Given my apparent “sensitivity.” I am working on consuming more “positive” media (and boxing in my media consumption), but I can’t live disconnected from the world. Yesterday’s heading was “criminal negligence,” but this is a Crime Against Humanity: How Families, Separated At The Border By Trump Policies, Are Coping. Listen to it. I don’t trust the “quote sites” to neccessarily attribute a quote well, but while I am taking care of myself, I also recognize the value of this observation, attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti:

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I can’t filter it out, and it still cuts. Every story about the horrible things the systems we make hurt children. Every dehumanizing experience with authority that children are directly subjected to, and every exhausted, desperate parent because they’re underpaid, dehumanized, sick, tormented… every one of those things is a crime. Pretty much that and the climate crisis should be things we reconcile ahead of just about anything else.

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I got some hours in front of a couple of different text editors this weekend. Two pages about what were maybe the local epicenters of trauma shared between my parents and I. It is not what I expected to come out, but it did. I rushed off the first draft of these spare pages to a good friend. Tears came out too. A couple of guttural cries even. Yesterday I banged out some useless Swift code to solve notional tutorial problems.

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It might be looking up by now, more vaccine available. Biden has moved the needles in certan specific ways. And christ, every day I am saddened by the news of so many who have had it more worse than we have. But it’s been a fucking year. We can all say that. In my case: Just trying to be a first-time parent of an ~18mo Child care not stable (and no real rebound, backup) At least one close relative vax-hesitant Not getting to see family (or get their help) to the degree we would have with the kid if it weren’t a pandemic Being buzzed by Hueys on top of normal stupid helo traffic in this town Fences and razor wire cutting off main thoroughfares to rest of the city Most close friends have moved away Spouse doing double-time at her job, dictated by current events (and overwhelmed with the failure of policy to support a certain vulnerable population before COVID even became a thing) No time between anything, not if I’m going to keep (or set) pace at work and with the toddler.

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If there is a Biden win, how will you demonstrate against his platitudes and short-sells with regards to our future? How will you celebrate his inauguration by attending and not letting him off the hook? How will you insist that he face our existential challenges with the broadest inclusion and the maximum effort possible? One of the opportunities for Trump, besides giving space to the racists and mysgonists, and magnifying the likewise tendencies of those harboring fear, was the reality that so many folks were effectively written off cynically or by mealy-mouthed compromise-on-compromise by Democrats.

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I’m not sure why the existential threats actually bearing down on us aren’t somehow apart of a every day proactive effort. Instead, in my country, we are preoccupied still with the horce race of how fascists are getting away with things and how other far milder corporate shills, who speak more compassionately to peoples fears but won’t actually do anything about them, may be preferable.

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