Getting Terrorized

If it seems like I’m not taking the current political situation seriously, that isn’t true.  I feel it.  It hurts.  It’s wretched.  I wish I could fix it, undertake some sort of violence that would set the world right.  I feel bad, for at least some amount of time, every day.  Feels worst in the lead-up to going into work on Monday – Sunday night, Monday before dawn.  Composing this on a Sunday, back on the 2nd.

But there are some facts that are very important to keep in mind.  Most of us are going to be able to live the rest of our lives just fine, whatever hardships this may add.  We can prepare ourselves in various practical ways for a lot of bad things, but not all of them.  Worrying is not preparing; it’s just hurting yourself.  I know, you can’t avoid it completely.  I sure can’t either.  But we have to minimize its impact on our lives.

Frankly, if we don’t, the terrorists win – to borrow a cheesy slogan from the post 9-11 era.  The fascists love it when we think about them all the time, when we show fear, even when we show anger.  Were you ever bullied?  Same deal.  I don’t love living in fear of what the bastards will do next, but I really don’t love the fact they can crank their hogs to the signs of my fear.

We have to oppose them.  I do think almost all the methods we were using before still have a place in practice now.  We might have to add some new tricks.  Keep up the good work, when and how and if you can.  And if you can’t?  Do your best to survive and thrive.  Anything you can do to make your life as good as it can be, that does matter.  It is a victory in this larger war, on one small but very important battlefield.

Meanwhile, what can we do to ease our worries?  I’m still trying to find things that work for me.  Obviously, I’ve been throwing myself into creativity, and plan to continue that as much as possible.  Even so, tonight I find myself feeling kinda ill, my viscera trembling like a fall leaf.  Keep in mind I wrote this days ago, so reassurance belated and probably unnecessary when you read it.

At least I have a posse.  I have a blue state behind me, I have a union, I have my comrades here.  It doesn’t feel real some days, but other times, it really helps me.  I know a lot of you don’t have all of those reassurances.  But you do have a comrade in me, for what I’m worth.  Let’s keep this life going, together.

Drop suggestions for ways to feel better, even if they only work a little bit.  Add ’em all up, that’s something.  See you later!

Specific Actions for Blue States

This is an open letter to the governors and state legislatures of California, Washington, New York, Minnesota, and anywhere that still has responsible human beings at the helm.  This blog itself is a wasteland of poorly considered guff, obscenity, and self-indulgent daydreams, so I’d rather this letter not be shared with links to the source.  Just copy-paste it at your politicians, if you agree with my thinking, and by all means, if you have better ideas, improve and rewrite it.  For my part, I’m sending it to Washington State’s Governor Bob Ferguson.

***

The federal government of the United States is being destroyed.  We will fight to preserve what we need, to get a fair return on what we pay into it through taxes, but the thugs have a death grip on every lever of power, and we must respond to their destructive radicalism with constructive radicalism.  We have to build something to replace everything they destroy.  And the best time to do that is right the hell now, because the destruction will happen very quickly.  Like global warming, it is already too late to truly get ahead of it.

This is not going to be easy at all.  I understand that it seems like I’m asking for the impossible.  Right now so much is under threat in so many ways, and we are all operating at a loss from responding to massive natural disasters, year after year after year.  But we cannot expect the status quo to suffice, even in blue states.  Perhaps especially in blue states.

I’m not talking about replacing capitalism, as much as I’d love to be.  I know there is not a body in power with any interest in seeing that happen, and that’s fine.  Properly regulated capitalism is still recklessly cruel and ultimately burning the world to ash, but it’s a system under which we can enjoy some liberty, can lead reasonable lives.  You ran for office in this country knowing what this country is, and I’m not asking you to fundamentally change that.

This the United States of America.  At our christening, we took this name to show that we are a collection of individual nations – willing to be united, but never willing to give up our self-determination.  My proposal is to assert control of that self-determination – to make it our own – so that when the feds say “public schools don’t exist, we’ll only fund hitler youth programs,” we can say “no thanks, we’ve got our own way.”

These aren’t meant to be done in sequence, hence bullets without numbers.  They have to happen all at once, as much as possible, because the “storm” they promised is coming down now.

• Come Together

The blue states need to be forming political alliances, making deals with each other for mutual aid and protection. As I recall, during the pandemic response, the governors did meet. Now it’s even more important to do this.

• Shore up Taxes

None of this will be possible without tax revenue.  All of our states have powerful lobbyists constantly campaigning to keep the wealthy from having to pay a fair share of the cost of having a civilization.  You may have to make some risky moves, you may have to examine every inch of every way money changes in the state to look for new angles, you may have to fuck up the avenues by which the wealthy put their gold bricks on the scale against you.  But you cannot afford to lose a cent.

This could be a significant part of why Democrats have lost so much nationally.  They profit handsomely from business as usual, from legalized bribery in the form of lobbyist money, from gerrymandering that makes their jobs safe at the expense of fair representation for all.  Obama and Biden could have seen the writing on the wall and used their executive power to limit the power of the executive, but they couldn’t bring themselves to lose a drop of their privilege.  You may have to reach within yourself to find principles that have been very hard for the best of us to find, when national power is on the line.  Please do.  Lives are depending on it.

We’re taught in middle school that budget decisions have to be approved by Congress, but the current president has shown that these norms are so much paper.  Expect every drop of federal funding to be leverage for intimidation and coercion, to abuse you and your constituency.  Get ready to lose it all.

• Replace Federal Funding

This could border on impossible, or it could be way easier than I’m imagining.  After all, most of the revenue of this country comes from our states.  But replacing federal funding of state programs will absolutely be necessary, for our continued safety and prosperity.  It is very unjust that our tax money continues to flow to a federal government that cares so little about us, that only trickles back as it sees fit – especially when that is jeopardized by the whims of a tyrant.  However, short of civil war, what can we do about it?

Work around the problem.  Come up with investment schemes, carefully negotiate with the wolves of business.  Maybe some functions of the state can be handled by the private sector.  That has been generally bad for utilities and extremely bad for telecommunications, but if you have no other recourse, privatization could prop up tax shortfalls.  Only use this one with the strictest of regulation, OK?

Right now US Treasury bonds are underpinning the global economy.  The tyrant could end that tomorrow because he didn’t get a nap and felt cranky.  What if California State bonds were so hot that international investors could just ditch the fed and buy into Cali?  How does your value stack up against the BRIC nations?  What about the combined value of the blue states?

• Plan Radical Restructure

Plan this, but with the knowledge it is aspirational – unlikely to be passed into law in one grand sweep.  This is what the radical right wing administration is attempting at the federal level, and attempting it with a grand sweep.  They want to destroy every institution on which the country has come to depend, and replace them with exploitative mock versions that funnel money into the pockets of wealthy administration cronies.  That’s a radical restructure.  We don’t have that kind of power, but maybe we could benefit from some careful measure of that kind of radicalism.

Our states’ institutions evolved over time from the growth of our respective economies, and from the progress of history.  This process is not elegant, not efficient, and there may be costly redundancies in our laws, policies, and bureaucracies.  The right wing solution being attempted at a national level is to wipe away the complexity of established systems and replace them with something new, simple, and rigged to feed the rich.

To help with the goals of shoring up taxes and replacing federal funding, targeting these inefficiencies may be a useful goal.  We don’t have to leave people in a lurch like they have.  The right way to do this is to study how our civil structures operate – what they do, how, and why – and see if we can engineer more elegant ways to achieve the same ends.  Then implement those fundamental changes in a way that exercises care to prevent lapses in essential services.

If the current president cared one jot about his own constituency, actually believed that his right wing agenda was a principled and good thing, he would have taken that thoughtful and slow approach to making these changes.  It didn’t have to be implemented like a blitzkrieg.  That’s just a way of showing off that they don’t have to care what anybody thinks of them anymore.  It’s a way of showing off that at a national level, democracy is over.

• Plan for State Border Problems

While red states demolish their social services, health care, infrastructure, human rights, and worker protections, our states will become the release valve for anyone trying to escape the badlands.  This is already true in many ways, but can get so much worse.  At least for the moment, interstate travel is free access, but as the reddest states try to lock their women in Gilead, border checkpoints may become a thing.  And if that doesn’t happen?  Then that’s a lot of red state refugees you may need to accommodate.

This can be a good thing, if it’s done right – like international immigration.  Try not to be as exploitive as our country has been in that regard.  Instead of “what can these desperate people do for us?” ask “what can we do for each other?”  Indeed, to the extent the fascists allow any international immigration to happen, the same kind of solutions can be applied to both issues.

Job programs and genuinely affordable housing are my preferred solution.  And if there aren’t enough jobs?  Figure out how to make more jobs.  It’s been done before, during the New Deal.  And if that’s too radical for you, this may be a good place to make deals with private businesses, to have them fulfill some of these roles, for profit.  Any unskilled position in healthcare, construction, agriculture, customer service – these are places where the most desperate people can be employed.  The kind of jobs we have a bottomless need to fill.

It’s important that any immigrants that are allowed to stay in our states should be allowed to do so in a legally sanctioned way.  Our country has allowed illegal immigration to prop up entire sectors of the economy, because that labor force was cheap enough to encourage us to turn a blind eye.  But that’s just human trafficking – moving unprotected bodies and subjecting them to abuses we’d never allow to happen to those we fully regard as human.  We have to be able to figure out a better way to do this.  I know the red state solution is going to be prison labor.  But that’s just slavery.  Let’s do better, for everyone.

And if it can’t be like that – if there’s a need to privilege residents of a state over immigrants from another – then there should be a refugee program to allow a more expedient path to residency, for those under the most threat where they come from.

• Rethink Healthcare

Our nation’s health care structure is a rolling disaster, created explicitly to make the rich richer, off the desperation and sorrow of the poor.  To an extent you cannot escape this.  Medicare is federal, and Medicaid is federally funded.

I think it’s instructive to look at the history of Medicare’s “parts.”  Part A was free for people insured through taxed wages and covered hospitalization.  Part B became necessary as healthcare expanded to lean more on specialists and outpatient care, and there was not enough money (was there?) to make the expansion happen without charging for it.  That’s $185 a month out of old folks’ Social Security checks, and not well-liked.

A and B didn’t cover everything, so gap coverage came along to pick up the rest, plus another letter for prescription drugs.  These are parts C and D, and these were a massive gimme to the rich.  The fed subsidizes these programs, forking over barrels of taxpayer dollars to private businesses.  In return, those businesses provide spotty service, while terrorizing and badgering the vulnerable with deceptive advertising and outright lies, denying care, and getting people killed.

This situation happened in stages.  Some causes were unavoidable – healthcare was bound to  become more sophisticated and expensive over time – and some were a result of avoidable government corruption.  At this point in history, we have enough perspective to come up with new ideas that aren’t hobbled by piecemeal development.

This is another Radical Restructure.  Your state could probably afford to lose its entire Medicaid program easily, if it had a well-designed and efficient replacement that covers many more people.  Maybe that could be handled as an expansion of the bureaucracy of Medicaid, but an expansion that relies on state funding over federal.  Because most importantly, as the federal government abdicates all responsibility for the well-being of its citizens, we are obliged – by the human decency they lack – to make sure everyone is adequately cared for.

• State Social Security

The federal program of Social Security will likely limp on in some debased form, barely helping anybody with anything, while its coffers are pillaged to pay for nuking Samoa, or some other absurd nonsensical atrocity.  I think it’s time to help seniors (and other vulnerable populations) within our states in big ways.  This can either be done with a new retirement program – a “State Social Security” – or by massively reducing the expenses members of these populations face, with expansions of Section 8, EBT, utility programs, etc.

Advantages of State Social Security:  This can be tied to investment schemes that generate revenue, and because people are already paying for and receiving Social Security from the federal government, this doesn’t need huge payouts – just enough to make up the shortfall, to keep old folks from having to eat dog food and ration medication.  Disadvantage:  Corporations will exploit any public benefit to raise their prices, busting you back to square one, with nothing but useless bureaucracy to show for it.

Advantages of Reducing Cost of Living:  Takes away that last disadvantage.  Need-based programs cost money.  More people using them means more people needed to administer them.  And as a strictly humanitarian thing, they cannot generate profit.  These programs are always targeted by aggressive lobbying – by rich vultures that will never be satisfied until the poor are beaten and bleeding in chains, calling it austerity.

The best way is probably some combination of the two, but one thing that is needed regardless of the approach is…

• Genuinely Affordable Housing

OK, you can’t very well have half your state on Section 8, and you can’t limit the asinine price of real estate without damaging the financial sector, right?  But there is absolutely a middle path here.  Poor people – the renting class – generate so god-damn much money.  The rich have come to feel entitled to have an ever-escalating amount of that money, with no thought to how much blood is in these stones.

If you could just get a corporation to be willing to accept a smaller profit margin, in exchange for providing massively more units for rent at reasonable rates, you could house many more people.  People who could afford to participate in your economy as consumers, as workers.  All you need is the political will to make these deals with a strong hand – without capitulating to lobbyists who tell you that “one or two sliding scale micro-studios in a block of two thousand $8000 units should be enough to house all your baristas.”  Those lobbyists are liars that do not deserve your tax breaks.  Don’t sell your people out; don’t let yourself look like a cheap bum.

• Disaster Preparedness

Climate change has caught us completely flatfooted.  What happens when we are still recovering from the last disaster every time that a new one strikes?  We are gradually worn down to nothing.  What happens with no help from FEMA?  Don’t let that be you.  I don’t know how much your state spends on research into new ways to deal with natural disasters – new solutions – but it needs to be a lot.

I know, we are so many grains of sand before the mighty gale.  But we caused this with innovation.  Surely there are ways we can deal with it that haven’t been fully considered or even developed yet.  And again, there’s a venal motivation for you as well.  What if California figured out how to manage wildfires, to prevent them from ever damaging property?  To prevent them from turning the sky into blood and hellfire multiple times a year?

What do you suppose that might do for the value of real estate there?  To the decision-making of businesses considering your state for a new campus?  If the new methods involve a process of labor or technology that can be employed and exported, how would you like to corner that market, in a world that is increasingly on fire?

This isn’t just about fire.  New solutions for flooding, earthquakes, winds, freezing, for temps that melt plastic and soften aluminum.  We’re in for a world of excitement.

• Global Warming is Not Going to Stop

I reiterate.  Look at what all of the world’s reputable scientists have said.  Look at what our federal government and businesses are doing in response to the crisis.  You know those maps of what the world will look like with no polar ice caps?  Familiarize yourself with them.  Count on that becoming a reality before this streak of fascism has even run its course.

None of you are in as bad of shape as Florida, but we are all going to take big hits – in addition to the disasters mentioned above.  NYC is going to have to move ashore, eventually.  Paint all your rooftops white.  Start wearing silver foil when you walk your dog.  SPF ain’t gonna hack it.  Air conditioning must be regarded as a human right, same for water.  Incorporate this kind of awareness into every law and policy you draft, for the next ten thousand years that it may take for the world to recover.

• Beware the Wolves

Unregulated capitalism devours itself.  It destroys competition, consolidates power, devolves into dictatorship and tyranny.  I’ve mentioned that, for lack of revenue, you may involve corporations in the essential functions of your state.  But this must be regulated powerfully, unfailingly.  That’s even without the consideration of a federal government that might consider dropping tactical warheads on San Francisco.  Watch your backs.

***

That’s all I got for the moment.  The nuke thing was hyperbole, I hope.  Don’t look at me like that.

This took way too much brain to compose.  Hopefully I don’t get spammed for donations by the DNC for the rest of my natural life.

Look forward to my usual foolery later today.

A Civil Restructuring

As Abe Oceanoxia mentioned, we’re in an era of endless recovery, where the damage wrought by natural disasters will always outpace our ability to repair it.  The slithering shitstain in chief is doing a blitz of horrible moves to make life worse for everyone.  Everything has everybody on back heel all the time, which parallels the recovery from natural disasters.  Before you can even get a handle on one fucked-up insult to human dignity, you are broadsided with another three.

But at some point, we are going to have to crawl out from under the fecal deluge, and make some moves.  You and I can only do so much, and we should of course do that much, but the people most responsible for fighting back?  That’s on the decent people in government.  What can they do?

It is distinctly possible this is the end of democracy in america for the next few decades.  Certainly it feels like the Civil Rights Movement was just busted back to the 1960s.  I used to say there was no way a politician on either side of the aisle would want to be the one holding the bag when Social Security runs out of money, but that sentiment belongs to a time when norms existed.  We’re in an era of uncharted fuckery, under the fascist deathclown administration.  Will they let the SSA fail?  They might.

This brings me back to those decent people in government, particularly in states where they have enough power and resources to make real moves for their people.  The governments of places like California, Washington, and New York, they need to start uncoupling themselves from the federal government.

What does it matter to your state if Social Security fails, if you have a state retirement system that covers your citizens?  What does it matter if Medicare fails, if you have a better state healthcare system?  Those things are not so trivial and not so easy, but I contend that they are possible.

Those would be the actions of true states – independent political entities.  Easy to forget that the very name of the USA is an artifact of a time when every state wanted to be its own country, with only a nominal federal government.  Well, the federal government is about to get nuked from within, so it’s time to start treating the situation with that kind of seriousness.

How hilarious would it be if the NYPD had its budget actually fucking constrained for the first time ever, to pay for important shit the people actually need?  It would be soooooooooo fucking easy to spot the excesses.  They could keep their massive salaries and benes and number of cops in the city, sure, and still save millions by, oh, say, not having offices in foreign countries?  Not having military vehicles?  I’d love to see it.

I had another article about this before, more or less, but that one didn’t get this specific.  I’m calling on the governments of blue states to make those baller moves.  Protect human rights.  Get teams of civil rights lawyers figuring out any way possible to keep civil rights decisions from escaping to higher courts staffed by fascist shitlords.  Get sociolgists forming comprehensive analyses of the ways people live in your states, where society is failing them, and develop more efficient and effective ways to palliate human suffering – thus making your states even more attractive to people fleeing from the United States of Jesusland.

Get civil engineers thinking of ways to take care of natural disaster preparedness without a lick of federal support.  Make concrete plans that will make your states physically safer and better places to invest in, for business and real estate etc.  Laugh at places like Florida letting themselves get blasted to pieces year after year, just to stick it to the transes and DEI wokesters.  What if Cali could figure out a way to make fire season less dangerous?  What an achievement that would be!

Yeah, there are a lot of items on here that seem wildly pie-in-the-sky, even sci-fi, but this is the future, guys.  Right now it’s a burning trashfire of a cyberpunk dystopia.  The failure of the central government might actually be just the opportunity you need to set this thing off – to really change the world where you are in ways that inspire all of humanity.

Do you have the political will?  You’ve never shown that spine before, but these are wild-ass times.  Show us what you can do, please.

Hey, why am I not making a hunnerd grand a year in a DC thinktank.  George Soros!  Hear me!  (in the voice of that guy that recorded himself kidnapping his kids and asked Qanon to save him)  Give me tha power.  Y’all know I’m good for it.

Hope: How?

As I mentioned previously, I’m going to be doing a speed writing event on the weekend that ends with MLK Jr Day, and I invite ye all to come along.  I’m going to write about 12,500 words a day from tomorrow, Friday Jan 17th, through Monday Jan 20th.  You can set more modest goals and only participate a few of those days if you please.  Fiction or non-fiction is fine.  Post in the comments or elsewhere with links in the comments, or be shy / inviso and just mention your word count when you get to resting points.  I’ll read yours if you read mine; critique can be as baby-gloved as you please.  Holler in the comments if you want to join.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

In the wake of the miserable election, I tried to do one post a day for more than a week, encouraging people to carry on, even tho we all know this is about to be horrible.  I stand by that.  I believe we can survive and I want to see all of you do your best – to not let the sorrow of what’s happened, the pain of what’s happening, and the fear of what’s going to happen cause you to give up.

This coming Monday is the inauguration of the Nazi Clown Administration – one of those symbolic moments that throw all the bad shit into focus, lure the mind to catastrophize.  Be careful with yourself.  For my part, I intend to be living in a dreamworld of magic, and you can see my self-indulgent nonsense if it works out.

I doubt it’ll be a quality distraction for most of you, though.  You gotta go with something that engages you personally.  With self-indulgent writing, I’m mostly engaging myself, and the number of people who can be suitably diverted by my jackanapery is likely few.  You like video games?  A lot of gamers buy or otherwise acquire far more video games than they could ever play.  If there’s one you’ve been meaning to get to, the novelty of coming in fresh on January 20th might help engage your mind in something good.

Likewise, if there’s a TV show you’ve been meaning to binge, good time for it.  Or a book series.  Of if you have the kind of lifestyle where an all-day orgy is a thing to do, might be a good time for that.  Drugs, in moderation?  Try to avoid ads in any media you expose yourself to; they will likely include a face you don’t want to see.

If you have any other suggestions, leave comments.  Could be useful.  Like, some odd reader can’t imagine anything working for him until the last commenter suggests model trains.  Give it a whirl.

HAHA!  I forgot the premise of my post.  Hope.  How?  Why did I think that would be a good idea for a post?  It just seemed like a necessary thing in that moment.

Well.  For starters, I made a special tag for posts relevant to this shituation, at this point mostly the initial ones following the election.  There may be some strand of hope for you in one of those posts somewhere.  And as I mentioned above, whatever it is, it’s got to be something that works for you.  We’re all so individual.  I can hardly tell you what will work best.

For me, the most compelling thing is that I have control over my own actions, and can choose how to conduct myself in life.  If everybody in the world was a crappy nazi and having compassion made one into a reviled outsider, I know I could be that bitch.  Feels good, knowing you can do good, in whatever small ways are in front of you.

So like before, where I shoveled that responsibility onto you, of coming up with Jan 20 distraction ideas, this is where I ask:  Is there anything that gives you some hope for yourself, or the people in your life?  Or are you one of those philosopher weirdos who feels more secure living with an alternate consolation, without relying on hope itself?  I sometimes lean that direction myself.

Anything may be useful.  Let’s remind ourselves what we’re living for, where relevant, and care for ourselves and others in whatever ways will make that life possible.

Shadow Everything

This is the end of my Hope Series, in the wake of the Likely Death of Democracy.  I’ve been queuing these posts for 6:30 AM Eastern time and a frivolous link post for 9:30 AM as a chaser.  I mention this because you may have missed previous entries.  There is one per day for every day from 11/6-11/16.  Check ’em out.

You may have seen a video recently where I said I want to see the equivalent of a “shadow government” for every aspect of life.  I want to buy shadow groceries at the shadow 7-11.  I want to see shadow movies at the shadow theater, eating shadow popcorn and drinking shadow coke.  With my shadow homies, Sheisty Pete and Nefarious Gonzalez.

Off topic, but how about Shadow… run?  In that TTRPG there were cyberboyz with something called a “monofilament whip,” which was sooo sharp it could slice through anything.  They had to keep it in a slice-proof little spool case like deadly dental floss.  It raised similar questions to the omnipotence of god – can there be a filament so mono that it can cut itself?  Would it turn into mono-confetti if you rattled your floss box?

Sorry, this is the last post of my “reasons for hope” series, so I should really be more serious.

OK a shadow government is where people are like, let’s actually run this joint because the official guys aren’t it.  Pretty quickly we will not be able to rely on the federal government for much.  The more “evil genius” of the coterie of ghouls waiting in the wings of the oval office will probably opt for a gradualism where the public won’t notice what they’ve lost until it’s gone, so I don’t expect Social Security to get shut off instantly, for example.  But it will get worse, as will every government service we rely on.  So.  Shadow government.

I do think good state governments will help a lot, but we will be better off with more self-sufficiency.  I nominate the university system to be the first system to get Shadow’d.

SHADOW UNIVERSITIES

The U system is a dead system walking.  The vast majority of professors are academic hobos who can barely afford mouthwash, while administrators snort coke off gold-plated toilets with israeli ambassadors.  I know the people who still are hanging on doing the best they can are doing the best they can, but.

Let’s get stronger systems in place for giving anybody whatever education they may desire, for free, under the table, out of the back of a rusty van with dealer plates, in a haunted stretch of Interstate 99.  Or the internet, whichever works better.  This would require a number of things to work.

First, an incentive.  The current U system uses the rotten carrot of adequately paying jobs as reward for million dollar debts.  The shadow system would have… what?  Shadow prestige, I think.  God, I’d heap laurels on a good shadow professor, for what those are worth.  Sexual favors too, if my husband allowed it, haha.

Second, it needs a way for professors to get by in a pursuit with no recompense.  You know, a lot of academic hobos / adjuncts are hard-pressed to get enough hours to pay rent, so they do have some free time.  Not all of them, but enough to support this endeavor?  Maybe.  Third, it needs resources, for lab work and such.  Well, meth labs exist.  We can figure it out if they can, although we have less money.

Fourth and by no means least, it needs at least a virtual classroom.  I think, maybe internet forums?  They’d be subject to getting disappeared instantly by crapitalism, but with frequent backups, you might be able to slide under the radar for years and survive a few fires, y’know?  Anyway, it would need a lot more than what I’ve discussed, but I hope what I’ve done is get a conversation going.

SHADOW SOCIAL SECURITY

Well, everybody who isn’t lost in the bullshit blizzard of media created by fascist billionaires knows that the rethuglicans want all social programs dead, dead, dead.  This is just a matter of time.  The only solution for this is something that people from more collectivist cultures have been doing for ages:  family and community associations.  In the West we used to have some things like this as well, but those institutions were eroded or violently taken out, in order to reduce us to rugged individualists who scrabble in the dirt until we die.

How do we rebuild something so completely fucking gone from our civilization?  Ya got me, chief.  But if we did, these groups could do things like care for the old and disabled, when all the mainstream gov institutions fail.  They can also pool resources, get young people jobs, provide physical protection when the community is threatened…

SHADOW MEDICAL SYSTEM

This already exists, and it is fundamentally bad.  Remember Sally Fields talking about how she was molested during her Tijuana abortion?  This is what we’re dealing with.  But.  I imagine the right kind of activists could improve it.  This would be fundamentally more expensive than anything on the list.  Shadow Social Security might help pay for some of it, but it might just need to be a kind of altruistic organized crime – straight up stealing medical supplies.

I don’t know, but it would be cool if, in some place where health care is all owned by the catholic church (much of the USA) or ruined by forced-birthers, there was recourse for health care that wouldn’t end in molestation or stolen kidneys.

SHADOW 911

Be nice to have somebody you could call to help with a rough situation where deadly force would be completely off the table.  Because 911 is tied to the pigs, even asking for an ambulance can get you twitchy overpaid nazis with guns.  I don’t want to discourage people from calling who they need to in an emergency right now, even with some amount of associated risk, but I do wish we had more alternatives.

SHADOW IRS

The tax system should be used to pay for the betterment of all, but it’s mostly a vacuum suck to the military industrial complex and other horrifying corrupt entities.  Not saying you shouldn’t pay your taxes because unfortunately that’s how things like Social Security are funded, but it’d be nice to be able to pitch some money into a fund you know will help your people.  I guess this gets back to the community groups I mentioned in Shadow Social Security.

SHADOW ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY

There are a lot of people making art for little to no recompense, just to be heard, to express something, whatever their reason.  Corporate art has glimmers of brilliance that it squeezes out of the tortured bodies and minds of exploited artists.  Fuck the big five book publishers, fuck Diamond Comic Distributors, fuck the fine arts community and its incestuous relationship with extreme wealth, fuck the RIAA to death, fuck Netflix, fuck Disney, fuck Time-Warner-AOL-Nestle-Mars-DuPont-Halliburton.

We need better systems for supporting indies, but more importantly for big projects, like competing with hollywood, we need better ways to have artists collaborate without exploitation.  It’s hard as hell because we’re such a chaotic bunch, but it could happen.  I can envision a better series of action-adventure movies than anything Disney could shit out, made with cardboard and computers, real writers, and a genuine vision.  I don’t know how yet, but I swear we could do this.

A good aim would be an indie soap opera.  Drama students and out of work dinner theater actors of the world, unite!  I want you to make compelling telenovelas for release on yewchoob or dailymotion or thepiratebay or thumb drives in manila envelopes and dark alleys.  It’s high time you got to answer your calling without a rapist’s casting couch in the way.

ORGANIZED CRIME

Technically speaking, even if these things were 100% altruistic and well executed, they would be criminal organizations.  Worse still, any institution that is not allowed to function in daylight is going to attract exploitation from the actual organized crime.  There are some who say the mafia is a community group that helps people get employed and defends when the community is under attack, all that stuff, but at the end of the day?  Protection rackets, drugs, sex trafficking, murder.  Bad shit, and any shadow org is going to attract some involvement of criminals like that.

There are no perfect solutions to a situation that is fundamentally bad, and I don’t have any solid ideas on how to make these things happen.  But it’s time to start trying again.  We have a lot of work to do.  We won’t have it all, won’t be safe or secure in what we do get, but we can get a better deal than the fascists are going to give us, if we make it happen ourselves.

It’s worth a shot.

With that, my Hope Series is ended.  Regular random content continuing tomorrow…

Long Live the Fighters

My least favorite refrain from oppressed people is “nobody cares about us.”  Bitch, please!  You have hella allies.  Yes, they aren’t always enough to keep you as safe, they might not be in your neighborhood, but they exist, and they are numerous.  You have the right to feel hopeless (I’d prefer you didn’t), but don’t try to spread your despair like a fucking ghost curse.  The rest of us don’t deserve that, and maybe our allies don’t deserve that either?

There are orgs with lawyers dedicated to defending this demographic (like lambda legal) or that right (ACLU), at least dozens of such groups.  They have the experience and knowledge to achieve things within the legal system we have.  It won’t always work, but sometimes it will.  There are orgs and less formal groups that provide material aid to people in trouble, like driving folks who need abortions between states, or giving help to homeless LGBT youth, etc.

There are hacktivists and whistleblowers who expose government evils to international shame.  There are left activists who take direct action, like antifa, protecting vulnerable people during protests, and making sure right wing thugs never have the street.  And there are whatever people in your own life that might be of some help.  People are people, which means every one of them is a mixed bag of good and bad traits.  But sometimes you need help from somebody who is a colossal piece of shit, and they’re willing to provide it.  My dad was rescued during a crisis by a fascist war criminal.  Take what you can get, when you need to.

We don’t all have the strength to fight fascism every day, but we do what we can, and some of us are much cooler in this regard than the average.  Real champions are out there, fighting for whatever causes move them, and every cause moves somebody.  Just because millions of Americans were ignorant or cruel enough to disregard human rights by sitting this election out, it doesn’t mean there aren’t millions more that see the danger and want to do whatever they can to fight evil – to protect those that need protection, from those who seek to cause harm.

Start looking for them.  Find your people: who you can reach, and what they can do for you.  And of course, whatever you find, take care of yourself as well.  And if, at the end of the day, you need somebody to fight for you,

Long live the fighters.

How to Not Live in Rage

God damn this is a hard one to write, in this moment.  That said, not a hard one to live up to – for me.  You see, I might hulk out from time to time, but most of any given day, I’m thinking about things neutral to positive.  I’m thinking about the creeping sorrel in the crack at my front door, about whether I could make a breeding habitat for alligator lizards in my back yard.  My mind is biologically healthy, mercifully so, and just doesn’t want to cling to bad feelings.

Anger is a bad feeling.  Some people with pathological minds think of it as “fun,” but they somehow don’t look like they’re having fun when they snap their xbox controller in half and bellow obscenities.  People who think about who they hate all day?  They are unwell.  It is said if you aren’t outraged you aren’t paying attention.  Well, if paying attention leads to poor health, then one must spend at least some amount of one’s life not paying attention.

I don’t know what else to say on this one.  I’m writing at two in the AM, and within the space of composing the first paragraph I lost the rage from the first sentence, then got it back at the beginning of this paragraph, then lost it again.  Think I might be tired.  Baby needs a nap.

But seriously tho.  If you’re angry all day, you need to jailbreak your mind.  I don’t have any constructive advice aside from the usual shit you have already heard a million times.  “Touch grass” meme.  I’m just here to remind you it is actually important for your health that you figure out how to do this.  And good luck with it!

If anybody has some good suggestions or wants to start a discussion about this in the comments, the floor is open.

Acceleration

Fuck accelerationists a lot, those people who, realizing crises precipitate change, have decided any amount of mutilated or dead innocents is a reasonable price to achieve their aims.  That said, if acceleration is happening despite our best efforts, they are not wrong that it can precipitate change.  This is a dark one, but it is a cause for hope.

Just how bad can the rethuglicans fuck this up?  How bad can they make themselves look?  Will they dismantle Social Security?  Privatize Medicare A and B?  Put ten-year-olds to work in Amazon distro warehouses?  Will they exonerate hate criminals?  Deputize proud boys to shoot up downtown Portland?  Be caught filling mass graves at the southern border?  Just considering the possibilities fills me with a murderous hatred, so I’ll just stop there.  Fuck those guys an awful lot.

I think that’s the best hope for a reversal of this country’s course, of us staving off decades of fascist rule: that the fascists cannot help themselves, and go so hog-wild for evil that even badly suppressed, the anti- votes will wipe those motherfuckers off the ballot.  And if voting is off the table?  That blue states might secede.  Who’s to say only bigots can rebel?

May we start living in less interesting times as soon as possible, but in the meantime, it’ll be grimly fucking interesting to see what happens, with fascism’s jackboot on the gas pedal.  This has become their country to lose, and that’s a dark hope, but it is a hope.

State’s Rights

In our perfected world, whatever that looks like, from sea to shining sea all will live under a universal guarantee of human rights.  But billionaire-owned media selling tax breaks for themselves with fear of the underprivileged, well, it’s got a big swath of the middle of this country in a death grip.  It does not matter one jot what the actual majority of people in those states want*, the ones favored by gerrymander have decided it’s time for jim crow, prison farms, gaybashing, bookburning, and elimination of any religion but christianity from the public sphere.  And, in this moment, they’ve won so decisively that they are very likely to work the levers of power to eliminate democracy in the USA for decades to come.

In the meantime, the excuse they’re using is state’s rights.  States should have the right to murder their own citizens to meet the cruel whims of Blood Jesus.  Why don’t you understand these things?  It’s only right.  The flipside of this coin is that it may allow blue states the power to pass strong protections for human rights, and might allow for a lot more.

The state of California has so many people, so many resources, that when they pass laws that are technically only enforceable at home, any business that wants to do business in that economy has to conform or gtfo.  Chik-fil-A can deep fry trans people in Arkansas (I assume) but not so much in the city of Compton.  In fact, it’s pretty likely that Cali has everything they need to just ignore the entire rest of the USA economically and use their access to shipping in the Pacific for anything they lack.

They are exceptional in that respect, but a number of coastal states can still pull a pretty strong flex if they want to – which is why it greatly heartens me that my own state has a democratic governor.  During the strife around covid, there were meetings between the governors on the “Left Coast” about how they should respond, almost as if… they had the power to tell the District of Columbia to kiss their asses?  I dunno.  I’m interested to see what’s possible if these leaders are bold enough, when the time calls for it.

It’s not right that in order to maintain their human rights, many people will have to flee their home states.  But as long as states are being allowed some say in these issues – and as long as some states are powerful enough to take that say whether it’s allowed or not – there are places in the USA where hope is a little less crushed.

*74 million fascists in a country of 300 million is NOT the majority.

Total Anarchy and Can’t Nobody Stop Us

I want to devise a virusTo bring dire straits to your environmentCrush your corporations with a mild touchTrash your whole computer system and revert you to papyrusI want to make a super virusStrong enough to cause blackouts in every single metropolis’cause they don’t want to unify usSo fuck it total anarchy and can’t nobody stop us
-Del the Funky Homosapien, Virus, from Deltron 3030 (2000)

Do you have respect for the law?  Fucking why?  Some laws are good guidelines for being a good person, like no passing in a school zone, pay the taxes that fund social programs libraries roads etc.  But if it ain’t one of those laws?  Who could possibly give a shit, that’s worth listening to?

Do whatever the fuck you want, whenever you want, however you can.  If the government says “penalties now,” well, fuck the government.  They have to catch you first.  Now.  Tall talk coming from a bitch that almost never commits crimes because I’m afraid I’ll get caught, but still.  I think part of the despair of living in a land where laws are unjust is the feeling you will be subject to those laws.  That isn’t always true, strictly speaking.

This is one of the great ways blue states can protect people from shitty federal decrees.  Commit to non-enforcement, like they did with marijuana.  There’s precedent for this.  But on a personal level, same thing.  Who’s going to bust you for shielding immigrants from ICE?  Anybody whose opinions you value?  Anybody you’ll feel so sad about disappointing?  Didn’t think so.

If you’re brave enough to risk the consequences, you can do all sorts of excellent things.  And there are places and situations in which getting busted is massively unlikely.  Try to arrest somebody for sodomy in Haight-Ashbury at this point in history, see how far that gets you.  Try to throw somebody in federal prison for jailbreaking their modem to prevent youtube ads, see how well that goes over with the public – assuming you could detect that they’d done that in the first place.

Part of the catastrophizing I’ve heard sounds like, “if it’s illegal to be me, i’ll just have to do what they say and stop existing.”  That is just weird, guys.  Another part is the idea there will be death camps for trans people, which is very unlikely for other reasons.  But even if some flavor of that happened, were you planning to save them the effort by offing yourself?  Were you planning to walk up the chute like a cow to a slaughterhouse?

Given how many people violate traffic laws every day on every road in the country, it’s hard to believe you’re all that passive and law-abiding.  It’s time for the “be gay, do crimes” slogan to be put into action.  Although you’re probably already driving too fast in school zones.  Not that crime.  The other one.  Yeah, you got it.