What’s Really Bizarre, Being From A Mixed Religious Family Background, Is I Recognize That I Have The

#i keep thinking about the essay i read by ilan benjamin. daniel pearl's cousin #who has lived so much more life and seen so much more and experienced so much more than i have (but who hasn't?) #(my isolation and frozen state at a much younger age is assuredly part of what has added to this shock and naivete for me) #anyway he listed the allyship he's worked for and believed in and the heartbreak he has willingly forgiven #and the humanity and rights for which he stands. and then he said #“when you killed my idealism i had no forgiveness left” #it's silly but it's lived like a splinter in my head and keeps (bizarrely) making me think of that scene from moulin rouge #when he says: thank you for curing me of my ridiculous obsession with love. #the thing that makes that tragic isn't his misplaced anger at her but rather the shattering of his idealism. he is in many ways an innocent #an artist who believes in truth and beauty and freedom and above all things love. who suddenly understands that's not how the world works#love can't save you. you can work so hard and try and be so compassionate and forgiving #eventually you have to see how the world is built and your idealism is not real and is not enough #that's what the past weeks taught me. because of the jubilation and justification and hatred and reveling in the pain everywhere #and disguising that as righteous. and pretending it's helping people who deserve help (it isn't. it won't) #and knifing people who have done absolutely nothing in the heart simply for being who and what they are#spreading screeds from another era as if we've been transported through time. and not caring what it does to friends or anyone suffering#and not caring that it's making things more dangerous and volatile because you don't really love the side you claim to support#as much as you hate the other. that's unforgivable. thank you for curing me of my ridiculous obsession with love#i don't know what to do. there's nothing i can do

the referenced essay:

https://www.thefp.com/

Once, I Was a Peace Advocate. Now, I Have No Idealism Left.

After terrorists killed my cousin Daniel Pearl, my family called for peace. But after the worldwide celebration of our people’s slaughter, m

via

The Dove of Peace - Pablo Picasso

Will literally anybody at all see those murdered kids' faces and start speaking up. Everyone in my life tries to tell me the whole world doesn't hate us, that the "silent majority" is with us. But what fucking use is a silent majority? If literally nothing at all whatsoever can get them to stop being silent?

Babies were murdered and your peers excuse it and celebrate the organization that killed them and held a party as they handed over their corpses. And this "silent majority" won't even reblog a post about it, on the off chance that they get blocked by their violently antisemitic tumblr mutuals on a completely anonymous microblogging website. If that is the extent of the moral backbone of the "silent majority," what fucking use is it? People can bring up every excuse in the world for not taking this or that action or not talking about this or that particular thing, but the fact of the matter is that if you literally never push back against bigotry in any situation at all no matter how low the stakes are, you are completely indistinguishable from a bigot and what's "in your heart" is less than worthless.

What's inside only matters because of what it makes you do. Anything else is a fantasy we tell ourselves to hide from the reality of who we really are.

had to go to the store and did not get this but did i look at it? yes

💜👻💜

i don't want to be making this post, i know none of you probably want to have to read this post, but i feel like i need to embed it into the establishing of this blog, and why, despite everything i built and created and shared there, the sense of community i thought i had, my previous one became unsafe.

if you are here, i am making the baseline assumption that you understand that the slaughter and torture of innocent people is wrong, will always be wrong, should never be celebrated, justified, or upheld as righteous, no matter who they are or where they come from or who's murdering them. i assume, even if you don't understand an entire complex situation or thousands of years of history (something you can do some cursory research on if you feel so inclined and would rather not spread harmful misinformation and outright bigotry about anyone), that you would not suggest that infant children deserve to be eradicated because of the country they were born, that women being brutalized don't deserve it because of actions committed by their government (a government many of them oppose). i assume that you understand that a terrorist organization that has written in their charter that their entire goal is the elimination of a specific people - regionally and worldwide - and causes active oppression, harm, and death to their own innocent people because they are more hellbent on killing and destruction than advocating for anyone (much less human rights), is not a bastion of freedom and dignity, and that conflating them is not only detrimental, but racist. i assume you understand that a right wing authoritarian government does not mean its people deserve to be massacred in their homes.

i assume you would not advocate for more violent death under the guise of progressive values. i assume you would not think that myself and half of my own family, unconnected to this by anything but shared ancient ethnicity, deserve to be exterminated. i assume you would find that inhumane and distressing to suggest.

i assume. but this is no longer something i know.

there have been people - mutuals, friends, i communicated with - who, over the past two weeks proved that none of this holds true for them. there were people instantly celebrating these deaths (that, in fact, was how the news was broken to me - by mutuals' jubilation over mass murder on my dash). there were people immediately justifying that, calling it necessary, saying that even the brutal assault of women "just has to happen" (or didn't happen at all, this from proclaimed "believe women" feminists). there were people spreading openly genocidal rhetoric about how a specific group of people "deserves to be erased" or "i hope they're wiped off the earth," using slurs, praising or mocking or denying the holocaust, and this website's terms of service wouldn't classify that as hate speech worthy of termination. there were people intentionally sharing debunked infographics or misinformed headlines which were later corrected (but never reading the corrections) or outright lies that come directly from n*zi propaganda (wish i was kidding) to call for more violence. vive la revolucion! was used to defend people chanting things like "gas the jews!" right in front of me, every day. there were mutuals reblogging the most vile, hateful people on this website without vetting what they were saying at all (i have a list of them, if you ever need it. did you know, for example, that her*tageposts is a n*zi sympathizer and north korean regime defender under the guise of being "communist"? yeah). the dehumanization and bloodlust and hatred on my dash was unlike anything i've ever experienced online, and what's WORSE, what made it such an agonizing betrayal, was it came from people i thought were allies, people i'd stand beside, who i thought understood and cared about human rights enough to not lust for murder and harm and destruction. i was, it turns out, wrong. all they needed was a reason.

on the surface, i know i am very disconnected from the horrors of this - i have no family in the region, by strict definition this is only half of my heritage. though as my dad would say, whether to g-d or the n*zis and their ilk, "half" doesn't matter. you are who you are, enfolded all the same. i have always loved and been proud of that. even when i was harassed and bullied and threatened and assaulted in my first two years of high-school about it. i always thought it was a beautiful thing to be a part of. i never felt terror around it until these past two weeks. i was consciously aware, but never felt it viscerally in my bones and like a weight on my chest, that people would want me dead. or if they did, they would be condemned as terrible, as fringe extremists, as far-right agitators. except that's not where this was coming from - this was coming from my own ideological side. this was coming from "friends." i don't think i can describe what that betrayal feels like or how profoundly wounding it is. people far more affected than i, far more connected and impacted, reached out to me in their hurt and anxiety, afraid of their mutuals, afraid of saying anything even remotely empathetic out loud, afraid of being attacked.

i have had tough things going on in my direct daily life for the past two weeks, but because of all this, i've barely slept. i can't remember the last day i got more than a few hours. i haven't cried this much since angel died. i have never felt such a pervasive sense of fear and despair. i never had panic attacks simply logging into my blog.

so again i say, if you're here, i assume you wouldn't participate in this. i assume you'd understand why it's dangerous and painful. i assume if i expressed grief or concern over the horrific loss of any human life, you wouldn't tell me i deserved it too. but this is not a certainty. this is not something i'll ever again know for sure. and if you're not, if you disagree with me that quantifying innocent lives' value *anywhere* with, "yes, but-," you don't have to stay, and i won't hold it against you. and if you're here, i love you, and i can only hope you're a safe person for me to interact with and love. but thats's what these past days and this rhetoric has done to me. and it's going to take me some time to not feel like the walls are closing in and to heal from that, though i know i won't forget it. so i hope you understand if i'm a little sad and a little skittish. i hope you don't mind that my most basic principle is that living beings of all kinds have sanctity, and no one deserves to die.

Marilyn Monroe at the Plaza Hotel Fountain in New York City (1957). Photo by Sam Shaw.

🥺❤️

“You have a good heart, and you think the good thing is to be guilty and kind. But it’s not always kind to be gentle and soft. There’s a genuine violence softness and kindness visit on people. Sometimes self-interested is the most generous thing you can be.”

— Angels in America (via ladysaviours)