In the end, it wasn’t the might of the city bureaucracy or law enforcement who got the constant blaring of truck horns to stop after more than week of terrorizing downtown Ottawa residents.
It was a 21-year-old resident of Centretown who had simply had enough.
“This situation, quite frankly, really ruffled my feathers,” Zexi Li, the lead plaintiff in a proposed class-action lawsuit told CTV Morning Live on Tuesday. “I really, really felt that no matter what, I had to do something.”
Oh wow, I didn’t know this. I have been hearing her name, but I assumed she was on Ottawa city council or something (I heard the city of Ottawa had started a class action, so I immediately assumed city council, not a regular citizen)
(a response to the ‘three minutes until…’ flash fic challenge over on Absolute Write. I do these weekly, I just don’t always post the results! honestly this one feels kinda flat and contrived I just really like the relationship building at the end.)
“It’s out of my hands,” said Reannon, folding their hands on the desk. “Nothing I can do will stop that monster, now.”
“There’s still three minutes to the announcement. If we could get out there, stop him, say something-!”
“No, Stacy. It’s done. We’ve lost!” One of Reannon’s hands gripped the other, tightly. They watched as Stacy paced the room, flicking the blade of her pocket knife in and out. “Just accept it.”
“I won’t,” Stacy said. “If Crawford manages to get on air, he’s going to pull the trigger on thousands of people. You know what he can do with a microphone, Reann! The country’s on a knife’s edge!”
“All of my official channels have failed. Do you propose to go and physically assault him? His guards will stop you before you get close.” Reannon’s tone dropped into something icy cold. “How will you stop him when you’re rotting in prison, Stacy?”
“I’m not giving up,” Stacy snapped, diverting her course to grab the door and fling it open. “You do what you want!” Once she was through, she flung the door closed. A picture, hung nearby, wobbled and fell to the floor. Reannon stared at the shards of glass, their lips pressed in a thin line.
-
It was devastatingly easy to approach the filming site. Stacy grabbed a toolkit, acted natural, and everyone thought she was just one of the technicians. No one had been warned to look out for a plucky little girl. And she had a nice smile. Crawford himself had told her that.
She didn’t go for him. He would be under guard; it would be difficult to get to him. She went for the equipment instead. A man in a hawaiian shirt turned in his chair to greet her, an easy grin on his face.
“Oh, hey. You here to help fix things up here? We’ve been having so many problems with playback.”
“Yeah, absolutely,” Stacy lied through her smile. “Let me just get in there.” She crouched, crawled in underneath the table with all the equipment. She could try and disable it safely, but there just wasn’t enough time - he’d be on in a minute. Taking out her pocket knife, she got to cutting lines. They sparked, and when the metal blade made contact with the wrong live wire, there was a distant crack and Stacy found herself impacting something.
“Oh my god,” she heard someone say, though the words were tinny and faint. “Oh shit, jesus christ, hold on, I can-”
“Holy shit, Ben, what happened in here?!”
“I don’t know, this girl came in and I thought she was here to help, like, you said they’d be here in five minutes -”
“You’re fucking lucky the repair crew’s on its way already! Shit, someone get a medic in here for the dead sparky!”
I’m not dead, Stacy wanted to say, I’m just really stupid. But the words wouldn’t come out. The mystery man said more things, and she thought she felt someone touching her, but…
-
And then she opened her eyes again, and she saw white ceilings and white walls. She turned her head, and saw Reannon, reading a book, seated in one of those comfortable chairs they have in the hospital for people who are waiting a long time for people to wake up -
Oh.
The hospital.
“Hey,” she said, and her voice sounded creaky and small to her.
“You’re awake,” said Reannon, and their voice sounded small too, so Stacy decided it must be her ears, because Reann never sounded small or uncertain.
“How’d it..?”
“A brief delay due to technical difficulties. He still got on screen. He made the call. They’re being chased down in the streets, now, and of course the police aren’t helping. He’ll probably press charges against you, too. You’re an idiot.” They said those last words as if it were a personal affront. To them, it probably was.
“Don’t care,” Stacy said, taking a slow and deliberate breath so she wouldn’t hurt her chest so badly. “Did something.”
“Action is not strictly preferable to inaction. There are times when it pays not to play, Stacy. You could have died. Were you not thinking at all?”
“Eh…”
“Of course you weren’t.” Reannon snapped their book shut, and laid it down on their lap. “You weren’t thinking of the people you would leave behind. Of the fight made so much more difficult without you. Of the projects left undone.”
“Not,” Stacy breathed, “that important.”
“You are oblivious.” Stacy knew it was her ears ringing, but she thought their voice almost sounded strained. “As usual, you leave my feelings unconsidered. I have stood with you on this from the beginning! We have… I have…”
Stacy squinted, tried to bring Reannon in focus, because she could swear by the sounds they were making that they were crying, and that was frankly impossible. Reannon didn’t cry.
“… Reann, you okay?”
“Of course not.” Reannon took a sharp breath inwards, rubbed at their eyes behind their glasses. “Forget it all. Just forget I said a word.”
Stacy tried to reach out, only to find that there were all manner of medical clips on her fingers. She huffed, dropping her hand back on the bed, and said nothing for a long moment.
In the end, she just said: “Sorry.”
“You don’t even know what you’re apologising for.” Reannon’s tone was formal again, with an edge of sharpness. “The apology owed is mine. You are injured. I should not force you to consider these things while you recover. As I said, please just forget it. There will be time enough to berate you.”
They stood, and Stacy looked over to them, alarm written on her face and in her words. “Don’t go.”
“All right,” they said, immediately, and sat again. “But I shan’t be much conversation. You should rest.”
And even though she had so much to think about - Crawford’s speech, Reannon’s revelation, her own precarious legal future - Stacy found it was easy to close her eyes and sleep again.
it’s literally impossible to have a normal discussion about media consumption on this website because every time you say ‘this website moralizes media consumption to a bizarre degree and treats what shows people watch like the be all end all of activism’ then people who think there’s nothing wrong with writing incest fanfiction start agreeing with you and every time you say ‘media consumption is not a morally neutral activity and fiction does impact reality, and there is certain media that you can’t ethically consume’ then people who call stephen universe ‘irredeemable media’ start agreeing with you
sorry for comment leaving but also imo also worth pointing out that “consumption” of media is not inherently ANYTHING, morally or value-wise, because consumption is not a single mode of engagement with a text. though of course this changes radically if you are saying “consumption” in the fandom-y sense (which I take this post to be doing, and in that case pretty firmly agree with the above statements in that context) then that’s a highly specific mode of readership compared to literally any other type of engagement.
like the goodness or badness of a work does not rub off on you by virtue of it being absorbed through your eyeballs, it’s very much a matter of what you bring to the table as an Active Participant and how you are choosing to interpret or understand or analyze its meaning as a text. there are absolutely terrible immoral things in this world that offer meaningful lessons by nature of their terribleness, and consuming these things is not itselfan unethical act (far from it), but the moral and intellectual value of that consumption is entirely dependent on your own engagement as a reader and the types of knowledge you’re seeking in those texts.
which is to say that studying old nazi propaganda is an incredibly effective tool for understanding history and combatting the resurgence of similar reactionary movements, although these pieces of propaganda can just as easily be used to further the very same reactionary movements—and it’s entirely dependent on people’s modes of engagement, because “consumption” is not a uniform or unilateral act. which is ALSO to say that reading and writing incest fanfiction as a hobby is not a particularly constructive or useful mode of engagement (and is in fact downright harmful and weird), so it’s absolutely accurate to delineate this specific phenomenon as bad (or “unethical”) consumption, lol.
[clutches my pearls]Trans people in 1921?!??! But I thought trans people were trendof today’s youth!
I’d like to add my great great aunt Flora!
Y'all wanna know why we don’t see or hear about trans people from that era?
That’s because that picture was taken at what is known in its native language as Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, it is the place where the first trans healthcare was developed, where the term transsexual was coined.
Do you want to know what happened to the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft?
It was the victim of the very first Nazi book burning. Their teachings were outlawed and their books destroyed. Their leaders - such as Magnus Hirschfeld - were criminalized and exiled, if not outright murdered.
The fascists exterminated not just a generation of trans people, but they erased our history from the books almost entirely. It took us almost a century to get back to where we are now.
We’ve always been here, but our future is not guaranteed. We have to fight for our survival, because it’s happening again.
![socialistexan:emdots:thattallnerdybean:[clutches my pearls] Trans people in 1921?!??! But I thought](https://64.media.tumblr.com/995b65701b7602bc1e4061c13204950c/tumblr_ot75q086AK1s9c6nao1_1280.jpg "socialistexan:emdots:thattallnerdybean:[clutches my pearls] Trans people in 1921?!??! But I thought")
