements was to establish trust and rapport with guests from the get-go. For me, gentleness was key: It created an environment in which people were willing to hear new views and felt less nervous asking questions. For example, guests — especially older folks — used to ask me all the time whether the people who owned the house were "good slaveowners." I would say, "Well, that's an interesting question," and suggest a couple of reasons why even the phrase good slaveowner itself is troubling. They'd nod and look reflective. We were already friends, so they didn't feel attacked by the correction. Then again, maybe they only believed me because they trusted a fellow white person as an unbiased source. And making a personal connection isn't a foolproof way to diffuse racism, as the shooting in Charleston shows: Roof felt so welcomed by the members of Emanuel AME Church that he considered not killing any of them, yet ultimately he went through with his plan.

An older colleague once reminded me to "talk to people, not at them." It's a small piece of advice. But day by day as I was face to face with strangers, challenging their deeply held beliefs on race, it helped.

Margaret Biser gave educational tours and presentations at a historic site for more than six years. Read more stories of her experiences on Twitter @AfAmHistFail.

First Person is Vox's home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.

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[taafka-invisible]

DIARY OF A TEENAGED LATINA SINCE THE 2016 ELECTION

Before we get to it. Let me tell you something: TRUMP LOVES HATE  TRUMP SUPPORTERS LOVE HATE TOO. WHITE SUPREMACY DOESN'T REQUIRE HATE TO FUNCTION. BUT HATE FUNCTIONED WELL INSIDE THE MAJORITY OF WHITE VOTERS DURING THE LAST ELECTION.

There's no way to look past, or ignore, or decide something else is more important than the people who can ignore the plight of their neighbors and chant "Build That Wall." That's hate. Being able to be affiliated with a group that encourages that means you're hate-filled yourself or dead to hate because it's hiding in you somewhere. The only ethical choice a republican had this election -- if they believed every single thing painted on Hillary over the years at Faux News-- was to not vote at all. 

EVEN THE SUPPORTERS THAT HELD THEIR NOSES AS THE VOTED FOR HIM should be seen as hate-filled whether they are or not. Trump supporters are as deadly to us just as the overseers and poor whites that surrounded the slave plantations, waiting to turn in and report slaves for running away 200 years ago.  The system of slavery absolutely didn't work without 90% white participation back then -- and that's while only a small fraction of white people owned slaves.  Today, the system of white supremacy apparently works with 57% of white people voting to keep it in place.  In case you are wondering, yes, I believe 57% white voters represents 57% total adult white population.  In fact, if both sides were the same on abortion rights etc, white women would have voted for Trump at a rate of 63 to 66%, maybe more than white men -- if my anecdotal evidence can be believed. I know where I live. I know who I'm talking to day-to-day. There's a reason white feminists are having a hard as hell time trying to be intersectional, arguing among themselves with large numbers of white women who CHOOSE to believe that "Black Live Matter" means "Black Lives Matter ONLY" instead of "Black Lives Matter TOO"  

When you believe a group of people not like you are of low character and low integrity, why wouldn't you believe "Black Lives Matter" means "Black Lives Matter ONLY" instead of "Black Lives Matter TOO?" That's how white supremacy works: You believe you are of superior ethical/moral stock and you curse others not like you and yours accordingly. 

And when you only care about those inside your white bubble, you think this is just more right / left political shenanigans. Inside the white bubble, you don't care that people are going to be destroyed and that some will actually die.  And the teenage girl who submitted her diary entries for us to read understand this. These diary entries should be seen as representing the outcome of hate OR e-race-sure - OR just plain lack of empathy, a lack of empathy so huge that it is justifiably defined as "evil."  Angelina Alvarez 's diary entries just broke my heart and and enraged me at the same time * * * * *

Feeling Rebloggy

HEADLINE

‘Don’t tell me it’s going to be OK’: diary of a Latino teenager in the age of Trump

from THE GUARDIAN

Angelina Alvarez fought pro-Trump graffiti by wearing a Dump Trump shirt to school. After he won the election, she kept a diary about her life and feelings

Election Day – 8 November

Trump won … I don’t even know what to think. I’m just scared, I want to be with my grandma right now and just hug her. My grandma that came here as an immigrant, who worked hard, who was able to buy a home, who sent her kids to college, who later became documented. How can people hate someone like her? 

I’m looking at my friend’s Snapchat stories and seeing that even a few of my “friends” are excited that he won. I ask them why they hate themselves. Unsure how to answer, they delete their stories. I’m just thinking about all of the families that are going to be affected by this. I pray that we all stay strong and do not back down to any of the obstacles we have ahead of us. It is such a disappointment. Our country is a disappointment.

9 NovemberIt was so uncomfortable at school today … I had my classes that have the biggest Trump supporters in my school. They were surprisingly dead silent, all of them. They didn’t look at me and I didn’t really look at them. I wonder why they were so quiet though, it scares me honestly but I don’t know why. 

My sister and friends told me that they saw a lot of people wearing their Trump gear and congratulating each other. I didn’t want to be there, I just wanted to go home. My stomach was uneasy and I didn’t even want to eat lunch. I couldn’t think in class, I couldn’t stay focused. I wanted to run home and just lay in my bed. 

Is this really my neighborhood or am I an intruder? 

One of my friends that I’ve known since I was in kindergarten, whose mother is undocumented, saw my sister and broke down sobbing. And I just read a post from another friend, she and her mother were taunted by junior high kids yelling “Trump” and “Go back to Mexico”. This is happening here, at my school, in my neighborhood. Is this really my neighborhood or am I an intruder?

10 NovemberThis morning I got a message from a teacher that we were having a meeting to talk about everything that’s going on with Trump. I love that our teachers care about us and how we are feeling. In reading all the posts that people are putting up I feel sad that they are alone and wish they could join us. 

I took a couple of my friends to the meeting. At first, there were only about 10 people – 15 minutes later there were about 100 of us. I felt so liberated and happy seeing everyone walking in. My heart was beating so fast I wanted to cry, I wanted to hug everyone. Seeing everyone in solidarity made me so proud, it made me feel hopeful. 

About 10 students spoke up and talked about not being scared, to unite and to prove the Trump supporters wrong. I wanted to get up there and point out that it’s not just Trump – he has all these followers behind him that are capable of worse things. I want to compare our situation with what the Jews must have felt when Hitler went from being a joke to being their leader. The pigment of our skin and the accent in our voice is like the star on their clothing.

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