charlie :)

Hey, everyone. I’ll cut to the chase. I want you to read this and signal boost this. You’ll see why soon enough.

Currently, as I write this (July 17th of 2019 at 10:27pm pst), the island of Puerto Rico and it’s inhabitants are in outrage. Protests are everywhere. And it’s not just on the island.

A video of Puerto Rican people in Spain was shown to me earlier today. To a non-Spanish speaker or reader, they seemed to be having a grand old time singing and chanting with drums accompanying in the background.

To someone who has the ability to translate Spanish, this is different.

Their signs said ‘#RickyRenuncia’ which translates roughly to ‘Ricky Resign’.

Two days ago, posts on a group of certain politicical people from the (Puerto Rican Government) were leaked. The Governor of Puerto Rico, Ricardo Roselló, also known as ‘Ricky’, was included.

Here is where the problem starts. The Governor was told by someone, through the chat, of illegal happenings in the government. What a normal governor should do is fix this and stomp it out. But Ricky is corrupt. He did nothing. So the man who told the governor told the one of the higher-ups in the islands government. This secretary then told the Governor. Who then fired the man who was trying to do his job.

The fired gov. Worker then leaked the photos.

The public found out and are furious.

Today, at this moment. 3,000 motorcycles are attempting to drive to the main government building of Puerto Rico, located in Viejo San Juan (Old San Juan), in a massive protest to get the Governor to resign.

Just recently they were met with a blockade and forced to turn around. Those still in the area of the blocked route were gassed by police.

A fire started in front of Fortaleza during this, done by protesters to show anger.

Now, you must be thinking, ‘Why does any of this matter to me?’

Let me tell you why this fucking matters.

Puerto Rico needs to be heard.

This is an island and population that has beenmistreeted for years.

Puerto Rican’s are U.S. Citizens who cannot vote in Presidential elections.

They have a representative in the U.S. government that can only show up. They cannot actually change anything nor do they have any right to do so in the U.S Government.

Puerto Rico is a territory that has wanted to be free for years.

When this island wanted independence from Spain they fought the country and gained it. But not in the way you would think.

No, what happened was that France thought we were useless to Dpain and a treaty was made between France Spain and the US to free Puerto Rico.

Because they found us useless. We had this freedom for the span of one day.

Then we became part of the U.S.

We gained citizenship much later, during the Vietnam War, so that we could be drafted to fight in a war that wasn’t ours.

There have been polls across the island asking whether or not Puerto Rico wants to be a country or a U.S. state.

Due to the debt we have to the U.S., we can’t survive as a Country, so the polls arrived with an answer for State.

The U.S. government never acknowledged this. They don’t care about us. We are still a territory.

It’s not just the U.S. that does things like this.

Spaniards tend to hate Puerto Ricans. They openly hate us because we are ‘below them’.

And many U.S. citizens are uneducated on the topic of us!

My mother, a Puerto Rican, has been asked where Puerto Rican was in Texas!!!!

It’s off the coast of fucking Florida!!

But back to the topic of now, this whole thing gives Puerto Rico a chance.

Currently we are trying to get Ricky ro resign, but we want so much more than that.

We want to be treated as equals.

I want you to get the hashtag ‘#RickyRenuncia trending. And I want you to signal boost this on all of your blogs.

I don’t care if this doesn’t fit your theme. We have no voice and we need one.

We need you to give us a voice.

Share this as much as you can if you care. And please try to educate yourself on us if you don’t know about us enough. Not many of you know enough to care.

All it takes is a repost, a reblog, a share, and a google search on the history of the island.

Help us get this man out of power and give us what we deserve.

-K.A.

Is it weird to feel empathy and sadness for a place that isn’t your home? Is it wrong to feel a pit in your stomach and a hole in your heart when many of your friends and acquaintances, many of the people you admire and many of the people who have served as your mentor in life have once called the island home? 

There’s a full scale riot in Puerto Rico and you’re probably hearing rumblings about it on your timelines. To summarize, there was a leaked conversation on the Telegram app (think WhatsApp) in which the governor of Puerto Rico and other members of his administrative team held conversations of insensitive, misogynous, homophobic and criminal nature. The nature of these message, which officials found humorous and worthy of applause, were abhorrent, embarrassing and downright heartbreaking.

These officials went through painstaking details to reveal how throughout the aftermath of Hurricane Maria and during the months where Puerto Rico was dealing with an ever-rising death toll, humanitarian aid that was sent to Puerto Rico; aid such as necessary potable water, food and sanitary items; were withheld from citizens that needed it most. These provisions were left to spoil, expire or become unusable in exchange for political propaganda and public relations stunts that these officials could “sell” or “promote” to the population and “sell” or “promote” them as benevolent and doing everything they can for the Puerto Rican population, thus earning them the 2020 re-election. That’s right, they were using the suffering of Boricuas and their desperation for clean food and water to lock down those crucical re-election votes. The motherfuckers.

In the midst of these details, they took their time to make many politically incorrect, hateful, cruel and abhorrent messages about the poverty level of their people; finding humor in saying a man paid for more for a shirt than he makes in a month. They found the time to make fun of women protesting the treatment of Boricuas post-Hurricane Maria, finding humor in their plight alongside the amount of female deaths due to domestic violence. They found time to make fun of the LGBTQ community, because hey, why not at this point, they joked about the #MeToo movement, and general misrepresented themselves to the point they appear to be the worst people on Planet Earth. Still, that’s not the sole reason the people have reached the boiling point.

The people of Puerto Rico have come to realize through these conversations the degree of unforgivable cruelty that these officials are seemingly capable of, knows no limits and knows no bounds.

Hundreds upon thousands of people have died. They have died horrible deaths from starvation, lack of water, and lack of sanitary conditions that no one considered a US citizen should ever experience. Yes, Puerto Ricans are considered US Citizens. Yet, these elected officials cared more about hiding the facts, placing a PR spin on it, and manufacturing information in order to  securing their place in the next election than doing their civic duty.

Soon after the conversations leaked, Boricuas and independent Puerto Rican media (because as revealed by the leak, state media is mostly, if not entirely, taking money from the officials, which is another story), many members of the administration resigned and the governor began a series of manipulative damage control tactics that he and his father, a previous Governor himself have employed in the past to great success.

Ricardo Rosselló, Governor of Puerto Rico exploited people’s most basic and deeply-rooted traditions and beliefs and manipulated Latin belief in religion and Christianity to his benefit.Using history as a crutch, he keyed on the fact that Latino culture is susceptible to religious stunts and manipulation and he relied heavily on Puerto Rican history; pulling from their history as an island nation that was colonized by the Spanish in the name of Catholicism to the dismay of the Taino people and then not as egregiously converted to Protestantism when the US made it a commonwealth. Religion has been the one constant that has brought both pain and healing to the souls of those who’ve been deprived of liberty and education in many ways in Puerto Rico, and ever the scumbag, Rosselló honed in on it.

Reportedly, Rosselló ran to a church the day after this all blew up, to seek “forgiveness from the Almighty” and have the churchgoers pray for him, using that Christianity as a crutch and banking on the most deeply-rooted of Latin beliefs and ideals. Want me to make it more fucked up?  It’s on good authority that the governor and his family have always professed the Catholic faith. Inside of the official home of the Governor,  the equivalent of the White House for Puerto Rico’s governor, “La Fortaleza”, there is a chapel where he could’ve gone to “get right with God” and have his “come to Jesus” moment.

 Instead, this “mamabicho” went to a Protestant church that streams their service online so everyone would see him “humiliating himself before God” in a last ditch effort to detract the angry mob that now wanted him to resign. Once again, he tried to manipulate his population with another PR stunt. 

Puerto Ricans thankfully, saw right through it.

 Rosselló would address Puerto Rico and it’s people as a whole on television saying he reaffirmed his commitment to see his job through and that he would not resign, but would instead “get rid of those that have wronged us” as if he had NO part in the damn thing, as if he didn’t say that stories about the Hurricane needed to be killed, that “crows needed to be fed corpses to keep them appeased”, as if he didn’t say that Ada Monzón (a respected meteorologist who went the extra mile and then some to keep us informed during and after Maria) should suck his dick. As if he didn’t sit there and say, along with his cronies, that they needed to make this whole Hurricane Maria situation work for them instead of against them. As if they didn’t laugh at the men, women, children, and elderly who suffered, got ill and perished under his watch. As if he didn’t let necessary and essential provisions go to waste for a fucking electoral vote. The motherfucker.

So that’s why they riot in Viejo San Juan right now. Because people had enough. People suffered enough. Enough people died. Enough manipulation happened. Because this hijueputa pushed it too damn far and worse? Found it funny. That’s why they march. To get their damn home back from the people in charge.

They took so much from these people, that they took the one thing they didn’t count on.

I will never forgive Ricardo Rosselló. I will never forgive the corrupt administration of Puerto Rico.

The article is ‘A Defense of Abortion’ by Judith Jarvis Thomson. Essential reading!

talk shit about cashiers? go to the self checkout or get out.

talk shit about fast food workers? make your own damn food at home.

talk shit about janitors + cleaning staff? live in filth.

talk shit about garbage collectors? drag your bags to the dump yourself.

talk shit about plumbers, electricians, + construction workers? fix your own damn house.