I'm hanging in there and that's enough

BRIDGERTON (2020-)

Season four, episode one

Now I have toddler children and phone calls are a lost cause, and I kind of get it because they had kids then, but they were still assholes about it.

Look, maybe I'm unusual and lucky in my exposure to Holocaust lit in school. Most people don't get well-versed enough in these memoirs and histories and historical novels that they know what's about to happen and "all the ways the bad guys get you" the way horror fans shout at the TV, "No, don't lean over the body to see if he's really dead, poke him with a stick, what are you, *trying* to die?!"

But for god's sake, y'all, does it really take more than plain old common sense to have basic opsec? If you make a list of federal government workers resisting the takeovers happening now "for inspiration for the masses" and send it around social media...who the frick else do you think can see that list? And what might they do *other than* take inspiration from it? If I'm a fascist government goon looking to stifle dissent and make an example to everyone, what a great shortcut you've given me!

And it doesn't even take that; if I'm someone like a garden-variety LibsOfTikTok follower, maybe I get it in my head that going Pizzagate on these people is a patriotic thing to do. Or maybe I just fall back on the basic hyper-online alt-right MO of doxxing and harrassing people to the point that they pack up and leave town or, god forbid, commit suicide.

I should not have had to tell people, during Occupy in around 2012, that announcing your protest on Facebook and asking people to click to say they'd be there is a bad, bad, stupid, baaaaaaad idea. The NSA leaks wouldn't come out until about a year later, but IT SHOULD NOT HAVE TAKEN THAT to understand that compiling a list of people who would be at your protest against the government, with pictures of their faces and their past drunken college escapades along with their workplaces and social affiliations, is a terrible and unsafe way to organize.

This is something that scares me deep in my bones about what's happening: Americans don't understand *how* to mistrust authority anymore. We might have the general sentiment, but we don't know what to do with it in a practical way. Do you think someone who lived under the Stasi for decades or who grew up on stories of their parents barely escaping the Ayatollah or Saddam or Papa Doc's crackdowns and purges would call the concerns people *absolutely have been voicing for at least a good 20 years now* paranoid or overreactive? Our comfort and relative stability have spoiled us into complacency, and now we don't know how to even think about this stuff.

There was an older gentleman sitting across from me on the M train.  It was about 6:30am, so I didn’t think much of it when he started leaning over.  It was when he kept going when most people would jerk awake that about 5 of us took action.  We asked if anyone knew CPR in our car, and when we pulled into the next station, we held the doors open and shouted for a doctor (there was a firefighter on the train with us who knew CPR, because that’s how things are in NYC).  No response during CPR.  The older gentleman’s lips were turning blue. 

When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics took over and after 2 minutes of no reaction, I watched something that will always haunt my soul existentially, the way this pic does:  The paramedic yelled at this man that he had to get up because he’d be late for work.  And he got a response.  I don’t know if the older man made it, but he had a pulse when they took him up the stairs to the ambulance.

dissociation discussion

bonus:

dissociation discussion

bonus:

I found his Instagram and he goes by ‘Bry the Fly Guy’ as well as Dr. Bryan Lessard, and his page is everything you imagine it to be and more.

Michelle, can you handle this?

Beyoncé, can you handle this?

I don’t think they can handle this!

I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly

I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly

I don’t think you’re ready for this

‘Cause my body too bootylicious for ya, babe