sovay: (Viktor & Mordecai)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2016-11-11 11:58 pm

I ain't going to sit by no window waiting for the glass to crack

The staff of the Diesel were wearing safety pins today. I saw them when I stopped by with Matthew in the afternoon.

All day I have been wearing a navy wool overshirt that belonged to [livejournal.com profile] nineweaving's father, a lieutenant commander and inventor in the U.S. Navy in WWII. It's one of my winter shirts now. It is scratchy and slightly too large on me and feels occasionally like a metaphor, but it keeps me warm walking from Kendall to Harvard in below-freezing winds. I don't want to have to live up to ghosts for the next four years, but I keep thinking of my grandparents, immigrants' children who marched for civil rights in the American South and Midwest and were sometimes the only Jews on campus and had an ACLU sticker on the porch of their house in Maine and wanted to see a state of Palestine as well as Israel, and at the moment I feel angrier on their behalf than on mine, as I feel angrier on behalf of my three-year-old niece who deserves a future moving forward, not retrograde.

[livejournal.com profile] derspatchel and I put safety pins on our coats before leaving the house tonight. It is almost literally the least we can do (signing an online petition involves less scrounging through drawers), but we will wear them as long as they are needed and in the meantime we will learn the actions we must take to make them more than a gesture.

You remember the people who died in the fight; then you decide how you will fight for what needs preserving. And what needs to change.

[identity profile] kenjari.livejournal.com 2016-11-12 06:55 pm (UTC)(link)
I bought a box of safety pins to keep at work today because I am such a zombie in the morning that I forget to put one on when I'm getting dressed. I can also hand them out to students who don't have any.

[identity profile] kenjari.livejournal.com 2016-11-14 03:28 am (UTC)(link)
I'm holding up okay. I'm not giving way to despair, but I'm feeling pretty frustrated and angsty. It's been hard to know what to say to my student employees. I can't honestly tell them that things will be okay.
I really need to find one or two things I can work on and concentrate on those, because it just seems like there are too many things to fight against, defend, take care of, etc. in the face of Trump's regime.
I may spend four years listening to nothing but Bikini Kill, Black Flag, and the Dead Kennedys.