Category: politics

“Welcome Back, America”

Karen

The bar was LOW but we made it over. Yes, we still have so much work to do, but the relief is…really astonishing. And having the world share in that relief kind of reinforces just how bad the last four years have been. Here are a couple moments that got me all teary over the weekend.

Van Jones’ reaction on CNN:

“…this is vindication for a lot of people who have really suffered […] It’s easy to do it the cheap way, and get away with stuff, but it comes back around. It comes back around.”

 

The bells of Paris ringing for us Saturday night, with the mayor saying “Welcome Back, America”:

 

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The bells are ringing in Paris. Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris says welcome back America . ????

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And this random post, from a Brit in France. The fact that so many people STILL VOTED FOR A RACIST–especially white women–shows us just how much work there is to be done, but getting rid of a would-be despot is hard. And we did it.

“Character matters. The truth matters. Being a good person matters.” It comes back around.

Mood

Karen

How’s everyone doing? I’ve eaten half of a three-pound bag of candy corn and can’t focus on anything, but, as I keep reminding myself, this is still better than 2016. (Please let that sentence remain true.)

This is pretty much how I’ve been since Tuesday (sound ON):

Tuesday Project Roundup: Small Pretty Things That Distract Us From The Large Terrible Things

Karen

GOOD MORNING! SHALL WE LOOK AT SOME PRETTY UNDERWEAR WHILE WE ARE INCANDESCENT WITH RAGE ABOUT WHAT THE GOP IS DOING TO OUR COUNTRY? AND OUR HEALTHCARE?? AND OUR BODILY AUTONOMY??? AFTER THEY DELAYED A SUPREME COURT VOTE FOR NEARLY A YEAR???!! SOUNDS GOOD!!

Hi! Everything is terrible!  Here are some piles of underwear with vaguely Japanese prints and more lace than I would ever have dreamed I’d be wearing three months ago!

There’s something to be said for the small focus of lingerie sewing–especially with lace, which needs extra attention. There’s something to be said for practice, too, since I think this batch is my best yet in terms of finish.

The Spoonflower print bras are Cloth Habit Watsons, the orange lace bra is the Studio Costura Mara, and the pink lace bralette is my first attempt at the Hanna, also from Studio Costura. (All the undies are my current favorite giant undies, the Noelle from Madalynne.)

Laces came from a grab bag from Tailor Made Shop and from Queen Lace Studio. Orange findings were from Bra Builders (before they changed up their colors) and the narrow lace trim on the black print undies came from Surge Fabric Shop.

 

Small soothing details:  Findings that match perfectly ,tiny flowers in the lace.

Deep breaths: Perfectly mirrored fronts and a strap that shows off that extravagant scalloped edge. (Studio Costura patterns continue to be great–this fit fine but next time I make it I will use a more supportive lining than bamboo jersey.)

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed these pictures of my crafts while the country is literally and figuratively on fire. I’m putting my hopes in the youth and in AOC and in the fact we’re all gonna vote to fix this. Right?

Thursday Reading

Karen

Are you getting Anne Helen Petersen’s new independent newsletter? It’s consistently great, especially last week’s on anticipatory grief, worry about the election, and the privilege of worry about politics because you’re safe otherwise:

For white, liberal, middle-class people whose jobs are secure — and for whom the COVID recession is effectively over — a lot of that grief centers on the president, on politics, on fears that the election will be contested, that we’ll fall into constitutional crisis, that QAnon and Proud Boy militias will fill the streets.

This is a real and existential fear, and I don’t wish to diminish it. It haunts the corners of my mind. Sometimes I realize my stomach has turned on itself — as I did just one minute into the debate this week — and it’s just that now familiar psychological cocktail of dread, fear, and sadness. That’s grief! It’s just that it’s for society! …

It’s a privilege, albeit a twisted one, to be able to grieve on such a philosophical level. I’m able to do so in part because I’m not currently bereft by personal loss. My family is isolated and lonely but able to remain physically safe and economically stable. I’m effectively floating through my year but also have the wherewithal to figure out how to change my address on my voting registration. I feel pretty consistently untethered but have not lost members of my close community and extended family to COVID. I am so angry at how dysfunctional every corner of our government has proven itself but I am not warding off eviction.

It should not be a privilege to feel physically safe and economically stable; it should be the norm. It should not be a privilege to have a modicum of security about your ability to vote in a democracy; it should be the norm. It should not be a privilege to live in a place where the government does all that it can to contain a deadly virus, and it should not be a privilege to be able to avoid eviction. All that shit we now call “privilege” should just be the baseline of existence in countries as supposedly developed and rich as ours.

 

Emphasis mine, but god. Why isn’t it like this?  “I don’t know how to explain to you that you should care about other people.”

Let’s Get Political Again

Karen

Mom’s illness pushed a lot of the shitshow that politics continue to be out of my head, but let’s get our blood boiling again! “Joe Biden Isn’t the Answer” is a long and damning piece by Rebecca Traister about Joe’s appeal to white guys, his policies, and the creepy af way he touches women.

The gross physical familiarity and disrespect radiated toward [Lucy Flores] by a man in her field, in a public space, treating her body as if it was his to smell and squeeze and kiss, is classically, casually—even while non-cataclysmically—symptomatic of the daily, easy belief that men can treat women’s bodies as accessible, without regard to the comfort or desires of the women in question. It is also further evidence that Anita Hill’s testimony—grounded as it was in the notion that unwanted, inappropriate verbal and physical contact is unacceptable in a professional context—left no impression on him. Here’s the truth: If Joe Biden had ever done two minutes of actual thinking about the harm he’d helped to inflict on Hill, on women, and on the nation in handling of those hearings, he wouldn’t still be doing this kind of thing.

 

(For anyone who would argue that Joe’s behavior “isn’t as bad” as our current President’s, may I put forth this radical idea: What if we elected someone with NO history of touching people inappropriately? They are out there! They exist!)

Friday Links

Karen1 Comment

1. If yesterday’s Judiciary Hearings left you incandescent with rage, well, you’re not alone and I don’t have a good way to fix it. (Although my deadlifts were FLYING up last night.) This is a letter I sent to Orrin Hatch (a lost cause and a withered asshole) yesterday, via Resistbot:

Dear Senator Hatch:

Today’s hearings have shown us Brett Kavanaugh is too emotional to serve on the Supreme Court.

Also: MERRICK GARLAND.

Sincerely,
Karen Kaminski

 

2. Did I mention rage?

3. Why our stories matter, which we have to keep telling ourselves: When The Muzzle Comes Off

There may not be a legal or political outcome that is satisfying: The perpetrators may not face real repercussions. But part of what #MeToo has always been about — despite the obsessive focus on the consequences faced by men — is what happened to the women (and to the men who’ve spoken out about their own abuse). It’s been about the exposure of their realities.

The telling of the stories, the raising of the voices, does its own political work and reveals things that we may have known at some level but have never been able to see so plainly: the connection between policy—the desire to control women’s bodies via restricting and policing their reproductive autonomy—and the personal treatment of individual women. The connection between a desire for legal or political domination—over workers’ ability to bargain, citizens’ ability to vote, black people’s ability to walk the streets without fear of being indiscriminately accosted by the police—and the drive toward personal, physical domination.

No

Karen

I haven’t been as political on here this year because constant outrage wears you down–a tactic I think the ruling party counts on. (And I’ve been worried about my mom, which takes energy away from worrying about the dystopian nightmare happening daily.) (She’s doing fine. I just worry like it’s my job.)

But separating children from their parents, using them as a bargaining chip to pass legislation, using them to make sure you are still making headlines, having no plan to reunite them with their parents, is SO WRONG I can’t even put it into words.

I know Carl Sagan and Doc, my two inspirations, would try to make someone who believes that this practice is OK see a different point of view and convince them with kindness why they’re mistaken.

But you know what? People who think it’s acceptable to forcibly remove children from their families don’t deserve the time of day, in my opinion. They don’t deserve to think their own children are somehow more virtuous. The people who started doing this, the people who enforce it, the people complicit in it, deserve less than the time of day; they deserve something out of Dante’s Inferno.

Call your representatives. Write your representatives. Tell them they and their party have lost your vote. March. Donate. Speak up. Words matter.

This

Karen

From The Onion, because America is best summed up in satire lately: Americans Hopeful This Will Be Last Mass Shooting Before They Stop On Their Own For No Reason

How long until another one replaces Las Vegas as the “most deadly shooting in America”? What can be done? Where do you even start?

I honestly don’t know if it will do any good, but I’m starting with my representatives–even though all of mine have taken money from the NRA. (Here’s where to find out.)

Contact them. Ask for change. Campaign and vote for people who may actually listen to you.

There is hope, in theory: Australia’s laws stopped mass shootings. Japan has some of the strictest ownership laws and correlating lowest gun homicide rates. Change is possible.