As soon as you turn out the light, a thief takes your day and your night

[sovay]

Just because one of the speakers at last night's protest thought we were well past any use in calling on elected officials does not mean that I did not just leave messages with mine in the matter of Rumeysa Ozturk, my senators to encourage them to speak out further and my representative to thank her for doing so. I do not feel that I have so many levers available to me that I can afford not to pull all of them just in case.

In all of the articles I am reading about deported, disappeared, or threatened students, I understand the tactical importance of their good characters and I don't care and I wish it were not necessary to make anyone care. I don't want their civil liberties to depend on a referendum of their pro-Palestinian activism and the degree to which it may or may not have been antisemitic as defined by a government which platforms Jew-haters like there's any kind of shortage. I was in Boston for the Marathon bombing. I was so afraid that the Crusader roleplay of the war on terror which even then had been part of the American doomscape for more than a decade had shot due process out of a cannon in the case of a bona fide domestic terrorist. Nothing about this steamrolling of constitutional rights makes me feel safer and it is not meant to, but it does make me want to scream that the fundamental rights and privileges of the law are apparently no longer even a nominal cornerstone of the American mainstream. It should not get tangled with whether their free speech is your free speech. It should not matter even if they are a nice person. I have gathered to my perplexity that the fear of the Devil turning round on them motivates far fewer people than I had once imagined, but come the everlasting exceptionalism on. Disappearing people off their doorsteps, dumping them in black sites for profit should be a no-brainer no-no.

I am obviously having a bit of a fritz-out over whether any of the actions I am taking even rise to the level of grit in the gears or whether they are merely a garnish of historical interest on an unstoppable slide and I am well aware that on some level it doesn't matter, because there is never any excuse for standing there looking on with folded hands and in any case it doesn't feel to me like the better course, but I would feel a whole lot better if I could see even a little bit of resistance in the mechanical sense in action.

Comments

[desireearmfeldt]

Yeah. :(

[selkie]

I think it's more visible here at the epicenter, where you can see the awful little pissy-faced zombie-stoats booed out of bars, tripped up the escalator, and confronted with lipsticked swasticars after leaving them parked around; where you can catch up with the feds stickin' their wooden shoes in the machine one spreadsheet at a time. I think the speed and breadth of the clown car shocked people, but it's still clear it's a clown car.

Your godson has just broken the dryer I spent $250 this morning to fix. He dropped a pencil down the trap and when he was unscrewing the door panel to get the pencil out, the door's locking mechanism dropped down after the pencil.
Yes, there is a load in the wash.
Did you want him alive I guess I'm asking or would you be fine communicating with him via his remaining fingerbones, nicely boiled.

[julian]

Yeah, basically, it may do good; if it does good, then it is good; if it does not, then it was not much time taken out of your time.

[asakiyume]

My sister is a Tufts graduate. She's written a letter to the Tufts Daily and gotten a bunch of fellow grads to sign it. I'll ask her if I can share it with you.

I think any kind of anything makes a difference. No, we are not going to just sit here and stare.

[thedarlingone]

Speaking as someone who grew up on the right-wing side of the tracks, I'm honestly just as baffled by the exceptionalism. I grew up on a constant diet of "we can't set this precedent because a left-wing successor in the position could use it against us, we have to work within the system and gain power legitimately". And now the same people are just smashing every check and balance in creation. I really don't understand humanity sometimes.

[dewline]

We understand each other.

[gwynnega]

I contacted my elected officials this morning. This evening I was glad to see that Maddow devoted several minutes of her show to the Somerville protests. I hope it helps.

[kathmandu]

Your efforts are worth trying and I hope they help.

As you say, we need to pull every lever we can reach.

[thisbluespirit]

*hugs*

It is always well worth doing whatever you can do, and well done so much for doing it despite the toll on yourself. And you never know how far these things go or who they impact! <3

[phi]

I don't have the processing capacity for any of what's happening in our world.

I'm just here to say "come the everlasting exceptionalism on" is a brilliant turn of phrase and I'm grateful that even in the current darkness, we still have art and literature and the people who create them.

[minoanmiss]

Thank you for marching. Thank you for your efforts.

I have seen tiny victories. A blog post about the ACLU getting a trans patient's healthcare reinstaated; the restoral of the WindTalkers to government websites after their deletion. Tiny, so far, but I am hoping, because I must hope.