while there is life, there is hope

A story that the Jews tell each other is that when the slaves were fleeing Egypt they came to the edge of the Red Sea and thought: well, fuck, this is it. Water in front of them and enemies behind. They had escaped, sure, but all this meant was that they were going to die free instead of in chains. A meaningful distinction in an abstract sense, but the Jews are a practical people, and mostly what they were concerned with in that moment was: they would be equally dead either way.

Someday we’ll live in the sky. Meanwhile, the house of our lives is this green world. The fields, the ponds, the birds. The thick black oaks—surely they are the invention of something wonderful. And the tiger lilies. And the runaway honeysuckle that no one will ever trim again.

so i’m watching the first Silent Hill and noticed my cat was too

I have a VERY hot take for you all:

“Leslie [Feinberg] was a tremendous organizer. We were so small, and we saw that something had to be done. But how could we get the people of Boston to oppose the racists? So Leslie tried something: Leslie went to the lesbian bars. There was a famous bar called The Saints. Everybody knew The Saints; it had been raided a number of times. Leslie went and started making speeches, started making contacts, started doing this, started doing that. One night, Leslie got the whole Saints bar and a sister bar to do a car caravan at midnight. They went to South Boston, which was the stronghold of the racist movement, and put up posters all night long, so when they woke up in the morning South Boston was full of antiracist posters. And the lesbian community had really taken it to heart that they were an integral part of this movement. Only Leslie could have done that. The movements at that time — gay, lesbian, and trans — were kind of isolated. And Leslie brought the lesbian and gay community to an antiracist march that was led by the black community. It was a tremendous step forward in the civil rights movement as a whole, both for the black community and for bringing gay, lesbian, and trans people into the movement. You just felt it. The movement felt it. The March Against Racism itself was fantastic. Many thousands showed up. The city opposed it, and had the police attack it. We literally pushed the police back and marched to Boston Common. It was one of the best marches Boston had ever seen. And Leslie was a huge part of it, and the gay and lesbian community was a part of it for the first time. That’s what Leslie’s life was: not just staying in the community that Leslie was part of, but making sure the working class as a whole, that we all moved together.”

being gay has changed almost all of my/my friends interactions with the rest of society so PLEASE stop saying it “makes you no different” and “it doesn’t affect you” and “everyone is the same”. this is a childish, ineffective way to address internalized homophobia.

“I wonder if the ways that we weaponize social justice language against each other is related to the experiences of profound powerlessness that we’ve had to endure. Many of us have never been able to heal from the deprivations of our childhoods. Being able to rationalize why someone is bad and deserves to be punished is a way to reclaim power in a world that actively disempowers us. I’m not suggesting, as some alt-right folks have done, that the work of naming or critiquing systems of oppression is wrong nor am I suggesting that we need to be more civil. I believe strongly in resistance to state violence and oppression as a necessary condition of our survival. I am interested in expanding our collective emotional awareness about how our traumas, ongoing and past, inform the ways that we engage in the work of advocacy and justice. What does it mean to acknowledge that many of us never had safe spaces to learn how to process complex emotions or manage intense conflict without relying on our fight or flight responses? How can we love ourselves and others while still holding everyone accountable to the values of liberation?”