Little Happy Thoughts

-cup empty: you will need to pee soon

What if the children go to schools unafraid of tear gas and bullets?

What if the birds come back, and the bees are healed, and every species moves from endangered, to threatened, to thriving?

What if the rainforest ADVANCES?

What if every parking lot had solar panels? What if every structure had solar panels? What if we built climbing gyms and terraced gardens in the skeletons of old coal power plants?

What if you baked your neighbor bread, and they shared their home-grown blackberries?

What if every person who needed a home, had one? What if every person who needed healing was healed?

What if every body was treasured for what it was, not what it should be?

What if every trans child's parents attended their graduation, their wedding, their new-name-day?

What if every warehouse became a closed-circle repair station? Goods flowing out, and back, and out again? What if landfills started to SHRINK?

What if the water and air were clean? What if there was enough public transit that the cars dwindled, leaving the streets safe for kids on bikes, evening deer, midnight cats and foxes?

What if we win?

The condors are back. The whales are saved. The sea turtles are no longer endangered. The cranes are back. The bees are recovering. The air in LA and Tokyo and London is clean again. The aquifers in the LA Basin are refilling.

Children are kinder than previous generations. Parents are stopping the abuse cycle. Being trans and queer is more acceptable than ever on a ground level.

It's hard to see if you're young, if you don't know how to step back from social media and the news. But remember--bad news sells, and the algorithm knows despair keeps you scrolling. It's a skewed lens.

We are fighting and we are winning against this adminstration's bullying. We are coming together against the bullies and they are running away scared because they don't understand that we will do that.

People are working hard every day to find ways to make sure fewer animals get hit by cars and planes and rockets.

Maker spaces are more common than ever. Solar and wind are more common than ever. Coal plants are shutting down every day.

Unprecedented numbers of acres are being bought back or given back to their rightful stewards, and the world heals because of it. People are working hard every day to learn how to help a forest recover faster.

We are not at zero. We are at decades of effort to heal the world. We've come SO far.

In 1982 there were only 22 California Condors left in the world. In 1992, when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS), with its public and private partners, began reintroducing captive-bred condors to the wild. In 2001 the first wild nesting occurred in Grand Canyon National Park since re-introduction. In 2002 there were only 8 pairs of wild nesting birds population-wide. In 2008, for the first time since the program began, more California condors were flying free in the wild than in captivity. Today there are nearly 500 – more than half of them flying free in Arizona, Utah, California, and Baja Mexico.

When I was born, there were no condors in the wild. I'm 37 now, and there are over 250 condors flying free.

When my mom was born in 1955, there were days when she wasn't allowed to go outside to play, because of the air pollution. When I was born, that never happened anymore.

When I was born, humpback whales were critically endangered, and people thought they were going to go extinct. Today, they've recovered to exceed their recorded numbers. Other whales too!

We fixed it.

Since 1990 extreme poverty has decreased worldwide by over HALF.

by glass_museum on tiktok

Everbody wants third spaces until a homeless guy shows up. Now theres a lot of talk about third spaces for a reason. We need places to form community beyond just home and work, but that begs the question of who gets to be a part of our communities? You want more parks, more libraries but then you complain when these public infrastructures are, well public.

For the unhoused the importance of public spaces isn't just a matter of wanting somewhere to chill with friends it's a matter of existence and freedom. In his landmark essay "homelessness and the issue of freedom," Jeremy Waldron argues that the freedoms of the poor are dispraportionately restricted under the law since their material conditions coerce them into a state in which they must choose between survival and the violation of the law. He writes that freedom exists for the homeless "only to the extent that our society is communist."

Now before your redscare ass starts to hemmorage over the C-word let me explain, but first let's define our terms. Specifically let's distinguish between postive freedoms and negative freedoms. While postive freedom is the capacity to act according to ones free will, negative freedom is the capacity to act free from the coercion of others.

So things like loitering laws [and] public indecency violations though they apply to the rich and poor alike, they apply disproportionatly to those who posses no private property of their own and thus who exist solely in the collective space, and so while a homeless person may posses the positive freedom to, say, physically lay down in a park, they have their negative freedom restricted since they'll be forcebly removed for doing so, because of the regulations placed on public spaces that prohibit certain actions that are typically relegated to the private, like sleeping, pissing, showering.

All these actions are natural and necessary, and yet theyre prohibited in the public space. And this limitation is no problem for owners of private property, since the public is conceived of as being complementary to the private.

However, as Waldron notes, "This complementarity works only for those who have the benefit of both sorts of places" so if youre homeless you're stuck in a situation where you're forced to violate the law in order to survive, because in order to exist, one needs somewhere they can exist.

There's oftentimes a contradiction with how people consider the homeless if they even consider them at all, people don't want them pissing in the streets, but they also don't want them pissing in the Mcdonald's bathroom. People don't want encampments, but they also oppose the construction of affordable public housing.

There seems to be a desire for increased public life, but only a certain kind of public.