Progressing Nowhere

Seeds For Tomorrow

and wen its day

i do not sleepe

i do not play

i go to stor

but not to begg

i watch the mylk

“La sirena y el pescador,” Elisa Chavez.

Hey all! This poem is part of my chapbook Miss Translated, which I produced in a limited run as Town Hall Seattle’s Spring 2017 artist-in-residence. The main conceit behind this work is that to accurately portray my relationship with Spanish, I have to explore the pain and ambiguity of not speaking the language of my grandparents and ancestors. As a result, these poems are bilingual … sort of. Each one is translated into English incorrectly.

and something about…blood? and transformation?  oooh yikes.  she didn’t want legs in the spanish version did she.  and it was a painful process.

1. That income tax cuts are good for poor, working and middle class people. (Compared to property tax and sales tax cuts, income tax cuts affect poor, working and middle class very little.)

2. That “they” – racial and ethnic minorities – benefit from social programs like welfare, housing subsidies, public transportation, and higher education, but “we” – white people – don’t. (Since there are LOTS more white people in America, even now, than “not white” people, simple math suggests most beneficiaries of social programs are white. And they are.)

3. That the “free market” can lead to the least expensive, highest quality solution to social and political problems. (Many social and political problems, after all, involve situations where no one has any money, so the “free market” has no reason to touch them.)

4. That the “free market” means that government must not intervene in the market, and must allow whatever the market determines to actually take place.(The “free market” requires government to pass laws, create courts, and run a stable banking system to make the market work smoothly.)

“Dissent is patriotic” is courtesy of the amazing ACLU. I’ve wanted to illustrate this quote for months.

Protest–and the spread of info–is powerful. It is not unpatriotic to criticize America’s injustices; it is unpatriotic to remain silent.

Originally posted on Twitter here.

So you know those news stories about how Millennials don’t buy enough breakfast cereal or paperback books or homes or whatever the hell that Boomers are complaining that “kids these days” don’t spend money on?  And y’all are like “LOL, no cash my pal”?  

I think there’s something more insidious going on.  You see, they thought they had you.  Forget the Saturday morning cartoons of my childhood, they had Disney Channel and Nickelodeon feeding you ads all day long.  Your generation got advertising in your schools.  Your parents took you to prosperity doctrine spewing MegaChurches (it’s Mega so it’s gotta impress the kids, right?).  

They thought you were going to be their generation of super-consumers.  

You are generations distant from the great depression, and the 1979 energy crisis.  Boomers want to pretend that the 2008 housing bubble wouldn’t affect the little kids.  And plus, we had grown past the era of Yankee thrift and hippie DIY frugality.  Right?  And there was no mopey Kurt Cobain glamorizing thrift-store flannel shirts.  You guys were going to out-consume the Boomer generation.  They were sure of it.

Those think pieces?  They’re Boomer disappointment that you have found value in something other than your place as a mindless consumer.

And yeah, I’m not going to pretend that y’all have more cash than you do.  It was fucking idiotic to think they were going to raise a consumer generation without having to pay them the money they would need to buy even life’s necessities.  And I could write a book about how my generation was complicit in destroying the old values around work and loyalty that left your generation screwed.  Really, I’m genuinely sorry for the mistakes we made.

Tumblr @staff have been silent about the use of this site by white nationalist bloggers, while numerous other sites (see this post) have made actions to ban nazis/white nationalists/”alt-right”/fascists. Tumblr needs to know their lack of action is unacceptable. I love my tumblr community and want to stay, but if this continues, I will have to considering leaving.

Let’s also let @staff know that as they’re trying to increase advertiser spend, they should be well-aware of most ad tech companies (on the buy and sell side) have explicit rules against hate speech. You can tell Tumblr is aware of this because they’ve doubled-down on trying to locate the NSFW posts (quite badly based on how their technology fails so often) for what I imagine is brand safety for advertisers.

Given groups like Sleeping Giants has been successful in amplifying the voices of users protesting brands appearing on Breitbart, any other platform could be next in having their advertisers signaled with a screenshot of said posts where hate speech is proudly displayed against an ad served… well, you get the drift.

1.) Boycott

I won’t be here, anyone else with me?

RACISM AND HATE SPEECH IS WORSE THAN PORN, Y’ALL.

(Remember that asking a website to restrict hateful content is not infringing on anyone’s freedom of speech.  Freedom of speech guarantees that no one can be sued or charged for expressing themselves.  It does not guarantee that they can do so on any given platform, if the terms of service make such expressions unwelcome.  Tumblr is a business; it is not the government.  We are asking them to make this a safe and pleasant space for their users: that if they want to continue using the rest of us as their revenue source, they should stop enabling and profiting off of certain types of harmful content.)

Because even in a movie with hobbits, dwarves, dragons, elves and a giant fiery eye. The idea of a brown hobbit doesn’t seem credible to a director. Because in a world with dragons, magic trees, faceless assassin, treeppl, an omniscient boy, iceppl, zombies and a fireproof child bride. Somehow black and brown ppl seem rarer than magic. The world of fantasy has been claimed by white-people and you better believe that they are hoarding it. The elves of Tolkien have to be white because they are the fairest, wisest and most beautiful of races. Those pointy eared fucks can’t even tan. The dwarves and hobbits have to be white because of reasons.

Even in a series that takes it’s inspiration for Targaryens from Egyptian culture doesn’t see fit to make the family look the part.

I love fantasy. But I hated that as a child I’d watch lord of the rings and see that the only time I saw skin even remotely my shade was on urukhai. I could never be a happy hobbit, a hard working dwarf, a beautiful elf or even a brave lady of Rohan. I didn’t belong in that world. We don’t belong in that world.The closest thing to me in asoiaf is the Naathi, Dothraki, Dornish and children of the forest. The first men should have been described as indigenous so at least we had some social commentary on displaced natives in America. But that role was relegated to the children of the forest who might not even be human, and have been driven to extinction. The Naathi are viewed as perfect slave stock, an observation Columbus made of our people when he “found” the new world. And the Dornish were so poorly written in the show that they were killed off an ignored. Even when we get to participate in the slightest with high fantasy, we become that which we are in this world. Slaves, savages, foreign. While white people can escape into the world of high fantasy, people of color are forced into the same tropes. Fantasy is an escape for them. They can see themselves in the characters they revere. We don’t get that. We have to blind ourselves to this, push it in the back of our minds so we can enjoy the show or book.Then people ask what’s the big deal. The big deal is that in a world of magic and wonder, it’s impossible for a person of color to be the hero.

I want to start a Campaign  to stop people using ‘PUSSY’  in reference to being weak.

Pussy is strong, can take the hard knocks and a good pounding,

Pussy can accommodate pushing a whole human being into the world

Pussy can stand the monthly sloughing of the lining of an internal organ

Balls on the other hand are the truly weakest things, they are soft, squishy, and shrivel up in a light breeze…..tap em with a feather and it brings their owner to their knees.