as small as a world and as large as alone, clatterbane: I am going to have to take a break...

6:27pm August 14, 2014

I am going to have to take a break from reading or reblogging anything overtly political for a little while. Which no doubt means staying off here for a few hours at least.

My health is not good right now, and that last “I can’t believe this is happening in America” reblog kind of punched me in the gut and was the last straw for now. I don’t need adrenaline attacks like that. It doesn’t help anybody.

Centuries-long systemic problems that are features NOT bugs can get extremely overwhelming sometimes. Especially when you are reminded again that an awful lot of people do have the luxury of acting surprised and indignant when thugs do work the same fucking way they were set up to work—and they can’t just ignore this particular instance. (That was autocorrect for a bad typo of “things”, but thugs fit at least as well so I had to leave it. Autocorrect on my tablet has a better idea of history and the continuing state of affairs than probably at least 90% of spoiled Euro-Americans.)

Meanwhile my family is still automatically trying to dodge the census, because you never know what the people in power will decide to do AGAIN. And the ones of us who do not look obviously of African descent have a lot less to worry about day to day than the many people who are obviously Black in the US. (I am very, very aware that these days I don’t risk getting shot on the street just because some racist piece of crap wants to murder somebody. That would have been totally legal in our state within my grandparents’ lifetime, though, as dangerous vermin on “someone else’s” land. It’s hard to forget that stuff even if you wanted to.) It’s a mess.

And was meant to be a mess for everyone but particularly wealthier Euro-American settlers, from Day One before a bunch of wealthy British colonist dudes decided to split off and get their own government going to more effectively grab stuff from everyone else without the few limits they’d been working under.

As a side note, this whole recent mess has left me even more convinced that the traditional peaceful protest approach is pretty ineffective by now. The system knows exactly how to handle protests after a lot of practice, and exactly what stories to try to spin around them. Whether it’s “just” kettling people, assaulting them less lethally, and painting them as troublemaking scum—or the desperate measures getting pulled out in Ferguson. I am definitely not suggesting some kind of violent alternative, which would only get a bunch of people killed and vilified even worse. Even just looking at it pragmatically. But, what we’re doing now they know how to neutralize. That’s part of what’s overwhelming too, because I have absolutely no clue what might work better on a practical level to actually change such a busted inhumane system. It’s depressing and rage-inducing whenever I think about it much.