Yo Let's Steal Their Cannons

You are allowed to have whatever emotions you want. No one can control your emotions. Emotions are healthy responses to things.

You are not allowed to have behaviors that are harmful just because you have certain emotions. Your behaviors are what you can control, and they are far easier to control than your emotions.

You can be jealous about someone or their talents until you turn green, but it is harmful to yourself and to that person if you try to sabotage them because of it. You can be so angry you can literally feel your temperature rise, but this does not give you permission to rage at others.

you may be sex-repulsed; that doesn’t mean sex is dirty and bad. maybe you were bullied by teenage girls; that doesn’t mean teenage girls are a force of evil. perhaps a villain in a work of fiction reminds you of someone who abused you; that doesn’t mean people who enjoy that character or that fiction are abusive. your feelings about those things are absolutely valid, and it’s not right for people to tell you you shouldn’t feel that way. but it’s also not right for you to act out against others based on those feelings.

that instinct to generalize served our species well when we were hunter-gatherers living in small bands in a hostile wilderness. you nibble a delicious-looking berry, you throw up, you know that berry is BAD and you make the yuck face whenever you see it so the other hominids know it’s a bad one. but in the modern world, in the information age, there are so many complex things you might encounter, you’re going to have badfeels about a lot of things that aren’t actually across-the-board bad.

Love Bites by Della Grace

Trans dream portraits by Landyn Pan

Hobbes Ginsberg - Still Alive

Texas Isaiah photography

Téa Campbell Ada Juarez and Edith Johnson of Meet Me @ the Altar

Dorian Electra

Princex Vidal (Vidal Francisco)

Beautiful Boy by Lissa Rivera (BJ Lillis)

Getty Images (yeah)

Edward Howell

Norbu Gyachung

Patrick Perkins

Mary Saxaroz

Manny Becerra

queerness, you don’t have to “grow

out of” it either.

-I come out of my cabin dressed in a button-up and a tie for our weekly fancy dinner. Eight-year-old boy A sees me and says "she looks nice!" Eight-year-old boy B cries out at the top of his lungs, "IT'S A THEY!"

-A very young girl I'd never spoken to approaches me at checkout, hands me what appears to be a piece of abstract origami, and walks away. I unfold one of the flaps to find "peace love pride gay" written inside

-Nonbinary campers are increasingly out and visible, and they notice me (our camp director now mentions me and our other nonbinary staff member when parents call with concerns about their nonbinary kids attending camp). One spends an entire programming hour glued to my side, talking emphatically about their favorite anime while we walk down the beach together. They later present me with a nonbinary flag friendship bracelet. They're eleven.

-Ten-year-old boy who typically has a great deal of difficulty controlling his impulses and responding appropriately to his emotions asks me suddenly over dinner whether I'm a boy or a girl. I thank him for asking me and tell him I'm not either. He responds, ever-so-chipper, "well, (camp name), I like you just the way you are!"

Anyone who spoke up against lynching was immediately attacked in the press for defending rapists (and pedophiles, though that wasn’t the word they used).

Ida B. Wells’ The Red Record is free and everyone should read it.

I did not say this as something I personally think but as an example of an opinion that exist in the world, which I mentioned when talking about the fact that not every prison abolitionist has the same concept of justice.

-

I think that all of the above is important and it’s really important to talk about how rape accusations have been used as a lynching tool and how “it’s legal to do whatever you want to someone who has done _______,” leads to lynchings.

Punishment is about power. As a result, punishment does not happen to ‘bad’ people. Punishment happens to people who can’t stop it from happening to them.

-

All that said, if one of my friends comes to me and is like “someone tried to rape me last night so I stabbed him”, I’m probably buying my friend a drink. Does that make me a hypocrite? I don’t know.

The tension between violence as punishment, violence as self defense and violence as resistance to the state and its systems of oppression, might be where a lot of this shit comes from. As anarchists, most of us know some violence is necessary and we know that nonviolence in the face of great injustice means allowing that injustice to continue. But to wield violence, we need to uproot our impulse to punish.

Like, when Richard Spencer got punched, I felt joy. Not just at the thought that this would harm his movement (which is a good reason to punch nazis), but at seeing that fist in his fucking face (which is my impulse to punish), and expressing that joy might be seen as pro-punishment, but it’s not meant to be.