#opression

i can't get over that tiktok using Pearls by Sade for a "fell victim to possessive hand on waist last night" POV and then people acting like the criticism was overdramatic.

what gets me even more is someone replying "this is not an issue irl."

girl. what the genuine fuck?

the song is literally about female suffering. about women carrying pain that the rest of the world ignores. and somehow we're pretending that's not relevant because you don't see it?

an example:

when it says “dying to survive,” that’s not poetic exaggeration. it’s the reality of extreme poverty where staying alive itself comes with suffering.

then there’s “it hurts like brand new shoes”, it’s pointing at the gap between worlds. how something as small as personal discomfort can feel huge to you, while somewhere else people are dealing with pain on a completely different scale just to exist.

women in Afghanistan are being stripped of basic rights. Yazidi women are still living with the aftermath of genocide, sexual violence, and displacement. women everywhere are dealing with violence, oppression, exploitation, and loss. these are not historical issues. these are current issues.

so yes, hearing a song about that being reduced to "omg possessive hand on waist 😍" is going to make some people uncomfortable.

and no, acknowledging the meaning of a song is not "making everything political."

sometimes media literacy is free. please use it.

still mad but thank you for hearing me.

˚۶ৎ ok i get how it can make people feel understood and like, validate them by having a lable for it, but really, love is just love and you are who you are, it shouldn't have to be more complicated than that 𑣲

"i dont typically hang around men/i dont have man friends/men make me nervous" ok! idgaf, theres some stuff that could be unpacked if you felt like it but im not gonna kill you with hammers cause like i kind of get it? also you might have experiences that justify this, but even if not again i dont care. not gonna block you straightaway

"all men are pigs/all men deserve to die/all men are evil" honey the evil is not stored in the dick and balls, nor the he/him pronouns. you should really leave some room for marginalized groups of men. just because someone is a man doesnt mean he isnt a man of color, or a trans man, or a gay man, or something else that causes him to be oppressed.

"all amab people are pigs/deserve to die/evil" either terf or intersexist or both and youre gross and should die by my obsidian blade, thanks

im not a man. but i do have friends who are men. they are not evil. if they were, i would not hang out with them. can we be normal?

Waiting For Godot

If the life is opressive and it is, then the task is not to escape it, justify it, or metabolize it into wisdom. The task is to see what can still be seen before the organism shuts down. That is not heroism. It is not dignity. It is inventory.

There is one thing most people never admit, namely, everyone is on a deadline, and most lives are structurally closer to death row than to any romantic notion of “a journey.” The difference is that some people spend their sentence hallucinating meaning, while others refuse the hallucination and look directly at the bars, the guards, the timetable, the walls. That refusal does not improve conditions. It sharpens perception.

What does that mean in practice? It means you stop asking whether life is worth it, fair, coherent, or redeemable. Those are comfort questions, even when they sound dark. You ask instead what is actually here to be seen that I would otherwise miss by anesthetizing myself? Mechanisms of power. Patterns of self-deception. The way desire lies. The way language pacifies. The way “normal life” is engineered. The way suffering is individualized to protect structures.

This is where someone like Arthur Schopenhauer remains relevant, not for his pessimism, but for his refusal to pretend that existence owes us anything beyond its own continuation. He did not offer solutions. He offered eyesight. And eyesight, once acquired, cannot be un-acquired without lying.

You are not obliged to “make peace” with the life's oppression. Peace is a social fantasy. You are not obliged to resist it either. Resistance is often just another form of meaning-making. What remains, when both are dropped, is something colder and rarer, lucid endurance without narrative. Not because endurance is good, but because, given the constraints, it is what is happening. Seeing many things before death does not mean accumulating experiences. It means stripping interpretations. Watching how the system actually runs, including how it runs you.

Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer is an award-winning Poet Laureate from Southwest Colorado. In this poem, she talks about longing for compassion and peace in the face of the cruelty of war and oppression. This poem is about Palestine, but its themes expand much further.