(no subject)
Oct. 13th, 2019 02:39 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* "Xi's Crackdown on Religion Is China's Worst in 40 Years:" https://www.ozy.com/acumen/xis-crackdown-on-religion-is-chinas-worst-in-40-years/95719/
* "White House Threatens Turkey With Crippling Sanctions:" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/us/politics/turkey-sanctions-syria-kurds-trump.html
* "U.S. official says situation in Syria is ‘rapidly deteriorating’:" http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/northern-syria-to-see-u-s-troop-evacuation-sec-of-defense-says-71191621740
* "Attorney General Barr rages against secularist "assault" on religion:" https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/10/attorney-general-barr-rages-against-secularist-assault-on-religion/
* "Barr blames social ills on ‘secularists’ in religious freedom speech:" http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/barr-delivers-speech-on-religious-freedom-at-notre-dame-law-school-71193157830
* "Investigations Of Fatal Shootings On The Border Can Drag On For Years:" https://www.npr.org/2019/09/07/758339563/investigations-of-fatal-shootings-on-the-border-can-drag-on-for-years
* "Conservatives say we’ve abandoned reason and civility. The Old South said that, too.:" https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/29/conservatives-say-weve-abandoned-reason-civility-old-south-said-that-too/?arc404=true
* This is from a while back, but it's worth reading. "The Proud Boys’ Real Target:" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/meaning-street-protests-portland/596686/
"The real target, though, is not Portland or antifa but all of us, and our sense of security that we are free citizens of a democratic nation, free to take our children downtown to play or to assemble peacefully to advocate values that the Republican Party does not approve. That party under Trump is now taking sides in the uneven war in Portland’s streets—and it is taking the dangerously wrong side."
* "Fort Worth Officer Fatally Shot Woman Inside Her Home, Police Say:" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/us/fort-worth-police-woman-killed-home.html
* "A homicide detective's dishonesty was kept secret for years. Now it could upend criminal cases:" https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-19/la-sheriffs-deputy-lying-murder-trial-testimony
* TW: Abuse "What if Your Abusive Husband Is a Cop?:" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/07/what-if-your-abusive-husband-is-a-cop
* "The Pope just made Cardinal Newman a saint – but was he actually gay?:" https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2019/10/13/pope-declares-cardinal-newman-saint-was-he-gay/
* "‘Out here, it’s just me’: In the medical desert of rural America, one doctor for 11,000 square miles:" https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/out-here-its-just-me/2019/09/28/fa1df9b6-deef-11e9-be96-6adb81821e90_story.html
* "A mother’s loss made her an anti-vaccination star. But vaccines didn’t kill her baby.:" https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/how-anti-vaxxers-target-grieving-moms-turn-them-crusaders-n1057566
* "Antibiotic resistance: researchers have directly proven that bacteria can change shape inside humans to avoid antibiotics:" https://theconversation.com/antibiotic-resistance-researchers-have-directly-proven-that-bacteria-can-change-shape-inside-humans-to-avoid-antibiotics-124296
* "The sinking class: the New Yorkers left to fight the climate crisis alone:" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/20/new-york-city-sinking-climate-crisis-waterfront
* "Conservatives Terrified New York Times 1619 Project Will Remind Black People Slavery Existed:" https://www.wonkette.com/conservatives-terrified-new-york-times-1619-project-will-remind-black-people-slavery-existed
* "A Century Later: The Treaty Of Versailles And Its Rejection Of Racial Equality:" https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/08/11/742293305/a-century-later-the-treaty-of-versailles-and-its-rejection-of-racial-equality
* I seem to not only be day shifted to the least possible useful wake cycle, but I seem to have picked up an annoying pathogen. I'm guessing virus. It's fucking with my sleep and making things a tad unpleasant, but no signs of it escalating into anything worth worrying about as yet.
Saturday I did lots of necessary small household tasks, plus caught up news. As wake cycles are weird and random, so will be news posting times.
* On Being a Witness (A Reply to Someone Elsewhere i thought might be of general value):
Is it as good as doing something to solve the problem actively? No.
But it does help sometimes. On the larger side, against certain kinds of opponents, it can be part of what pressures them into stopping or slowing the harm. The world is watching made a difference in the civil rights era, in English occupied India, in south Africa. It's not enough by itself. Better if the witnesses keep speaking, keep adjudicating for the use of more effective levers, but it's a piece of something useful.
I think a lot about Holocaust deniers, about the people who rewrote the history of reconstruction to pretend that early Reconstruction wasn't working and that the KKK were really the heroes, not folks like Thaddeus Stephens and Robert Smalls. The accounts of witnesses matter. The weight of the eyes of the soldiers who liberated concentration camps matter long with the recorded accounts of the survivors of the camps and the lynchings etc.. It helps to have a record that tells it true. To have accounts we can read, or listen to, or watch. To have witnesses go out into the world and keep talking about terrible things that need fixing or preventing next time. It helps to have people talking about what's happening in Kashmir or the Concentration camps we've built for refugees, because all those eyes, all that talk, help keep the pressure on. It's not enough, but it helps keep up the momentum, the donations to organizations fighting in court or smuggling queer people out of Chechnya, to help keep the front line activists fighting.
Witnessing can't solve problems itself, but it helps.
There is a famous study from the Vietnam Era about how few men will actually aim and hit a live enemy. Most people fire along, but don't hit humans because hurting another human being is a hard line for most people to cross. All those soldiers not aiming? Still helping, because having all those other guns blasting away at nothing makes it easier for the ones who are firing effectively to do it and keep doing it. It's support. Obviously, you want a larger percentage doing the more effective work, but getting rid of the people who fire but don't aim wasn't the solution. They are giving emotional support and a sense of being part of something. They are letting the person doing the hardest emotional labor, the one taking on the lingering psychological effects believe that everyone else is doing it. It's not an exact analogy, but the point is, if only 10% of the people are doing the thing, the others standing behind them witnessing are helping them carry the load of that.
On the small scale, I am thinking about the tiny number of adults who were my witnesses growing up. There weren't many of them, but they helped. Oh, don't get be wrong, I'd rather the fuck have been rescued, but rescue wasn't one of the choices. I had most of a decade of constant psychological abuse to survive somehow. Adults were constantly lying about what was happening, gas lighting, playing games designed to break me and/or make them feel better about what they were doing to me.
That 4th-5th grade teacher who never actually taught me, but did what he could in the tiny spaces in which we interacted, the shop teacher who allowed no cruelty withing the four walls under his control and who once towards the end of 8th grade for not having the power within the school to do more than provide me that tiny bit of safety and was fucking haunted by having to watch year after year? That was a life raft. His witnessing that was what was happening wasn't right was more valuable than anything else he could have given me that was in his power to give. The Latin teacher who absolutely knew and had subtle ways of conveying it.
Trust me, their witness fucking mattered to my survival, to my long grim resistance until I was finally free of that place. I never lost sight of the pain that witnessing caused them. It was a sacrifice they made that nearly every other adult I encountered wasn't willing to make. It was so much easier not to see or to tell oneself a comforting lie. I will never forget the grief in their eyes. I will never forget what it must have cost them to watch day after day, year after year, not just me, but others being harmed that way. Their sacrifices helped me carry a wait a whole lot of adults wouldn’t have managed.
Having someone else see and agree that this was real and wrong? It's part of why I'm still here. It's sure as a fuck a big chunk of why i fought so hard for my kids when I was teaching. It's why I don't look away. I don't have the physical strength and energy and money and law degree etc. for the front line stuff, but I can witness and pass on the stories. It's not enough, but it is something. If enough of us do it, then the people on the inside know someone gives a fuck, someone sees and thinks what's happening isn't right, and maybe it's enough to keep people fighting another day and another. If enough of us witness it supports protest movements and the activists standing out front. It makes it feel lest like screaming into a void.
I will always take something over nothing, even if way more is needed. Rescue is better, but I'll take survival over the alternative.
So yes, I think witnessing has value, but remember, your survival has value too. If it's too much, take a step back and rest. Take care of yourself in all the ways you need to. sacrifice what you can afford to sacrifice, but not everything. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Plan for the long haul.
*****
* Full list of Resistance and charity links has been migrated to my profile as it was getting out of hand.
* "How you can help Hurricane Dorian disaster relief:" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/08/hurricane-dorian-disaster-relief-how-you-can-help
* A small, cheap thing to help climate change if you have little money to spare: https://onetreeplanted.org/products/amazon-rainforest-peru
* How to donate to Rainbow Road: https://www.rainbowrailroad.com/donate
* Here are a bunch of state level links to help people in immigrant detention: https://taibhsearachd.tumblr.com/post/186058182962/woundability-this-4th-of-july-celebrate-the
* Angry about the concentration camps on our Southern Border? Here is a list of useful things you can do: https://medium.com/@togetherandfree/feel-helpless-amidst-the-horrific-immigration-news-youre-not-how-you-can-make-difference-today-108dc42de88e
* "More Organizations to Support Helping Kids in Concentration Camps:" https://thisfinecrew.dreamwidth.org/201920.html
Here is a massive list of things you can do to help refugees inside and outside of the Camps: https://s-leary.tumblr.com/post/185783586806/so-youve-probably-seen-the-post-going-around
* A list of organizations to help you run for office: http://lovingmyselfishard.tumblr.com/post/167330144634/psst-hey
* Have something you want to tell your Congress Critters? If you can not protest in person, here are some other options:
Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to the representative of your choice.
This App phones your rep for you: http://takeastance.us/
Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resistbot.io/
* This is a cool person and the clothes are being made from an ethical source. Looking for cool inclusive Pride themed merch? www.nerdykeppie.com
* HorrorMux is open for apping the next story, which is a 1994 Lost Boys type thing. Available Archetypes are here. I'm Martyr/Angel if you want to find me.: http://horrormu.com/index.php/Available
* Help pay for cat food, litter, meds, medical copays: Paypal Lethran@gmail.com or paypal.me/Gwydion
* If you are interested in helping, right now the Cat thing we need most is:
https://www.chewy.com/wellness-core-signature-selects/dp/147047
Or possibly this: https://www.chewy.com/instinct-by-natures-variety-limited/dp/44654
* Birthday/Solstice master list: https://gwydion.dreamwidth.org/2108835.html
* "White House Threatens Turkey With Crippling Sanctions:" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/11/us/politics/turkey-sanctions-syria-kurds-trump.html
* "U.S. official says situation in Syria is ‘rapidly deteriorating’:" http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/northern-syria-to-see-u-s-troop-evacuation-sec-of-defense-says-71191621740
* "Attorney General Barr rages against secularist "assault" on religion:" https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2019/10/attorney-general-barr-rages-against-secularist-assault-on-religion/
* "Barr blames social ills on ‘secularists’ in religious freedom speech:" http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/barr-delivers-speech-on-religious-freedom-at-notre-dame-law-school-71193157830
* "Investigations Of Fatal Shootings On The Border Can Drag On For Years:" https://www.npr.org/2019/09/07/758339563/investigations-of-fatal-shootings-on-the-border-can-drag-on-for-years
* "Conservatives say we’ve abandoned reason and civility. The Old South said that, too.:" https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/29/conservatives-say-weve-abandoned-reason-civility-old-south-said-that-too/?arc404=true
* This is from a while back, but it's worth reading. "The Proud Boys’ Real Target:" https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/meaning-street-protests-portland/596686/
"The real target, though, is not Portland or antifa but all of us, and our sense of security that we are free citizens of a democratic nation, free to take our children downtown to play or to assemble peacefully to advocate values that the Republican Party does not approve. That party under Trump is now taking sides in the uneven war in Portland’s streets—and it is taking the dangerously wrong side."
* "Fort Worth Officer Fatally Shot Woman Inside Her Home, Police Say:" https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/12/us/fort-worth-police-woman-killed-home.html
* "A homicide detective's dishonesty was kept secret for years. Now it could upend criminal cases:" https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-09-19/la-sheriffs-deputy-lying-murder-trial-testimony
* TW: Abuse "What if Your Abusive Husband Is a Cop?:" https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/10/07/what-if-your-abusive-husband-is-a-cop
* "The Pope just made Cardinal Newman a saint – but was he actually gay?:" https://www.pinknews.co.uk/2019/10/13/pope-declares-cardinal-newman-saint-was-he-gay/
* "‘Out here, it’s just me’: In the medical desert of rural America, one doctor for 11,000 square miles:" https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/out-here-its-just-me/2019/09/28/fa1df9b6-deef-11e9-be96-6adb81821e90_story.html
* "A mother’s loss made her an anti-vaccination star. But vaccines didn’t kill her baby.:" https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/how-anti-vaxxers-target-grieving-moms-turn-them-crusaders-n1057566
* "Antibiotic resistance: researchers have directly proven that bacteria can change shape inside humans to avoid antibiotics:" https://theconversation.com/antibiotic-resistance-researchers-have-directly-proven-that-bacteria-can-change-shape-inside-humans-to-avoid-antibiotics-124296
* "The sinking class: the New Yorkers left to fight the climate crisis alone:" https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/sep/20/new-york-city-sinking-climate-crisis-waterfront
* "Conservatives Terrified New York Times 1619 Project Will Remind Black People Slavery Existed:" https://www.wonkette.com/conservatives-terrified-new-york-times-1619-project-will-remind-black-people-slavery-existed
* "A Century Later: The Treaty Of Versailles And Its Rejection Of Racial Equality:" https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2019/08/11/742293305/a-century-later-the-treaty-of-versailles-and-its-rejection-of-racial-equality
* I seem to not only be day shifted to the least possible useful wake cycle, but I seem to have picked up an annoying pathogen. I'm guessing virus. It's fucking with my sleep and making things a tad unpleasant, but no signs of it escalating into anything worth worrying about as yet.
Saturday I did lots of necessary small household tasks, plus caught up news. As wake cycles are weird and random, so will be news posting times.
* On Being a Witness (A Reply to Someone Elsewhere i thought might be of general value):
Is it as good as doing something to solve the problem actively? No.
But it does help sometimes. On the larger side, against certain kinds of opponents, it can be part of what pressures them into stopping or slowing the harm. The world is watching made a difference in the civil rights era, in English occupied India, in south Africa. It's not enough by itself. Better if the witnesses keep speaking, keep adjudicating for the use of more effective levers, but it's a piece of something useful.
I think a lot about Holocaust deniers, about the people who rewrote the history of reconstruction to pretend that early Reconstruction wasn't working and that the KKK were really the heroes, not folks like Thaddeus Stephens and Robert Smalls. The accounts of witnesses matter. The weight of the eyes of the soldiers who liberated concentration camps matter long with the recorded accounts of the survivors of the camps and the lynchings etc.. It helps to have a record that tells it true. To have accounts we can read, or listen to, or watch. To have witnesses go out into the world and keep talking about terrible things that need fixing or preventing next time. It helps to have people talking about what's happening in Kashmir or the Concentration camps we've built for refugees, because all those eyes, all that talk, help keep the pressure on. It's not enough, but it helps keep up the momentum, the donations to organizations fighting in court or smuggling queer people out of Chechnya, to help keep the front line activists fighting.
Witnessing can't solve problems itself, but it helps.
There is a famous study from the Vietnam Era about how few men will actually aim and hit a live enemy. Most people fire along, but don't hit humans because hurting another human being is a hard line for most people to cross. All those soldiers not aiming? Still helping, because having all those other guns blasting away at nothing makes it easier for the ones who are firing effectively to do it and keep doing it. It's support. Obviously, you want a larger percentage doing the more effective work, but getting rid of the people who fire but don't aim wasn't the solution. They are giving emotional support and a sense of being part of something. They are letting the person doing the hardest emotional labor, the one taking on the lingering psychological effects believe that everyone else is doing it. It's not an exact analogy, but the point is, if only 10% of the people are doing the thing, the others standing behind them witnessing are helping them carry the load of that.
On the small scale, I am thinking about the tiny number of adults who were my witnesses growing up. There weren't many of them, but they helped. Oh, don't get be wrong, I'd rather the fuck have been rescued, but rescue wasn't one of the choices. I had most of a decade of constant psychological abuse to survive somehow. Adults were constantly lying about what was happening, gas lighting, playing games designed to break me and/or make them feel better about what they were doing to me.
That 4th-5th grade teacher who never actually taught me, but did what he could in the tiny spaces in which we interacted, the shop teacher who allowed no cruelty withing the four walls under his control and who once towards the end of 8th grade for not having the power within the school to do more than provide me that tiny bit of safety and was fucking haunted by having to watch year after year? That was a life raft. His witnessing that was what was happening wasn't right was more valuable than anything else he could have given me that was in his power to give. The Latin teacher who absolutely knew and had subtle ways of conveying it.
Trust me, their witness fucking mattered to my survival, to my long grim resistance until I was finally free of that place. I never lost sight of the pain that witnessing caused them. It was a sacrifice they made that nearly every other adult I encountered wasn't willing to make. It was so much easier not to see or to tell oneself a comforting lie. I will never forget the grief in their eyes. I will never forget what it must have cost them to watch day after day, year after year, not just me, but others being harmed that way. Their sacrifices helped me carry a wait a whole lot of adults wouldn’t have managed.
Having someone else see and agree that this was real and wrong? It's part of why I'm still here. It's sure as a fuck a big chunk of why i fought so hard for my kids when I was teaching. It's why I don't look away. I don't have the physical strength and energy and money and law degree etc. for the front line stuff, but I can witness and pass on the stories. It's not enough, but it is something. If enough of us do it, then the people on the inside know someone gives a fuck, someone sees and thinks what's happening isn't right, and maybe it's enough to keep people fighting another day and another. If enough of us witness it supports protest movements and the activists standing out front. It makes it feel lest like screaming into a void.
I will always take something over nothing, even if way more is needed. Rescue is better, but I'll take survival over the alternative.
So yes, I think witnessing has value, but remember, your survival has value too. If it's too much, take a step back and rest. Take care of yourself in all the ways you need to. sacrifice what you can afford to sacrifice, but not everything. It's a marathon, not a sprint. Plan for the long haul.
*****
* Full list of Resistance and charity links has been migrated to my profile as it was getting out of hand.
* "How you can help Hurricane Dorian disaster relief:" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/08/hurricane-dorian-disaster-relief-how-you-can-help
* A small, cheap thing to help climate change if you have little money to spare: https://onetreeplanted.org/products/amazon-rainforest-peru
* How to donate to Rainbow Road: https://www.rainbowrailroad.com/donate
* Here are a bunch of state level links to help people in immigrant detention: https://taibhsearachd.tumblr.com/post/186058182962/woundability-this-4th-of-july-celebrate-the
* Angry about the concentration camps on our Southern Border? Here is a list of useful things you can do: https://medium.com/@togetherandfree/feel-helpless-amidst-the-horrific-immigration-news-youre-not-how-you-can-make-difference-today-108dc42de88e
* "More Organizations to Support Helping Kids in Concentration Camps:" https://thisfinecrew.dreamwidth.org/201920.html
Here is a massive list of things you can do to help refugees inside and outside of the Camps: https://s-leary.tumblr.com/post/185783586806/so-youve-probably-seen-the-post-going-around
* A list of organizations to help you run for office: http://lovingmyselfishard.tumblr.com/post/167330144634/psst-hey
* Have something you want to tell your Congress Critters? If you can not protest in person, here are some other options:
Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 and ask to be connected to the representative of your choice.
This App phones your rep for you: http://takeastance.us/
Here is one that will send your reps a fax: https://resistbot.io/
* This is a cool person and the clothes are being made from an ethical source. Looking for cool inclusive Pride themed merch? www.nerdykeppie.com
* HorrorMux is open for apping the next story, which is a 1994 Lost Boys type thing. Available Archetypes are here. I'm Martyr/Angel if you want to find me.: http://horrormu.com/index.php/Available
* Help pay for cat food, litter, meds, medical copays: Paypal Lethran@gmail.com or paypal.me/Gwydion
* If you are interested in helping, right now the Cat thing we need most is:
https://www.chewy.com/wellness-core-signature-selects/dp/147047
Or possibly this: https://www.chewy.com/instinct-by-natures-variety-limited/dp/44654
* Birthday/Solstice master list: https://gwydion.dreamwidth.org/2108835.html