In light of recent events, here is a picture of Spock nerve pinching the SHIT out of some nazi scum.
There is more to this than ‘Spock takes out a Nazi’. Shatner and Nimoy are Jewish. They specifically reqired that Spock and Kirk had to defeat the Nazis. This was just about 25 years after the Holocaust. It was still fresh in everyone’s memory. This episode was a condemnation of the Nazi party and sympathizers. It wasn’t some half assed Nazi AU shows like to so much. This was a dialog.
‘Professional organizers and veteran activists have strategies for staying sane during a long fight. If you’re serious about sticking it out in the picket lines for the duration of the Trump presidency, you’re going to have to learn these strategies or else burn out in the first six months.’
Even if your activism is just trying to stay aware, in one piece and supporting the people out there working their butts off, you may need this.
This is something I just shared on FB about my experiences as a patient escort. Just thought I’d put it on here too.
Alright y’all. Prepare for a long post, but one you should read.
Some of you know, but some of you don’t, that I volunteer at Planned Parenthood about twice a month. My official title is Volunteer Clinic Escort. My role is to safely get patients and family into the clinic safely, with privacy, and with a friendly face. Not all Planned Parenthoods (PP) have these, but the clinic where I volunteer does because we have loud, abrasive, volatile, threatening, verbally abusive and dishonest anti-choice protesters who harass people in the clinic. I would like to tell you about my experiences with them and with patients who talk to me as I stand outside with my umbrella and vest.
(I would like to note that this is not the place to tell me that abortion is wrong, that I should not support PP, that I need to stop what I’m doing. I’ve heard every argument before. In fact, I’ve had every arguement screamed in my face. You’re welcome to your opinion, but I will not be acknowledging it on here, and I ask that others ignore dissenters too. This post isn’t about me and why you think I’m wrong. It’s about what I see every time I volunteer.)
When I am volunteering, I am outside and often have patients and family members talk with me. I’m obviously not there to counsel or to offer advice medically one way or another, but I am a friendly ear and people just need to talk sometimes. Also, when volunteering, patients entering the clinic are verbally harassed by the anti choice protesters almost immediately and, while we don’t encourage it, they often yell back. The protesters don’t listen.
On my very first day, I had a person head into the clinic. As I smiled to her and went to get the door, an anti-choice protester (ACP) yelled “Mama! Don’t kill your baby!” The patient immediately responded tearfully “my baby is dead. My baby is falling out of me right now. I didn’t do anything.” The ACP, without missing a beat, screamed back through her child-sized megaphone “No he isn’t! Your doctor lied to you! These murderers just want your money!” I ushered in the patient as gently as I could while my co-volunteer told her kindly that those people didn’t matter and that in a week they wouldn’t even remember what they heard here.
In the year and a half I’ve been doing this, we have had a ACP sneak into the clinic and threaten to burn the place down. The police did nothing. We had two other ACPs try and enter the clinic to tell patients they would adopt their babies. We told them to get off the property and when they didn’t, we called the police. Eventually the ACP returned to the narrow strip of lawn they stand on at the edge of the parking lot, and luckily so, because the police never showed again.
My clinic, luckily, has never faced extreme violence while I was there. But other PP and health care clinics are not so lucky. They are burned down, have bombs planted, have clinic escorts and workers physically harmed.
They are shot at and three people die.
I have had patients tell me that they will be killed by their partner if they have an abortion. I have been told that their partner will kill them if they DON’T have one. I’ve been told how people with physical disabilities cannot carry a child without side effects so severe they may not survive. I’ve had patients explain that their mental health is at risk if they go through with the pregnancy. I’ve had patients come in with a wanted pregnancy that ended in miscarriage and they needed PPs help to safely remove the tissue. I’ve seen people come in who admit to being addicted to drugs and know they cannot go through this pregnancy.
Planned Parenthood helped all these people, not just with medical care, but with helping abused patients find help to escape violent partners. Helping those who want to conceive find fertility doctors. Helping drug addicts find resources to become healthy.
All the while, the ACP stand outside, screaming and hollering, telling women that they are murderers and whores and that they will burn for murdering their babies. But it’s ok, they do it out of love. They scream at these people and tell them awful things and then beg to have the patient come talk with them.
They don’t see the hypocrisy.
It is a rule to not engage with the ACP at all. In the year and a half I’ve been doing this, I’ve said maybe a total of 50 words to the group, all of which are some form of “you are on our property, step back right now.” I may not engage them, but we can make eye contact and make them believe we are listening. We do this so the ACP begins shouting at me, and not a patient getting air outside. I would much rather be shouted at than have them scream at a patient.
When I am being yelled at, I have been called: a murderer, a nazi, a slavery supporter, a bad mother, a bad wife (they do not know if I am married or if I have children), a witch, a lesbian, a liberal, a member of satan’s army, a Muslim lover, a bitch, a slut, and evil. Some of these things are true and some are perfectly fine things to be, but to the ACP they are all bad.
Sometimes we have patient partners come talk to the protesters. They try and explain to the ACP why they are there with their partner. I’ve heard them tell the ACP every single reason, and every single time, the protesters still tell them they are wrong and a bad father and a supporter of Satan. Every. Time. And they call this love.
Since Trump took office, one of his first orders signed was a Global Gag Rule. People thought that this rule meant that no US money would go to pay for abortions overseas, but in fact, US funds have never paid for abortions and haven’t since 1973. Even in the US, because of the Hyde Amendment, no federal funding goes to pay for abortions.
What this gag rule now does, however, is prevent money from going to clinics that even mention abortion as a method of family planning. They don’t have to perform them. If they are mentioned at all in pamphlets or classes, they lose foreign aid money. This means that now they can’t provide birth control, wellness checks, prenatal care, or classes.
This will cause unwanted pregnancies. This will cause people to seek out abortions, often in unsafe condition.
This will cause people to die.
Roughly 1/3 people with a uterus will have an abortion in their life. I haven’t spoken to everyone who has had one, but I’ve spoken to more than most. No one gets an abortion out of malice. No one gets an abortion just to end the life of a fetus, just for kicks. No. One.
Planned Parenthood provides important health services, including abortion. They do this despite the risk of physical bodily harm, every day. People like myself stand outside PP to protect patients because it is important.
We. Will. Not. Stand. Down.
I will continue to volunteer, even though since Trump was elected, the ACP have gotten more and more aggressive in their tactics, since they believe Trump supports their actions. I will continue to walk these patients inside, to get help, because it is important and right. I will continue to fight Trump the slew of anti choice people supporting him. I will continue to support choice even though I know I will lose friends and will face hatred from people I know.
Planned Parenthood is important, and we will not stand down.
I went into some buildings and you heard the boos and the racial remarks but that kinda geared me up. I was called the N-word so many times that I thought it was a compliment, you know (laughs) So I just went out and played. […] They had never seen a black man on the ice. I just told myself: “Just go out and play and try to represent the hockey club at the best of your ability. And if the fans can’t see that then don’t worry about it.” I am a black man. I know when I look in the mirror that I am a black man. Nobody needs to tell me that. — Willie O’Ree, who became in 1958 the first black player in the National Hockey League
When applied to a family, the gaslight treatment is a special form of dysfunction. It happens when you, a child, receive messages or encounter experiences within the family which are deeply contradictory. Messages which are opposing and conflicting; experiences which can’t both be true. When you can’t make sense of something, it’s natural to apply the only possible answer:
“Something is wrong with me.”
Today, scores of children are growing up under a gaslight of their own. And scores of adults are living their lives baffled by what went on in their families, having grown up thinking that they, not their families, are crazy.
I have seen gaslighting cause personality disorders, depression, anxiety, and a host of other lifelong struggles. Receiving contradictory messages that don’t make sense can shake the very ground that a child walks on.
The Four Types of Child Gaslighting:
1. The Double-Bind Parent: This type was first identified by Gregory Bateson in 1956. The double-bind mother has been linked by research to the development of schizophrenia and Borderline Personality Disorder. This type of parent goes back and forth unpredictably between enveloping (perhaps smothering) the child with love and coldly rejecting him.
The Message: You are nothing. You are everything. Nothing is real. You are not real.
The Gaslight Effect: As an adult, you don’t trust yourself, your validity as a human being, your feelings, or your perceptions. Nothing seems real. You stand on shaky ground. You have great difficulty trusting that anyone means what they say. It’s extremely hard to rely on yourself or anyone else.
2. The Unpredictable, Contradictory Parent: Here, your parent might react to the same situation drastically differently at different times or on different days, based on factors that are not visible to you. For example a parent who is under the influence of alcohol or drugs one day and not the next; a parent who is manic at times, and depressed other times, or a parent who is extremely emotionally unstable. Whatever the reason for the parent’s opposing behaviors, you, the innocent child, know only that your parent flies into a rage one moment and is calm and seems normal the next.
The Message: You are on shaky ground. Anything can happen at any time. No one makes sense.
The Gaslight Effect: You don’t trust your own ability to read or understand people; you have difficulty managing and understanding your own emotions, and those of others. You struggle to trust anyone, including yourself.
3. The Appearance-Conscious Family: In these families, style always trumps substance. All must look good, or maybe even perfect, especially when it’s not. There’s little room for the mistakes, pain, or natural human shortcomings of the family members. The emphasis is on presenting the image of the ideal family. Here, you experience a family which appears perfect from the outside, but which is quite imperfect, or even severely dysfunctional, on the inside. This can stem from Achievement / Perfection focused parents (as described in Running on Empty), or from narcissistic parents.
The Message: You must be perfect. Natural human flaws, mistakes, and weaknesses must be hidden and ignored. You are not allowed to be a regular human being.
The Gaslight Effect: You feel deeply ashamed of yourself and your basic humanness. You ignore your own feelings and your own pain because you don’t believe it’s real, or that it matters. You tend to see and focus on only the positive things in your life, which fit into a particular template. You are extremely hard on yourself for making mistakes, or you put them out of your mind and simply pretend they didn’t happen. You may be missing out on the most important parts of life which make it worthwhile: the messy, real world of intimacy, relationships and emotion.
4. The Emotionally Neglectful Family (CEN): In this family, your physical needs may be met just fine. But your emotional needs are ignored. No one notices what the children are feeling. The language of emotion is not used in the home. “Don’t cry,” “Suck it up,” “Don’t be so sensitive,” are frequently uttered by the CEN parent. The most basic, primary part of what makes you you (your emotional self) is treated as a burden or non-existent.
The Message: Your feelings and needs are bad and a burden to others. Keep them hidden. Don’t rely on others, and don’t need anything. You don’t matter.
The Gaslight Effect: You have been trained to deny the most deeply personal, biological part of who you are, your emotions, and you have dutifully pushed them out of sight and out of mind. Now, you live your life with a deeply ingrained feeling that you are missing something that other people have. You feel empty or numb at times. You don’t trust yourself or your judgments because you lack your emotions to guide you. Your connections to others are one-way or lack emotional depth. Even if you are surrounded by people, deep down you feel alone. None of it makes any sense to you.
Were you born under the gaslight? If so, you are not alone. You are not invalid or crazy or wrong. it’s vital to realize that you have been, by definition, deeply invalidated. But “invalidated” and “invalid” are not the same. “Invalidated” is an action, and “invalid” is a state of mind. You can’t change what your parents did and didn’t do, but you can change your state of mind.
In May 1939, as the Nazis were tightening their chokehold on Europe, the United States government rejected the SS St. Louis, a German passenger vessel carrying 937 refugees who were trying to dock at the Port of Miami.
Almost all of those refugees were Jews fleeing violence in Germany and Eastern Europe, according to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. The ship was eventually forced to return to Europe, where 254 of its passengers were killed.
On Friday, to commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a pair of Jewish scholars — Russel Neiss and Charlie Schwartz — started tweeting the names of the people who were aboard the SS St. Louis, under the handle @Stl_Manifest. Read more
“Knowing that they were losing “valuable product” due to their slaves’ propensity to swim, slave owners began taking drastic steps to protect their property. One of these steps was to instill a fear of the water by dunking disobedient slaves in water until they nearly drowned and by creating fear through stories of creatures living in the water. Thus it didn’t take long to excise or destroy the West African swimming tradition from African- American culture. The Jim Crow laws that were enacted after The Civil War prohibited blacks from the popular seaside resorts in places like Atlantic City, N.J. and Revere Beach, Mass. And by the 20th Century, as the swimming pool began to gain in popularity in the United States, the color line prohibited blacks from enjoying this pleasant recreational skill.
In addition, self-segregation also played a role in limiting those of African ancestry from getting in the water. I remember my Aunt saying to stay away from the pool because, “black folk don’t swim.””
Next time you hear someone ask questions like, “Why don’t black people swim?” Or “Why are so many black people afraid of dogs?” And, “Why are there do so many black people live in poverty?”…..let ‘em know that those aren’t coincidences. These things didn’t just happen naturally, all on their own. There’s a reason for it, and you don’t have to be an historian to know they’re all interconnected through slavery, endemic racism and persistently racist cultural norms.
this years holocaust remembrance day is very important, given the current political climate. take today to remember the horrifying acts committed against jewish and romani people. take today to recognize the beginning of those same acts forming against PoC in america today. take today to resist those in power however you see fit, and after today, dont stop resisting. i am a jew still personally affected by the holocaust even 2 generations later. every jew is affected by the shoah, but there is a special pain to know what happened to your own family. or worse, not knowing what happened to the unknown people you see in old family photographs. we as a people will never be the same. remember the holocaust today. dont let this happen again.
non-jews are absolutely allowed/encouraged to reblog this
Since there are no date stamps on tumblr I wanted to add that Holocaust Remembrance Day is today. Jan 27th.
Steel Phoenix Studios 