erin

I don’t know how you read that entire thing and decided I’m doing nothing. Leave me alone if all you have to offer is cynicism and critique. I am organizing with local leftists organizations. I am not walking out of my job and losing healthcare and employment in the current job market out of pure principle. If there was a nationwide movement that had real momentum I would join it. I am a part of organizations that are trying to organize such things.

Again, we are not doing nothing. I am doing more than most, but organizing with community, supporting each other, staying politically active, pushing for reform and change at the local, state, and national level, and protesting is not nothing. You cannot actively look at someone who is escaping a burning building with their family and say “well why aren’t you in there pulling more people out? You should do more.” Surviving and supporting each other is the most many people can do. Strike and active resistance would mean houselessness or lack of healthcare for most people. It simply isn’t bad enough to have the support of the general populace yet, they’re too brainwashed, and I am not going to throw my life away for an ideal.

I am doing all I can. Fuck anyone who sits in comfort while a system I was born into and actively detest destroys my life and the lives of people I love and says “not good enough.” Do you look at refugees from state violence and say “why didn’t you stay and resist? You should have fought back. There are more of you than there are of them.” We care for ourselves, our family, and our communities first. We work with the hand we were dealt.

Your idealism is callous and unrealistic. I do not believe that you would act any differently were you in my shoes. Can you honestly say that you would choose to forego health and/or home in a pointless gesture of resistance against a machine that will not notice or care for your “sacrifice?” Such an action would be selfish and self-serving. I will not deprive my family and loved ones for a meaningless gesture because some people on the Internet think that EVERYTHING listed above is “doing nothing.” I have tried to explain, but you clearly have a vested interest in victim blaming over listening.

You… think I don’t recognize it? What? I’m a leftist queer woman living in a declining dystopia. I’m laughing at the fact that you think we can just say no to terms that every job has in many areas, especially hourly ones. They keep you working 39.5 hours a week and never let you go “full time” so they don’t have to give benefits, or classify you as a contractor, and your only option is paying a portion of your salary for the opportunity to have healthcare you could otherwise never afford. I was forced to stay in a hellhole job for years because I was broke, had nowhere else to go, no better opportunities, had every job application denied because they’re mostly fake postings to make the facade of growth hold in our failing economy, all because if I didn’t stay in my job I would no longer be able to afford health insurance for a life changing surgery I would otherwise never afford. I couldn’t just tell them “no, I won’t accept those unfair terms,” BECAUSE THEY’RE THE ONLY OPTION. We don’t have comprehensive labor laws! Most of us live in wage slavery! Any talk of union or strike would mean the immediate loss of employment, and yet I still organized behind their backs.

I laugh because someone is looking at a victim of an oppressive regime and saying “not good enough.” I laugh because otherwise I’d cry. Recognize your fucking privilege and leave the cynicism at the door. I’m doing everything I can, just like most of us. Even the complacent ones are victims of oligarch controlled media brainwashing, and a culture of exceptionalism and nationalism that keeps us trapped in a bucket of boiling water and thanking the cook for the opportunity.

I’m scared, I’m angry, and I’m frustrated looking at a culture that thinks a “blue wave” in the midterms will change everything, when our system is irreparably broken. I want to see a general strike. Any attempts to organize one will fail and have failed, because people cannot afford unemployment. All I can do is organize and educate and hope we get some change around healthcare and labor laws before it gets too much for me and I leave.

Nothing I said contradicts this.

Ah. You’re a troll. “Should not have accepted those terms,” lol, lmao even.

Do you know that none of them organize? Have you considered that the slightest mention of union or strike in many places leads to immediate termination, especially in at-will employment states? Loss of a job means loss of healthcare which means death. I’m not trying to play the victim. I am fortunate to be able to organize with local leftist organizations and my healthcare is secure. Most Americans are not so lucky. It’s not some absolute extreme, it happens to people we know and love.

It’s so easy to make the assertions you do. I’d like to see you choose those actions over your child’s medication. We don’t get a social safety net. If we’re fired, it could mean we go into lifelong debt, homelessness, or simply die. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Those who can should organize. Those who cannot should care for their family and immediate community.

It’s so easy to say things like this when you aren’t living the situation. What would you have them do? Die for no reason? There isn’t some organized revolution to go join.

You probably mean well, but this rings of “all lives matter.” There’s nothing wrong with pointing out injustice and oppression, in isolation. The issue lies in using it as a rebuttal to the suffering of others. “The Irish were enslaved” is fine, but “white people were slaves, too,” is minimizing the vast industry of oppression that was the slave trade.

No one is claiming a patent on suffering, but you are minimizing theirs. You can acknowledge suffering without trying to draw comparisons, and especially without the strawman argument. The phrase “black people don’t own the patent on suffering, sorry” rings of resentment and snark, and isn’t at all representative of most black people’s view of human suffering. Oppressed people support each other and prop each other up. We aren’t measuring each other’s suffering or keeping score. Some of my greatest allies are people that don’t share my own personal struggle, but relate with their own, and I likewise support them (I am a queer white woman).

40 hours a week on makeup? I need to step up my game. I’m only spending 4.5 hours a day on my makeup.

Geostationary satellites are not standing still. They’re orbiting the Earth at the same rate that it rotates “beneath” them.

Tithing is still a thing, it just means giving money to the church, specifically 10% in some denominations. I think what you’re referring to is “indulgences,” the practice of paying the Catholic church for entrance into heaven.

Ecofascism is not cool! Humans are part of the environment. Indigenous people all over the world live in symbiosis with the environment. The problem isn’t humans, it’s capitalism driving the ever increasing exploitation of nature so the line can always go up. “Kill all humans” and “humans are a disease” and other such phrases are ecofascism, and completely missing the point.

The east coast had a HUGE snowstorm. I was a kid. I remember building tunnels and igloos and having snowball fights with my siblings and friends. My younger brother was undergoing chemo. My parents were stressed about money. Obama won the presidential election and I cried, not understanding politics but only knowing that Obama was the option my parents didn’t vote for.

The struggle is real. I’m curious how that will go. My hair gets way too oily.

As a woman with long, curly hair, if I don’t condition, I go from having nice curly waves to a ball of unmanageable frizz. I’ve also had to experiment with different shampoos to get the results I want, to clean my hair without damaging it. It definitely isn’t engineered for marketing purposes. Ask anyone with long, curly, or kinky hair and they’ll tell you how important their hair routine is. If you have short, straight hair, it probably doesn’t matter nearly as much. Your hair is fully replaced in a few weeks. I need to keep my hair healthy for years. My hair is down to my sternum, and it took years to get this long. If I didn’t take very good care of it with the right soaps and conditioner, it would not be able to be this long or this nice.

Reducing it to just chemicals and chemicals is well, reductive. Basically everything is a chemical. Your natural oils are chemicals. Sweat is a chemical. Dirt is chemicals. We need to wash out some chemicals, but we don’t want dry scalps or damaged hair, so we need to use the right soaps and the right conditioner to remove those bad chemicals and replace them with chemicals to mimic our natural oils until they build back up. Most people probably don’t need to wash their hair as often as they do, but conditioning is definitely not a marketing scam.