Lying In The Flowers 🌼

touching grass is not enough i must psychically connect to a mushroom colony

Random things. What happens when you protest in Russia? You are immediately arrested. It’s not a game of chance, it’s a guarantee. All protests are forbidden. We are not allowed to call the war – the war, you’ll be fined at best, arrested at worst if you do. In fact, as of today, if you’re caught at an anti-war protest, you’re considered a member of a radical extremist group and are facing 6 years in jail. People “detained” for protesting are invariably beaten. Concussions, contusions, broken bones. Men more so than women, though women can’t rely on it. You can be asked to strip since they “need” to check your underwear. You’ll be verbally abused and threatened the entire time. And yes, of course, it doesn’t stop there, since they now know you and your family and where you all work and live. In this country, there is nothing truly independent, there never was. If the words “1937” mean nothing to you, you are very, very fortunate. For us, it’s this again, only a thousand times worse because now it’s empowered by technology.

The other day they arrested a bunch of kids. Literally kids, four of them, aged seven to eleven. They, along with their mothers were carrying flowers to the Ukrainian embassy and a small simple poster “No to War”. They were all detained and immediately separated, kept locked up for the night. We don’t know how the kids were treated. Mothers had their possessions confiscated, not allowed to call anyone, stripped, yelled at, threatened. The harshest threat was to be stripped of parental rights on the spot, never see their kids again. The kids were released closer to morning when a lawyer from a group that helps people in these situations arrived. I have no idea how these lawyers are still allowed to function. Small mercies. (Support them here: https://donate.ovdinfo.org/)

But it’s not just the pain of punishment or jail sentence. It’s the utter uselessness of it all. He won’t care if half the population comes out to say “No to War”. He won’t care if it’s all of us.

A few days ago, every school in the country received instructions to hold special classes to explain to kids why “the liberating military operation” was necessary and what happens now. The teachers have been given manuals on what to say and how to answer the kids’ questions. Some of the answers include: “Don’t worry if you hear that some countries don’t want to be friends with us anymore. There are other countries who do, and besides, Russia is a very big country, so we have everything you can possibly need right here.” By “other countries”, my guess is, they mean North Korea. After the class, the kids are supposed to take a test. It’s electronic, entered through a QR code, and the answers are automatically logged in. Questions include: “Explain why the liberating military operation was necessary” and “Expand on what the Russian government is doing to help people of Lugansk and Donetsk.” The results of the test are tallied, and if some kid doesn’t give the right ones, their parents are called in for “a talk”.

We will either end up with a bunch of really smart kids or another generation of completely deluded people. The last time something like this had happened was in 1991, when the Soviet Union was falling, and my classmates and I were asked to make a choice of do we want to pledge allegiance to the communist party or not. I was ten. My class, as I remember, was split roughly in two. The kids who voted “yes” looked at the rest of us with teary eyes and whispered “our parents told us to do it, they are too afraid.” And we got it. We all got it. Nobody hated anybody for the choice, because we all knew that fear and we all knew what it was like, to be hostage of the regime. We who voted “no” knew what we were risking. At ten years old, we were more politically savvy than a lot of full-grown adults across the ocean. It’s not a good thing.

For roughly twenty-something years, we lived in the illusion that we were out of that prison. Sure, our democracy was not perfect, but whose is? It was maybe incredibly naïve of us, but can you blame us that we wanted to believe it? That we still desperately want to, which is why there are a lot of really confused people in the country right now who still can’t grasp that their leadership has betrayed them?They will, in fact, believe anything but this. They will sooner believe him and ignore the facts, because a) they’re not getting the facts, and b) the truth is terrifying.

Nothing has changed. We’re still in the USSR. Yesterday, in Nalchik, students of the local university were ordered to go out and express their support for the president. They had no warning. At some point the university staff members entered their classrooms, handed out banners and t-shirts, and ordered them to go outside “to stand in solidarity” with the president. Refusal was not an option on pain of expulsion. Among other statements, they were made to hold up banners saying #wearenotashamed which should tell you everything you need to know about how the Russian people really feel.

I’m not going to talk about the independent media, because the last survivors of this extremely rare breed are being shut down as we speak. Meduza is still holding up by some miracle, but their turn can be any hour. They have been declared “a foreign agent” some years back, which means that they can no longer be properly financed and have to preface every single post and article with a huge all-caps statement that this information was created by a foreign agent, presumably to turn “loyal citizens” away. They have been subsiding on crowd-funding this whole time, can’t imagine how, since all transactions are now traceable and giving them money is not without consequences. (Support them here: https://support.meduza.io/)

The world has turned away from us, and I get it, but they don’t understand what they’re doing. Or maybe they do but don’t care. I don’t mean this on an emotional level, but purely practical. The more they punish the Russian people, the more, unfortunately but sadly naturally, the Russian people will unite in their support of He Who Must Not Be Named. He will feel even more legitimate in his actions and he won’t stop. Not that I can imagine anything that could make him stop now but… It’s not helping. It might make a lot of people out there feel better about themselves, but it’s not helping.

Worst of all, we can’t help Ukraine. So much as saying that we’re fighting a war or that we are losing that war can earn you up to 15 years in prison for “spreading misinformation.” It’s impossible to send over money, and as for supplies we can only gather those for the refugees that are fleeing to Russia. Our economy is on the brink of collapse, and the people that are running from the war and come here will have to share it with us. We’re doing what we can for them. It’s not enough.

And personally… My mornings these days start like this. I wake up. I don’t want to get up. I do eventually. Splash water on my face etc. Take my heart medication. Wait for it to take effect. Then I open Telegram and see if Meduza is still broadcasting. Read the overnight update. Learn that the horror continues in a multitude of fresh new horrifying ways. Remind myself that I have no right to sympathy or feeling sorry for myself or any of that. I was not the one who spent the night in a bomb shelter. I was not the one whose house was destroyed. I wish I was but I’m not. I’m just a useless spectator who’s too chickenshit to even go get beaten up and who rationalizes her cowardice any way she knows how. I want you to know this about me before you decide to continue knowing me. I am unaccountably grateful having known all of you.

I don’t know what else to say except maybe this. Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.

happy birthday torao 🖤 10.06.20

Words of Wisdom

“It is better to be unhappy and know the worst, than to be happy in a fool’s paradise.”

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

Please if you have the means consider donating to the following:

Queer Svit - https://queersvit.taplink.ws/ helping LGBTQ+ and BIPOC аffected by the war and political repressions

Center-T - https://centre-t.com/english helping transgender people in Russia

КилькоТ-Действие - https://boosty.to/kilkota

Delo LGBT+ - https://www.delo.lgbt/ || https://boosty.to/delolgbt

“The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keep out the joy”

-Jim Rohn

when hozier said “the likes of a darkness so deep that god at the start couldn’t bear” and when hozier said “i’d still know you not being shown you i only need the working of my hands” and when hozier said “some part of me must have died the first time that you called me baby” and when hozier said “i would still be surprised i could find you darling in any life” and when hozier said “heaven is not fit to house a love like you and i” and when hozier said “but if we fall i only pray don’t fall away from me” and when hozier said “you were steering my heart like a wheel in your hands and darling i haven’t felt it since then” and when hozier said “if there was anyone to ever get through this life with their heart still intact they didn’t do it right” and when hozier said “if i was a riptide i wouldn’t take you out” and when hozier said “darling there’s a part of me i’m afraid will always be trapped within an abstract from a moment of my life” and when hozier said “do you know i could break beneath the weight of the goodness love i still carry for you” and when hozier said “darkness always finds you either way it creeps into the corners as the moment fades” and when

Did anyone else see this incredible cover by Michael Kovach or was this gonna just stay hidden on Twitter????

How do u deal with all the problematic aspects of One Piece (transphobia, sexism, etc?)

Okay, so I’ve hit most of the individual “problematic” elements of the series individually, and I’m not going to regurgitate my thoughts here, but I feel like there are a lot of people in fandom today who hyper focus on individual flaws of a story to the point of being unable to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. This goes for a lot of things, not just One Piece, because we live in a world of surface level hot takes, and most people don’t take the time to think critically about the media they consume. 

To put it simply, it’s not as easy as “[X Series} did [X Thing] bad, and therefore [X Series] is bad”. 

Using a non-One Piece example, the last couple months I’ve been reading through Moby Dick. It’s a book that was written in the 1850s and has a lot of the causal racism that you’d expect from the time period. It’s a story that condones and encourages the indiscriminate slaughter of sperm whales for nothing but the oil they produce, vilifies albinism, is overly long and at times incredibly pretentious. 

I don’t enjoy Moby Dick because of the racism. I enjoy it for its insight into 1850s whaling life, the symbolism of Ahab’s futile struggle, and because Ishmael describes a certain species of porpoise as a “huzzah whale” due to the fact that they’re small, happy, and fat. I read past the offensive stereotypes and see the genuine friendship between Ishmael and Queequeg and read quotes like “Better to sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunk Christian” and see that Melville was trying to work past the caricatures typical of the time period, and even if he was successful by the standards of today, he is to be commended for the attempt.

The flaws of Moby Dick (and its author) do not detract from the overall quality of the work, at least for me. It is one of the great American classics, warts and all. And while I believe stories can shape what we feel and believe, at the end of the day It’s the reader’s responsibility to separate fiction from reality. Do you, the reader, feel like One Piece’s flaws outweigh it’s merits? Is the bad so egregious that it forever sours the good? Or are you aggressively picking at aspects you personally don’t like and throw it in the face of fans who do?

There are aspects of One Piece that can be rightly criticized, both in structure and content, but I don’t read the series to validate my beliefs and opinions. I can think [Insert Controversial Character Here] is a fun character and not condone their actions. It’s a story, there needs to be conflict. If nothing problematic happened it wouldn’t exist. 

(Note that there’s a difference between a conflict that’s necessary for the plot and a misstep by the author. The people who came away from things like Sanji’s timeskip antics thinking they were funny already thought things like that were funny. Oda did not make it so.)

Oda is not free from his culture and worldview. Neither am I, and neither are you. Sometimes you’ve got to bridge that gap yourself and meet the author halfway, and in the instances where you can’t, there are ways of having a healthy discussion within the fandom that don’t devolve into shouting matches and name calling. This goes both ways—people who blindly defend a series can and often do have the lack of critical thinking as mindless haters. 

And if a series (or a book, or a movie, or whatever) truly causes that much distress, then don’t engage with it, and don’t shit on the people who do. It really is that simple.

branded by the sins of another