Nothing is okay. Nothing feels okay. I was texting with a friend this morning who said woman will fight this hard and I said, "I agree but on the other hand something is deeply wrong with white women." She said, "White supremacy is the problem and white women buying into it." I keep running into that answer. It really hit me when seeing the results when Roy Moore *barely* lost his senate bid. He was defeated due to Black women turning out and trouncing him resoundingly. White women voted for him by a huge percentage. There is something so deeply ill about that.
I remember that interview! I did not order the book yet. Maybe I should let you read it first and tell me if I should 😀 Seriously, though, what I've gotten to believe more over the years is that getting guidance and direction more from non-white than white activists is a good idea. Though I try to keep in mind the reality that Garrett Bucks always points out, that the problems come from white-dominated communities, and if we want to see real change then people like me have to start trying to change those communities. This is something I saw when researching my book, too. Progressive white NPR-listening people did not get it AT ALL. They literally didn't understand why I wanted to talk about the racism of highway-building rather than Thoreau. But the Black women I walked with? They could have written several of my chapters within a week.
I don't disagree. But at the same time, aren't white people slated to soon become the minority population? I'm not going to waste my breath on too many of them. There's ignorance and then there's willful ignorance. Too many are overly committed to the latter, I think.
Absolutely. I think what I'm saying (messily) is that white progressives who say they believe in justice, etc., have a responsibility. Because as white people become a minority, many will fight like hell to hold onto power anyway, and will do a tremendous amount of damage. I don't know, honestly. I just look around the Flathead at all these gargantuan trucks and heavily armed everybody and think about how fucking entitled all these people are, what kind of life they think they have a right to and how much harm they're willing to cause others in order to hang onto it. I don't even think it's ignorance. I think they know exactly what kind of world they want.
What I'm even talking about I don't know. I don't think you should waste *your* breath on any of them at all. Most people shouldn't. Can I, though, coax some fellow white women into being better or more effective allies? I keep thinking I have a responsibility to do so, but I can't even get people who supposedly believe in human-caused climate change to stop driving their SUVs every fucking where so I don't know what good I'm going to do. I'd rather help my neighbors the Blackfeet and Salish in any way I can; yet what I wonder is, is part of that help doing something to make my immediate community less awful for everybody else?
Actually, that reminds me that when I got my first Covid vaccine it was in Browning, and there were a number of us from the Flathead there. And one of the people who were monitoring for the 15 minutes afterward said something like, "You know what you can do to help, is work on all those people living in the Flathead." Because our low vaccination rates were a huge risk to the Blackfeet Nation.
Whiteness (not being pale-skinned, but the colonial white supremacist culture) feels like a disease that harms everyone else before turning on its host.
I keep re-reading Bruno Latour's "Down to Earth" about how the elites decided decades ago to leave the rest of us behind, hence the madness, and thinking about writing a blog/newsletter about it -- but then I lose steam. Why? For my 12 readers? So I keep turning back to my book, and my new job that I like, and that isn't utterly bullshit, and the garden that's just starting to green up. I've been yelling at my fellow "upper middle class" white women since we were teens, and it's safe to say they agree with the Bush Administration that "the American way of life is not up for negotiation" (Rio, 1992). And as their kids apply to colleges -- boy howdy! The entitlement. That THEIR precious white children, who did everything right, and got great grades at private schools and played a sport etc ... aren't getting into the "schools they're supposed to ..." well, they go so fast to blaming POC. If I really love them, I remind them that their kids will be FINE. If I don't, I just ghost. I'm kind of going "full Candide" this summer. Garden. Beloved old people who are failing. Kids who are growing up ... a book that needs to be written.
I just googled "down to earth book" and got a bunch of results on a book about "laid-back interiors," which seems a little bit on the those for this whole subject?!
Funnily enough, I just listened to a brief thing from Douglas Rushkoff this morning about his forthcoming book "Survival of the Richest," which starts with this meeting he was asked to speak at that turned out to be a private consultation session for these few billionaires who wanted to know how to keep their security people from turning on them when they had to escape to their bunkers. Seriously.
The college application process makes the entitlement so crazily obvious and raw. Everything about school from about 5th grade onward is about grooming them for that process. And we wonder why you end up with depressed 30-somethings who feel at sea in their lives.
When my first kid was in day care, already then other moms were talking about the kinds of sports trajectory their kids needed to have to get into the good colleges. Like how they couldn't miss travel weekends in first grade because then they wouldn't be allowed onto the more competitive teams and then wouldn't get scholarships to college. I told my husband I was going to advise our kids to aim to become life coaches, because by the time their contemporaries were in their mid-30s, they were going to need a lot of guidance in how to live as a human being.
Here's a link to the Bruno Latour: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/754.html And I love the life coach advice! I grew up deeply embedded but broke broke broke in the upper-middle class, which gives one an interesting perspective. I bailed early -- and have been somewhat startled in my 50s to realize how many of the people I thought had come along with me were, in fact, secretly way more bourgeois than I realized. Or came into money. Same diff.
Damn. That actually looks like a book I need to read. I do not need more books to read! But this looks right up my research alley. Especially this line: "it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national."
Yeah, I hear you. It can be so subtle. Though someone did tell me straight out a few years ago that her whole purpose with being involved with education was a horror of being poor. Like, I kind of get what she was saying but on the other hand her approach was guaranteed to create a society of winners and losers. Or to perpetuate such a society.
Chris, I read this one twice, both times with angry tears. (The first time I also gasped to see my words next to yours. Thank you.) I once asked an organizer how she moved through an unjust world without being consumed with a desire to set everything on fire. She'd been subjected to so much, I felt like lighting the match on her behalf. She said that she loved individuals and hated oppressive systems. That provided the balance she needed. I saw this in action. Her love didn't excuse those individuals. She still held them accountable. That's love too, you know? Anyways, I've really tried to follow her example. But I am starting to lose my grip on her vision. I am having an increasingly difficult time separating the individual from the systems they eagerly support. Or even the systems I assume they eagerly support. And I don't know...that makes me feel like I am losing a little bit of my humanity. And that makes me angrier. And well. A mess.
I donated to Cora Neumann after reading your post. Thank you for linking to her campaign.
Meg, first, thank you for donating to Cora. Every bit helps. Secondly, I have to say I try and love individuals and hate institutions myself though I've never seen it articulated that way. Thank you. There are some individuals who are going to be assholes no matter what, but plenty of people who have a cloud over their souls because of the institutionalization of so much bullshit. It's hard to hang onto our humanity in the face of SO MUCH of that, and why building communities like you are trying to do are so important. Sometimes we can't hold onto the vision and may need to hold onto people who CAN, at least until we get our rest. It's nothing to be ashamed of to need someone else to fill the breach now and then. It's important to recognize it's a long, long game.
Fighting this shit however we can. But yeah it’s disheartening to hear “vote” when they won’t even try. Canceling student debt would be immense. I never had any myself. But I know how it crushes people… and the fucking economy, if you’re more interested in that than people. Imagine if you gave people billions to spend on shit we they love profiting off of? Housing, health care, fucking avocado toast, whatever, how “stimulated” the aristocrats would be? I voted progressive in the primaries here, I doubt it will change much, but we need politicians who will give us something to vote FOR, not just against the christofascists, who keep moving “normal” to the right and it never moves back to where it was, much less to anything that might be progress.
Also, re Land Back. I have a funny story about a time I was at a Native Days powwow at Crow Agency. Dale Old Horn was MC and a tourist stopped at the stand to turn in a camera he found....Dale announced that a camera had been found along with the following..."an honest white man...you don't see that every day (crowd chuckles). While the guy is walking away, Dale continues...and mister...tell your people....we want our land back! (Crowd comes apart). Guy quickly exists grounds.
In my opinion, if anybody really cared about human life, they would resoundingly uphold Roe. Let us continue to respect an individual’s right to choose. We would all be better off. Especially the children.
And yes. Caregivers are disgustingly undervalued, and under compensated. Think about this. Who will be precious to you when you begin your journey of physical and mental decline? The individuals who shepherd you through, who bless you with their patience, compassion, and grace. The ultimate gift. If anyone deserves to be adequately rewarded it is a caregiver.
I just returned from my first outing of any kind (and I mean ANY kind--as in actually leaving my condo) for 2 1/2 years. we drove to Pasadena (for a show about Parkinson's disease by a good Parkie friend of mine who wrote, produced and starred in it) then on to Tucson to visit another Parkie friend and his family. Both these visits raised my own Parkie spirit--except, it was clear amerika is still really fucked up. nothing is quite what it appears to be out there--workers in service industries (hotels and restaurants and gas stations), for instance, are still stressed way out, although they're trying hard to smile and say "yes sir whatever you want or need sir." their hearts are not in it because the jobs they are asked to do are impossible now. on the road, i thought, "we need a John Steinbeck to get in his pick-up camper again w/Charlie, and criss-cross amerika to help us know where who and how we are--maybe not a white novelist but someone else, an indigenous poet perhaps"--and I thought of you. you seem to be able to interact w/all sorts of folks despite how you might actually despise their values or condemn their views. do you know someone else might take on this kind of work if not you?
The Trump Era has forced the rational Left to attempt to understand and accommodate the irrational Right. We are dealing with the difference between spending a day at the Museum of Modern Art and attending a Monster Truck Rally. We are dealing with the difference between Critical Race Theory (History) and Master Race Theory (Christian White Supremacy). Thanks to Supreme Court Justice "Sam the Sham" Alito, we now know that Catholics and Republicans hate sex. Alito's face is akin to a death mask, a tell as to the contents of his embittered soul... and the boyish-looking Roberts, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch were ruined by the pedophile Catholic priests who groomed them to worship "the scepter of Jesus." Amy Coney Barrett is a second class member of a Catholic patriarchal sex cult. Clarence Thomas is a Catholic convert addicted to porn. All this proves that God is a stand-up comedian. The key to the abortion controversy has nothing to do with the irrational belief in God's Plan. The key is rational acceptance of abortion that is "safe, legal and rare," along with no-nonsense sex education and free contraception. The ultimate goal of the Left is Community. The ultimate goal of the Right is a bar fight. It is a death match between the Superego and the Id.
I surely understand the very justified anger and outrage. Maybe the white feminists I know aren’t the same? They are the ones who have and do March for the rights of black, brown, LGBTQ rights and more. We are so not a caring country. It’s a huge part of what’s so wrong. I live in a deep red state. My state district last year elected a Republican who’s children had accused him publicly of molestation rather than a guy working for equal rights. He was so bad the MO GOP threw him out of the caucus - that’s a crazy level of bad. I wish I had something better to offer.
That's the thing -- I know loads of great, strong white women activists working so hard on so many of these issues. But when it comes to pure numbers? White women as a whole end up upholding the white supremacist colonial structures. It's so hard.
This is an instance where I think we get trapped in our bubbles and think the whole world is like our experience. I feel that way about Missoula, or did. Now, post-George Floyd and my city's happy resettling back into its pre-Floyd status quo, I come more and more to realize its "progressiveness" is just a facade.
This might sound odd, but I am starting to wonder if NPR is a big part of the problem. I think it lulls people into complacency that our institutions are functioning and doing the right things. Like it channels the outrage into some kind of "it'll be okay" sensibility. But it won't.
Definitely. Even their tone of voice lulls their "liberal" listeners into comfortable complacency. Upsetting news is quickly followed by soothing conversation.
NPR was the background noise of my childhood and the rest of my life. Even living overseas I listened to it almost daily. Up until the day after Trump's election. I just felt in my gut that they would normalize every bad thing and didn't want to listen to it happening. Now when I hear friends quote it, I wonder how much time we've lost taking real action on so many fronts.
That said, local/state NPR stations do really good reporting, which I appreciate! I wish they got more of the funding directly because their work is too often smothered under the national shows.
I relied on NPR for news for years, but I can hardly stand to listen to it now. After 2016, they frequently provided a platform for GOP leaders to spread their party positions with no fact checking or debate. Frustrating! On a national level , they take funding from Koch and the oil and gas industry. Money talks. Strangely, their podcasts are much more progressive.
Please don't give up on your allies...we are here, steeped in our own tears, migraines from the daily assault on humanity. So much what Dr. Twyla said. I feel less every day that this is my town, county, state, and nation...and that's okay. But what now? Sitting here with too many questions and so much anger. You're 100% correct. WtF. What is the end game?
A couple of quotes: the first is from Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American, May 10, 2022. The second quote is a comment (from, proud to say, a fellow Montanan) to an op-ed in the
NYT on May 5, 2022
"Journalists for Business Insider ran the numbers and found that 84% of the state lawmakers who have sponsored trigger laws are men, five states had no women sponsors for trigger laws, all but one of the 13 governors who have signed trigger laws are men, and 91% of the senators who confirmed the antiabortion majority on the Supreme Court are men. These men are overwhelmingly Republican: 86% of the trigger law sponsors were Republican, all of the antiabortion justices were nominated by Republicans, and 94% of the senators who voted to confirm the antiabortion justices were Republicans.
At the same time that a small minority is imposing its will on the majority of Americans, Republicans are insisting they, not those who are losing their rights, are the victims."
Kirk
Montana May 5
"If you give Republicans your vote, they will take away your rights. The five assenting justices are obviously poorly educated in the hard sciences and social sciences so making scientific arguments will not change their minds. Their lack of principles is based on their adherence to their faith over their oath to the US Constitution. If you give Republicans your vote they will take away your rights. It is just this simple. You can enumerate many other rights that they are actually and potentially aiming at with their twisted, faith based reading of the Constitution but the most important argument is: If you give Republicans your vote, they will take away your rights. The Republicans have put six faith based justices on the SCOTUS with the sole intention of taking away your rights. They have campaigned on this for fifty years and strategically uprooted institutional government norms in order to do it. The voter has listened to the siren song of lies and voted for theocratic Republican legislators. If you give the Republicans your vote, they will take away your rights."
I've been thinking a lot about the ideas of care, the devaluing of care, and how pickled white women are in the patriarchy, how so many for so long have upheld patriarchal racist structures under the guise of feminism--of the dreaded girl boss, hustle culture--still chasing the white male ideal, just as white women. How quickly people descend into a culture of power-over, rather than power-with. I feel like I'm scrambling around in countless history books trying to find an answer to the origin of all the horseshit we are witnessing, of the incalculable cruelty that has been imposed on so many for so long in this 'country.' Thank you for linking my work friend, it made me tear up. And I too donated to Cora Neumann's campaign--at the end of the day I still want to fight and burn it all down, and I'll keep trying because of knowing people like you and your followers are out there in solidarity.
I just wanted to say that opening for this particular Let’s Go Brandon crowd seems like it would be very unnerving & a lot to process emotionally. Thanks for sharing this with us.
Nothing is okay. Nothing feels okay. I was texting with a friend this morning who said woman will fight this hard and I said, "I agree but on the other hand something is deeply wrong with white women." She said, "White supremacy is the problem and white women buying into it." I keep running into that answer. It really hit me when seeing the results when Roy Moore *barely* lost his senate bid. He was defeated due to Black women turning out and trouncing him resoundingly. White women voted for him by a huge percentage. There is something so deeply ill about that.
AHP interviewed the author of this book some time ago and it was so good I ordered the book ... but haven't read it yet.
https://bookshop.org/books/the-trouble-with-white-women-a-counterhistory-of-feminism/9781645036890
I remember that interview! I did not order the book yet. Maybe I should let you read it first and tell me if I should 😀 Seriously, though, what I've gotten to believe more over the years is that getting guidance and direction more from non-white than white activists is a good idea. Though I try to keep in mind the reality that Garrett Bucks always points out, that the problems come from white-dominated communities, and if we want to see real change then people like me have to start trying to change those communities. This is something I saw when researching my book, too. Progressive white NPR-listening people did not get it AT ALL. They literally didn't understand why I wanted to talk about the racism of highway-building rather than Thoreau. But the Black women I walked with? They could have written several of my chapters within a week.
I don't disagree. But at the same time, aren't white people slated to soon become the minority population? I'm not going to waste my breath on too many of them. There's ignorance and then there's willful ignorance. Too many are overly committed to the latter, I think.
Absolutely. I think what I'm saying (messily) is that white progressives who say they believe in justice, etc., have a responsibility. Because as white people become a minority, many will fight like hell to hold onto power anyway, and will do a tremendous amount of damage. I don't know, honestly. I just look around the Flathead at all these gargantuan trucks and heavily armed everybody and think about how fucking entitled all these people are, what kind of life they think they have a right to and how much harm they're willing to cause others in order to hang onto it. I don't even think it's ignorance. I think they know exactly what kind of world they want.
What I'm even talking about I don't know. I don't think you should waste *your* breath on any of them at all. Most people shouldn't. Can I, though, coax some fellow white women into being better or more effective allies? I keep thinking I have a responsibility to do so, but I can't even get people who supposedly believe in human-caused climate change to stop driving their SUVs every fucking where so I don't know what good I'm going to do. I'd rather help my neighbors the Blackfeet and Salish in any way I can; yet what I wonder is, is part of that help doing something to make my immediate community less awful for everybody else?
Actually, that reminds me that when I got my first Covid vaccine it was in Browning, and there were a number of us from the Flathead there. And one of the people who were monitoring for the 15 minutes afterward said something like, "You know what you can do to help, is work on all those people living in the Flathead." Because our low vaccination rates were a huge risk to the Blackfeet Nation.
Whiteness (not being pale-skinned, but the colonial white supremacist culture) feels like a disease that harms everyone else before turning on its host.
I'm with you on ALL of this. I'm just a little weary these days, and some people are harder to spare fucks for than others.
I think that's part of the struggle: where to put one's energy? It's honestly something I can't figure out.
I have "Columbus and Other Cannibals" on my massive TBR pile. Maybe it's time to see what it says.
I am clearly in a rage-y mood these days. Apologies 💕💕💕
No apologies! I can totally relate!
I keep re-reading Bruno Latour's "Down to Earth" about how the elites decided decades ago to leave the rest of us behind, hence the madness, and thinking about writing a blog/newsletter about it -- but then I lose steam. Why? For my 12 readers? So I keep turning back to my book, and my new job that I like, and that isn't utterly bullshit, and the garden that's just starting to green up. I've been yelling at my fellow "upper middle class" white women since we were teens, and it's safe to say they agree with the Bush Administration that "the American way of life is not up for negotiation" (Rio, 1992). And as their kids apply to colleges -- boy howdy! The entitlement. That THEIR precious white children, who did everything right, and got great grades at private schools and played a sport etc ... aren't getting into the "schools they're supposed to ..." well, they go so fast to blaming POC. If I really love them, I remind them that their kids will be FINE. If I don't, I just ghost. I'm kind of going "full Candide" this summer. Garden. Beloved old people who are failing. Kids who are growing up ... a book that needs to be written.
I just googled "down to earth book" and got a bunch of results on a book about "laid-back interiors," which seems a little bit on the those for this whole subject?!
Funnily enough, I just listened to a brief thing from Douglas Rushkoff this morning about his forthcoming book "Survival of the Richest," which starts with this meeting he was asked to speak at that turned out to be a private consultation session for these few billionaires who wanted to know how to keep their security people from turning on them when they had to escape to their bunkers. Seriously.
The college application process makes the entitlement so crazily obvious and raw. Everything about school from about 5th grade onward is about grooming them for that process. And we wonder why you end up with depressed 30-somethings who feel at sea in their lives.
When my first kid was in day care, already then other moms were talking about the kinds of sports trajectory their kids needed to have to get into the good colleges. Like how they couldn't miss travel weekends in first grade because then they wouldn't be allowed onto the more competitive teams and then wouldn't get scholarships to college. I told my husband I was going to advise our kids to aim to become life coaches, because by the time their contemporaries were in their mid-30s, they were going to need a lot of guidance in how to live as a human being.
Here's a link to the Bruno Latour: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/754.html And I love the life coach advice! I grew up deeply embedded but broke broke broke in the upper-middle class, which gives one an interesting perspective. I bailed early -- and have been somewhat startled in my 50s to realize how many of the people I thought had come along with me were, in fact, secretly way more bourgeois than I realized. Or came into money. Same diff.
Damn. That actually looks like a book I need to read. I do not need more books to read! But this looks right up my research alley. Especially this line: "it is urgent to shift sideways and to define politics as what leads toward the Earth and not toward the global or the national."
Yeah, I hear you. It can be so subtle. Though someone did tell me straight out a few years ago that her whole purpose with being involved with education was a horror of being poor. Like, I kind of get what she was saying but on the other hand her approach was guaranteed to create a society of winners and losers. Or to perpetuate such a society.
I would love to read this essay!
Chris, I read this one twice, both times with angry tears. (The first time I also gasped to see my words next to yours. Thank you.) I once asked an organizer how she moved through an unjust world without being consumed with a desire to set everything on fire. She'd been subjected to so much, I felt like lighting the match on her behalf. She said that she loved individuals and hated oppressive systems. That provided the balance she needed. I saw this in action. Her love didn't excuse those individuals. She still held them accountable. That's love too, you know? Anyways, I've really tried to follow her example. But I am starting to lose my grip on her vision. I am having an increasingly difficult time separating the individual from the systems they eagerly support. Or even the systems I assume they eagerly support. And I don't know...that makes me feel like I am losing a little bit of my humanity. And that makes me angrier. And well. A mess.
I donated to Cora Neumann after reading your post. Thank you for linking to her campaign.
Meg, first, thank you for donating to Cora. Every bit helps. Secondly, I have to say I try and love individuals and hate institutions myself though I've never seen it articulated that way. Thank you. There are some individuals who are going to be assholes no matter what, but plenty of people who have a cloud over their souls because of the institutionalization of so much bullshit. It's hard to hang onto our humanity in the face of SO MUCH of that, and why building communities like you are trying to do are so important. Sometimes we can't hold onto the vision and may need to hold onto people who CAN, at least until we get our rest. It's nothing to be ashamed of to need someone else to fill the breach now and then. It's important to recognize it's a long, long game.
This was really helpful to read today, Chris. Thanks so much for taking the time to write it.
💚
All I can say is that this all resonates a lot with me.
Fighting this shit however we can. But yeah it’s disheartening to hear “vote” when they won’t even try. Canceling student debt would be immense. I never had any myself. But I know how it crushes people… and the fucking economy, if you’re more interested in that than people. Imagine if you gave people billions to spend on shit we they love profiting off of? Housing, health care, fucking avocado toast, whatever, how “stimulated” the aristocrats would be? I voted progressive in the primaries here, I doubt it will change much, but we need politicians who will give us something to vote FOR, not just against the christofascists, who keep moving “normal” to the right and it never moves back to where it was, much less to anything that might be progress.
Vote for, not against. What a concept, eh? Jeez.
Also, re Land Back. I have a funny story about a time I was at a Native Days powwow at Crow Agency. Dale Old Horn was MC and a tourist stopped at the stand to turn in a camera he found....Dale announced that a camera had been found along with the following..."an honest white man...you don't see that every day (crowd chuckles). While the guy is walking away, Dale continues...and mister...tell your people....we want our land back! (Crowd comes apart). Guy quickly exists grounds.
I love this.
Great piece Chris.
In my opinion, if anybody really cared about human life, they would resoundingly uphold Roe. Let us continue to respect an individual’s right to choose. We would all be better off. Especially the children.
And yes. Caregivers are disgustingly undervalued, and under compensated. Think about this. Who will be precious to you when you begin your journey of physical and mental decline? The individuals who shepherd you through, who bless you with their patience, compassion, and grace. The ultimate gift. If anyone deserves to be adequately rewarded it is a caregiver.
An awesome photograph of you, by the way.
Sincerely,
Melissa
Thank you, Melissa, as always.
I just returned from my first outing of any kind (and I mean ANY kind--as in actually leaving my condo) for 2 1/2 years. we drove to Pasadena (for a show about Parkinson's disease by a good Parkie friend of mine who wrote, produced and starred in it) then on to Tucson to visit another Parkie friend and his family. Both these visits raised my own Parkie spirit--except, it was clear amerika is still really fucked up. nothing is quite what it appears to be out there--workers in service industries (hotels and restaurants and gas stations), for instance, are still stressed way out, although they're trying hard to smile and say "yes sir whatever you want or need sir." their hearts are not in it because the jobs they are asked to do are impossible now. on the road, i thought, "we need a John Steinbeck to get in his pick-up camper again w/Charlie, and criss-cross amerika to help us know where who and how we are--maybe not a white novelist but someone else, an indigenous poet perhaps"--and I thought of you. you seem to be able to interact w/all sorts of folks despite how you might actually despise their values or condemn their views. do you know someone else might take on this kind of work if not you?
You've just described my dream project, Wayne.
The Trump Era has forced the rational Left to attempt to understand and accommodate the irrational Right. We are dealing with the difference between spending a day at the Museum of Modern Art and attending a Monster Truck Rally. We are dealing with the difference between Critical Race Theory (History) and Master Race Theory (Christian White Supremacy). Thanks to Supreme Court Justice "Sam the Sham" Alito, we now know that Catholics and Republicans hate sex. Alito's face is akin to a death mask, a tell as to the contents of his embittered soul... and the boyish-looking Roberts, Kavanaugh and Gorsuch were ruined by the pedophile Catholic priests who groomed them to worship "the scepter of Jesus." Amy Coney Barrett is a second class member of a Catholic patriarchal sex cult. Clarence Thomas is a Catholic convert addicted to porn. All this proves that God is a stand-up comedian. The key to the abortion controversy has nothing to do with the irrational belief in God's Plan. The key is rational acceptance of abortion that is "safe, legal and rare," along with no-nonsense sex education and free contraception. The ultimate goal of the Left is Community. The ultimate goal of the Right is a bar fight. It is a death match between the Superego and the Id.
I surely understand the very justified anger and outrage. Maybe the white feminists I know aren’t the same? They are the ones who have and do March for the rights of black, brown, LGBTQ rights and more. We are so not a caring country. It’s a huge part of what’s so wrong. I live in a deep red state. My state district last year elected a Republican who’s children had accused him publicly of molestation rather than a guy working for equal rights. He was so bad the MO GOP threw him out of the caucus - that’s a crazy level of bad. I wish I had something better to offer.
That's the thing -- I know loads of great, strong white women activists working so hard on so many of these issues. But when it comes to pure numbers? White women as a whole end up upholding the white supremacist colonial structures. It's so hard.
This is an instance where I think we get trapped in our bubbles and think the whole world is like our experience. I feel that way about Missoula, or did. Now, post-George Floyd and my city's happy resettling back into its pre-Floyd status quo, I come more and more to realize its "progressiveness" is just a facade.
This might sound odd, but I am starting to wonder if NPR is a big part of the problem. I think it lulls people into complacency that our institutions are functioning and doing the right things. Like it channels the outrage into some kind of "it'll be okay" sensibility. But it won't.
I TOTALLY agree with this. And given the exodus of non-white correspondents from there over the last couple years, well....
1000%
Definitely. Even their tone of voice lulls their "liberal" listeners into comfortable complacency. Upsetting news is quickly followed by soothing conversation.
NPR was the background noise of my childhood and the rest of my life. Even living overseas I listened to it almost daily. Up until the day after Trump's election. I just felt in my gut that they would normalize every bad thing and didn't want to listen to it happening. Now when I hear friends quote it, I wonder how much time we've lost taking real action on so many fronts.
That said, local/state NPR stations do really good reporting, which I appreciate! I wish they got more of the funding directly because their work is too often smothered under the national shows.
I relied on NPR for news for years, but I can hardly stand to listen to it now. After 2016, they frequently provided a platform for GOP leaders to spread their party positions with no fact checking or debate. Frustrating! On a national level , they take funding from Koch and the oil and gas industry. Money talks. Strangely, their podcasts are much more progressive.
Yes.
Please don't give up on your allies...we are here, steeped in our own tears, migraines from the daily assault on humanity. So much what Dr. Twyla said. I feel less every day that this is my town, county, state, and nation...and that's okay. But what now? Sitting here with too many questions and so much anger. You're 100% correct. WtF. What is the end game?
Thank you. No intention of giving up anytime soon.
A couple of quotes: the first is from Heather Cox Richardson's Letters from an American, May 10, 2022. The second quote is a comment (from, proud to say, a fellow Montanan) to an op-ed in the
NYT on May 5, 2022
"Journalists for Business Insider ran the numbers and found that 84% of the state lawmakers who have sponsored trigger laws are men, five states had no women sponsors for trigger laws, all but one of the 13 governors who have signed trigger laws are men, and 91% of the senators who confirmed the antiabortion majority on the Supreme Court are men. These men are overwhelmingly Republican: 86% of the trigger law sponsors were Republican, all of the antiabortion justices were nominated by Republicans, and 94% of the senators who voted to confirm the antiabortion justices were Republicans.
At the same time that a small minority is imposing its will on the majority of Americans, Republicans are insisting they, not those who are losing their rights, are the victims."
Kirk
Montana May 5
"If you give Republicans your vote, they will take away your rights. The five assenting justices are obviously poorly educated in the hard sciences and social sciences so making scientific arguments will not change their minds. Their lack of principles is based on their adherence to their faith over their oath to the US Constitution. If you give Republicans your vote they will take away your rights. It is just this simple. You can enumerate many other rights that they are actually and potentially aiming at with their twisted, faith based reading of the Constitution but the most important argument is: If you give Republicans your vote, they will take away your rights. The Republicans have put six faith based justices on the SCOTUS with the sole intention of taking away your rights. They have campaigned on this for fifty years and strategically uprooted institutional government norms in order to do it. The voter has listened to the siren song of lies and voted for theocratic Republican legislators. If you give the Republicans your vote, they will take away your rights."
These are both excellent, Patrick. Thank you.
I've been thinking a lot about the ideas of care, the devaluing of care, and how pickled white women are in the patriarchy, how so many for so long have upheld patriarchal racist structures under the guise of feminism--of the dreaded girl boss, hustle culture--still chasing the white male ideal, just as white women. How quickly people descend into a culture of power-over, rather than power-with. I feel like I'm scrambling around in countless history books trying to find an answer to the origin of all the horseshit we are witnessing, of the incalculable cruelty that has been imposed on so many for so long in this 'country.' Thank you for linking my work friend, it made me tear up. And I too donated to Cora Neumann's campaign--at the end of the day I still want to fight and burn it all down, and I'll keep trying because of knowing people like you and your followers are out there in solidarity.
❤️
I just wanted to say that opening for this particular Let’s Go Brandon crowd seems like it would be very unnerving & a lot to process emotionally. Thanks for sharing this with us.
It was less unnerving than you might think. Those dudes are everywhere around here. One learns to avoid them like dog turds on the hiking trail.