A day at a time, I suppose

Reasons to vote for The Greens:

Labor and Liberal support the Adani coalmine, which will further destroy the majestic Great Barrier Reef and the 64,000 jobs it provides. Greens will stand up against Adani.

Climate Change is an undeniable threat to the environment and our way of life and it is the central issue of The Greens while Liberals are full of climate deniers and Labor is less committed to reducing emissions than The Greens (45% vs 100% emissions reduction by 2030)

They want a transition plan to help those currently working in the coal industry to be retrained for new jobs. Their idea involves a $1 billion transition plan for workers affected by the end of the coal industry, which Richard Di Natale says will create more than 170,000 new jobs.

Greens will have a carbon price which would raise about $7 BILLION a year - saving the environment while also raising revenue for essential services

Greens want to end offshore detention - a cruel practice that has caused severe mental health problems in detainees, medical care being withheld for 5 years, and has been labelled torture by the UN.

They also want regional arrangements to help refugees so that they don’t resort to risky journeys via boat to flee persecution and potential death in their countries of origin as well as a comprehensive search and rescue to prevent deaths at sea.

Greens propose 10,000 places for community sponsored refugees - double that of Labor’s and 10 times that of Liberals to “give community groups the chance to offer additional support for people in need.”

Former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser endorsed the Greens in the 2013 election stating that neither of the major parties deserve to form government because they both have unsatisfactory asylum seeker policies. Why vote for Liberals/Labor if not even a former Liberal PM won’t?

They have plenty of socially progressive policies to benefit everyone, not just those who already benefit from society. For example: The Greens have a $50 million plan to help increase the ability of migrants in Australia to access English language support.

The Greens want to introduce the “Buffett rule” so the rich don’t get away with not paying taxes. The Greens version of this limits deductions made by those earning more than $300,000 and make them pay a minimum tax rate. It’s estimated to raise $9.5 billion

They want to make dental part of medicare, to help it become more accessible and affordable

The Greens want to boost university funding by 10% instead of cut it and provide free undergraduate Uni and TAFE for all students. This will be funded by ending fossil fuel subsidies to save $140 billion over ten years.

Boost Newstart by $75 a week - a payment that hasn’t been raised in real terms in 20 years and those on it struggle to get by.

They want to ban conversion therapy, a hateful and harmful practice that emotionally traumatises LGBT+ people

They want to work with First Nations people to establish a path for sovereignty and treaties so we can close the gap. They also want to work on expanding education programs to 

$12 million to community organisations annually that empower communities to tackle racism

They want a national strategy to counter violent extremism in all forms through funding for community level-anti racism/extremism programs

A vote for The Greens is a vote for a better future for our environment. It’s an investment in the education of our nation. It’s a vote for progress and to stand up against discrimination. It’s a vote for the security of our nation. It’s a vote for accessibility for all - not just those rich enough to get ahead in life. It’s a vote for combining economic policy with environmental.

the president of guinea built/is building infrastructure and school and wells all over the country and is decreasing youth unemployment exponentially

the president of cote d’ivoire made school mandatory of children ages 6-16 and banned plastic bags while also building ultra modern trasportation infrastructure

but its also super invalidating to bi people?? like no, everyone is NOT bi, if everyone WAS bi, why would biphobia exist? why would bi people face such high rates of domestic violence? why would bi people experience ANY sort of oppression if “everyone was bi”???

It’s not easy being my color in this industry, it’s really not, and these conversations are really hard. I don’t talk about a lot of this stuff.

not at the expense of writing butch lesbian characters, it shouldn’t be one or the other. (hell, it’d be interesting to have both a butch lesbian and a butch straight woman in the same cast.) but i keep seeing people say “make this butch character a lesbian! if you make her straight that’s boring and cowardly!”

and… i don’t know what fucking planet those people are living on where media is full of butch women, like actually butch women, not just Furiosa and Gwendolyn Christie’s oeuvre. I don’t know on what fucking planet media regularly has women who don’t perform femininity shown in loving relationships with men, and their lack of femininity isn’t A Thing. 

 how many girls are growing up and seeing that if they want to be A Woman who Loves Men they have to be femme? seeing that the only people who are dressing and acting and existing the way they want to are lesbians and trans men? while… you know, not being lesbian or transmasc, or not knowing that they’re lesbian or transmasc. 

“We play for different teams.”

“Oh, so you’re straight and she’s….” 

Something that makes you uncomfortable is not a trigger. Someone disagreeing with you is not gaslighting. A fight is not abuse. Emotional/verbal harm isn’t violence. 

Emotional abuse is super harmful but on it’s own it isn’t violent. My ex was very emotionally abusive but I’d never tell someone who was getting hit by their partner every day “oh I totally get it, I was in a violent relationship too”. And as someone who has been physically attacked by homophobes, I always feel so belittled when someone says “yeah homophobic violence is horrible, I get it all the time when I hear people use slurs”. 

But still, I disagree. Once again I’m not using this distinction to say emotional abuse isn’t as bad as physical harm. Obviously that depends on the case. I’m just saying that they are different. This is always what I’ve found not just in my lived experience but also in my work. I wrote my thesis on DV and just published three studies on hate crime. I now work in prisons in rehabilitation programs for offenders as well as in the community with survivors, and tbh I’ve never had a client (offender or survivor) not draw this distinction themselves at some point. I can’t tell you how many women have told me “the bruises can heal but i’ll never forget what he said to me”, or hate crime complainants who’ve said “I don’t care that much that they smashed my windows, what really hurt were the words they spraypainted on the door”.

They’re different. The impacts certainly overlap but they’re not identical, and we shouldn’t treat them that way, in research or in practice. 

Tbh this whole discussion is really setting me off so this will be my last post before I lose my cool. 

If you’re both going to define violence as something that deliberately causes any type of harm, then that’s a ridiculously broad definition. I don’t know how to explain without repeating myself that violent and non-violent forms of abuse do not have the same causes or impacts or patterns, even if their intentions are both abusive. But if deliberate harm is the only criteria for a definition, what are we going to start calling violence now? Hacking someone’s Facebook? Excluding them from a group of friends? Stealing someone’s backpack when they leave it behind in a library? Calling a retail worker useless because they don’t have my size of jeans? These all cause harm, so why not? Even in terms of abuse more specifically, are we really going to pretend that financial control, social isolation, harassing phone calls, monitoring someone's communications and physical abuse aren’t separate but inter-connected tactics under the abuse umbrella? That they don’t have different patterns and outcomes, and that the non-violence of these other behaviours is a big part of why they’re so effective?

Again, as someone who has experienced both (and works in the field), I find the conflation of these terms to be a disservice to both the emotional abuse and the violence I’m dealing with. Broadening terms to the point where they can mean literally anything doesn’t help people to accurately describe or meaningfully come to terms with what happened. A big part of the reason I’m finding it difficult in therapy to accept language that’s used (e.g. trigger, gaslighting, violence) is because I constantly see people, especially online, water them down to include the vastest range of harms to the point where they hardly seem to describe mine even though i’m a textbook case. At the end of the day people can call their experiences what they want, but i’m still going to feel like it’s a copout when I’m deciding whether or not to report my sexual assault and I hear someone say they understand violence because they’ve been verbally sexually harassed. 

Something that makes you uncomfortable is not a trigger. Someone disagreeing with you is not gaslighting. A fight is not abuse. Emotional/verbal harm isn’t violence. 

Emotional abuse is super harmful but on it’s own it isn’t violent. My ex was very emotionally abusive but I’d never tell someone who was getting hit by their partner every day “oh I totally get it, I was in a violent relationship too”. And as someone who has been physically attacked by homophobes, I always feel so belittled when someone says “yeah homophobic violence is horrible, I get it all the time when I hear people use slurs”. 

But still, I disagree. Once again I’m not using this distinction to say emotional abuse isn’t as bad as physical harm. Obviously that depends on the case. I’m just saying that they are different. This is always what I’ve found not just in my lived experience but also in my work. I wrote my thesis on DV and just published three studies on hate crime. I now work in prisons in rehabilitation programs for offenders as well as in the community with survivors, and tbh I’ve never had a client (offender or survivor) not draw this distinction themselves at some point. I can’t tell you how many women have told me “the bruises can heal but i’ll never forget what he said to me”, or hate crime complainants who’ve said “I don’t care that much that they smashed my windows, what really hurt were the words they spraypainted on the door”.

They’re different. The impacts certainly overlap but they’re not identical, and we shouldn’t treat them that way, in research or in practice. 

Something that makes you uncomfortable is not a trigger. Someone disagreeing with you is not gaslighting. A fight is not abuse. Emotional/verbal harm isn’t violence. 

Emotional abuse is super harmful but on it’s own it isn’t violent. My ex was very emotionally abusive but I’d never tell someone who was getting hit by their partner every day “oh I totally get it, I was in a violent relationship too”. And as someone who has been physically attacked by homophobes, I always feel so belittled when someone says “yeah homophobic violence is horrible, I get it all the time when I hear people use slurs”. 

But still, I disagree. Once again I’m not using this distinction to say emotional abuse isn’t as bad as physical harm. Obviously that depends on the case. I’m just saying that they are different. This is always what I’ve found not just in my lived experience but also in my work. I wrote my thesis on DV and just published three studies on hate crime. I now work in prisons in rehabilitation programs for offenders as well as in the community with survivors, and tbh I’ve never had a client (offender or survivor) not draw this distinction themselves at some point. I can’t tell you how many women have told me “the bruises can heal but i’ll never forget what he said to me”, or hate crime complainants who've said “I don't care that much that they smashed my windows, what really hurt were the words they spraypainted on the door”.

They’re different. The impacts certainly overlap but they’re not identical, and we shouldn’t treat them that way, in research or in practice. 

Something that makes you uncomfortable is not a trigger. Someone disagreeing with you is not gaslighting. A fight is not abuse. Emotional/verbal harm isn’t violence. 

Emotional abuse is super harmful but on it’s own it isn’t violent. My ex was very emotionally abusive but I’d never tell someone who was getting hit by their partner every day “oh I totally get it, I was in a violent relationship too”. And as someone who has been physically attacked by homophobes, I always feel so belittled when someone says “yeah homophobic violence is horrible, I get it all the time when I hear people use slurs”. 

Like I had this one creative writing class, and we did little warm-ups each day, right? And I forget what the prompt was, but I just scrawled out a scenario where a shooter busted into church and someone (in first-person) had to smack ‘em upside the head with a frying pan from the nearby kitchen before they could shoot up the entire congregation.

I got a perfect score for something I’ve run through in my head a thousand times, tweaking little details here and there on occasion. What if I’m at school? What if I’m going to the bathroom? What if I’m helping my brother to the bathroom? What if they’ve already shot people? What if they’ve already shot me?

And the woman at the lonely desk in the front lobby who checks everyone in, everyone, except at the beginning of the day when everyone all comes in at once. And you have to live with the fact that you’ve seen her miss people while checking in others, because we’re kids and impatient to get to class one time and sometimes we just walk past - and are we setting a precedent that’s going to get us all killed? Is this teacher or secretary or hall monitor just going to get shot anyway, before the rest of us, so the killer can come in? Does she KNOW, for SURE, that that kid who walked past is a student? And anyway, it won’t save us, because they don’t check the bags or anything, so if the shooter IS a student they can just check right in!

And you used to be friends with the weird kid because he liked the same music as you, and now you have to careful weigh whether that makes YOU responsible. Do you have to keep being his friend so maybe you all graduate alive, even if he has a camouflage hat and his dad was probably in the military and he listens to edgy music and he talks about weapons all the time and you know he has a gun at home? Will being friends with him save you, or if you slip up once, make him mad, don’t sit with him at lunch, say something teenagers say about each other when you think he isn’t listening, are you a walking ghost? Are your days numbered? If you’re a girl (I am), you’re even more terrified, because WHAT IF HE ASKS YOU OUT? You don’t like him that way. Will he kill you if you say no?

You stop sitting with the weird kid. You live with the guilt of knowing maybe this was the last straw. He doesn’t shoot up the school. He was okay in the end, and you’re still guilty… and you’re still scared.

You go over to a friend’s house. At one point, everyone takes a break and plays with bb guns. It’s the first time you’ve seen a gun in real life. You’re the first to get shot. It hurts more than you thought it would - they shot you on the side of the neck. You wonder if they were lucky, or if they know how to aim. You don’t know if there’s a real gun somewhere in the house. Later, weeks, months later, you two have a falling out. You’re terrified for the rest of high school.

And instead of the anti-bullying talks from middle school you have lockout-lockdown drills, and they come and pound on the doors to see if anyone opens them, and in some schools they have the good courtesy to tell you it’s a drill so you aren’t crying, except then… then you have to wonder if your sobs would have given you away. Except they wouldn’t have - you’re a quiet crier, but what about the kid next to you who screamed at a physics demonstration last week, what if it wasn’t a drill and you heard pounding at the door, would she scream?

Can you fit under that closet shelf? Can you fit into that chemistry cabinet, if you move the scales out, first? You can’t try in class. The teacher doesn’t have time for that. You want to, though. You want to KNOW if you could close yourself into that tiny space that locks when it shuts all the way and wait. Maybe you wouldn’t suffocate, it has cracks at the edges after all. You don’t think you’re claustrophobic. You don’t think you’ll scream.

Nobody shoots up your school. You graduate. You go to college. Someone sets off a firework near one of the dorms - not yours, but a friends - and the groupchat is alive with the not-so-fun, never-fun game of “fireworks or gunshots” with the stakes being your lives. You all decide, “fireworks.” If you were wrong…

A friend breaks up with someone and you spend a little time wondering what you would do if they broke into the dorm while you were hanging out. Would you die for them? Sometimes you decide no, sometimes you decide yes. You aren’t sure which turns your stomach inside out the most. You had a dream about a school shooter asking who would be the first to die. You didn’t volunteer. They picked you anyway.

Two years after you graduate, your school gets a threat. Police search it. The kids are locked in rooms for hours. Four hours, five. You imagine it. They wouldn’t have said it was a drill on the loudspeakers, that time. Police WOULD have opened the door to your classroom, because they were searching room-by-room. Would you have screamed? Five hours without food or water or being able to go to the bathroom. Some people had to pee in the trash cans. In a dark room in front of their classmates. Your friend’s school has cops with guns in it now. It didn’t when they graduated, and you weren’t there for the not-a-drill… but they were fears both of you had, two fears out of hundreds. Just because you weren’t there when they happened doesn’t mean they didn’t feel like a rope around your neck.

The newspaper article interviews a student and you find out the kids thought it was an active shooter. They didn’t know it was a note. Doors slammed. Lockers slammed. The police were searching the school, there was a lot of slamming. How many of those slams sounded like gunshots?

Do you have a right to feel this way, since it didn’t ever happen to you? Every lockdown was a drill for you. Does that matter? You know the part of your brain asking isn’t a part you should listen to, but it doesn’t matter. Half the adults say you’re overreacting, or that it isn’t being caused by guns, but by bullying or just teenagers being teenagers or mental health or something, ANYTHING, that’s YOUR FAULT instead of theirs.

Let me reiterate that.

HALF THE ADULTS ARE SAYING SCHOOL SHOOTINGS ARE YOUR FAULT.

And you remember that you stopped sitting with the weird kid, and you wonder if that’s true. And then you remember not letting that one teacher in once, and you wonder if they blame you, if they were the half of adults that would never understand the fear you felt in that instant.

And it follows you, this fear and these events and the news from home and the flinch when someone slams a door. But you’re the adult now, you’re out of high school, and so the kids are yelling at YOU when they say “DO SOMETHING, WE’RE DYING!” At least, in your mind, they are. Even though you aren’t out of college, even though it’s the older people who did this, you feel like you are to blame BECAUSE YOU DIDN’T DIE. Because the weird kid DIDN’T shoot up the school. Because the teacher WASN’T a murderer, because the lady at the front desk DIDN’T get killed, because you never sat for five hours in a dark classroom thinking you were about to die. It’s your fault now, because you graduated, that part of your brain says. And it takes a tumblr post to tell you that that’s survivor’s guilt. That it’s trauma.

You still have the school shooter dreams. You think you always will.

When the staff came over the loudspeakers and said the nearby shooter had been apprehended, everyone fell out of cabinets and from under tables and out of lockers sobbing and grabbing eachother….it was surreal and haunts me until this day.

My junior year, my last year, we heard a banging noise. It didn’t quite sound like a gunshot, but we weren’t sure. Then the lockdown announcement came over the intercom. The banging kept happening. Our teacher left the room to tell the substitute a floor above us what to do. We we’re quiet, waiting for him to come back. Or not. The banging kept happening. He came back. The banging stopped. The lockdown stopped. Some kids were messing with a metal door. There wasn’t a shooting at my school.

The school hosted a party after graduation. Some of us were too scared to go. We didn’t want to be scared any more. I went. Nothing happened.

I used to love storms, now I’m scared of thunder. It sounds too much like gunshots. My brothers who were homeschooled don’t understand why I hate even looking at guns. I’m in University now, and I still look in my classrooms. What would I do if it happened now? Some of my friends are still in high school. I can’t say goodbye to them anymore. I don’t want it to be the last time.

It is absolutely heartbreaking that this isn’t the case anymore. Reading these reactions to drills just shows how quickly this changed. I graduated 3 years ago. In 3 years, this has become so common and reoccurring that even drills are traumatic. It also pisses me off because something should’ve been done about this shit already. But no. El boboso naranjo is stuck in the fucking NRA’s pocket.