Wide Sweeping Statements

And here is a video explaining what’s going on in more detail than I provided.

With everything else going on in the world, it can be hard to keep up with stuff going on at home, but ICE is still out here terrorizing innocent people. We must keep our eyes on them, and keep fighting.

Feel free to add more sources or info to this post, should you have any.

What they did not have to contend with, as far as I am aware, is a coordinated protest movement making a ruckus outside and disrupting operations as much as possible.

There are very few things for US Americans to be proud of these days, but this is worth being proud of.

However, to be clear, I am NOT a pacifist and in the words of Nina Simone, I ain’t bout to be non-violent honey.

They’re killing trans women, particularly Black trans women, as they always have and will keep doing in increasingly horrific ways. No amount of protests will keep us safe. Cops definitely ain’t gonna keep us safe - over in Philly they beat and arrested 15 people at a pride event in the Gayborhood while the “official” city pride event was apparently costing $10 per person minimum.

They’re abducting racialized people off the streets and occupying entire US cities like DC and Memphis with the explicit goal of disappearing as many of us as they can, regardless of “citizenship”, visas, or anything else.

Black people are being actively lynched. Black CHILDREN in particular have been found lynched after being “missing”. I can literally go on Twitter or Facebook for less than a minute and discover a new lynching or murder of a trans woman.

We are especially being taken when we are alone, when others leave us alone, when others do nothing.

We have to be willing to protect ourselves and each other if and when needed. We need to get a lot more comfortable with ACTION not just words, with not turning away when we see something happening before we get caught up in it.

Will the person you saw and turned away from go missing?

Will they be dead next, or worse?

Even if you can’t stop it, can you get their name? Can you record it? Find their families?

It cant just be us fighting always, especially as things get worse. You have to start moving too.

My parents pulled me for the fourth grade, and I was homeschooled until the end of high school. Nine entire years. They pulled me from the public schools for a perfectly reasonable reason — my mental health was in the toilet and I needed to be away from other kids who might hurt me as they had spent all of my third grade year doing. My mom has a fucking PhD in neuroscience and tutors math professionally. She was, during the ten years that my siblings and I were homeschooled, the best, kindest, most caring, understanding, lovely teacher you could ask for.

But I'm still broken. That's the thing about homeschool. You can have the best experience possible in homeschool and still come out a fundamentally broken person. My social development stopped at the age of 10. I'm a 22 year old adult woman with the social skills of a 10 year old. That's not to say that that COULDN'T have happened in public school, but being homeschooled only made it more of a certainty. Both of my siblings and I have fewer coping strategies on average than our peers with similar neurodivergencies because we basically did not live in the real world for a decade during key developmental years.

Don't ban homeschooling because of the religious nuts. There are plenty of them. Hell, I KNEW plenty of them. But there are also plenty of quote unquote "good" homeschool families. Ones that do everything you would hope the model homeschool family does. And they are still hurting their children, even if unintentionally, because homeschooling is an inhrently traumatic experience. It's isolating. For seven entire years of my life, I had no friends. Not because I was a social outcast, but because I didn't even SEE anybody regularly enough. But, nonetheless, I knew people. You generally do if you get involved in the community.

Ban homeschooling because it breaks and utterly destroys everyone who goes through it.

Everyone.

More to follow, lovelies!