Category: politics

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.

 

Friday Links

Karen

1. What a week. Call or write your elected representatives. I am still loving ResistBot (and have donated twice, I love it so).

2. I’ve also signed up for emails from The Wake Up, written by Sally Russell, who says, “Over the last eight years, I’ve been seIf educating on race relations, racial justice, white supremacy, and privilege in America, and well, it’s BAD. I’m convinced that change will not come until more white people wake up and take action.”

3. When the news makes you feel like this on the inside, it can also be helpful to blow off some steam. Read-shout along with me (if you don’t mind swearing): Shame Hillary Clinton Didn’t Try To Warn Us About Trump’s Basket Of Deplorable Nazi Fuck Trash

4. And far more productive reading: SPLC’s list of 10 Ways To Fight Hate

 

Political Wednesday

Karen1 Comment

Some things I’ve been doing, reading, and being worried by (well, more than the usual for 2017)

Doing: 
I’ve talked about 5 Calls before but have also been using and enjoying Resistbot, which lets you text or Facebook message a fax or letter to your officials. (Great when your office is too noisy for a call or it’s late at night.) The more you use Resistbot, the more “features” you unlock–gamification of resistance!

Reading: 
What The F*ck Just Happened Today is where I go for a quick roundup of national news. Somehow having it summarized with no pictures makes it a lot easier to ingest.

The Cut has a long piece about Hillary after the election. It’s frustrating for a lot of reasons but I love me an interview with Hillary.

Clinton asked if the group had heard that searches for the word misogyny rose by 10,000 percent after Amanpour used the word. Can you believe that six months after this election, people still didn’t know what misogyny means? I asked in reply. A smile barely flickered around Clinton’s lips before she deadpanned: “Why, yes. I guess I can believe that.”

 

Worrying:
This is fringe-y but I grew up with the Cold War; it’s easy to accept that Russia is still seeking world domination. Putin’s playbook for discrediting America and destabilizing the West.

Speaking of:

Political Wednesday

Karen

Yep, these are back. I tried just enjoying spring and thinking about my own little life and what to sew or buy next, but…then you get trailers for The Handmaid’s Tale that make you worry you’re looking at the not-too-distant future, and then the Senate changes the rules to get their way, and then the L.A. Times publishes a six-part editorial on “Our Dishonest President” and you realize: you gotta stay aware. If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.

From the L.A. Times editorial, part 1:

…nothing prepared us for the magnitude of this train wreck. Like millions of other Americans, we clung to a slim hope that the new president would turn out to be all noise and bluster, or that the people around him in the White House would act as a check on his worst instincts, or that he would be sobered and transformed by the awesome responsibilities of office.

Instead, seventy-some days in — and with about 1,400 to go before his term is completed — it is increasingly clear that those hopes were misplaced.