the whole “i used to be a teen who hated authority only to grow up to become the authority that hates teens” is a bad bad thing that practically every other generation has fallen into and we all need to make an extremely conscious effort not to repeat the fucking pattern
Studies have shown that the shift starts to happen around age 30. If you’re close to that, make a conscious effort to be open to and accepting of younger people. I’m 31 and paying close attention to how I react to young people and new trends and shit and trying to keep myself from developing those thought patterns.
ultimately i think kindness is the most radical thing you can do with your pain and your anger. it’s like, you take everything awful that’s ever been done to you, and you throw it back in the world’s teeth, and you say no, fuck you, i’m not going to take this. you say this is unacceptable. you say that shit stops with me.
humans are fucking terrible and this awful world we live in will fucking kill you but if you are kind, if you are brave and clever and try really hard, you can defy it. you can impose on this bleak and monstrous structure something beautiful. even if it’s temporary. even if it doesn’t heal anything inside you that’s been hurt.
i’m gonna sleep and i’m gonna wake up and i swear by everything in this deadly horrible universe i’m gonna make someone happy.
i’ve seen a number of comments and tags where people feel that they must swallow or repress their anger in order to engage in kindness. that is not at all what i am recommending here. radical kindness is an expression of anger. it is not passive. it is not repressive. it does not require you, in any way, to forgive those that have fucked you up. it does not require you to be quiet.
it just requires that you be kind. viciously. vengefully. you fight back. you plant flowers. give to charity. play games. pet someone’s dog. scream into the dark. paint and write and dance, tell jokes, sing songs, bake cookies. you have been hurt and you don’t have to deny that hurt. you just have to recognize it in other people, and take their hand, and say: no more. enough. fuck this. no more.
have a cookie.
i will say this again: we are all going to die. the universe is enormous and almost entirely empty. to be kind to each other is the most incredible act of defiance against the dark that i can imagine.
i will say this again: we are all going to die. the universe is enormous and almost entirely empty. to be kind to each other is the most incredible act of defiance against the dark that i can imagine.
3. Two good quotes by Kurt Vonnegut: “Hello babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the
winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. On the outside, babies, you’ve
got a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of,
babies-“God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
And: “Be soft. Do not let the world make you hard. Do
not let pain make you hate. Do not let the bitterness steal your
sweetness. Take pride that even though the rest of the world may
disagree, you still believe it to be a beautiful place.”
#hopepunk
“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal… To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
-Rebecca Solnit; Hope in the Dark
I really needed this right now. Thank you
Indeed.
I think it’s important to clarify that radical kindness doesn’t mean you have to be kind to your abusers, or to asshole men in power (like the orange one or his horrible judge). It’s not biting your tongue, smiling, and allowing yourself to be mistreated in order to fulfill some sort of fucked up ideal of “the high road” or whatever. It’s refusing to allow anyone else to be mistreated without comment. It’s extending kindness to other survivors and other folks facing oppression, even when that oppression is different than the kind you face. The folks in charge want us broken down into easily-controlled bite-size chunks. Empathy, compassion, communication, cooperation, collaboration – these are kindness, and they are powerful, radical tools that we can use to help one another heal and to build our communities into something stronger and better.
You know just how long 2018 has been? You know how long?
Did you even remember there was an Olympic games this year? Because I didn’t. I thought oh, last year. No. There was a winter Olympics in Korea and I forgot about it.
You know how long this year has been? The tide pod thing happened in January of this year
I’m gonna be real here for a sec, and I’m sorry for being the one to say it. Every single one of you who is advocating for shows that tried to be inclusive and had hiccups to be voted down and be punished by attempting to lower the ratings and sending messages to the higher ups are playing themselves. You all turned on SU, Korra, Voltron, and will turn on the Dragon Prince and She-Ra as well when those also turn out to be flawed shows and not peak respectability politics as well. There is no such thing as a perfect show, let alone the prefect rep.
Do you really believe execs care about what you’re saying? All that they will see is that people hate shows with reps, and that shows with reps get the most hate and more so than shows that don’t even try, so the message to them is that we shouldn’t try since people will eventually turn on them. All you’re doing is making creators see what these shows go through and go you know what, it’s not worth it. Because the level of outright malice is vicious and horrifying.
Execs don’t care what you’re saying all they see is that you hated the rep so to them it’s better to not have rep. If you think big corporations care about your plight then you are heavily misguided. Creators have to fight and fight to get scraps and there are many internal politics on what goes down and how. They aren’t kidding when they say they fight for it. Shows that try will always be held on a higher standard and when that isn’t met it’s punished for trying and those above the shows will go welp, better never include those nasty queers if they’re gonna hate it. Thats’ the bitter reality of it and it will never change so choose your words and actions carefully.
netflix is literally losing money over regions that prohibit queer representation, you KNOW they will JUMP on the chance to cancel shows with rep to replace them with more hetero (mainstream) shows they can show in all regions! so please don’t be the reason they cancel these shows, and please remember that in the end, it is a cartoon aimed at children, there are a lot of restrictions on them already.
Since I’ve decided to make a tiny R2D2 for my robotics class I spent the morning finding .wav files of the different sounds he makes but the original file names I knew would get confusing
so here I am sitting here psychoanalyzing and personifying as many of them as I can because okay yeah he’s beeping and chirping but what was he feeling