Particularly if you live in Texas, please vote, just for the schadenfreude. Can you even imagine if Texas goes blue. Can you even imagine Ted Cruz losing. I’m getting giddy just thinking about the conservative meltdown. There is literally zero path to the Presidency for Republicans that doesn’t include Texas. If they have to sweat bullets for the next forever thinking that Texas might be a left-leaning state… guys, this just sounds like a fun time.
The first, and most obvious, is this: Treat every poisoned word as a promise. When a bigoted blusterer tells you he intends to force members of a religious minority to register with the authorities—much like those friends and family of [my grandfather Siegfried who fled from Hitler in Austria to Palestine]’s who stayed behind were forced to do before their horizon grew darker—believe him. Don’t try to be clever. Don’t lean on political intricacies or legislative minutia or historical precedents for comfort. Don’t write it off as propaganda, or explain it away as just an empty proclamation meant simply to pave the path to power. Take the haters at their word, and assume the worst is imminent.
Do that, and a second principle follows closely: You should treat people like adults, which means respecting them enough to demand that they understand the consequences of their actions. Explaining away or excusing the actions of others isn’t your job. Vienna in the first decades of the 20th century was a city inflamed with a desire to better understand the motives, hidden or otherwise, that move people to action. Freud and Kafka, Elias Canetti and Karl Kraus, Stefan Zweig and Franz Werfel—these were the eminences who crowded the same cafés Siegfried and his musician friends most likely frequented. But while these beautiful minds struggled to understand the world around them, the world around them was consumed by simpler and more vicious appetites. Don’t waste any time, then, trying to understand: Then as now, many were amused by the demagogue and moved by his vile vision. Some have perfectly reasonable explanations for their decisions, while others have little to go on but incoherent rage. It doesn’t matter. Voters are all adults, and all have made their choices, and it is now you who must brace for impact. Whether you choose to forgive those, friends and strangers alike, who cast their votes so deplorably is a matter of personal choice, and none but the most imperious among us would advocate a categorical rejection of millions based on their electoral actions, no matter how irresponsible and dim. So while you make these personal calculations, remember that what matters now isn’t analysis: It’s survival.
Which leads me to the third principle, the one hardest to grasp: Refuse to accept what’s going on as the new normal. Not now, not ever. In the months and years to come, decisions will be made that may strike you as perfectly sound, appointments announced that are inspired, and policies enacted you may even like. Friends and pundits will reach out to you and, invoking nuance, urge you to admit that there’s really nothing to fear, that things are more complex, that nothing is ever black or white. It’s a perfectly sound argument, of course, but it’s also dead wrong: This isn’t about policy or appointments or even about outcomes. This isn’t a political contest—it’s a moral crisis. When an inexperienced, thin-skinned demagogue rides into office by explaining away immensely complex problems while arguing that our national glory demands we strip millions of their dignity or their rights, our only duty is to resist by whatever means permitted us by law. The demagogue may boost the economy, sign beneficial treaties, and mend our ailing institutions, but his success can never be ours. Our greatness, to use a tired but true phrase, depends on our goodness, and to succeed, we must demand that our commander in chief come as close as is possible to reflecting the light of that goodness. There’s no point indulging in the kind of needlessly complex thinking that so often plagues the intelligent and the well-informed. There’s no room for reading tea leaves, for calculations or projections or clever takes. The only thing that matters now is the simple moral truth: This isn’t right. As long as we never forget that, we can never lose: As grandpa Siegfried knew all too well, those who refuse to gradually put up with the darkness are making a very safe bet; if you’re wrong, there’s no harm, but if you’re right, you win more or less everything.
So forgive me if these next four years I’m not inclined to be smart. When it comes to the task ahead, I’ve no interest in deep dives or shades of grey or mea culpas. Like my grandfather, I’m a simple Jew, and like him, I take danger at face value. When the levers of power are seized by the small hands of hateful men, you work hard, you stand with those who are most vulnerable, and you don’t give up until it’s morning again. The rest is commentary.
Basically… I’m too busy trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy to play Savior To The World and show up to every rally, protest, or political event to Make My Voice Heard.
Even jesus had issues with that shit, ok? So fuck off I’m human and I’m ALLOWED TO BE HUMAN.
half the notes: youre the real oppressor for telling me what to do.
the other half: cut out this useless liberal proselatizing. you are an invertebrate and you will perish in the revolution.
we have a new prize comment which is “pretty neurotypical of you to assume i have the capacity to care about other people”
While I recognize people with mental disabilities that prevent them from caring about other people are valid and deserve respect; I must also remind you that not caring about other people is contrary to human survival. Humans would literally die at birth if other people did not care about them
Oh look, it’s the thing. The exact thing.
I know Geek Fallacy 1 is tempting, guys, but “when someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time” is still good advice.
If someone does uncaring things and you call them on it and they throw back that you have to accept it or you’re ableist against Cluster B people, run.
Some people can deal with that. You are not required to, though.
No one is.
The reason I reblogged this in the first place as being relevant to The Empathy Discussion was the comment after makiruz (via @lines-and-edges, quoted here):
This comment is a reaaaallly good example of how English uses “caring” to mean both an experience of emotion and an action you can take and how sometimes those definitions are not… really all that directly linked, but get conflated with each other by people who experience them as the same thing.
Like, if you experience the emotion of caring towards cats, then you probably like being around them. But you don’t have to experience any particular emotions to keep a cat alive and happy. (In fact, cats are notorious for enjoying the presence of people who don’t particularly like them, because emotionally demonstrative humans are sometimes Just Too Much.) Taking care of each other (and animals) – aka altruism – is the part that’s necessary to survival. And it’s important for people not to forget that part – no matter what emotions they do and don’t feel.
Those who do not experience the emotion of caring are still capable of performing the action. They’re not the same thing, they’re not even linked. Even those motivated purely by self-interest can understand that altruistic behavior evolved at all because it is beneficial and a sound survival strategy, and choose to act accordingly.
If you experience them as the same thing and for you they are linked, that doesn’t mean you’re automatically an evil person, but it DOES mean you might have a harder time behaving caringly toward someone you don’t emotionally care about – hence the people who keep arguing that “high-empathy people lack empathy for low-empathy people”. It’s not that they want to demand you to have empathy for them when they have none for you because they have none in general, but that they want you to treat them decently, and they understand that if for you “treating people decently” is so intrinsically linked to “having empathy for people” that you can’t believe someone who lacks general empathy might still somehow be motivated to generally treat others decently…. then you are highly unlikely to treat people decently if you do not have empathy for them.
I don’t know if this explanation is finally going to make sense, since the last several tries apparently didn’t, but. Here it is again, in yet another different phrasing.
Anyway, I can say from experience that I personally do experience the emotion of caring, but also since I don’t link that directly to performing the action, I’m able to act caringly toward people I really don’t emotionally give much of a crap about. Because altruism is a survival strategy and it’s actually easier in my estimation to just treat everyone decently and behave caringly whenever possible, than to go around trying to come up with a way to determine who “deserves” my caring behavior. And also because I don’t wanna be just another flavor of bigot who excludes certain groups from my “people who deserve to be treated decently” calculations on the basis of some superficial characteristic.
Heck, sometimes the emotion of caring is overwhelming enough that it paralyzes me from completing the actions of caring. Which is a lovely little catch-22 when it comes to trying to interact with people who conflate the emotions with the actions, because they then assume I have no caring emotions when really what’s going on is I’m having TOO MANY caring emotions to handle and have stopped functioning temporarily on account of empathy overload.
Basically this, although, caveat….
Sometimes it honest-to-gods is too much to be asked to do anything more than maintain my little bubble of sanity. Sometimes, yet another tragedy when there have already been like eight this week trending on tumblr alone means if I CARE, if I expend any more emotion towards it, or any other action towards “making it better” would break me AND my bubble. Mentally, emotionally- sometimes even spiritually. (I reached that breaking point just before my diagnosis of Hashimoto’s this year.)
I’ve been carrying so much on my shoulders since this time last year that I haven’t even really broken down about because I can’t. There’s too much to DO. There’s too much to CARE about. Too many tragedies, too many people telling me my right to protect myself, to protect my family and my home is actively Against The Children. Too many “representatives” telling me my right to exist as a transperson is bullshit and Liberal Pandering. Too many people telling me my experience means nothing in the grand scheme of things because it’s somehow some sort of -ist.
That’s too much for a lot of people to handle, alright? It’s not a value judgement on “caring.” It’s not saying that people who care; regardless of which sort of “care” you mean; are stupid or useless Sensitives with too much sentiment to survive. It means that the reality of my situation leaves me very little left over for the problems of the world.
It means that trying to figure out my situation; with all the new medical problems, the logistics of moving, the realities of my life post-diagnosis; is taking up all my emotional bandwidth. I do what I can re: reblogging relevant posts and doing my best to keep my head above water. Most of the time? That is my “best.”
I’m not healthy the way I was when I was helping make phone trees and calling local and state governments back in 2010/11. I don’t have the spoons to show up to rallies and try to help create carpools and time scales. I can’t BE that involved anymore, and I’m only twenty fucking six. I haven’t even hit THIRTY yet and I’m being told that my days as an activist are over because “if you don’t show up, you don’t care! How dare you sit behind a computer in the safety of your home while we’re dying and going to jail?”
Well. I had neither the money nor the ability to travel to DC before the Trump election. I am not a woman, so it would have been hell for me to go to the Woman’s March as a transmale where I would have been misgendered every other minute, and told I’m Male Scum the rest of the time. I was told explicitly not to show up to the Pipeline Protests due to space and food restrictions and the crowds of performative outrage that didn’t do much and taxed local infrastructure, such as it is… what do you WANT me to do with that? Honestly? Am I supposed to shell out to show up to every single event and make a financial burden of myself in order to performatively care about others?
Some of us are just honest-to-gods tapped out. It doesn’t mean we wouldn’t or couldn’t care; regardless of which way you mean. It means that right nowwe lack the capacity for more than “Yet another tragedy that shouldn’t have happened, yet another thing to be performative about, yet another strain. This might as well happen-” as we reblog, and spread awareness, and perhaps take ourselves offline for awhile to do something silly and self-healing like an overly involved bath, or baking something nice for ourselves or, perhaps, sewing tiny clothes for stuffed animals that do not truly NEED them. Because the cute is healing and soothing, and narrowing your focus for a few hours to something that takes repetitive motion and very little thinking can be very nice indeed.
TL;DR: Sometimes burnout means the only people we can be demonstrative towards are our pets and our partners. Sometimes we can’t even extend that to our parents and siblings, sometimes our world HAS to shrink just so we can keep putting one foot in front of the other. It doesn’t mean we lack empathy. It doesn’t mean we can’t SYMPATHIZE. It doesn’t mean that we are incapable of showing basic human decency to those around us or that when we reach our breaking point, we turn into Scroogian nightmare people who bark at retail workers and berate children for being children ffs. (or that we do not apologize if it happens due to strain and reaching a breaking point.)
It means that the breadth and scope of our “caring” is narrow by necessity, and we shouldn’t be berated for that. I haven’t said that “caring is useless.” What I HAVE said is that “sometimes the only person you are capable of caring for and being altruistic for, is yourself and perhaps a pet or a partner.” What I HAVE said is “Sometimes, active performative caring is something you are incapable of, and it doesn’t mean you don’t care emotionally. It means you don’t have the bandwidth, spoons, or whatever Metaphorical Something to DO anything with the emotion.”
I hate in the MCU or anything when the aliens or whatever are attacking and everyone’s just ‘oh yeah we be chilling just cowering over here’ as if seventy percent of humanity isn’t really angry all the time like catch these hands motherfucker I’ve bitten people for trying to steal my chips you think you can just steal my whole fucking planet YEET HERE COME MY TEETH film people be using responses to natural disasters but I promise if human sized things came to throw down humanity would be ready to fuck them up like yeah you got laser guns I got this dope ass stick I just found let’s go you ugly fuck
silentwalrus1: #yeah bicht!!!!!!#gimme the battle of new york with fuckin chitauri comin down and the shift manager of the times sq H&M has finally had Enough#Tracie bout to kill this alien with a traffic cone#’ JUST PRETEND THEY’RE TOURISTS’ she screams choking out goddamn Lizard Lite with her lanyard#10 feet away a park slope mom is beating an alien to death with her four year old’s knockoff eco friendly razr scooter#every single retail employee gets ten years’ worth of therapy in one day#captain america’s kill count: 83 aliens#kathleen from accounting: 94 and also her boss
Humans are biolent, angry little creatures who live under a constant state of stress and have very little sense of self preservation. #whatsmykillcount would be trending in Twitter while people posted videos on every available platform. Like honestly Earth is not the one.
You never know you’re from a Death World until somebody tries to conquer it.
Leave people some space to grow. Some people hold beliefs they were raised with; right or wrong; and having them challenged makes them dig in their heels. You’re calling their existence into question, the ethics of the people who raised them, the morality of their ENTIRE CAREER TO THIS POINT.
Yes, sometimes it takes time because they are right in the middle of it up to their eyeballs. Change in that atmosphere is like moving through molasses. Acknowledge the change, and move on. If they start backsliding and denying people their basic human dignity again, that is the time for righteous anger and calling your representatives.
What you don’t want to do is make it look like if you weren’t Dem from the start you should never change because you’re already unholy and evil. That ALSO encourages doubling-down and even worse behavior because “might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.” And “well if they ALREADY think that way, I might as well be making even more money off this shit until I get voted out.”
House Of Crows 