To Do, Not Try

Sorry if it’s a little cramped- had to make this all fit in ten photos. Hope you guys like it….. and again…. sorry Andrew

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"Maya angelou's family killed a pedophile that raped her, and that just traumatized her more. "I thought that I had caused the man’s death, because I had spoken his name. That was my seven-and-a-half-year logic. So I stopped talking for five years." Read I know why the caged bird sings."

and here is my comment:

the fantasy of killing a pedophile to defend your child is... an escape from reality. as with all fantasies where a single act of violence stands for a lifetime of effortful care. it lets us off the hook for the day to day labor of actually protecting the human beings around us. it gives us an excuse to look away from what abuse actually looks like.

it allows us to ignore that setting boundaries is a daily practice. it allows us to ignore the subtle ways in which we punish children for having boundaries. it allows us not to think about things we can do, the effort we can put in, in smaller repeated ways, to be kind and caring. to be safe to talk to.

it is a grand gesture that, were you to actually go through with it, would neither prevent the harm that you fear nor help your child to heal from it. it is an idea with no bearing on reality for 99.99% of people, while rape and abuse are a reality for a large fraction of people.

it is not useful to imagine killing a pedophile. it is not useful to claim you would kill a pedophile. it wouldn't be useful to actually attempt to kill a pedophile in almost any situation.

it is useful to think about how you can help your child know they can get help. they can say no. they can tell adults to stop. they deserve to be comfortable. they deserve to be informed.

the entire point of the post is that your child will not be saved by your imagined wrath. the entire point is that your day to day actions, and your attitude towards children as people, are more impactful to your child's well-being. far more realistic. more important.

not least because your child doesn't need you to be wrathful. they need your love. they need care. they need attention.

meanwhile, the public performance of wanting to kill child abusers doesn't do anything to child abusers. most child abusers believe they are doing the right thing for their children.

saying you want to kill abusers doesn't signal anything good to children, either. as others have said, it makes children more afraid to speak up and ask for help. that might be their mom, their coach, their troop leader. it gives those abusers leverage; the children cannot tell if they want things to be stable.

and it makes it harder for adults to BELIEVE children, too! because if their child was really abused, then they've staked their honor on committing that violence, even if it was against their brother or spouse or grandpa or pastor or neighbor or their other kid's favorite babysitter. and if they don't want to do that, well... then they must decide whether they believe completely their child, or whether their child's boundaries must really be respected, or... if maybe it's impossible to know.

how many abuse survivors have tried to disclose, only to be told that so-and-so wouldn't do that, or they didn't mean it, because so-and-so loves you and we all like so-and-so. this dichotomy goes both ways, psychologically. if a child abuser is entirely evil and has to be killed, then someone who's not entirely evil and i don't want to kill can't be a child abuser. this must be something else. there must be a mistake.

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"none of you ever send corrections when I offer the draft so y'all have consented to my version"

"we don't read that shit"

"you must trust me implicitly to create our shared reality that's so sweet"

It's very important to talk about what happened to Renee Good, the horror this administration has inflicted upon the world, and how we got here. I do not, however, think it is ever ethical to essentially encourage suicidal thoughts and aggressively tell people things will never get better. In fact, things won't get better if everyone gives up and believes resistance is futile because we're all dead anyway. In addition, someone trying to talk themselves out of a dark place isn't necessarily undermining what happened to Renee, either. The people saying we'll survive are generally people who are scared and have taken Trump seriously for years, not the people who downplayed him before the election.

Oh I definitely think part of this is that people really didn't believe things would get this bad, so they're having a delayed reaction and are feeling what we felt before or immediately after the election. There's a reason why I cried every day for about 3 months straight, but have shed few tears lately. I was actually just talking about that with my supervisor; she asked me if I'd seen what happened to Renee Good, and I said yes, and, "Some people really screwed up over a year ago and didn't think anything would fundamentally change. But I knew. That’s why I was crying my eyes out the next day and needed to go home from work."

She said, "Yes, I remember that." (She'd comforted me in that time. She'd just gotten citizenship, and despite her facing hardships in Algeria, I think she's shocked over the past year.)

But I'd also put myself back in therapy immediately after the election because I knew what a bad place I was in, and I didn't want this administration to kill me. We must live to see this end. We have to try, and we can't be dragged down by people who've given up. As I said many times, Trump 1.0 taught me that daily misery doesn't change current events, and only puts your own life on hold

@cardassiangoodreads Quoting a Discord friend (who is also a trained psychologist):

"We are at the point where things may start to get scarier as they start to get better.

The resistance is working, but that means Trump is going to get more desperate and escalate more. He's not flexing power, he is desperately trying to get the power back.

Prepare to see things to look frightening but don't let that pull you into despair or hopelessness. He has failed in every other attempt to consolidate power, and signs are pointing to him going to fail here too, but not until after a lot of scary acts

Remember, when overwhelming you is one of their tactical goals, self care is resistance"

I haven't said this before because I don't want to be misconstrued as undermining what's happening, but this is actually my take as well. The administration is WEAK. They're desperately trying to display strength, which is dangerous because they see violence as strength, but Renee's death only increased protests against ICE. You have people shouting at ICE, "You can't kill all of us!" People simply aren't going down without a fight. The National Guard was told to get out of the states that didn't request them (like CA). Resistance is much stronger now than it was this time last year; just think of how bleak things felt in January-February 2025. Trump is polling underwater on basically every issue, and not by a small amount. The administration keeps LOSING in a lot of ways. All their attempts to prosecute their enemies have been thrown out by courts thus far. They couldn't even keep Jimmy Kimmel off the air. They drastically lowered hiring standards and training times for ICE officers because they're NOT hitting their hiring goals and NOT hitting their deportation quotas. Democrats did very well in elections last year, and they could very well overperform this November in the midterms

“I always remember having this fight with a random dude who claimed that ‘straight white men’ were the only true innovators. His prime example for this was the computer… the computer… THE COMPUTER!!! THE COM-PU-TER!!!

Alan Turing - Gay man and ‘father of computing’ Wren operating Bombe - The code cracking computers of the 2nd world war were entirely run by women Katherine Johnson - African American NASA mathematician and ‘Human computer’ Ada Lovelace - arguably the 1st computer programmer”

- Sacha Coward

Also Margaret Hamilton - NASA computer scientist who put the first man on the moon - an as-yet-unmatched feet of software engineering, here pictured beside the full source of that computer programme. #myhero

Grace Hopper - the woman that coined the term “bug”  

also computing was typically a job for women (many of whom were black women that made incredible contributions) back in the day, so it’s absolutely fucking wild that straight white men think they are the foundation of computer innovation. men PUSHED women out and took the credit.

what the failed education

system never did.

Delia Derbyshire over there building a synthesizer from scratch to play the Dr. Who theme on.

Rosamund hesitated. It was, she had to admit, the first time she had ever been given a wish, so she wasn't an expert with this sort of thing, but she felt that this was not part of the typical script. "Sorry," she said. "Is that not allowed?"

The fairy grimaced. When it spoke, its voice came out pained and stressed. "Y-y-y-e-e-e-no," it sighed at last, dragonfly wings sagging. "No, technically no, it's not not allowed, but-" It suddenly brightened. "How about gold? Can't go wrong with gold. Gold's a good wish."

Rosamund frowned. This was really not going the way she expected at all. "Excuse me-"

"Beauty, that's a good one too, beauty's always popular," it went on. "And if there's a ball nearby tonight I can probably-"

"Excuse me!"

The wand was twiddled in chitinous fingers. "Right," the fairy said, sounding scolded. "Sorry, it's just..." Its voice trailed off.

Her grandmother's clock chimed midnight from the mantelpiece.

Then - "I'm sorry," it said, not daring to look up, "I know it's not fair, but - you know what I am. You know what we do to wishes. If you wished for wealth I'd have to turn your hair into silver, so you’d have to tear every strand out of your head before you could spend it. We can't help it. It's what we do. The cost of a wish is that you get what you want, but you don't get it the easy way.

"So if you wish for a child, it'll be - strange. Twisted, somehow. Made of pine or marzipan or have the head of a hedgehog. That's the cost of a wish-child; you'll get the child you wished for, but it'll never be - right."

Rosamund waited to see if there was anything else. She felt a sting to her pride when she realized there wasn't. "Is that all?" she said. "I wouldn't care what I got-"

"You all say that," the fairy said. "You all say you wouldn't care what you got. You all say it, and you really believe it, until the neighbours sneer at you and your hedgehog child for too long, or your back aches because your thumb-high child can't help you in the fields, or your pine child kicks and bites and won't obey, and then you think, 'This isn't the way it was supposed to be,' and then..."

The fairy stopped and looked into Rosamund’s eyes. It was a beautiful thing, all glittering carapace and iridescent wings, but just for an instant it looked terribly, terribly old.