There is no such thing as a good guy with a gun. Only potential murderers, either in service of their own murderous gun fantasies or in service of a murderous state. It is literally that simple. -- truth.
I'm tired, too, of shit from a different angle -- easy gun access, which is how my son blew his head off. Rape culture, and moving through the world as a 3 TIME survivor of that shit. Being a woman. Being over 30, being over 50. Being invisible. Still being told to be quiet by my own parents. And yet, I'm white, middle class, money in the bank. So what do I have to whine about? Nothing, and everything. I appreciate your writing, every time.
"because of a boiling cess pool of ignorance and stupidity kept on high heat by soulless ghouls."
Best advice I've heard recently is from the key note speaker at a graduate school social justice conference hosted in Egypt. The speaker whose name I'm not remembering was a novelist and social activist. And Egyptian. She said we don't create or read narrative art to change the minds of assholes. Their minds- the leaders and their followers won't change. Art has no sway. I'm paraphrasing poorly. She said we do it for those who believe and act otherwise, in opposition, over and over. The futility in that message somehow heartens me.
Susan, though your comment doesn't give me hope, it captures how I feel. Perhaps we do something valuable reminding the good folks with compassionate, troubled hearts that they are not alone.
Charles Blow recently wrote that the only language he has left is rage. Seems to me that powerlessness in the face of injustice has - all over the world - been the source of what we like to call terrorism. That those who most revile the state of this nation are predominantly non-violent makes domestic revolution unlikely. But we get a taste of what happens when rage has to be expressed from those with the most at stake and the least to lose episodically. I don’t know where I’m going with this except to say that I share your feeling of futility and often daydream of actions that would purge my hopelessness
Yes. Benjamin Whitmer, a writer friend of mine, said this (or something close to it), and I quote it often: you can't call yourself a pacifist until you've been hit in the face with a baton. Which is why we need more than the usual suspects to take to the streets.
We will outlive some bastards. Others will outlive us. I just hope that I am breaking the chain between the bastards that came before me and whomever follows me.
"What, or who, am I against anything? I can't even keep my own heart sorted out, how am I going to help anyone with theirs?"
Maybe it doesn't feel like enough, but sentences like these are exactly what's needed: this invitation to examine ourselves first, to question the validity of things and yet voice the questions anyway, to keep on giving a shit despite all the apparent futility.
There's an amazing amount of energy in these words. I for one feel always better for having read you - not in the standard sense of 'comforted/reassured', but in the existential, vital sense of feeling significantly less alone, significantly more grounded, and therefore somehow more capable of confronting whatever's next. Thanks as ever. Here's to outliving the bastards.
When I visited Chile a few months before the uprisings of October 2019, the face of deeply good man and socialist former President Salvador Allende was everywhere in murals.
The deep sadness over the unfulfilled promises of his Popular Unity government is still palpable nearly 50 years later. The visit changed my outlook on legalism and bourgeois government finally and forever.
"In that final battle, with the country at the mercy of uncontrolled and unforeseen forces of subversion, Allende was still bound by legality. The most dramatic contradiction of his life was being at the same time the congenital foe of violence and a passionate revolutionary. He believed that he had resolved the contradiction with the hypothesis that conditions in Chile would permit a peaceful evolution toward socialism under bourgeois legality. Experience taught him too late that a system cannot be changed by a government without power."
It's arguable that had socialism survived in Chile against CIA intervention, we'd all be living in a very different world: it's there that the "Chicago boys" started running their neoliberal social experiments.
I wish I had the kind of words that you have to shape all of these feelings. I keep saying this, but I'm grateful every time for how you are able to articulate it all. And my heart breaks for what your son went through.
Keep showing up, somehow, and take care of yourself when and how you can.
You are doing A LOT, actually. Being brave enough to write these words every week and gathering these like-minded people to read and discuss them is a lot more than nothing. You are informing and empowering. You are inspiring and humbling. Keep giving. It's welcome and needed.
Also, prior to George Floyd, I was quite ignorant on institutionalized racism and my white privilege. I'm so glad that these conversations are happening and people are waking up to real history and where we all come from. I hope that it is the beginning of positive change.
Having rounded third, the thought of dancing on anyone's grave has receded somewhat.
The thing about our legislature and guns is that while there might be some very small number of people who think it should be easier for college students to have guns easily available, for the most part, imo, this is about (a) doing it because they can and (b) making you, me, and everyone reading this angry, so they can laugh about how angry they made us. I haven't figured out whether/how to modulate that anger given the knowledge that it is exactly what the assholes want from me.
Keep showing up, Chris. Keep putting your rage, your ideas, your love into the form of words. I sometimes think it is my own writing as well as the writing of others that keep me going. Stay strong, friend!
So true. Sometimes, rage mingles with sadness. the other night, I watched two documentaries: one on gluten and how the current situation (the no gluten hype and the rise in people suffering from gluten intolerence and coeliac disease) is all the consequence of greed from chemical companies that produced nitrates for explosives and had to find other outlets for those at the end of WWII . Other outlet being fertilizers. But they had to "create" a neew sort of wheat, because the "old" one suffered from the fertilizers. But the new sort was weaker and had to be "helped" with...pesticides! So basically we are poisonned because some guys didn't want their production capacities to go to waste, nevermind that consequences. And right after that documentary, another one on "special" schools in Canada where they took Indian kids and brutalized them, tried to erase their culture. 4000 died.
So, I know this has nothing to do with guns and stuff, but what I mean to say is : we are indeed surrounded by greed, malevolence, plain ignorance, and sometimes it seems to be just too much to bear. After watching those documentaries, I just felt like all those people needed to burn. in hell or wherever.
At times it is so hard to find the good, even in oneself. I would gladly dance on their graves. gladly.
There is no such thing as a good guy with a gun. Only potential murderers, either in service of their own murderous gun fantasies or in service of a murderous state. It is literally that simple. -- truth.
I'm tired, too, of shit from a different angle -- easy gun access, which is how my son blew his head off. Rape culture, and moving through the world as a 3 TIME survivor of that shit. Being a woman. Being over 30, being over 50. Being invisible. Still being told to be quiet by my own parents. And yet, I'm white, middle class, money in the bank. So what do I have to whine about? Nothing, and everything. I appreciate your writing, every time.
Sending you love, my friend.
Julia, you aren't invisible here.
aw. Thank you.
A loving and powerful, courageously heart -wrenching response. Thank you.
I'm so sorry. Yet being sorry is about akin to thoughts and prayers. But still, sending some love your way. Thank you for sharing this.
"because of a boiling cess pool of ignorance and stupidity kept on high heat by soulless ghouls."
Best advice I've heard recently is from the key note speaker at a graduate school social justice conference hosted in Egypt. The speaker whose name I'm not remembering was a novelist and social activist. And Egyptian. She said we don't create or read narrative art to change the minds of assholes. Their minds- the leaders and their followers won't change. Art has no sway. I'm paraphrasing poorly. She said we do it for those who believe and act otherwise, in opposition, over and over. The futility in that message somehow heartens me.
Susan, though your comment doesn't give me hope, it captures how I feel. Perhaps we do something valuable reminding the good folks with compassionate, troubled hearts that they are not alone.
I hear you. Hope may be too large a promise.
Well said.
"Do it because it's the right thing to do" feels like a necessary thing to hang onto these days.
Yes, a key lesson I learned (and am still working on) in the COVID times is to ignore and not waste time on assholes. Yoga Sutra 1.33.
Thank you, Susan.
Charles Blow recently wrote that the only language he has left is rage. Seems to me that powerlessness in the face of injustice has - all over the world - been the source of what we like to call terrorism. That those who most revile the state of this nation are predominantly non-violent makes domestic revolution unlikely. But we get a taste of what happens when rage has to be expressed from those with the most at stake and the least to lose episodically. I don’t know where I’m going with this except to say that I share your feeling of futility and often daydream of actions that would purge my hopelessness
Yes. Benjamin Whitmer, a writer friend of mine, said this (or something close to it), and I quote it often: you can't call yourself a pacifist until you've been hit in the face with a baton. Which is why we need more than the usual suspects to take to the streets.
We will outlive some bastards. Others will outlive us. I just hope that I am breaking the chain between the bastards that came before me and whomever follows me.
Indeed, yes.
"What, or who, am I against anything? I can't even keep my own heart sorted out, how am I going to help anyone with theirs?"
Maybe it doesn't feel like enough, but sentences like these are exactly what's needed: this invitation to examine ourselves first, to question the validity of things and yet voice the questions anyway, to keep on giving a shit despite all the apparent futility.
There's an amazing amount of energy in these words. I for one feel always better for having read you - not in the standard sense of 'comforted/reassured', but in the existential, vital sense of feeling significantly less alone, significantly more grounded, and therefore somehow more capable of confronting whatever's next. Thanks as ever. Here's to outliving the bastards.
Here's to it indeed. Thank you.
When I visited Chile a few months before the uprisings of October 2019, the face of deeply good man and socialist former President Salvador Allende was everywhere in murals.
The deep sadness over the unfulfilled promises of his Popular Unity government is still palpable nearly 50 years later. The visit changed my outlook on legalism and bourgeois government finally and forever.
Gabriel García Márquez wrote this insightful piece on Allende and Chile for the New Statesman: https://www.newstatesman.com/world-affairs/2013/04/why-allende-had-die
Food for thought from that piece:
"In that final battle, with the country at the mercy of uncontrolled and unforeseen forces of subversion, Allende was still bound by legality. The most dramatic contradiction of his life was being at the same time the congenital foe of violence and a passionate revolutionary. He believed that he had resolved the contradiction with the hypothesis that conditions in Chile would permit a peaceful evolution toward socialism under bourgeois legality. Experience taught him too late that a system cannot be changed by a government without power."
It's arguable that had socialism survived in Chile against CIA intervention, we'd all be living in a very different world: it's there that the "Chicago boys" started running their neoliberal social experiments.
Thank you, Amy. And thank you for the link.
I wish I had the kind of words that you have to shape all of these feelings. I keep saying this, but I'm grateful every time for how you are able to articulate it all. And my heart breaks for what your son went through.
Keep showing up, somehow, and take care of yourself when and how you can.
Thank you, Nia.
You are doing A LOT, actually. Being brave enough to write these words every week and gathering these like-minded people to read and discuss them is a lot more than nothing. You are informing and empowering. You are inspiring and humbling. Keep giving. It's welcome and needed.
Also, prior to George Floyd, I was quite ignorant on institutionalized racism and my white privilege. I'm so glad that these conversations are happening and people are waking up to real history and where we all come from. I hope that it is the beginning of positive change.
Thank you, Angie.
"Middling"? Nope.
Having rounded third, the thought of dancing on anyone's grave has receded somewhat.
The thing about our legislature and guns is that while there might be some very small number of people who think it should be easier for college students to have guns easily available, for the most part, imo, this is about (a) doing it because they can and (b) making you, me, and everyone reading this angry, so they can laugh about how angry they made us. I haven't figured out whether/how to modulate that anger given the knowledge that it is exactly what the assholes want from me.
Thanks, as always, Charley.
You did a good job of capturing the rage, as well as the futility I feel at all this.
Thanks, Carl.
The flame of anger is what sheds light on the darkness. I deeply resonated with these words. Thank you 🔥
Thank you, Jessica.
Beautiful. Probably perfect. Solidarity, brother.
Thank you, JHF.
Keep showing up, Chris. Keep putting your rage, your ideas, your love into the form of words. I sometimes think it is my own writing as well as the writing of others that keep me going. Stay strong, friend!
So true. Sometimes, rage mingles with sadness. the other night, I watched two documentaries: one on gluten and how the current situation (the no gluten hype and the rise in people suffering from gluten intolerence and coeliac disease) is all the consequence of greed from chemical companies that produced nitrates for explosives and had to find other outlets for those at the end of WWII . Other outlet being fertilizers. But they had to "create" a neew sort of wheat, because the "old" one suffered from the fertilizers. But the new sort was weaker and had to be "helped" with...pesticides! So basically we are poisonned because some guys didn't want their production capacities to go to waste, nevermind that consequences. And right after that documentary, another one on "special" schools in Canada where they took Indian kids and brutalized them, tried to erase their culture. 4000 died.
So, I know this has nothing to do with guns and stuff, but what I mean to say is : we are indeed surrounded by greed, malevolence, plain ignorance, and sometimes it seems to be just too much to bear. After watching those documentaries, I just felt like all those people needed to burn. in hell or wherever.
At times it is so hard to find the good, even in oneself. I would gladly dance on their graves. gladly.
It IS hard to find the good in ourselves sometimes, Caroline. But we keep trying, don't we? Thank you for this.
well said Chris.
Please dont give up hope.
Keep it alive.
It may be soft, it may be fragile.
But the softest things can stand against the hardest treachery.