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The patriarchy is no good for anyone, and this week I came across an illuminating example. My friend discovered a major issue at work and had to manage the resolution process. Listening to them describe the whole experience conjured up a vivid (and completely insane) depiction of how it all went down. In my mind’s eye I could clearly picture the gaggle of tech-bros-with-stay-at-home-spouses running around uselessly flapping their arms without a clue where one could even start solving a problem. In this particular incident, the tech bros blew up the collective data stream by failing to consider their team’s impact on the system as a whole. They had an idea and then they did it… using the shared infrastructure. They did not identify how much space their new idea would take up, and they did not check to see if the common-use infrastructure had that much space available. It did not. The tech bros acted just like people who are nearly never required to consider their impact on other people in any area of life. Consequently, my friend – a person who grew up cultured as fem – had to mom the shit out of all the tech bros to facilitate everyone working together to solve the problem they created. Vast income inequality is similarly no good for anyone. As exemplified every single day since January 20th when the Orange Menace was sworn in as president. This is what happens when you take a person who has had literally everything in their life arranged for and around them for their entire existence. Then someone (or a lot of someones) think it’s a good idea to put them “in charge” of a massive institution that has to actually function like the federal government. They have no idea what they’re doing and the big important agencies they are in charge of start to falter. I just saw the new Frankenstein movie and it’s a similar story. A wealthy man (who grew up under the tyranny of his cold and overly-demanding father) spends all his time shut away in his manor doing dangerous science without any colleagues, peers, or mentors to bounce things off of. His staff takes care of the mundane day-to-day business of the rest of his life, so the wealthy out-of-touch-with-regular-life scientist is free to spend all his time in the echo chamber of his own mind. Then he makes a thing with consequences beyond his initial imagining and it hurts a lot of other people. Somehow the well-funded, mistake-making, peerless, mad scientist avoids all actual accountability and never has to resolve the fallout from his horrible mistake because he dies while running away from his problems (after first making things worse). The poor creature must live on alone in a world that doesn’t understand or accept it with no liaison to usher it into any aspect of the rest of society. And everyone else who was hurt or impacted by the whole making ill-advised mistakes, running away from them, then coming back and making things worse fiasco is left to pick up their own pieces. Our current societal systems are built on the pillars of Patriarchy, White Supremacy, and Wealth Domination. That’s why society doesn’t actually work for most people. The ultra-wealthy elites who currently run things do whatever they want and the rest of us have to run around picking up all the pieces and managing the fallout of their self-centered policies and investment schemes. We have to work multiple jobs to afford groceries and health care, collect cans to fund schools, and hold bake sales to pay for access to art and literature while out-of-touch fools drunk on their own ideas hold exclusive meetings in expensive places to hatch new and more complex methods for absorbing all the world's resources for no actual purpose other than their own continued accumulation. Those same folks at the top refuse to make the significant changes necessary to fix our broken systems because the current systems work quite well for them. The people who are benefitting from the current system should not be in charge of “fixing” it for the rest of us. Just like how the health insurance companies should never have been invited to help “fix” the health care system when the ACA was crafted. But someone gave those grifters a seat at the table and now here we are spending more on health care than everyone else in the world and having nothing but debt and poor health to show for it. And yet some folks still can’t connect these dots. It’s continuing education season for the accounting industry, so I have spent the last two weeks listening to old white men explain how they help their already overly-resourced clients continue to accumulate excess wealth. Mostly it’s just depressing how out of touch these professionals are with the economic reality of most people, but I did attend a surprisingly fascinating update on the economy. The Economist began his presentation by saying “It’s not as bad as it looks. In fact I think it’s going to be fine.” Then proceeded to explain himself. What was fascinating to me wasn’t the content of his presentation, although he did provide some interesting charts and figures showing the vastly different impacts of inflation on various sectors and other assorted data. But the most interesting thing to me was how he almost made it into pro-socialism camp. He said wages are down and “It’s terrible for the employee who is dealing with the same inflation as everyone else.” Yes; correct. But then he said “But it’s great for the employer.” And I rolled my eyes. No, sir. It. Is. NOT. It’s never good for employers to have a workforce who can’t meet basic living needs. "Consumers represent 69% of the economy," he told us. Where does he imagine those people get their money to buy all the stuff these companies are selling? Later in his presentation, the economist talked about health care and highlighted that some folks will see as high as a 20% increase due to the end of government subsidies. He said “When you have the highest cost and the worst results, that’s a broken system.” Yes; correct. Then he went on to say “How do we fix our health care system? It won’t be the politicians; it’s going to take the people rising up.” What?! YES. And then he kept going, “And New York is just the tip of the ice berg. People want real change and they want real solutions.” YES. THAT’S WHAT WE HAVE BEEN SAYING THIS WHOLE TIME. Followed by, “The young people (Gen Z) are looking around and saying ‘you know, capitalism really isn’t working for me; let’s try socialism.’” Yes, you’re on the right track! Keep going! And then he said “Oh no no, socialism isn’t the answer.” Wut. He thinks we need to cut other stuff to fund health care… You were so close! SO CLOSE. So. Close. He walked right up to the door and had his hand on the handle and then… I don’t know what. I guess he missed a stair and ended up back at capitalism’s doorstep because that’s all he knows. He, like many other finance professionals is too steeped in our current system to see outside it. And they don't know anyone who isn't just like them, so they are never exposed to different ways to consider problems or solutions rooted in different perspectives. The people who are in charge are terrible people. They are selfish and inconsiderate and greedy. Otherwise they would not have clawed their way to the top of a system that rewards those behaviors. Generous, community-minded folks don't make it through the system to the top with their humanity intact even if they start with good intentions and a human-centered outlook. The system changes you. The people at the top should not be in charge of the rest of us because they are uniquely qualified to serve only themselves. This is also clearly evidenced by almost every response to significant natural disasters. A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit is full of these stories. Tragedy strikes and the people come together to take care of each other. In the absence of the status quo, people come together to society in a decent and sharing way. Then the authorities arrive to ruin everything by “establishing order” because the ruling class is frightened of losing its grip on power. Those wealth-and-power-holders are so steeped in the current system they cannot imagine any other option. They cannot imagine how to function if they aren’t in charge. Community and social skills are something a lot of us don’t have the privilege to avoid learning. Anyone and everyone can learn these skills, but certain demographics get through most or all of their life without having to pick them up – namely white, cis het men. Which leaves their slack to the rest of us to pick up and sort out in a mostly or totally unacknowledged way. As a fem human, I have been required to pick up quite a lot of slack for adults around me who should be able to manage their own shit but definitely aren’t doing it. And most of that labor has been invisible and unacknowledged. And that reality fills me with an incandescent rage. Which I then also have to do all the work to process through and manage. It’s exhausting. And I only sit at the intersections of fem and queer and grew up poor. As a white person with a college degree I benefit from other flavors of privilege. My consideration for some of my fellow human beings has been optional. Which means I should definitely do that work. Because I care, I take the time and invest the energy in pulling my own social and emotional weight. I manage the practical impact I have on the people around me in life, work, and play. I tend my own internal and external landscape. I consider my fellow human beings. We should all definitely do the work to hold all our fellow society members in our considerations. Please do your work. Especially now when all we have is each other. Information and inspiration
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Throughout this year I have been thinking a lot about our present reality. We are living in strange and scary times and I am often unsure what to do with it all. Like many people, I have to structure my consumption of news and social media so that I can decompress and re-find my grounding, otherwise I will break apart at the seams. Unfortunately, I also need to know what's going on. It continues to be critical to not look away in this moment - I must witness the unfolding catastrophe so I can get in its way at every possible opportunity. Fascism is not a problem that will solve itself, but it is solvable. Just not if everyone sticks their head in the sand. The whole point of the Broligarchy's "strategy" is to take an outrageous number of horrible actions in rapid succession so the rest of us are overwhelmed by the sheer number of atrocities and paralyzed in horror as the pillars of our society come crashing down around us. So I have refused to check-out entirely. And I'm grateful to see so many other folks sticking it out with me. In fact, there are a lot of people who are paying much more attention now than they have in their entire lives. Which is what we need. But if the shitshow continues as it has done, if it goes on and on and on relentlessly, and we must remain ever vigilant in our opposition, how do we survive under these conditions? How do we work and play and love under these conditions? How do we thrive under these conditions? We do it together, that’s how. The fascist and conservative playbook is to pit we lowly masses against each other based on arbitrary factors none of us actually care about like skin color, salary, and who you want to bang. The antidote is solidarity. I recently took a trip to Seattle to connect with some martial arts friends. The folks at Seven Star Kung Fu feel like cousins since we share a common lineage a few generations up our respective martial family trees. They usually come to Portland for the twice-yearly Fun Fighting workshops my long-time training buddy and I co-host. They couldn't make it down in October, so we took ourselves north to return the travel favor. When Michelle and I first started Fun Fighting we called it Femm Fighting. Our aim is to create a safe space for martial artists who have historically been marginalized in dojos dominated by cis men, to train and have fun and find community. We're forging connections across martial arts styles and between schools and among all ranks and experience levels. Our demographic includes women, femm humans, nonbinary people, and trans folks. Which there is not yet a single term for in the current lexicon of popular culture. (At least not one that doesn't continue to center cis men, as in the category non-cis-men) After the most recent workshop, we received feedback that some folks who are definitely in our demographic were not sure they were invited because they don't identify as fem/femm/femme. Luckily we are making up the protocols as we go in collaboration with our community, so we simply changed the name. Enter: Fun Fighting. Close enough to the original name to keep most of our branding, but without the gendered specificity of the word femme. The Patriarchy will take all our efforts to overcome and we want to include all our fellow fighters. While I was in Seattle I visited the Wing Luke art and history museum in Chinatown International District. I lucked-out with an amazing and singular version of the Museum and Historic Hotel Tour. The usual Guide was out that day, so the Director lead me and four little old ladies on a fascinating journey through time. We explored what life was like in the early days of Seattle's Chinatown and Japantown districts. We stood in shop fronts and boarding house rooms and family meeting halls and heard about the people who lived their lives in those places. Our Guide shared many interesting personal accounts from the early 1900's, and the little old ladies shared stories from their own childhood experiences in the neighborhood during the middle of the same century. We all asked so many questions and the Director had so much information to share, we went over our time by a considerable stretch. But none of us minded; it was like we checked out of modern time to fully take-in the people and places of the past. The tour also covered the history of labor movements started by Chinese and Japanese and Filipino immigrants in and around Seattle. We learned about how these different cultural groups joined together to overcome racist policies of the day and gain workers rights and fair treatment. We learned about the geoduck harvesters who joined up with the longshoreman. And we learned about Larry Itliong, the Filipino farm worker who took the Seattle labor organizing practices east to the Washington agricultural workers, and then south to the fields of California where he convinced Cesar Chavez that the Filipino and Mexican laborers were stronger together. That museum visit was a timely reminder for me to stay the course of community building because the way we survive under these horrific conditions is by coming together. None of us can ever defeat the powerful few at the top of our capitalist, profit-centered societal structure. But we can do truly amazing things when we come together in solidarity to share in each other's fight. So take the time to learn about the other people around you who are oppressed. Learn about your own family or cultural history of struggle and solidarity. Then come together to craft a future where everyone is free. Their struggle is your struggle. Your struggle is my struggle. Their fight is our fight. Information and Inspiration
These days most things are upsetting if you’re paying any amount of attention. Since my last essay on the heels of Inauguration Day, I have felt buried. Both by the day after day onslaught of complete federal insanity as well as by the sheer amount of effort and energy it takes to continue to survive it. It’s absurd that while federal agencies are dismantled and my neighbors are kidnapped and troops are deployed to my city and the government shuts down that I still have to show up for work. I still have to organize my community and do everything we can to obstruct the rise of fascism. And I still have to drink water and do the laundry and brush my teeth. Frankly it’s a miracle that any of us are getting anything done at all. But we mostly seem to be managing, and that's amazing. Two weeks ago I was buoyed up by Saturday’s enormous protest march. It started on the bus. A couple seats behind me a small group discussed their recent employer’s choice to replace their jobs with robots. "I can't fund that product now, not if it's produced in that way." How nice to overhear labor organizing on the bus. I glanced slightly to the side to look out the window and saw an anti-swastika social media image scroll by. How nice to sit next to someone with that social media feed. At every stop, more folks boarded the bus with signs and sassy tee-shirts, talking jovially and clearly headed to the No Kings protest. Meanwhile the bus vibrated so intensely while stopped or at low speed that I couldn't look at anything without scrambling my brain. So I closed my eyes and practiced some internal Taiji Qigong Kung Fu stuff. I was fully in my body, enjoying the ambiance of solidarity around me. It felt like an incredibly Portland bus ride. I felt a profound sense of belonging and I love every second of it. Downtown, I got off the bus with everyone else and we walked together toward the protest. Along with all the other busloads of people just arriving. There were so many of us we were like a mini march all on our own. Hundreds of people streaming along blocks and blocks of sidewalk carrying signs toward the waterfront. At one point a pro-OrangeMenace march went by and we stopped to let them pass. There were... tens of people. Chanting vapid slogans in flat passionless voices. It was a remarkably tense moment, everyone around me seemingly holding their breath and unsure what to do. Then I laughed out loud. Heartily. Because it was just so absurd. We weren't even there yet - we were still just on our way - and we already outnumbered all the president's supporters 10 to 1. Once I broke the silence, others began booing at the backs of the maga group and we carried on. A few blocks later we blob merged with the main march and I was enveloped by the sea of people and signs and inflatable creatures. It was the most joyful protest I've ever attended, it felt more like a festival than a political action. There were people from all ages and demographics, coming together to be loud and resistant. There were so many good signs! I laughed, I cried, I rolled my eyes. I felt called to action and I felt inspired. The photo highlights were all over social media in the days after the protest, so the witty reprimands and sick burns will live on indefinitely online. Thanks, internet. After we crossed the bridge it was my time to go. I stood at the bus stop watching the crowd pass. It went on and on and on. I was not at the beginning of the march, somewhere in the middle, and there was so much more march behind me. 15 minutes later my bus arrived and the march was still going strong. Like it was never going to end. I felt hopeful in a way I haven't very often this year. Not naively hopeful that a protest alone will stop tyranny in its tracks, but hopeful that as I resist the rise of fascism it will be in solidarity with more people than have shown up before to fight for justice. A few weeks ago as I went by on the bus I saw a some words painted on a wall: still here It reminded me that one of my great contributions to the revolution are these words. My loving and insistent call for everyone everywhere to heal themselves enough to see themselves, so they can see the humanity in others and then treat everyone humanely. It is my gay agenda. And at this point it's not optional. We can't not get our shit together. The alternative is what’s happening right now: fascist psychos who think they can fill the deep dark void within themselves by taking away the right for other kinds of people to exist and controlling everything and everyone else (and also amassing all the money even though they have plenty and there's absolutely no point). Those of us who have been on our healing journey for more than five minutes understand that it doesn’t work like that. There is no way to fill an inner void with external input. And there is no way to take your fulfillment from others. There is no way to take your security from others. All it does is cause suffering and trauma. And we don't have time to keep traumatizing each other, especially with the looming future catastrophe of climate change on our doorstep. Also, in the end, when this is all over - when we have suffered and then overcome and we kick the fascists out of government and we fix the planet and we equitably redistribute all the resources - I’m still going to be here. And they’re going to have to look me in the face. All those people who caused this catastrophe by voting for it and enacting fascist and racists and bigoted policies are going to have face me and everybody else. They are going to have to go to the grocery store and take their kids to school and show up at work alongside all the people they tried to legislate out of existence. It’s gonna be so awkward. But not for me. Because I was paying attention to what all that terror and injustice was doing to my heart and soul and body. I was mitigating and expelling and healing as we went about the business of making change and seeking justice because otherwise I would not have survived. So in the end, I will still be here. We will still be here. And we will demand accountability. Information and Inspiration
Last week was hard. This whole month has been hard. I was busy enough at the end of the year between holidays, house guests, and work deadlines that I set the impending political doom slightly off to the side. Then the year turned and I was like "holy shit, that's this month!!!" Enter all the dread and a whole lot of time spent on extra doses of self-care and community organizing. The eve of the inauguration my partner and I hosted our monthly queer contra dance. I wore a political statement shirt and I encouraged anyone else who wanted to join me to attend dressed in solidarity. It was an evening of queer joy and community. On Monday I started my day with a martial arts class, had breakfast and then took a nap. In the afternoon I had a discussion with a friend about community care and healing and then made dinner with friends. I completely ignored all news and social media. It was all exactly the antidote I needed for what was going on in Washington. Then on Tuesday I went to trusted sources on the internet for a curated rundown of what madness had occurred the day before. This is when I learned that it is now the policy of the US government that I don't exist. That might have been upsetting, but instead I just thought "Well joke's on you assholes because I exist. Haha I exist!" I have turned some kind of corner in my personal emotional experience of all this garbage. Just by existing I upset the small, closed, straightforward worldview they want to impose on all of us. Their plan to re-write reality to match their twisted, cruel view of what should be the world order will only work if we all agree to go along with it. And I don't agree. In fact, I can't agree... because I exist! haha I feel an almost overwhelming amount of joy that my very existence as a queer, nonbinary human is ruining their plan. It's nice to have a joyful fuck-you in my pocket instead of just an angry or obstinate one. Don't get me wrong, I have plenty of rage and disobedience swimming around my internal emotion ocean, but I wanted to share this one joyful framing in case anyone else is exhausted and/or overwhelmed and/or doesn't want to just be angry all the time. So in case you need to hear it: You exist! As queer people, as women, as immigrants, as poor folks, as people of color, as trans folks, as freaks, as people without indoor housing, and as anyone else who doesn't conform to the box assigned by whoever is currently making up the rules of polite society. And you all matter. Your existence is a grain of sand in the eye of the people who would rather you disappear. Please continue to thrive. Love and solidarity. Information and Inspiration
The election feels like a long time ago from this side of the holidays. The initial shock has worn off, but I don't feel any better about it. It took me a couple weeks to get my head above the waters of post-election malaise. I managed to keep my hope intact all the way through election night by completely ignoring all news in every form. I had a great night sleep. Then I woke up the next morning, heard the news, and cried a lot. For me the hardest part about the national result is seeing just how many people thought it was a good idea to vote for that guy despite knowing exactly who he is and what it would mean. I already knew the rich and powerful would rather I didn’t exist, but they were mostly faceless shadows of capitalism. Now I know the people trying to take away my rights are by and large just regular folks trying to get by and live normal lives. And those people blame people like me and people I love for their wretched unfulfilling lives instead of blaming the jerks who actually create and maintain the economic and environmental situation we currently find ourselves in. During the rest of November each idiot appointed to an important position was yet another reason the government will function even less well than it already doesn't quite function. I can see clearly various aspects of my personal and professional life will become more difficult after January. I am not looking forward to all the extra labor. It’s already quite a lot of effort for me to just exist day after day. I'm not sure exactly how to be in the world anymore. When someone greets me with a polite “hi, how are you,” I can’t just say “fine” given the ever-present full bodied feeling of impending doom. And I can’t assume most folks I encounter are alright after seeing that so many people prefer to persecute certain kinds of people rather than work through their own internalized bullshit so we can all have nice things like healthcare, housing, and human rights. I have leaned-in to self-care and community organizing as an antidote to my despair. I have also made time to remember that our local election results were pretty great. I’m looking forward to seeing how the new city council structure plays out. I’m grateful to live in the place I do and I feel a whole lot less safe visiting people I love in certain other parts of the country. I am coping by expressing my support for justice and care causes much more loudly. And of course I’m noticing things, making connections, and writing about it. Sometimes a phrase emerges that perfectly describes a particular experience or cultural phenomenon. Unfortunately sometimes the person who brings us that perfect phrase is a deplorable human being, as is the case with the term horcrux. In the seven-part teenage wizard series written by the notoriously TERFy English transphobe, the villain splits his soul in an attempt to reach immortality. He hides each soul shard in a container called a horcrux, which protects the bit of soul outside his body. It seems to me that many Americans have created their own emotional horcruxes. Not by the act of murder as in the book series, but by an equally soul-splitting act: dehumanizing others. In order to treat a fellow human being as less than human, you must give up a little bit of your own humanity. This is a well documented consequence experienced by people working as soldiers, prison guards, and the like, most famously revealed in the Stanford Prison Experiment in 1971. Conservative ideology and colonization have disincluded many ways of being human and marked them invalid, uncouth, or evil. But a bunch of those black, brown, queer, trans, fat, feminist, disabled or otherwise liberated people keep existing and persisting and going to therapy. We keep healing and remain as living evidence of the abuse and neglect we survived. And that means the perpetrators of all that abuse can’t go serenely about their lives without any reminders of the harm they caused. Which is a good thing because when we hurt each other the only way for everyone to move forward healthfully is through accountability. When one person has abused another (accidentally or on purpose), the fallout can go a couple different interpersonal directions. If the abuser takes accountability, they can seek repair and assist the other person’s healing journey. This is the best version. If the abuser does not accept responsibility for their words and actions, there can be no repair. When I have witnessed or experienced an abuser refusing accountability, that also often results in the abuser wanting to completely remove the abused person from their lifescape. Once abuse is identified and the recipient demands a different dynamic in order to continue the relationship they become living evidence of past misdeeds. Someone who is not interested in making amends and would rather forget they were cruel or pretend it never happened can't have a person around who was there and who knows they did. Slather on some perfectionism culture and it all goes down hill: if you can never be wrong, then when you are you must disguise it. And if there are people who were there and can tell the story, then you have to make those people wrong instead. In broader society it seemed like we had made some progress when President Barack Obama was elected. As with every time we see a first that shouldn't have to be monumentous it felt like a solid step in the right direction worthy of celebration. Unfortunately the backlash was like woah. An inoffensive leader every which way you considered him, President Obama was supposed to be a breath of fresh air in the Washington halls of power. But short-sighted and self-interested politicians on "the other team" made it their mission to stand directly in his way no matter how much their constituents would have benefitted from his policies. Then came the orange menace and made everything louder and ruder and completely wrecked any guise of decorum. Now it’s so bad that the mental gymnastics required to justify support of such a horrific rich-guy-turned-politician have become the conservative horcrux. In the book series, one professor explains the horcrux is possible because “killing rips the soul.” Dehumanizing another person (or entire group of people) also rips the soul. The orange believers have done some truly fucked up things to create their horcruxes and they are not about to stop over the next presidential term. Their souls are torn to shreds. It is possible for someone who has created a horcrux to put their soul back together, but it requires remorse. “You have to really feel what you have done” and in the series it is said that most people die of the pain. The further down the path of dehumanizing others the more work it is to come back. But it's still worth it. I don't believe there is ever a point of no return from hurting your fellow human beings. You may have to spend the rest of your life rebuilding what you destroyed, but that's better than continuing to make it worse. Before the election I thought there was a small group of very wealthy and powerful people who wanted me and people like me to stop existing. I thought most regular people were only going along with harmful policy because they had been duped by the snake oil salesperson in orange. I thought most regular folks alive right now wanted equality and liberty and justice for all, even if they didn’t understand the systemic reasons why we don’t have those things currently. Then the votes were counted on Tuesday. And now I have to ask you all to identify your horcruxes and do the work to resolve them. Make yourself whole. Help others heal themselves back to wholeness. That's the only way forward. Information and Inspiration
I’m feeling hopeful for the first time in this election cycle and it’s weirding me out. Don’t get me wrong: I’m grateful to be feeling even a glimmer of something other than abject doom, but I definitely wasn’t expecting it. It feels very strange that only a couple weeks ago I was fully resigned to plug my nose and vote for the not-fascist because I don’t want to live in a Project2025 world. And now I get to vote for someone who might actually have a chance to build some cool things for the future. I strongly suspect this is the only way a woman of color could have made it onto the ballot. As a nation we’re probably still too racist and sexist for anyone other than an old white guy to have secured the party nomination, especially right now when people are scared and the future is so uncertain. It was probably necessary for Biden to run all the way through the primaries before passing the torch. It needed to be the only correct logistical option for the party to unite so soundly behind someone so completely different than all the prior presidents. When the news first broke, I was hoping the prospect of getting to help elect the first woman president would be enough incentive for the I'm-just-going-to-sit-this-one-out folks to change their mind and show up on Election Day. And it looks like it is. Miraculously, Biden dropping out and Harris taking up the mantle flipped the blue side of the ticket from elect us to stop the other guy into elect us to move forward into a brighter future. And we all might just pull it off. There are a couple things about this moment that strike me. One is the utter mundanity of being labeled as weird. For those of us who grew up as “the weird kid” we know that small phrase can have enormous social consequences. So I do not minimize in any way the suffering some folks have endured under that label. But compared to all the other things the orange monstrosity has been called, weird is totally tame. There appears to be some magic in that low-grade label. If someone accuses you of a big something, it makes sense for your defensive reaction to also be big. Even a ridiculous, overblown, stop-acting-like-an-infant sized reaction is proportionate to the charges. Even if the accusation is true. Maybe especially if it's true. But when the accusation is so banal and your defensive reaction is still volcanic, all of a sudden it doesn’t make sense and your out-of-control, overblown, extraness is revealed to the casual observer. Maybe that’s why it feels so much to me like an emperor’s new clothes moment. I (and many many many others) have been keenly aware this whole time that a certain rich-guy-turned-politician is a dangerous, child-molesting, rapist who wants to be a dictator just like Vladimir Putin. We have also known this idiot is completely unhinged and utterly detached from reality. But those facts were not enough to maintain the energy in the fight against his efforts (and the efforts of those powerful people around him) to topple democracy in the US. That baffled me right up until now when I am watching the shift happen in real time. There are so many extreme realities right now at home and all over the world. A lot of people became overwhelmed and had no mechanism or opportunity to recover from that burnout before the next wave of immediate-attention-requiring-disaster struck. I see now that folks really just needed a break. Fortunately for all of us, circumstance seems to have provided one in a completely unexpected way. So if this is what it took for you to come back to the table, or to arrive for the first time, that’s great. Welcome. Welcome to the Save Democracy And A Lot of Peoples’ Lives Coalition. We’re so glad you’re here. I’m so glad you’re here. And for my comrades who have been in it without stopping this whole time, I offer encouragement, affirmation, and a cautionary reminder. Firstly, it’s okay to feel hopeful and also feel weird about feeling hopeful. There are still so many important issue to continue fighting for and a whole system to fight against, that won’t change with a Harris presidency. And I want to remind us all to make space for the disappointment you might feel in everyone else who couldn’t be bothered to show up before. They may have had good reason for their absence, remember the system works diligently to keep our focus on other things. I am definitely equal parts elated that everyone who is now energized and engaged is here, and also disappointed that defeating a deplorable human being running for the highest political office wasn’t enough incentive to show up earlier. So if you also feel that bitterness, please take the time you need to process those feelings. Give yourself space and grace, get a hug, punch a pillow, and talk to a fellow exhausted activist because it’s critical those feelings don’t leak out in the form of activist elitism. It’s all too easy to turn-off a recently activated person by judging them for not already having been an activist. And you know what? It doesn’t actually matter. Whatever gets you to the table, no matter how long it took. As long as you’re here now (and at the polls in November), we can welcome you into the fold and show you what we've been working on so far. Hopefully between now and election day you find camaraderie and community and stick around to continue the fight for care, dignity, and justice for all people that will continue long after November. Information and Inspiration
Every June I spend a week at the big global anti-fraud conference put on by one of my professional licensing organizations. It’s always an excellent event, with great speakers and tons of sessions on interesting topics. The conference location changes every year, moving around the country, and this year it was in Las Vegas. It’s a place designed for conferences with every major casino offering great deals on venue space in exchange for the influx of thousands of attendees to eat at restaurants, see the shows, and feed money into slot machines while they’re in town to learn or network or be a fan. Vegas is also cheap to fly to from basically everywhere so it’s a win win win. Because it’s such a hub for conferences, I’ve made dozens of trips to Vegas of my career. The town where what happens there stays there also happens to be one of my least favorite places on earth. It’s endlessly flashy, ceaselessly loud, and overflowing with people everywhere at all times of day. The architecture is enormous and every corner, edge, and detail is a spectacle. Everything about the place is Extra. There isn’t a silent hallway or elevator without music. There are no walls without extravagant art or enticing advertisement or both. Absolutely everywhere feels like a party at all times. At best, it’s exhausting. At worst, it’s assaulting to the whole nervous system. And that’s just the ambiance. The other patrons of the place also fuel my distaste for it. Thousands of people thronging together through a sensory overload experience, looking for a place free of the usual requirements of everyday decency. Most people are drunk or on the prowl or both. One year while I sat at a restaurant eating dinner with a colleague I saw a gaggle of fem-presenting humans walk by wearing short skirts and carrying excessively sized (undoubtedly alcoholic) beverages in commemorative cups. A few tables away from me was a pack of masc-presenting humans in Tshirts with popped collars. As the gaggle passed, one popped collar clad individual started barking. Yes, barking. Like a dog. In an attempt to get the attention of the short-skirted folks. I was grossed out to the max, but to my horror IT WORKED. The skirt crew turned around and made the acquaintance of the Tshirt brood. I watched in disgust as the two teams made plans to join forces later for an exciting evening. I’m not sure if any of those folks were conscientiously participating in that misogynistic mating ritual. I assume they were all just playing out a script they thought gave them permission to be naughty for the night. I can’t imagine the short-skirt friend group had a conversation in their hotel room before going out that went something like this: “You know what I want tonight?” “What?” “To be objectified and demeaned.” “Oh yeah, totally, me too.” “Yeah I can’t wait to be used by someone who has absolutely no regard for my desires or boundaries.” Who knows, maybe they did. Maybe they had an entire discussion about consent and safety and aftercare and went out looking for that exact moment I was witness to. I think it’s more likely they internalized the list of ways femm folk are allows to “let loose” as approved by the Patriarchy. It’s okay to be a slut as long as it’s in service of fulfilling a man’s fantasy and you can all go home later to your respectable lives and pretend it never happened. I’m all for uninhibited self-expression and I heartily approve of folks exploring the full depth and breadth of their humanity. I am even in favor of a place available to explore those baser parts of our selves we can travel to and leave behind for the real world. But the thing about this Sin City is it’s really only meant for a narrow slice of the vast vice pie. And entrance to the playground doesn’t include consent or agency. It’s not an escape from default society, it’s a super concentrated dose of it. This year was especially challenging for me due to a constellation of factors. For one thing, my long covid symptoms include increased light and sound sensitivity. Bummer. The timing was also unfortunate because Monday was the second anniversary of the US Supreme Court overturning Rowe v Wade. I wore a red shirt in solidarity with women who went on strike that day, refusing to perform the unpaid and often unrecognized labor they usually do. My wardrobe choice seemed to go utterly unnoticed, so it didn’t feel like much of a statement. The invisibility of my protest against the invisibilizing of the everyday experience of women and other femm folk hit me hard right in the feels. It was also June. So I spent one whole week of Pride month in the straightest, most hetero-normative place imaginable being decidedly gendered as a woman. As a newly out non-binary person it wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever experienced, but it was grating. Not one person asked my pronouns (or anyone else’s), which was in stark contrast to my usual home city experience. I am extremely lucky to live in such an affirming town, but it does make it harder to go other places. It has taken me four decades to feel like I’m allowed to be myself in ways that don’t conform neatly to societal standards. And I still can’t really exist in my thus-far fullness outside the little bubble I live in. I did well maintaining my constitution with extra doses of self-care and long-distance support from home, but it all finally became too much the second to last day. I was sitting in a session listening to the presenter mansplain about implicit bias and I started to feel out of sorts. I waited until the break and retreated to my hotel room where I discovered I was running a fever. I pumped myself full of infection fighting herbs and vitamins, took a nap, a hot bath, and went to bed early. I slept horribly, awakened alternately by fever, chills, and disturbing dreams. I skipped the final day of sessions in favor of rest and continued consuming medicinal quantities of anti-viral and immune boosting herbs. By the time I was packed, I was feeling much better. Since my malaise came and went so quickly I concluded that I had come down with a case of the patriarchy. On one hand, that’s hilarious because it’s just so absurd. On the other hand, it makes perfect sense. I share this as a reminder that the stress and trauma of our lives has an impact on our physical form. Please be sweet to yourselves in some way each day and take the time to shed the doomgloop of the world in whatever way you need to. We have to the heal the world, and in order to do that we have to continue to heal ourselves. Good luck out there. Information and Inspiration
Like many professionals I must complete a certain number of continuing education credits each year to maintain my license. Due to a series of unfortunate events I found myself sitting in an ethics class one day last week instead of getting to all the work I had planned to accomplish. In one section the instructor discussed the relevance of appearance and stressed the importance of maintaining reputation. It was good advice because accountants hold a position of public trust, so we should not be entering into transactions that look sketchy even if they are technically allowable. But then he went on to caution against disparaging the work of other accountants by saying "Even if you're right, keep it to yourself because it reflects badly on the entire industry." What?! No. Bad. Where is my spraybottle?! This instructor was actively promoting the accounting equivalent of the blue wall of silence. And I cannot abide the Spreadsheet of Silence. Not even one little bit. The correct response to someone within a group acting out of sync with professional or community standards is transparency; not coverup. Trust is not built by keeping things from people that might upset them. You build trust by being accountable for your mistakes and repairing the damage resulting from your actions. You build trust by airing your dirty laundry and then cleaning it up. It's the exact same undercurrent in every community controversy I have witnessed or experienced in recent years. Like when we had to ban a dancer a few years ago for preying on vulnerable community members. When one impacted person finally voiced their experience, the old guard on the organizing board wanted to handle the matter discretely and quietly in the background, out of the public eye, like had always been done before. The rest of us wanted a completely transparent process. Something the community could see and understand and know to rely on in the future. When some part of the community is harming some other part of the community (intentionally or unintentionally), there's no way around bringing that shit to light. If you pretend it's not happening, then it keeps happening and people continue experiencing harm. If there's no mechanism to raise the issue, or if community leadership actively covers up the problematic behavior when someone does report it, then eventually all the impacted folks and their friends leave the community. It's the same in broader society and around the world. People in power who do terrible things often use their power to shield themselves from accountability. Our pillar institutions in the US were built of and continue to run on various forms of oppression. Harm persists. People suffer. Those of us trying to make a difference get exhausted. Unfortunately we can't just leave Earth. There are currently no other habitable planets in our solar system. And even if there was somewhere to go, there isn't currently a way for marginalized folks to get there. I’m not interested in perfection, I’m interested in accountability. I don't want to hold anyone to a standard of perfection and I don't want to be held to a standard of perfection. I spent way too many years imposing that on myself (it's still something I struggle with). Perfection is not possible. But what would be amazing is for everyone to try their best, recognize when they fail, take responsibility and be accountable, and seek to repair. Then we can all experience something better in the future. Information and Inspiration
Community is vital for human survival. We don’t all need the same volume, frequency, or flavor of social connection, but we all need it like we need water, food and air. For how vital it is, it’s unfortunate so many things get in the way of fulfilling social connections for so many people. Perfectionism, trauma, undeveloped communication skills, the patriarchy. All the things that prevent us from showing up as our fullest selves because it’s not safe or not allowed or not good enough. And even once we work through some of our own personal baggage, we will forever be performing maintenance on our reconfigured systems because we continue to exist in the societal soup of all that same bullshit. Even with as much healing as I have done, I still have to do the math each day on how many and which pieces of emotional armor I need to put on before going out in the world. And when I get home I have to do the emotional labor of taking that armor off. I'm lucky I don't have to leave it all on all the time. It’s really a miracle any of us manage to get together at all, but we do. Despite all the challenges (and often because of those challenges), we gather. We come together and we form community. And that's amazing. It's definitely a relief to be around other folks who have been through some of the same things I have lived in my life. It's healing to experience belonging and togetherness. And it's important to make sure we're working through the collective baggage all together as a group. Otherwise those things we're working so hard to heal in ourselves and actively resist from greater society continue in our community spaces and get in the way of relating to each other. No matter how much we have in common, if I spend time with someone who can't or won't see me as a complete and complex person, that interaction cannot satisfying my desire for connection because it isn't connection. If I have to keep my mask on, it's just hiding in the presence of another human. And while there can definitely be value in being alone together, that's not the same thing as social connection. When I spend time with someone who sees and hears me fully as an entire being, then I feel connected to that person. And that's when I feel belonging. It may sound obvious, but it seems important to note: any attempt to manufacture the feeling of belonging by extracting it from others will always fail. Unfortunately this is a mistake I keep seeing communities make, including communities of people routinely othered by greater society. When default society spaces have no room for you, it's important to find or create a space that feels affirming and safe. To be safe it often means some demographics must be excluded from those spaces, and that's perfectly fine. It becomes a problem if the only glue that holds your group together is being better than someone else. Deriving your value by comparison to a "less valuable" version of person or lifestyle or hobby is no value at all. That's not healing from the wounds of society constantly saying you aren't good enough or rich enough or smart enough or beautiful enough or normal enough. That's just passing on your trauma to someone else, and it perpetuates all the problems you were trying to escape by creating that new space in the first place. Recently I have witnessed a group of folks wade into a new practice of non-monogamy without doing the prerequisite community emotional labor that creates a solid foundation of trust to build other relationships upon. These otherwise level-headed folks bought into a nonsense belief that having multiple romantic connections somehow eliminates your responsibility to tend the connections with those people. It's like they think detaching from the societal expectation of monogamy detaches them from responsibility for how they impact the people around them. In case you're wondering: it doesn't. It also doesn't make you a more evolved human or get you any closer to enlightenment. Practicing non-attachment with people is more about not attaching your expectations to those people; not shirking all responsibility for your friends and fellow community members. That’s just accountability avoidance. I can have as many emotional, physical, and/or romantic connections as I have availability in my calendar and it doesn't negate my need to occasionally rely upon others and be reliable for others in-turn. It doesn't have to be my partner's fault that something they said triggered me, they can still listen to my hurt feelings with compassion and offer me care as I do the work to heal from that wound in my past. There is no shortcut to healing. You just have to do the work. We each have to tend our inner selves and we all have to tend the physical and emotional spaces we share together. Community is a mirror. Looking into that mirror allows us an opportunity for recovery. A chance to confront and reconcile with our inner demons while being held in loving support by our fellow human beings. Incorporating more pieces of ourselves into the whole is how we heal. Detaching from people won't get you there; all it does is allow you to hide from yourself. Information and Inspiration
Some things just happen. Earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, the ocean's tidal rhythms. The earth orbits the sun and spins on its axis, and we experience day and night. Other things don’t just happen, like war, poverty, and the criminal justice system. People in power start wars, communities fail to provide resources to people without resources, and societies deprive some people of their personal liberty to offer the illusion of safety to others. Lately I’ve been hearing this kind of human-created circumstance discussed in the news as if these things just… happen. Like fixtures in the landscape we need to work around instead of the result of all our collective participation in societal and global social and economic systems. On one hand I can understand that perspective for things that have existed for generations. The telephone, for example, was invented long before I was born, so to me telephonic communication definitely feels like an immovable fixture of modern life. And if it isn’t causing any problems for me then I might not bother to consider where and when it came from. Which is why it’s so critical to make sure everyone's voice shapes our institutions and governance policies. We need to hear from every kind of someone that something we’re doing continues to serve all of us so we don’t just keep doing what we’ve always done because that’s how we’ve always done it and nobody in charge noticed it was a problem for somebody else. On the other hand is what confounds me about the framing of our present moment: these things are causing problems. Obvious problems. Well known and highly documented problems. Smart, qualified, and credible people are talking about the problems with the war on Ukraine and the siege on Gaza. Smart, qualified, and credible people are talking about the detrimental impacts of poverty and the criminal justice system. Smart, qualified, and credible people are talking about our dangerous reliance on fossil fuels and the resulting impending climate catastrophes in our near future. But the folks who can do something about it don’t seem to be listening. And now we’re talking amongst ourselves as if nothing is being done because there isn’t anything that can be done. And that’s dangerous. It means we’re not holding the people who run our systems accountable for how things are running. The US presidential election is still 9 months away. Someone could conceive, grow, and birth an entire human before we all cast our vote. But we already know which two candidates of which two parties we will need to choose between on this year's ballot, even though most of the primaries haven’t taken place yet and nobody seems to want what we’re apparently going to get. So we should do something about it. It’s hard to know what to do, but just because it’s hard doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try. The US government isn’t a democracy machine; it’s a government machine. If you feed it democratic policies and practices, then you get democracy. If you feed it fascist policies and practices, then you get fascism. The fates are not handing us a Biden vs Trump election, we are creating that future inevitability by not doing something else. I see the same resignation in much of the discussion about AI. AI isn’t a force unto itself. It didn’t arrive from another galaxy fully formed and ready to take over the fun parts of our lives while we work dead-end jobs that barely cover our rent. We created it. Humans made (and are making) AI. It’s not just an alien invader as Yuval Noah Harari described it; it’s a version of ourselves we ran through a machine. The call is coming from inside the house because AI is only the result of exactly what we put into it: us. We are here in this moment with these challenges because this is the reality we have collectively crafted. Fortunately, that means we can make it into anything we want as long as we make it into something on purpose. Last year’s tax season was brutal for me. But everything that made it a bummer didn’t just happen; the bummer is what happened because I didn’t do something else. So this tax season I’m doing a few things differently. I could have resigned to a repeat of last year, but I don’t want that. So this year I’m crafting a completely different experience. I want us all to do that in every way we can because we need to craft a brighter future in order for it to happen. Information and Inspiration
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AuthorJaydra is a human in-process, working to make the world a better place. Sharing thoughts, feelings, and observations about the human experience. Archives
November 2025
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