I’m loving everyone’s photos of the women’s marches today. It’s particularly awesome to see that so many older women are there – it speaks both to how widespread the sentiment is, and to everyone’s confidence that the protests are and will remain peaceful. (There will likely be a small patch or two of broken windows, as there were yesterday. Some people love to make trouble for its own sake. Ignore them.) The protests are officially happening on all seven continents. (Though sadly I have yet to see photos from Antarctica.) I wish I could be there with y’all.
I predict – with 100% confidence – that the orange muppet will do or say something outrageous in an attempt to get the headlines back on himself. It’ll probably happen as soon as the march is done, maaaybe as late as tomorrow, but I doubt it.
Don’t be scared. Expect it, know that it’s deliberately as dramatic and extreme as possible. He’s had a while to plan it, it’ll be the first major thing he does in office. It’ll also set the tone for everything that comes afterwards, both in terms of what he does and how people will react to him.
The wise choice in his shoes would be to do something showy, but
entirely positive – announce that he’s saved more jobs or some such.
Make it look like he’s already doing good things and the protestors are
all fools to not be supportive of him. But I have money that says that
he doesn’t.
It’s a great example of how easily he’s manipulated – he can’t stand not being praised, or barring that at least being the center of attention, so one protest will make him start his administration by being vitriolic instead of unifying.
Trump plans to cut the National Endowment for the Arts so now more than ever keep artists, the theatre community and creators in your thoughts and support them whenever you can.
The C.W.H.L. was created in the back room of a Toronto restaurant by former players from the National Women’s Hockey League in Canada (not to be confused with the American N.W.H.L.). That league failed in the face of ownership and financial disputes.
“I don’t think when we first started we were going to get past one year,” said Sami Jo Small, a founding member of the C.W.H.L., who competed in the 1998 Olympics and still plays for the Toronto Furies.
Early on, the C.W.H.L.’s foundation was unstable at times, and growth was uncertain. But under the leadership of Commissioner Brenda Andress, the C.W.H.L. never wavered in its plan for slow but steady advancements, and in recent years, a rise in sponsorships and audience in Canada has the league closer to its goal.
I am proud of the work I’ve done as part of theWomen’s March policy table – a collection of women and folk engaged in crucial feminist, racial and social justice work across various intersections in our country. I helped draft the vision and I wrote the line “…and we stand in solidarity with sex workers’ rights movements.” It is not a statement that is controversial to me because as a trans woman of color who grew up in low-income communities and who advocates, resists, dreams and writes alongside these communities, I know that underground economies are essential parts of the lived realities of women and folk. I know sex work to be work. It’s not something I need to tiptoe around. It’s not a radical statement. It’s a fact. My work and my feminism rejects respectability politics, whorephobia, slut-shaming and the misconception that sex workers, or folks engaged in the sex trades by choice or circumstance, need to be saved, that they are colluding with the patriarchy by “selling their bodies.” I reject the continual erasure of sex workers from our feminisms because we continue to conflate sex work with the brutal reality of coercion and trafficking. I reject the policing within and outside women’s movements that shames, scapegoats, rejects, erases and shuns sex workers. I cannot speak to the internal conflicts at the Women’s March that have led to the erasure of the line I wrote for our collective vision but I have been assured that the line will remain in OUR document. The conflicts that may have led to its temporary editing will not leave until we, as feminists, respect THE rights of every woman and person to do what they want with their body and their lives. We will not be free until those most marginalized, most policed, most ridiculed, pushed out and judged are centered. There are no throwaway people, and I hope every sex worker who has felt shamed by this momentarily erasure shows up to their local March and holds the collective accountable to our vast, diverse, complicated realities.
Y’all might remember that I had you guys sending postcards to Gus and Charlie, because Gus was fighting cancer, and losing kind of badly. Gus was 7 years old when he died on September 29th, just prior to what would have been his 8th birthday.
My friend Sasha held her son as he died and then carried him to a hospital, so that at some point in the future no parent will have to deal with this. In his death, Gus may have provided answers to the questions his incredibly rare and deadly form of cancer brings to the table.
Gus was only able to make to almost-but-not-quite 8 years old because of the ACA. He was able to experience things and live as full a life as possible and learn about dinosaurs and go to school (he was diagnosed young, prior to even entering school) and make friends – because of the ACA. His mother and father were only able to afford a service and cremation because his ACA-compliant insurance paid the bulk of the bill. They were only able to continue financially caring for their youngest son Charlie (who just turned 7 years old…yesterday, I think) and keep themselves in food and housing rather than going bankrupt…because of the fucking Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.
With her permission, I have posted this here, because I want people to know exactly how badly Republicans will be screwing children, and their grieving parents, over if they repeal the ACA.
For Gus, who never made it to 8; for Sasha and her husband, who lost their son; for Charlie, who lost his brother –
For all of the other parents and lost children who are and were in the same boat –
We can’t let Republicans do this. We need to step up to the plate. Because they – Sasha and Gus and everyone like them – can’t.
only if you write mine on child poverty in this country
“housing in Auckland is shit, expensive and basically a crime against the poor”word limits are just a maximum right, it can be that short?
– Fantail
EDIT: here’s paragraph two:
betta-ray-bill replied: “also our PM is full of shit and can’t make up his mind as to whether there is or isn’t a housing crisis on a week to week basis”
Steel Phoenix Studios 