May 25, 2022
I’ve been thinking like many of us about what to think. Didn’t really feel the need to add to the sea of posts stating what does not even need the assistance of words. Yet still as I become incredibly annoyed by the simplistic demand for gun reform I feel compelled to add that this is not about gun control or faith or monsters or even mental health. I believe what we are seeing is but a mirror of the violence our society imposes on humanity. I’ve stated before that the many practices of state sanctioned violence do nothing but chip away at our ability to exist in our humanity, at our ability to care, to empathize for society as a whole and everyone who composes the collective. The monsters our society creates are our responsibility. They are the visible symptoms of a disease that we all continue to spread through our chosen ignorance & quick & convenient disregard for issues that we know continue to infect our ability to be brothers & sisters. We know well what a thriving and healthy society needs. Yet we choose to believe our consistent littering of poison won’t eventually take a toll or affect all of us. You post that you are broken because it’s easy to empathize for a grid of school aged children. But can we challenge ourselves to think about or care about or take responsibility for caring about the root cause of how a society breeds people that have no regard for human life? Can we feel for everyone too including the troubled young man who did this? This incident is not the first I hope where you realize we live in an increasingly sick world. A world full of issues like poverty, systemic institutional racism, homophobia, greed, war, mental illness, deteriorating public health, state sanctioned violence, criminalization, abuse of power, I could go on but in summation we collectively are participants in an international disregard for humanity, a disregard for the land we occupy, the air we breathe, the resources we share and don’t, and the priorities we set. The collective consciousness is something we all should begin with. Learn to give a damn and problematize the issue when it’s not so obvious we should. It’s all so tiring. #uvalde #humanrights #resistance
May 28, 2022
We have no right to ask our communities to stay unsafe when this country is designed to harm us. Just like we shouldn’t control or police a woman who wants to get an abortion / bec we aren’t the ones to raise said children we also have no business forcing our communities to be unarmed when we remain unsafe in this world / expected to accept state sanctioned systemic violence and growing oppression. Our children are in harms way, and while guns are not for everyone we have no right to try to force folx to give up their right to safety/ to self protect when we remain not only unprotected but under attack. Not all of us fit in a left or right box. Some of us are dreaming of a world that is pro human rights not pro labels. The struggle for human rights is a fight for the long haul, we have to come to terms with reality that many of us are not going to see that type of change / making it even more critically important that we fight back against any attempt to take our rights away. What we need to do is take the right and power away from government and police and stop funding systems that keep criminalizing and murdering us. Banning guns is not going to keep us safe, because people who want to murder will only find a way to get a weapon illegally / like folx do with every other thing that’s banned. Our anger must be redirected to create - not ban. We keep playing into the spectacle, playing a game with the masters rules trying to take our turns at who gets to police next. We need to abolish the ways in which we police ourselves and each other and all the borders barriers we create to distance us from our shared humanity. & by policing I don’t JUST mean the police force I mean the ways in which we keep judging and trying to impose our way of being onto others. The real issues at play in Uvalde are the same issues and systems that killed George Floyd, James Garcia, Dion Johnson, the list goes on. We have to do the work of dismantling/ decolonizing the oppressor in us, the righteousness we carry that tries to simplify every issue and start problematizing the status quo and reimagine new ways to be in community with each other. We trust all sorts of authorities instead of trusting each other. We failed that boy in Uvalde, who knows how but this is a given. We are a society plagued by toxic masculinity, racism and violence and we wonder how or why we are where we are. We are always too important to be inconvenienced with “others.” Those parents outside of the school were ready to risk their lives because living without our children is not living. But the police doesn’t see our kids as life worth protecting because they have no interest to gain from our existence. They exist to protect white supremacy, capital, power and their own. Wanting to revert back to the great Amerikkka. These forces like most systems of authority are trained to no longer be people but extensions of policies and protocols that have no consciousness.
Now I know this position is unpopular but at this point I don’t care who agrees. Not posting this to gain friends. We all need to live authentically and unapologetically so we can continue to create space for others to do the same. I am disgusted with the same nightmare over and over. Systemic trauma is exhausting. Trump and Obama era gave us children in cages, people are still being murdered by police, our families are still unable to cross borders while America gentrifies every other country. We are trying to now control women’s bodies. Attacking trans children. We have marginalized groups of people that live unsafe. So many International human rights violations. If I’m gonna be another bystander at minimum I want to express my absolute disgust and rage. & no I’m not here to depressed and hopeless. You best believe that I’m teaching my children that the only authority they ought to respect is their internal one. Who knows maybe one day our future generations will do more than what we have done. #stillnotsaved #abolition #uvalde
