Even in the middle of a pandemic Congress is still trying to strangle USPS to death. Lord.
For anyone that’s unaware on how Congress has tried to bleed the USPS dry for decades to benefit private shipping corporations and b/c it was an example of the Government actually working, here you go:
Also – this would really screw up the drive for Vote by Mail, which people are trying to get implemented for the November presidential election. Several GOP politicians, including the president*, have made outright statements recently saying that they oppose universal Vote by Mail (which already happens smoothly and successfully in some states, such as OR), because “Republicans would never win another election”.
But, further – the USPS employs over half a million people. It hires a lot of POC, and a lot of veterans. It has decent wages and benefits.
You know - YOU KNOW - that if the USPS is privatized, and a company such as Amazon takes over, they will pay workers minimum wage, make sure to avoid giving benefits, and treat them like dirt. (Just look around for all the horror stories that exist right now about how Amazon delivery drivers are treated by the company.)
And this will fuck over everyone who has to use the mail to pay bills or rent. Imagine if, instead of paying 55 cents to mail your rent, you have to pay $2. And that happens with everything you want to mail, no matter how small it is. It will fuck over all the small crafters out there with home businesses who rely on the reasonable shipping rates that USPS offers. It will also fuck up the amount you pay for shipping for a lot of other things, because companies like UPS and FedEx engage in “last mile” deals with the USPS, where they pay USPS to deliver packages locally, so that FedEx and UPS drivers don’t always have to visit every single location. That saves those companies money, which helps to lower their overall shipping costs. If they go to having to deliver ALL their packages (or paying a private company for it, who charges more), the cost of all shipping will go up.
I know I keep repeating this but:
CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVES. CALL YOUR SENATORS.
Even if they are GOP assholes who won’t listen. Call, or write. Even (some) GOP assholes can become afraid of public pressure. There are scripts out there to follow, if you have social anxiety about phoning, or don’t know what to write.
I know the list of what you need to call about is getting long. I know it’s scary. I’m not wild about it myself. But SO MUCH is going on right now, and we can’t let some of these issues fall through the cracks just because Congress is juggling a lot of equally important issues. REMIND THEM. Make your voice heard!
this would really screw up the drive for Vote by Mail, which people are trying to get implemented for the November presidential election. Several GOP politicians, including the president*, have made outright statements recently saying that they oppose universal Vote by Mail (which already happens smoothly and successfully in some states, such as OR), because “Republicans would never win another election”.
What makes this photograph remarkable is you see a group of people on stage perfectly willing to let children die for money being confronted by someone who is not. That is absolutely what is happening in this picture.
America is lost. And as long as people keep on believing that their freedom depends on the tea leaf interpretation of late 18th century document written by pre industrial rich landed white men for the benefit of pre industrial rich landed white men, then it’s doomed
Coach Kerr said it all. The list of mass shootings is too long; 1,000s murdered.
Moment of silence. Thoughts & prayers. Rinse. Repeat. Nothing changes.
We’re not safe at school, work, houses of worship, malls, grocery stores & movie theaters. 27 school shootings have taken place so far this year. The U.S. has surpassed 200 mass shootings this year
i really don’t want to hear the opinions/hot takes from non-americans (especially white non-americans) about any of the mass shootings or other instances of gun violence that happen here. i’ve never heard anyone say anything that was remotely useful or insightful. the people who can do anything aren’t going to see your posts. the ones who are going to see them are well-aware –and now feeling condescended to in addition to feeling powerless and afraid.
When the USA makes up a twentieth of the world’s population but a quarter of the world’s prison population with a disproportionate number of black inmates and legal prison labor, it’s quite obvious that the police never abandoned their roots as slave catchers.
The jokes keep coming from places where fascism is also on the rise and threatening the lives of the children there. When will everyone realize that all of us regular people are up against the same enemy no matter what our disparate country’s politicians and militaries are doing?
Obsessed with how schools in the United States would rather create high level security measures that would likely result in an even stronger school to prison pipeline by conditioning than just…. put that energy towards guns
“I overheard a lady at work say "I don’t see why they don’t put more law enforcement at schools to prevent this”, and in that moment I knew she had never gone to a school district that had to fire its on campus cop bc he had sexual relationships with a student. Nor gone to a school where the cops would harass students.“
White people going on shooting rampages against poc resulting in higher police presence which does nothing but result in further harassment of poc. Fascinating how that works out it’s almost almostas if the entire system is rigged.
Many of these school shootings happened with police present. Uvalde was one of them.
Yeah, and apparently the heavily armed police in Uvalde just sat on their asses while teachers were taking bullets trying to protect the kids.
You know that guy Jake Angeli from the storming of the capitol?
This guy? Yeah?
I think he’s a knobhead but his look is pretty sick. Well look at all his tattoos. They all have a Norse mythology theme, certainly the ones over his heart ie ‘paganism’.
How much of a radical Christian can you be with tattoos to another religion on full display? It just seems oddly inconsistent. ♂️
I have two thoughts that coexist, though they may seem contradictory at first glance.
The first thought: I will never tell a black person, disabled person, person of color, or transgender person that they are wrong when they say, “Both political parties are bad.”
Frankly, they’re right. The terrible things that white, cisgender, able-bodied people are afraid of right now have been the reality for marginalized people in the United States for centuries. Lack of access to healthcare, including abortions. Lack of access to employment, income, and housing. Lack of support in the criminal justice system; being criminalized for existing. Lack of freedom to vote, to gather, to live where they want, to say what they want. This has been the case when Democrats are in charge and when Republicans are in charge. Period.
Therefore, when marginalized people - and my list above is not an all-inclusive list - say that they cannot support either political party, I do not fault them. I do not tell them they are wrong, and I respect their decisions regarding their activism and political action, or lack thereof.
The second thought: I wholeheartedly believe that when you do not belong to those targeted groups, when you have the freedom and ability to vote, to speak and be heard, to raise money, to go where you want and live where you want, to escape the criminal justice system with your life intact - and you base your lack of political action in a “both parties are bad, so I refuse to vote for either of them” philosophy… you are not doing the right thing. You are causing harm. You are wasting your privilege instead of putting it to good use. Whether you realize it or not, you are sitting comfortably on your moral high ground, flaunting the fact that you will be able to survive bigoted policies pushed through by emboldened elected officials at every level. There would not be such terrible federal court cases if our local judges knew we would punish them for even showing interest in starting such despicable work.
The work of activism is both the work of acknowledging that the system is inherently harmful and protesting its very existence, and also the work of doing everything you can within the system to stall the people who desire and enable that harm. There is value in both the revolution and the incremental labor. In fact, I believe both are necessary, if we are to save this nation.
To the youth that feel like their voices aren’t being heard,
Please don’t give up. I know that it is frustrating to be screaming at the top of your lungs and to be treated as though your words are still not loud enough to matter. I know that you are scared, that you are dying, and it still doesn’t seem to be enough to create change. I know that it is disheartening, it is life changing, it is the type of thing that hardens hearts and will shape a generation.
Please don’t let it shape you into a generation that thinks they can’t change things. Please don’t let it shape you into a generation that thinks they do not matter or that no matter what you say, how well you say it or the size of the stage in which you give your speech it will not be enough to change hearts, minds or laws. It is enough, and our time as the youth of this country will come. I beg of you to stay strong, to keep talking and organizing. I beg of you to persevere and let that be the trademark of your generation.
You are enough and you are changing minds and hearts, soon it will be enough to change laws and policies. Keep going. We believe you can do this and we support you.
All my love,
A millenial who couldn’t be prouder of this country’s teenagers in light of recent events.
If you think these “anti drag” pushes aren’t going to be used against trans people for just existing in public, you really really need to read up on the vice laws which caused Stonewall.
If you think Stonewall was only trans women and transmascs/butches/trans men weren’t arrested during the leadup to the riot, you need to read up on who was there, who was arrested, and why.
They are coming for all of us. Your supposed respectability will not save you. We will survive this if we stick together, and only if.
From the Wikipedia page for Stonewall (warning for sexual assault mention):
The raid did not go as planned. Standard procedure was to line up the patrons, check their identification and have female police officers take customers dressed as women to the bathroom to verify their sex, upon which any people appearing to be physically male and dressed as women would be arrested. Those dressed as women that night refused to go with the officers. Men in line began to refuse to produce their identification. The police decided to take everyone present to the police station, after separating those suspected of cross-dressing in a room in the back of the bar. Both patrons and police recalled that a sense of discomfort spread very quickly, spurred by police who began to assault some of the lesbians by “feeling some of them up inappropriately” while frisking them.
Literally you need to defend men in dresses to fight against transphobia, period. The hate comes from the same root.
Attacking drag is attacking the right to present how you chose. And legislation against it will be weaponized against everyone, Cis, Trans, and otherwise.
Drag is a product of queer culture, and includes many many trans people in addition to GNC cis people.
Yes, you need to include Bianca Del Rio wearing a dress and makeup as part of her comedy, yes, you need to include a cis man who cross-dresses because it turns him on. As soon as you make it okay to go after one single group for wearing clothing that “doesn’t match” their assigned sex or perceived gender, its open season to attack everyone for their presentation.
Yes, there are transphobic and misogynist drag performers. The whole category of art is not, and tons and tons of trans people participate in drag and drag is what cracked their egg.
Also, it’s wrong to suppress anyone’s presentation, whether they are cis, trans, woman, man, non-binary, gay, straight, anything. I don’t care how they identify. If Trixie Mattel doing her thing makes you dysphoric, fine, don’t watch her. But it’s not wrong. It’s not grooming. It’s not anything wildly different from a cast member at Disneyland dressed as Snow White.
This is utterly unconscionable, and there’s a reason this is all getting pushed during Pride. If things like this start to come back, it leads back into the old bad “three articles of clothing from the "correct” gender" days.
Y'all wonder why I keep beating the same drum over and over, well.
To be clear, this legislator is announcing an intention to introduce legislation. That is not the same as a law being passed or the governor making an executive order. Like, this is very bad. For sure. But it is something that can be fought before it is put into actual policy.
I feel like all of the posts I have seen about this are treating it like it’s the same as the executive order to treat gender affirming care as child abuse. This is absolutely a result of that, but it doesn’t yet have the power that abbott had when he just made a decision to destroy families.
Hi, y'all are behind the power curve on this. There was backlash against “drag queen story time” in public libraries dating back 4 or 5 years. This was literally just drag queens reading children’s books to children in drag. That’s it. Public libraries in Texas and many other states had their funding cut, had to cancel the events because of bomb threats, and were explicitly legislated against. I think some actually ended up closing down over it. Over drag queens reading age-appropriate books out loud to kids because they were in drag. This is happening, now. This has *been* happening.
Would you like me to post pictures of my spouse at the counterprotest in support of our local drag storytime in 2018 (I had the flu, so I missed it) so you stop condescending about this?
I fucking know. Clearly a lot of people don’t, if you read the notes.
Talking about something which continues to happen in the context of how it is currently escalating doesn’t mean we don’t know that it’s been happening. Like, the original post is specifically talking about how these pushes will affect a broad spectrum of ppl (bc a lot of the puriteens think that banning drag is properly banning “sexual content”), not saying “this is new.”
Fuckingexhausting.
Not to add to the alarm but I want to say this isn’t just happening in Texas:
I want to say my family went to drag brunch in Tampa in 2016, because there’s a famous drag restaurant chain that used to be downtown. It was popular, it was chill and campy and funny, families were everywhere, there was absolutely nothing dangerous or harmful to kids. But now the right want taking your kids to brunch there a child abuse charge that get your kids removed.
They want to criminalize all forms of queer expression, as child abuse.
I strongly suggest, my dearest friends, that if you have anything to spare that you consider making care packages for your elderly friends and neighbors. Be safe, of course. Be considerate and courteous. There’s still an illness rampant in the streets. But consider how difficult it is for them to get out to stores and if they are able, how naked and bare they are.
If you have a roll of TP you can afford to part with (you can, unless you’re a twat who’s wiping your ass with half a roll of TP every time you drop a deuce), add that to the pack. If you have a couple cans of protein – tuna, pork and beans, chicken, salmon, etc – put that in there. Sanitary pads can be used by anyone who has incontinence, add two or three (especially if they’re overnights or heavys). Any sort of sanitizing products, portion it into a ziploc or a small bottle and share. A couple bottles of water. Napkins you might be hoarding in your glove compartment, if you have a car.
People are afraid. The elderly are often alone, with very few people to rely on. We shouldn’t have to be. Remember kindness.
