Author: Ruby Sinreich

big fish chasing small fish, small fish getting together and chasing the big fish

There are more of us every day

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The sickest thing about this whole episode (the latest being the sham Kavanaugh hearings) is that the vast majority of Americans don’t support these power-mad Republicans nor their draconian agendas, but they and the media have got us thinking that we are in the minority! They have taken our power away from us like taking candy from a baby.

There are less and less of them every day. And every day they will try new, more desperate tactics to cling to power. If the people only had a sense of our vast, collective energy, we would be unstoppable.

I’m still not sure whether we are going to make it through this. We have strayed so far from anything resembling democracy I can’t see the way back.

Disinformation agents attack NC Women’s March

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As soon as I RSVP’ed to a Facebook event for the 2019 Women’s March in Raleigh, I knew something didn’t smell right. The page owners were posting weird, partisan memes that seemed totally out of character, and no-one would reply to my messages asking who was in charge. This week I decided to get to the bottom of it, and by way of friends of friends I found that the page is in fact a scam!

This is exactly how the Russians/Republicans have been manipulating our communication, politics, and elections for over 2 years now. The fake “Women’s March Raleigh NC 2019” page on Facebook has a fake event that has thousands of RSVPs for the wrong march date! And by spreading questionable memes they may be manipulating sentiment in ways we can’t even predict or understand until after the fact.

One of the real Women’s March organizers replied to me about this on Facebook:

we’ve reported the page as spam several times. It’s 100% not managed or set up by the WMOR organizers, they’re at Women’s March On Raleigh. Last year we had a similar problem when a vendor set up a FB page posing as the WMOR group to sell t-shirts. This page and it’s event aren’t legit

Read my Facebook post with all of the receipts in the comments:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10160753082835321
presentation title slide

Diverse communities are strong communities

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Last week I was proud to represent Drupal Diversity and Inclusion at DrupalGovCon. Along with Dori Kelner, I co-presented a session to help people understand the challenges we face as a community and what DDI is doing about it.

You can see our slides overlayed with the audio of our talk here:

White woman fainting

White feminism can’t save us (and neither can removing Trump)

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Amy Siskind’s heinous White Feminism was on full display this week when she responded to some very valid criticism about her oblivious White privilege and about her Republican-friendly past by attacking very intelligent and well-respected Black women like Imani Gandy instead of owning up to her mistakes.

Siskind said and did some patently horrible stuff in the past, including supporting Sarah Palin and collaborating with Alex Jones. Seems like she should take responsibility for herself and acknowledge where she was wrong. If she’s changed, she could just say so. If she hasn’t, people should know where she stands.

My friend Max raised another important issue about Siskind’s very problematic “All we have to do is get rid of the Orange Menace, and we can go back to having brunch” attitude.

I’ve seen a lot of this from Democrats and “never Trump” Republicans, and it makes me a little queasy when they talk about impeachment. It’s not like Trump is the only problem. He’s just a festering symptom of the greedy, nihilist Republican cancer. Of course Trump is a criminal and deserves to be impeached, but Congress will never do that (not even if corporate Dems make midterm gains) and more importantly, it won’t solve the problem of being ruled by a party that lies and cheats to enrich and empower themselves with no care for democracy or the future.

On the banality of life under authoritarianism

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I used to watch movies and documentaries and wonder how people could live seemingly-normal lives in repressive states like the Soviet Union, Afghanistan, China, etc.

Now I’m living it in the US. Now I know how we get there.

Although the urge to scream and lie down in the middle of the highway to stop everything rises in me daily, the inertia of daily life is stronger. I have a child I have to keep functioning for.

I have a good job, a good family, and a good house, which I don’t take for granted.

I know it’s only an accident of fate that I can keep going about my business and enjoying my relatively-easy life because I’m white and middle class, because my family came here a century ago instead of a week ago.

I have a lot of privilege, compared to some.

But I also know that it would only take some small slip of fate to put me under the boot of Republican authoritarianism. I live in constant fear that the shoe will drop.

I finally understand the human need to keep on keeping on, even when all around us is dehumanizing.

So I continue to enjoy my privileged, middle class comfort while feeling increasingly guilty about it and wondering when my bubble will pop.

Most of the time I feel powerless to stop fascism, but I keep a flame of resistance burning for the future.

Happy birthday, America.

Excerpt of "Home" by Warsan Shire

Home

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Home by Warsan Shire, 2011

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

Children leaving the Lodz ghetto for the death camp at Chelmno

This is not the bottom

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Friends, please stop assuming things can’t get any worse. We got to this nightmare through complacency. Let it stop now. Things can and WILL get worse than this. We need to be prepared and act accordingly as soon as possible to stop this crazy train.

I’m glad to see some resistance starting to form now, in spite of the dearth of anyone seriously organizing it. Wouldn’t it have been great if people had listened when we said resist and don’t normalize19 months ago? How much suffering could have been avoided?

I have the sense that millions of people would be willing to participate in strategic direct action to stop migrant family separation right now, and as far as I can tell no-one is organizing them! Last year I was hopeful that Rev. Barber’s new Poor People’s Campaign would be able to channel people’s frustration into direct action. I appreciate what they are doing, but their actions are inconveniencing no-one, they are aren’t spreading the message beyond existing supporters, they are stopping business as usual.

This year I my hopes were raised by the students who survived the massacre in Parkland, FL. But it doesn’t seem that they’ve been able to hold the national attention, and while they have been expanding their vision and starting to see how many issues intersect with gun violence, they are not in a position to lead a national movement against Republicans as a whole, which is what I think is needed right now.

Note: There will be actions across the country on Saturday June 30. Visit familiesbelongtogether.org to find one near you. If there isn’t one on the map, organize it!

totalitarism

Trump didn’t create this empire

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We have got to stop acting like Republican greed, deceit, and cultivated ignorance started with Trump! Here’s a Bush advisor in 2002:

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

They tell us this over and over and we still don’t listen. It’s been going on for many decades. Dems don’t even fight back.

Democrats and the media still want to fuck around with “civility” while Republicans are literally creating an empire (a death cult) based on greed and hate. People are fucking dying.

Trump is most certainly an imperial president with no clothes, but he didn’t create this empire. He’s just the perfect fruition of decades of Republican greed and nihilism. I hope he’ll be the empire’s downfall, but I’m not sure we have enough democracy left to fight back, especially as long as the only opposition party is so consumed with incrementalism and protecting the sanctity of the same institutions that got us here.

"The greatest most beautiful clothes the world has ever seen."

Cassandra at the peak of her madness.

Compassion

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There are a lot of good reminders being shared today about how you can reach out and help friends who may be struggling with depression. This week’s news is also a good reminder that you can never know what other people are going through. So cut them some slack. Hold people accountable, but do it from a place of love.
 
When I am having episodes of high anxiety, I almost never tell anyone. Sometimes not even my closest friends.
 
When I do tell people, they ask me what I’m stressed about. I try to list off some things, they sound small, and it makes me feel dumb for worrying. They may be trying to help, but you can’t logic mental health issues away.