Given Trump’s on-going incitement of white supremacists to intimidate voters at the polls, is anyone still wondering why they should vote by mail?
I put my ballot in the mail on Monday without even leaving my house. It was picked up by a mail carrier (working so late that they were wearing a headlamp). Today, Wednesday morning, I got a text from http://northcarolina.ballottrax.net that it’s on the way to the Durham County Board of Elections! So easy. The hardest part was finding an adult to “witness” my absentee ballot.
The BallotTrax system is reliable and safe. Certainly safer than I feel about going to vote in person. If you don’t think Trump’s pals will find more ways to make voting harder, riskier (because of COVID) and scarier (because of white supremacists) in the next month then you are definitely not paying attention.
Why tempt a very uncertain future when you can safely vote from home? Republicans want you to to not trust the USPS, but mail carriers are on our side. They’re working their butts off to make sure our votes get delivered and BallotTrax (thanks to NC’s excellent Attorney General Josh Stein) ensures ballots will be counted.
In the months since then, two things have become even more clear than before. One, our government has no regard for civil rights, human dignity, or democracy and will stop at nothing to promote the interests of the rich, white, and powerful at the expense of everyone else. And two, there are some people in and around Alamance County that will happily and shamelessly attempt to shut down peaceful dissent if it in any way challenges their racist assumptions about the world. (Alamance County is the home base of neo-confederate ACTBAC.) But we’ve also learned that there are even more people in and around Alamance that believe that Black Lives Matter and that protest is patriotic, and they’ve been bravely showing up in the streets of Graham for the past several months.
When I drove to the Never Again protest on November 24, I wasn’t aware there was a Confederate statue in Graham. I learned later that the Sheriff had sent his troopers to the town square to protect it from the imagined threat. Meanwhile, we were four blocks away attempting to peacefully march to the Alamance Detention Center so that we could say the Mourner’s Kaddish, sit shiva, and observe other Jewish rituals in remembrance of the many people who have died in ICE custody. Unfortunately, the racist Sheriff Terry Johnson would not allow this to happen. Ironically, once we were arrested we were transported by the county directly to the same detention center that they prevented us from walking to!
Photo of me (Ruby Sinreich) being arrested by Officer Ellis of the Haw River Police Department at a protest against ICE and Sheriff Terry Johnson in Graham, North Carolina on November 24, 2019. Photo by Anthony Crider https://www.flickr.com/photos/acrider/49118904508/
As Jews we have a special responsibility to remember the horrors of government-backed xenophobia, the dangers of draconian law enforcement, and the nightmare of illegal incarceration and family separation. When we say NEVER AGAIN, we must mean it. We cannot idly watch the actions of federal, state, and local government as they gradually but steadily march toward fascism. Those of us with privilege are called to spend it now in many forms of resistance large and small to stop the gears of authoritarianism, save people’s lives, and in doing so, save our own souls.
This summer, nonviolent protesters speaking out for Black lives and against the Confederate statue were arrested on a public sidewalk. (The ACLU of NC sued the town of Graham over their anti-protest ordinance and won.) And in recent weeks, as we have learned about a tragic and predictable COVID-19 outbreak at the Alamance detention center, people speaking out for health and human rights were arrested for such nonexistent offenses as swearing in the presence of a police officer.
It’s now undeniable that Alamance County officials have a racism problem, and that elected leaders are not concerned about the health or human rights of their residents. Alamance has the biggest prison COVID outbreak in the state of North Carolina with over 100 cases (out of just about 400 incarcerated people), far surpassing big cities like Charlotte and Raleigh. Thankfully the wonderful people of Down Home NC are working to free as many people from this nightmare as possible by raising bail funds.
In this new context of weekly demonstrations for and against racism in Alamance County, the town of Graham’s reactionary attempts to squelch free speech, and the increasingly grim reality of living in an uncontrolled pandemic stoked by racism, toxic masculinity, and ignorance, the nine of us arrested in Graham last November are scheduled to have our second appearance in court next week! You can show your support for us by donating to the Alamance Mass Bail Out.
This is not the time for poetry. Words deny me. I deny words. The world does not need fragments. It is screaming to be whole.
I keep busy pulling up weeds – each clump the hair of a dictator, floating in the pool of privilege – wanting everyone to have a pool, doing laundry over and over again, cooking for the family so we stay healthy for the genocide, walking the dog because it the only time she smiles and races like a cartoon character down the hall to go out, her paws circling the slippery floor, feeding the cat with her genetically pendulous belly, observing the fallen white petals on the wet dark pavement, the broken trees leaning perfectly up against a tall tree trunk, the fairytale modernist houses tucked behind spiky bushes that almost convince you that our world is solid.
It has never been good for the many. All of this keeps me from the task at hand – preparing to teach young adults that art makes a difference but I am not convinced. I can cut all the paper in the towering boxes on my desk for surreal collages, prescribe antidotes to every disease, paint masks on all the faces in photographic portraits but there will always be more paper and nightmares, pandemics and the need for catharses, the maskless deniers carrying guns.
I rise early this morning to move my body with others on a little screen, stamp a letter to my mother, hoping the post office stays open long enough it to get there. Everything good under threat, you want to go back in time or forward, imagining it was or could be better but here we are – hurricanes, droughts, floods, cages, criminals at the helm of this sinking vessel we all know as capitalism. Why is the end of the world easier to imagine than the end of capitalism? I have stopped trying to understand because reality defies logic, gives into the worst. If there is one thing I have learned it is that we can not predict the future but we pretend to change it.
Image: Painting from elin o’Hara slavick’s collection Bomb After Bomb
This weekend I was pleased to present a brand new talk at DrupalCamp Asheville. I’ve been wanting to attend this camp for years since it’s the only one in North Carolina. This year my calendar was finally open and I was planning to attend in person, but of course that was not meant to be.
Many Drupal developers consider site builders to be one of the most important types of users they are building for. The project lead regularly talks about how to “Improve the site builder experience” in his state-of-Drupal keynotes. But how well do developers really understand site builders and what we do? I put together this presentation to help people understand the realities and constraints of being a site builder.
Below is a video of the talk. It’s only about 35 minutes long. This was my first time presenting it. If I do this talk again in the future I’ll include more examples to illustrate each point.
I’m sure this only scratches the surface because it only tracks incidents of police violence that are reported on Twitter but I really appreciate folks (including Durham lawyer Greg Doucette) for putting this together.
See also The Guardian‘s site The Counted, which they created to track police killings in 2015 because no-one else was even doing it.
In 2017, I stopped talking about the parallels to 1930s Germany (when fascists were gradually coming into power) because people tuned me out and acted like I was hysterical. Now here we are.
I cannot understand people’s insistence on believing that Republicans are failing because they are incompetent. They are extremely strategic, they just don’t have any intrinsic morality. They will grab all the money and power within reach, and they’ll believe it was right if they don’t get caught.
Even in the areas where they simply lack the skills or capacity needed to govern, that is a strategic choice. They don’t want there to be an effective safety net, schools, public health, transportation network, public safety, healthy environment, or anything that connects us socially or culturally.
People who are poor, sick, isolated, scared, and hopeless are easier to manipulate, especially by authoritarians that appeal to the worst parts of human nature, ie: Republicans.
Rant inspired by this Twitter thread:
2 weeks ago, I assumed the Trump administration's coronavirus response was abysmal due to incompetence.
I no longer think we're here through gross negligence. The Republicans in charge HAVE been taking action, just not for the health and safety of Americans.
After screaming into the void for weeks on Twitter about the desperate need for massive testing and rapid social isolation, we are now living that quarantine life. Like many parents I am trying not to terrify my child (and myself), but unlike many parents I will not sugarcoat things. Especially after spending decades talking about how our political leaders are failing us, I am not going to lie about the fact that we are all suffering now because those failures have come home to roost.
I know my child thinks I am going a little overboard with this quarantine business, so showed him a few visuals to help him understand. These were the most helpful things we looked at today.
My friends who like Bernie Sanders keep telling me that he disavows the bros and toxicity that his supporters are known for. Then yesterday the Sanders campaign proudly tweeted the endorsement of an absolutely hateful scumbag, Joe Rogan.
It’s one thing to accept an endorsement from someone you don’t entirely agree with, it’s entirely another to EMBRACE AND HIGHLIGHT it as a sign of the kind of support you have. Especially given the deficit of trust Sanders already has, this sends a clear message to marginalized people that we will be thrown under the bus at the first opportunity to get some sexist, homophobic white nationalists on board.
I voted for Sanders in 2016, and I will be glad to vote for him (maybe even volunteer) in the general election if he wins the primary. But I absolutely will not support him when I have progressive alternatives like Elizabeth Warren who clearly actually gives a crap about people like me (and you). And I am also having a hard time swallowing friends’ continued support for Sanders. I can’t help but trust people a little less when I see you still defending him.
I didn’t know about Rogan before, I think he does something sporty? So here is more context:
Joe Rogan also had friendly interviews with Milo Yiannopolous & Jordan Peterson, yelled "you're a fucking man" on-air about a trans woman, vocally argued against allowing trans kids puberty blockers THIS YEAR, says "f*g," and believes the world is stacked against men, so. Enjoy. https://t.co/X1oFy71elf
Here is the absolute most important reason that this really matters:
Rogan’s endorsement was the kind to quietly pocket, or to have the campaign team get out through surrogates and influencers. That way the campaign gets its win _without_ shoving Rogan into the faces of core Democratic constituencies who find him abrasive, at best.
Florence Rice, 86 (at the time the photo was taken), was raised in the foster care system in NYC. She saw her mother only a handful of times throughout her childhood. When she got pregnant as a young single woman in the 1930’s she decided to have the baby. A few years later as a working single mother, she found herself pregnant again and knew that she didn’t want to be like her mother – unable to take care for the child. She made the decision to have an abortion. Unfortunately, she received her abortion from an illegal provider, and contracted a serious illness afterwards. In 1969 when feminists began speaking out about their abortions, Florence was one of the first to do so. Her story underscored a class divide: richer women got safer abortions, poorer women were more likely to end up at a butcher.
