we were meant to be free
I love leftists. I love intellectuals. I love union organizers. I love people who care. I love people who stand up to injustice. I love seeing all the ways people put their time and bodies and hearts on the line to do what’s right. It’s so beautiful to me. So healing and hopeFULL and inspiring. I think so many people are stunned into inaction by trauma– learned helplessness is a real thing. And the threat of the white supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy is real. There are consequences to stepping out of line, just like there are consequences any time anyone stands up to an abuser. But the freedom? The empowerment?! To stand up to a fucking menace?! That’s healing. Let there be so many people fighting back that it’s unstoppable. Let the tides turn and STAY turned in a more loving direction. It is possible– there are more of us than them. And we have love. Love is the most powerful thing in the universe. It IS the universe. To quote that boring ass book the status quo upholders love to whip out whenever it’s convenient “Love is the law.” What they’re doing is rooted in the basest manifestations of human experience; greed, power-over, control. Many have tried that before and they always fail. Marx said “Revolution is inevitable.” Here it is. The strength of the human spirit was not meant to kowtow and allow itself to be broken–that’s why it never has been. Everyone oppressed has always fought back and fought back and fought back and, while progress is certainly, frustratingly NON-linear, there is progress nonetheless. Think of all the people who have said “No” in the past. They’re walking with us now. They’re proud of you for living their legacy. I’m proud of you too. Thank you for your service, you’re literally braver than the US Marines.
I went to a Democratic Socialists of America pool party recently with my friend Niv where we discussed The Communist Manifesto by Marx and Engels and Race and the Communist Manifesto by Robin D. G. Kelly and I had such a good time! Whenever I am in leftist spaces; whether it’s at a protest or a meeting or just having a really good conversation with a loved one (all of my loved ones' politics align with my own and that’s not an echo-chamber thing, it’s a discernment thing), it makes me so emotional. I feel so in awe of the intelligence, the empathy, the layers of understanding (both intuitive and academic), the absolute earnestness of caring and showing you care. It really touches me. I like to imagine the meetings and communities sitting around discussing, commiserating, arguing, sometimes yelling, caring so vehemently throughout history. I just googled “Who was the first leftist?” (obviously the term wasn’t invented until the French Revolution, but the ideas have been around for as long as there has been subjugation of some people at the hands of others) and stumbled upon a terribly written article by some very angry little man who is Rock Hard for Rush Limbaugh™️ about how Lucifer was the first leftist. Never mind that Lucifer is a fictional character (sorry, Daddy!), but also, I have always thought it was so telling that “evil” in Christianity is so often associated with critical thinking. Saul Alinksy’s epigraph in Rules for Radicals, has reverberated through the bowels of right wing Christians since he wrote it 1971. He wrote, “Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know where mythology leaves off and history begins — or which is which), the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom — Lucifer.” I feel like you could change a couple of details in that quote and that last word to “Jesus” and it wouldn’t feel ridiculous. Light-bringer. Interesting.
Paraphrasing the author of that blog post, because I can’t be bothered to source him, give me a B-minus for not citing, idc, That’s who leftists are–they’re evil, they destroy property, they want to overthrow the government, and they don’t care about rules!! I am clutching my pearls! Heavens!! Watching the protests in LA and all over the country and world, I am bracing for the inevitable push back; the hand-wringing over property damage – turning activists, revolutionaries, people who we will look back on and think Those are the people who saved us reduced to criminals. Anything bad that happens to them will be justified to many, because “They broke the law.” What if the law is fucked?! What if they are laws we never consented to–never would consent to? What if they are only serving a handful of amoral megalomaniacs with a debilitating empathy deficiency? What if they are wrong? What if it’s more about the suppression of any resistance than it is about serving the interests of the people? My very hot high school A.P. english teacher, who I had a HUGE crush on, didn’t believe in marriage. This blew my mind. I think it blew everyone else’s too, because one day we all started peppering her with questions about it and she, surprisingly, admiringly, answered them. She said “I just feel like any time you press down on someone, they’re gonna start to squirm.” I knew that squirming deeply.
Growing up constantly limited by the expectations and anxieties of a dysregulated caregiver–one who could not handle my imperfection or individuation, and I had been quietly fighting back (or at least building up resentment) since this one day when I was 4 years old and had the absolute audacity to be in a bad mood. I didn’t know why I was in a bad mood or even that I was in one; maybe I had on scratchy clothes or didn’t get enough sleep, or my mom had taken her hangover out on me already that day and either physically or verbally abused me, maybe my grandma had taken me to the grocery store where the lighting was offensive and the temperatures varied wildly and I got overstimulated. Whatever the reason, I was being a real sour puss. She tried everything to cheer me up but it was mostly just getting on my nerves. I didn’t have the words for Just let me be in a bad mood!! But I think that’s what I needed. Eventually, the day ended with her calling me an ungrateful little brat (🤙) and giving me a spanking; which, believe it or not, didn’t feel abusive like my mother’s whacks to the head with a hairbrush, gut-churningly hard slaps to the ass, or eventual soap-opera smacks across the face, but I would later come to terms with the fact that they were, in fact, abuse. I sat at the top of the stair case, little legs dangling underneath the wrought-iron banister, thinking something so bad; the little red, horned leftist on my shoulder whispering Say it, say it. So I opened my mouth and (this is my partner’s explanation for when you really want to say something, but you’re having a hard time getting it out) the little man on my tongue pushed and puuushed and out came “You’re a witch!” just loud enough for her to hear.
It would be decades before I would make sense of why the person who loved me the most in the world, the person who I loved and looked up to the most in the world, my Queenie, who was also mother and father and best friend and fairy godmother would cause me to squirm. Pressure. Control. Unrealistic Expectations. Disproportionate punishments. I couldn’t help but fight back. With my mother, who I had lost affection for almost as soon as I could think for myself at all–she was just so mean and cold and selfish and never liked me a day in my life, and her men; the ones why kicked the door down with all their anger issues and need for power-over and suddenly asserted themselves as the dreaded step-dad as well, it was more straight forward? I became a hell raiser. I would stand up on my bed just so I could look the worst of them in the eyes and point my little finger in his face to tell him, to show him, just how not scared I was. He once put a bunch of dog shit on my beloved trampoline (what my poor white trash family couldn’t provide in affection or stability, they made up for with one truly awesome, if not totally irresponsible Christmas gift a year) to punish us for not picking up after our dog. Under my leadership, my little tomboy gang and I cleaned it up with the white socks from his sock drawer. We stuck giant wads of bubble gum on his car tires, we blasted Backstreet Boys at all hours of the night when he took our bedroom door off the hinges. When he’d fling my math book across the room, standing over top of me and my little sister, red faced, spit flying, calling one or both of us the R-word, I gritted my teeth just like my mother did when she was angry, so I could hold the tears back. I’d never let him see me cry.
Consciousness is expansive. It’s infinite. It’s a wonder you fit into that beautiful body with all that spirit you have! A little miracle. Humans have the distinct privilege of awareness; we are able to be the universe witnessing itself, witnessing others witnessing itself, witnessing us! It’s amazing. It’s fluid and pulsing and yielding, it can bend and stretch and unfurl to fit more and more without breaking. That’s what we’re made of. We weren’t meant to be limited by systemic bullshit. We weren’t meant to be beholden to a handful of dead-inside white men who don’t even have the decency to pay the proper amount of taxes on the exorbitant amounts of money they exploit the working class out of. Did you know how much more valuable your labor is than you are being paid? What would the ruling class do without our labor? How would they function? Certainly not with the degree of luxury to which they have become accustomed. Talk about lazy. Talk about entitled. Talk about sinful, false idols, domestic terrorists, pure evil. If Satan was the first leftist, does that make the Christian God a fascist authoritarian? Honestly? Checks out.
Don’t let them spin this story. Don’t let them convince you to hide; to go still in the overwhelm, to dissociate, to surrender. Fascism needs that fear to thrive. We can overwhelm them, we have the numbers. We can get what we want. We can manifest it! We can co-create it! We have the literal most beautiful angel and Prince of Darnkness on our side lmao. We have love!
We have the smartest people in the world. Did you know Albert Einstein was a socialist? There’s nothing wrong with squirming under oppression– it's a reasonable reaction to an unreasonable situation. It’s our divine right to fight back. We weren’t meant to be oppressed. We were meant to come here and embody the energy of the universe, which created us in their image. We were meant to be free.
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