Woof, This Week [She Types On A Tuesday]
Poppets. good morning! May your next few hours be filled with great coffee, good conversation, and non-mediocre social media binging.
This doesn't fit with the rest of today's reading, but the leaders of Republicans for Choice, a long-standing org within the party working on pro-choice women’s health issues, announced their departure from the GOP via New York Times editorial (so you can maybe guess which audience they are targeting.) They say they are leaving because their party is “beholden to the social extremists who (are) winning primaries in our broken, gerrymandered electoral system.” They state that the GOP ignores the group’s basic premise that “True fiscal conservatives should embrace family planning because it reduces poverty, increases educational attainment and work force competitiveness, improves health and provides people the opportunity to make educated moral choices,” and that the "big tent" that once welcomed them is collapsing. I would argue that 30 years of GOP policy - which the authors point out in the piece - started bringing down that tent long ago, but hey, I hope they and other socially liberal Republicans can find a way to resist.
[Queue awkward transition...] Speaking of the influence of social extremists, this is so not fine: The American Red Cross has offered to come and inspect the conditions migrants are being held in across the country, but they have not been granted permission. So they haven’t inspected. That's right. In America, in 2018, the American Red Cross has not inspected inspected the camps these migrants are being held in.
Yes, we've entered a particularly terrible moment. From The Irish Times:
“Fascism doesn’t arise suddenly in an existing democracy. It is not easy to get people to give up their ideas of freedom and civility. You have to do trial runs that, if they are done well, serve two purposes. They get people used to something they may initially recoil from; and they allow you to refine and calibrate. This is what is happening now and we would be fools not to see it.”
Right now, it’s really easy to become news-blind and want to turn away. But as Mister Rogers says, we should look for the helpers: through a group called Torn Apart, librarians are using library research science to find, document and share the locations of ICE detention centers across the country. Using “government immigration records, tax forms, job listings, Facebook pages,” they “locate the detention centers that could be holding these children.” So whether your resistance is in the streets, or in the “digital humanities,” there's always a way to stand-up and speak out.
And in case the above is soul-crushing - you know, because all of this is certainly soul-crushing - my Auntie Louise passed on this calming video of a sand pendulum. So turn off your sound, put that on loop and take a few deep breaths, mmmkay? Then get to work.