livingloser

There are still many, many people telling the fascist fuckwits to eat shit. There are still long green spring evenings and slow golden summer afternoons and winter nights and autumn leaves. There are still coffee shops and weird little bookstores and small businesses on sidewalks lined with flowered trees. There are still sunrises and sunsets and blue skies and ocean shores and mountains. Oh yes, there are still mountains, which I have an especial fondness for. High up there in thin air, you can see forever.

There are still Gay People In Your Phone and texts and in-jokes. There are your blorbos. There is still fic and fanart. There are still books and music and games and art. There is a lot of art. Even with the AI beast trying to gobble and commercialize everything, there's still art! There are still people who think using your own brain to do things is important! There are still universities and publishing houses and other places where it's our job to think about things that matter!

There is still work that feels fulfilling to do. There are still constant little moments of quiet and beauty and rest. There are still jaw-dropping pictures of nebulae and galaxies and the great immensity of space, as we continue to learn things we never knew before. And amid all those stars, there is still a tiny, beautiful, and vulnerable blue planet which we only get to live on for a very short time, and there are still kids who are counting on us to make sure they get to inherit it in some kind of recognizable form. There is still the weird fact that when you give someone a hug and sit with them for a while and tell them over and over that it will be okay, it actually feels like it might be okay. I think that all means something.

Doomerism is really easy right now. I get it. I honestly 100% do. But I also don't see any point whatsoever in throwing up our hands and letting said fascist fuckwits gleefully terrify us into submission and make us live in fear and act like they're the Actual Meaning of the World (they are not). They suck so incredibly hard, but they're also so small and so stupid and so ultimately insignificant. They will not define this particular moment if we don't let them, and if we stick around to make sure they don't. Fuck 'em. I believe in you.

(the two images below are linked in the above Marisa Kabas skeet)

And in the latest NYT/Siena poll:

Everybody who's been showing up to protest, everybody who's been shouting at town halls, everybody who has been calling, writing, and emailing their reps: this is what you have helped to do.

When they try to pull this shit and we stand up and scream at the top of our lungs "not today, Satan," it works. It may not work immediately and it may work slower than we'd like, but it does work. When we push back hard on their bullshit, they falter.

Things are still scary, yes. I'm not saying we're out of the woods. But there are battles we are winning.

In the americas Indigenous peoples have recognized gender variant or two spirit people long before colonization. My people have lived with our land for more than 11,000 years (and yes there is record and scientific evidence of our presence that far back). That's at least 11,000 years of queer history in North America.

What trump is doing goes against scientific and medical consensus. It's an ahistorical, anti-intellectual act of colonialism. We've been here far longer than musty ass power-hungry old men, and we're going to outlast them.