Dancing Through Life?

B: "They have a fandom I'm in. EA."

A: "EA is not a fandom!"

B: "We write fanfic?"

We will never know their names.

The first victim could not have been recorded, for there was no written language to record it. They were someone’s daughter, or son, and someone’s friend, and they were loved by those around them. And they were in pain, covered in rashes, confused, scared, not knowing why this was happening to them or what they could do about it - victim of a mad, inhuman god. There was nothing to be done - humanity was not strong enough, not aware enough, not knowledgeable enough, to fight back against a monster that could not be seen.

It was in Ancient Egypt, where it attacked slave and pharaoh alike. In Rome, it effortlessly decimated armies. It killed in Syria. It killed in Moscow.  In India, five million dead. It killed a thousand Europeans every day in the 18th century. It killed more than fifty million Native Americans. From the Peloponnesian War to the Civil War, it slew more soldiers and civilians than any weapon, any soldier, any army (Not that this stopped the most foolish and empty souls from attempting to harness the demon as a weapon against their enemies).

Cultures grew and faltered, and it remained. Empires rose and fell, and it thrived. Ideologies waxed and waned, but it did not care. Kill. Maim. Spread. An ancient, mad god, hidden from view, that could not be fought, could not be confronted, could not even be comprehended. Not the only one of its kind, but the most devastating.

For a long time, there was no hope - only the bitter, hollow endurance of survivors.

In China, in the 10th century, humanity began to fight back.

It was observed that survivors of the mad god’s curse would never be touched again: they had taken a portion of that power into themselves, and were so protected from it. Not only that, but this power could be shared by consuming a remnant of the wounds. There was a price, for you could not take the god’s power without first defeating it - but a smaller battle, on humanity’s terms. By the 16th century, the technique spread, to India, across Asia, the Ottoman Empire and, in the 18th century, Europe. In 1796, a more powerful technique was discovered by Edward Jenner.

An idea began to take hold: Perhaps the ancient god could be killed.

A whisper became a voice; a voice became a call; a call became a battle cry, sweeping across villages, cities, nations. Humanity began to cooperate, spreading the protective power across the globe, dispatching masters of the craft to protect whole populations. People who had once been sworn enemies joined in common cause for this one battle. Governments mandated that all citizens protect themselves, for giving the ancient enemy a single life would put millions in danger.

And, inch by inch, humanity drove its enemy back. Fewer friends wept; Fewer neighbors were crippled; Fewer parents had to bury their children.

At the dawn of the 20th century, for the first time, humanity banished the enemy from entire regions of the world. Humanity faltered many times in its efforts, but there individuals who never gave up, who fought for the dream of a world where no child or loved one would ever fear the demon ever again. Viktor Zhdanov, who called for humanity to unite in a final push against the demon; The great tactician Karel Raška, who conceived of a strategy to annihilate the enemy; Donald Henderson, who led the efforts of those final days.

The enemy grew weaker. Millions became thousands, thousands became dozens. And then, when the enemy did strike, scores of humans came forth to defy it, protecting all those whom it might endanger.

The enemy’s last attack in the wild was on Ali Maow Maalin, in 1977. For months afterwards, dedicated humans swept the surrounding area, seeking out any last, desperate hiding place where the enemy might yet remain.

They found none.

35 years ago, on December 9th, 1979, humanity declared victory.

This one evil, the horror from beyond memory, the monster that took 500 million people from this world - was destroyed.

You are a member of the species that did that. Never forget what we are capable of, when we band together and declare battle on what is broken in the world.

So, yeah, Roe vs. Wade.  And also, quite possibly, a huge chunk of the 14th amendment, including support for birth control, trans rights, and Lawrence vs. Texas.  It’s clear that this court is going to rework the American legal framework in fundamental ways, given a decade or two.

I’ve been thinking about what I have to give at the moment, and I think one of the more valuable things is that I’m just barely old enough not to take this stuff for granted.  I’ve got clear, formative memories of what it’s like to live under a government that bans your sexual orientation by law, to work productively towards a better world under those conditions, and to live a good kind of life while you do it.  What follows is a few things I learned from the last time the pendulum swung in this direction, targeted primarily towards US citizens that live in red states and other places where local patchwork laws won’t make up for what SCOTUS will take.

The future is not like the past, and I don’t want to overstate how much will be lost or how big the risks will be.  I don’t think you’ll necessarily need this post in its particulars.  Instead, take it as reassurance that you are not, and need not feel, helpless, even as the larger currents of society sweep us all out to some very alien shores.  There are things you cannot do, but there are things you can, and those things matter far more than you might expect.  Even the worst case scenario is not infinitely bad, and you’re more capable of rising to the occasion than you think.

1: Have a bubble.  The single most important thing you can do for your own security is to find like-minded people, and the internet makes this much easier this time around.  80% of personal happiness comes down to the small bubble of people you spend day-to-day life with, not the laws you live under or the attitudes of strangers.  Keep that support network near you, until you’ve internalized the fact that your intrinsic value as a human being does not flow from the judgments of your society.  When your bubble is in need, give until it hurts.  Rely on them to give you up-to-date information.  When you’re in trouble, make sure they know.  These people are your home.

A group of online friends, no matter how intimate, is not a bubble.  This is not to cast aspersions- many of the deepest relationships of my life are online.  But you need somebody that can smuggle you medicine, that can bail you out of jail, that can give you a couch to sleep on tonight.  You probably won’t need those things often, but when you need them, they can be life-and-death.  Material proximity is simply too necessary in a pinch, you can’t afford to ignore it.

2: Pride is more than a word.  These laws go beyond simple compulsion.  They are designed, first and foremost, to broadcast norms and to define an ‘us’ and a ‘them’.  You’d be surprised, in fact, how often people bend over backwards to avoid actually enforcing this kind of law, although you can never count on it- there’s always a small fraction of true believers out there who earnestly think that abortion is murder or that God will smite cities with earthquakes for harboring homosexuals.  But the real way these laws work is in marking you, not in punishing you.  They will try to make labels like ‘faggot’ or ‘slut’ prominent in your life, and they will succeed.

You can’t control the official narrative, and you can’t stop them from isolating you, but you can create a counter-narrative in the spaces you do control.  Celebrate often.  Reclaim slurs.  Throw great parties.  Be really, really funny.  This is good for morale over a long marathon, it helps facilitate and strengthen those bubbles (Rule #1!), and it also gives the lie to the propaganda about your sad, squalid life outside the guidance of our glorious leaders.  Dissonance is your friend, because it shocks people out of their assumptions and gets them thinking for themselves.

3: The kids are not all right.  Young people are vulnerable in a way that adults are not, and they are quite likely to internalize the norms being pushed by society in a way that can be shockingly self-destructive.  They don’t have a bubble yet (Rule #1!), and the love of parents is typically a lot more conditional than they’ve been told.  Without as much life experience, feelings about sex and self-identity can be very intense.  Whatever you’re going through, teenagers are going through it five times worse.

You won’t often know which kids need your help and which don’t, and you won’t be able to help everyone who needs it.  The best option here is to be an inspiration and wait to see who reaches out to you.  Scatter ideas of a better world as widely as you can get away with, the wink and the nod that says other things are possible and good.  And when someone does respond by reaching out, the most powerful help that you can give will often be your own example.  Tell them your story, give them a model for the sort of life they can live outside the officially sanctioned plan.  This can and will save lives.

4: Disdain kills faster than hatred. Don’t get me wrong, there are some true psychopaths out there, and when you don’t have the protection of the law, there’s a very good chance that one of these will come your way sooner or later.  But the true danger is not from psychos, but from the mass shrug, the indifference of millions that assume your suffering is to be expected and treat the story of your life as a fable about the dangers of sexual disobedience.  Internalize this as soon as possible: once you are labeled in this way, you cannot assume sympathy or help is coming in a crisis, except from whatever your bubble can offer.

But!  Disdain is also a more tractable problem than hatred.  Most people, actually, are not psychopaths, and their willingness to watch you die is a lot stronger in theory than it is in practice, particularly in person.  When people come face-to-face with you, they’ll often feel an impulse to be kind, or at least polite, and this alone can act as a powerful challenge to the indifference of crowds.  Humanize yourself, personalize your relationships, and as much as you can, dissolve crowds and institutions into their constituent individuals.  Good hygiene and dressing well are going to be far more instrumentally important to you than they would otherwise be.  And if you do manage to extract some goodwill out of the system this way, pay it forward; empathy doesn’t flow evenly to everyone, and getting less of it doesn’t mean that you deserve less of it.  Passing is a strategic compromise with injustice, not a sign of moral superiority.

5: You have the mandate of Heaven.  Really.  The future is yours, not theirs, no matter how weak you feel right now, and no matter how powerful they seem in the moment.  Orthodoxy, coercion, and especially physical violence- all are servants of the present.  They are tools used to delay the inevitable, fundamentally degenerative in character.  As an outsider to those systems, you’ll discover more ways to be human in a week than they’ll find in their whole lives, and in time, you’ll make a new world that they can’t even see, let alone control.

YES TO ALL OF THIS.  One of the many reasons I find Alloran fascinating: We get so many tiny details about him that hint at multitudes, and most of the time they’re given up incidentally.  It starts as early as that moment of genuine hesitancy — genuine uncertainty — before he gives Ax his name in #8, and it continues all the way through the Animorphs straight-up forgetting he’s there in #54 until he steps in to help Ax.

The character is — for lack of a better descriptor — deeply human.  He custom-designs his fighter and names it after his estranged wife.  He awkwardly comforts Loren after Chapman is casually ableist toward her father.  He has these tiny bursts of genuine emotion: snapping his tail like a little kid just after being freed from Visser Three, revealing to Elfangor that he is not just angry but deeply pained by the Andalite Electorate’s rejection after the hork-bajir massacre, giving Arbron that field promotion with honors in an effort to soften the blow (to Elfangor more than Arbron himself) that an andalite fighter housing two squishy biped charges is no place for a taxxon-nothlit, etcetera.

…which is disturbing, in light of the fact that he’s also a monster.  He views the hork-bajir species and culture as a natural resource of which he can deprive the yeerks, incidentally annihilating an entire people to hurt a different species.  He wants to dump a yeerk pool with hundreds of thousands of civilian yeerks because, well, just because.  He’s some guy.  He gets up in the morning, puts his shoes on one at a time (metaphorically speaking), nerds out about science or art for a bit, and demonstrates the capability to commit genocide with a wave of the hand.

I don’t disagree with his racism (specieism?) with Taxxons/Hork Bajir. I would add his willingness to massacre defenseless if not excusable, is explainable in the context of his presence in the Yeerk homeworld. His own troops (likely Arisths among them given the world’s low priority at the time) were gunned down in part because they were ordered not to fire on any controllers. His darker tendencies, while coloured by bigotry, also seem motivated by a fear of victimhood

So I guess I can excuse the ruthless slaughter of unarmed citizens, but I cannot excuse being mean to your girlfriend.

Or, if you are mean to your girlfriend then you are also capable of slaughtering defenseless non-combatants.

all the adults in the room: no doN’T

[Screenshot text:

All things now went well, with hope always of becoming still better; and Sam was as busy and as full of delight as even a hobbit could wish. Nothing for him marred that whole year, except for some vague anxiety about his master. Frodo dropped quietly out of all the doings of the shire, and Sam was pained to notice how little honour he had in his own country. Few people knew or wanted to know about his deeds and adventures; their admiration and respect were given mostly to Mr Meriadoc and Mr Peregrin and (if Sam had known it) to himself. Also in the autumn there appeared a shadow of old troubles.]

Sam is canonically distressed by the way that their own people do not fully acknowledge and realize the extent of what Frodo sacrificed and did. 

Pippin also canonically pulls a sword on a “ruffian” who mocks Frodo, explicitly outraged at the idea that this POS is disrespecting the Ringbearer. 

Use the medications properly to prevent interactions with healthcare providers. The pills are very effective, but they have to be used right. Carefully follow the instructions provided on the How to Use Abortion Pill website. Note that misoprostol tablets should always be taken by dissolving them under the tongue. Do NOT insert misoprostol vaginally if you are self-managing an abortion. While this is medically safe, it can leave incriminating pill remnants that can be detected in the vagina during a pelvic exam if you end up needing to seek medical care. 

If it’s not an emergency but you need expert health advice, use a free calling service like Google Voice to call or text the Miscarriage + Abortion Hotline at 1-833-246-2632. Medical complications are very uncommon with abortion pills, but they’re not impossible. The M+A Hotline is safe to use and is staffed by trustworthy clinicians who volunteer their time to help those who choose SMA. Do not use your own phone number to call as this will create a record that is visible to your cell service provider. 

Don’t disclose any information about SMA to emergency room staff if you do need to seek medical care. This is how most people who are arrested for SMA are reported. Healthcare providers are almost always who calls the police in cases of SMA criminalization. Contrary to popular belief, HIPAA does not protect your private health information from being shared with police if you are suspected of doing something that could be considered a crime. If you believe you need to seek urgent medical care, do not hesitate to go. Say “I think I’m having a miscarriage” and provide your symptoms. Do not mention any use of or purchase of abortion pills. There is no widely available test to detect misoprostol in your bloodstream. If you do not disclose it, there is no way for a medical provider to tell the difference between a medication abortion and a spontaneous miscarriage.

The Supreme Court did not overturn Roe v Wade tonight

Politico leaked a draft opinion that indicates they likely will, though the specifics of the decision aren’t final. Again it’s a draft and was not officially released