there's our catastrophe

Nov 17

I critique radical self-care rhetoric a lot but one of the main reasons I don’t like it is that it conflates work for social change with work to heal yourself, in ways that can really bog down political projects by bringing them down to the scope of the individual. so it’s bad for movements. but it’s also bad for individuals: if you’re going to be happy you need to develop the capacity to ameliorate your problems within the society we live in, not just the capacity to identify the systemic factors causing your problems. you can fight them as much as you want but they’re not gonna disappear in your lifetime and even if they do you’ll still have to deal with the scars. systemic oppression and personal suffering are obviously linked, but they are different things we need to deal with in different ways. it’s prevention and cure.

that’s one reason why an end to self-care by B Loewe — the principal claim of which is that “movement work is healing work” — is…not a good critique of self-care rhetoric. it’s the exact same idea, that social movements and self-care are the same thing, it’s just kind of callous about it.

you should read for badass disability justice, working-class and poor lead models of sustainable hustling for liberation, a more in-depth response to Loewe’s article by leah-lakshmi piepzna-samarasinha.

Oct 8

esthersuspectsthenargles:

I felt I should share this on Tumblr as well as Facebook, seeing as I have different school affiliates on this site.

As some of you may not know, my mother is of Noongar heritage (indigenous people of the Perth and lower Western Australia area) I’m from the Balardong region as shown here…

I’ve been confronted countless times by people in school telling me to get over the Stolen Generation, saying things like “Why does it even bother you?” “You wern’t taken away from your mother so get over it.” I’ll tell you now, it’s not an easy thing to get over.

It’s true I may not have been taken from my mother, but my mother was badly affected by the attempt at “Whitening” Aboriginal kids. She tells me she remembers significant moments, like when her older brother was taken straight from her fathers side and chucked into the back of a cop paddy wagon and taken to a white family, or when she was out with her mother and two of her sisters one night, they were caught out after 6:00pm and were also chucked into the back of a cop paddy wagon and driven home. This all took place during the 60’s and 70’s, not all that long ago really. The wounds are still fresh. I could tell you heart breaking stories of other Aboriginal families and their struggles, like a close friend of my mothers, she was removed from her parents at a young age, and when she was let go went searching for her parents… she later found out they had both been killed by cops for trying to steal a chicken.

Because my Nan and Pops familys were pulled appart, they were not given the knowledge previously known by their ancestors, meaning they had nothing to pass on to their children and now, my own mother knows next to nothing to pass on to me. I was essentially drained of my culture.

All through my childhood, since I was born up to about a year ago, my mum went through depression and was on medication to “help” her with the problems, all they did were immobilize her. She wasn’t able to leave her bed or even the house. She didn’t get to see me grow up. She missed all the little things like awards at school or even play-days with friends. Dad was essentially a single parent.

I am lucky I grew up the way I did, I am lucky enough for an education, I am lucky enough for running water and fresh food, I’m so thankful everyday for it. I will embrace both sides of my blood, Noongar and Northern Irish, I am a unique mixture and blessed for it!

I simply wish to tell the people of the Perth area, and the rest of Australia for that matter, to watch what you say. Think about what you’re going to express before you open your mouth. I over hear racist “jokes” everyday targeted at my culture, a strong example happened not to long ago in a health lesson in school, we were all sitting listening to our teacher when she directed our attention to the next subject, alcohol, a student on the far left of the class said quite loudly, in an “accent” we hear quite commonly around Perth from people trying to “act” like a drunken/homeless Aboriginal, “I can drink as much alcohol as a f*ckin’ want I don’t get drunk! I’m Flabba Jabba Wabba Noonaghh!”My teacher being the person she is immediately turned around and reprimanded the kid straight away, she had no Idea of my heritage until I spoke up. I expressed my feelings to the class in that I’m hurt everyday by the heartless jabs at my culture, half the time I’m sitting in the same room as the racist gits and they don’t even realise they’ve done something wrong until I speak up or leave the room crying… which is what exactly happened in that situation, I told everybody how I felt and broke down crying, I had to leave the classroom because I couldn’t hold it in. An example of the ridiculous “accent” I was talking about can be found here for anybody who doens’t know what I’m talkign about.. Warning there is some vile language in the video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkjPbu8A3Dk

In a whole I’m quite disgusted with my peers and in fact the majority of my country. Racism is treated as a joke and not handled seriously. I’m all for a laugh now an then at certain things, but there are limits. I wish people would just stop being so ignorant and open their minds to others perspectives. So please, to any Aussie out there who stereotypes my culture and thinks it’s people are all drug addicts and drunkards, come and have a conversation with me, see how you feel after you’ve actually met on of us. I am affected by the Stolen Generation, it has battered my family and it’s heritage, there’s no way I can ever get over it, I can try, but it won’t ever change the fact that I’ve holes in my culture that’ll never be filled.

Thanks for taking the time to read this if you have, it means a great deal

- A 14 year old Proud Ballardong Noongar YORGA!

(via aboriginalpressnews)

Jul 8

bookbat:

haymitchisnotwhite:

theravendesk replied to your post: i’m reading thg fanfiction rn how many times have…

i never EVER understood why people found him so easy to villainize! he was the exact opposite of katniss in the best way! REVOLUTION! pro-active! while i love katniss, bc katniss didn’t choose him doesnt MAKE HIM EVIL and also I AM SO GLAD SHE DIDNT

wait you don’t like Gale x Katniss?? i love Gale x Katniss though I ship Peeta x Katniss as well.

i don’t understand either. he was the only person who got any shit done in MJ when Katniss and Peeta were still wandering in their PTSD and aftereffects of what the Capitol had done to them

and you know what i absolutely fucking hate? that the way the text portrays Gale is problematic and thereafter how fandom hates him is problematic. it’s problematic because Collins demonizes taking arms against an oppressor and/or treating them like they’re treating you in self defense. (re: Malcolm X and how people pit him against MLK.) and i fucking. can’t. with that at all.

I’m not actually sure that the text does demonize Gale? I think there’s a fair amount of sympathy for people who respond to oppression with violence. See: the fact that Katniss votes in favor of the last round of the Games. (As does Johanna, and I’m not sure how the general readership responds to Johanna, but I find her just excruciatingly sympathetic.) Seems to me that Gale and Peeta represent two different moral compasses: the one sort of grandly directed outward, toward the ideas of freedom and a just society, and the other more micro-scale and grounded in an idea of goodness that’s all about loving someone faithfully and giving them your best. And so the thing that is just stomach-droppingly disorienting about Mockingjay is that both of those compasses just start spinning like crazy. And I think there’s a pretty direct and intentional parallel between the two. Obviously Peeta is, in a very real and physical way, altered by his interaction with the Capitol, to the point that he has been, really, displaced/replaced. (I don’t think it’s just world-building preciousness that made Collins use the word “hijacked” where “brainwashed” would have been the obvious choice.) It’s not his choice, and it doesn’t really mean anything in terms of who he is, morally. It’s just that when you touch something it changes you (your body doesn’t end at the limits of your body, etc). I think of Gale the same way: fighting the Capitol becomes so much a part of his physical reality that it … replaces parts of him with new parts. (Think of how much of Mockingjay is about the daily drudgery of planning a revolution, about all the meetings and petty negotiations and how physically numbing all of this is; think about the schedules being tattooed on the arm; think about how actually dull and grinding all of this is, especially for an ultraviolent action-heavy book written for teenagers; it’s not accidental.) It’s not moral or immoral, precisely. It’s too material for that.

I mean, everything good in the Hunger Games eventually comes down to two people: Katniss taking care of Prim or hunting with Gale or allying with Rue or disappearing from society to love Peeta in seclusion. These books don’t have much to offer you if a just social system is your goal. They’re more about carving out livable niches in wider human societies, which are inevitably (the book’s view, not mine) pretty fucking horrible. I also think it’s a traumatized perspective, this pervasive and disruptive suspicion, which is why Katniss, who is seriously THE MOST TRAUMATIZED, is its focal point. And I really don’t like the implication that this traumatized worldview is politically unacceptable.

(Wow, that got into “unnecessarily defensive over a fictional character” territory really fast. I JUST REALLY CARE ABOUT KATNISS, YOU GUYS.)

(via luria-p)

Jan 18

“In 2007, in the absence of consensus, an international team of experts identified five “empirically supported early intervention principles” which included promoting a sense of safety, calming, a sense of self- and community efficacy, connectedness, and hope. The jury’s still out on what’s needed and when is best, but promoting awareness about the psychological impacts of disasters like the Queensland floods and the Black Saturday bushfires is crucially important, both now and many months after our nightly news bulletins move on. Beyond the crisis, there is no quick psychological fix, but follow up is important.”

ABC The Drum - Treating trauma - Risks of debriefing after disaster (via caitlinate)

so glad that the psych establishment is starting to question the received wisdom of immediate debrief as always appropriate — although of course this has been around for a while. also I really, really want to read Crazy Like Us.

(via rebelsea-deactivated20121016)

there's our catastrophe

work is its own cure. you have to like it better than being loved. ⚑ ♀

work is its own cure. you have to like it better than being loved.

⚑ ♀