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Sorry about my incredibly shitty phone photo but I just wanna shout out this Golden-Crowned #Sparrow fully just sitting *in* the bird feeder as they're eating. Mood.

I'm sorta getting hot mad about the framing of that recent story about the Amazon worker dying on the warehouse floor (horrifically and notably, NOT the first time that has happened) and the articles all reinforcing the narrative of how the workers were "forced" to keep working around his dead body.

I'm fucking sick of the reinforcement of the power that capitalism holds over us, BY us. I'm sick of pre-emptive compliance being reframed as inescapable use of force by a system that is perfect and monolithic in its power. "But I will lose my job and thus my ability to survive" is certainly not *always* hyperbolic reasoning, but it is also the Catch-22 where the more you believe in it, the realer it becomes.

Everyone collectively witnessing a co-worker's LITERAL DEATH IN REAL-TIME is a fucking reason to riot your workplace to the fucking ground if ever I saw one. They were "forced" to keep working in the same sense as the participants in the Milgram experiment were "forced" to deliver what they believed to be deadly electric shocks. Through conditioning to authority, through relinquishing – however unintentionally – the very *concept* of their own autonomy, their sense of what is right and wrong.

I'm not "blaming" the workers more than I'm blaming every single fucking authoritarian piece of Amazon shit all the way up to, and coalescing upon, fucking Bezos. I'm not saying the threat to their livelihoods isn't fucking real. MOST of us are feeling that in multiple ways right now! But if we are gonna actually throw off the yoke of capitalism (and fascism, and ya know, DO ANYTHING to keep the planet from literally burning) then we have to fucking let go of this goddamn eternal victim narrative, where those in power are untouchable, and all we can really do is angrily meme about it and pass around the same 20 bucks eternally in ever-closing circles of impoverished "mutual aid."

Those people had a choice. We have a choice. They are shitty, shitty choices, but they are only going to get shittier until there truly *are* none, if we keep telling ourselves it's not worth exercising them. I'm sick of the "we're so damaged and weak" narrative. It might be true, but do you wanna go out being slowly crushed the fuck to death or at least with your vicious little teeth sunk into the flesh of power???

Idk. I'm really not trying to be a hater. There's just something so perfectly, horrifyingly stark about this image right now that it's just – this is it. Ya know? This is the part where the narrative of human nature and human choice is laid very fucking bare in a scene that would be eye-rollingly over the top if it was in some preachy dystopian scifi novel. The part where we all shake our heads and think *we* would have done better. But we *are* "we." Every one of those workers is "we." And we can do better. But that window is fucking closing, and whether we end up in the other side of it, whatever that might be, or end up trapped in this burning hell, depends on what exactly we're telling ourselves is possible.

https://www.instagram.com/p/DWzRwQ4gRH5/

I don't have Instagram nor do I want it, but I understand that many projects refuse to leave the platform and see it as the best way to engage for fundraising.

This org does real, direct, on the ground work and all funds go 100% to buying items for distro.

I don't *really* wanna add more of my thoughts to the "protests: are they good or pointless" conversation, but one thought I don't always see talked about is that the same protest "tactic" can be less or more pointless depending on where it's occurring & in what context.

Like, to me, massive citywide protest in big "liberal" city where libs peace-police everyone and then by & large go home without having actually changed or even challenged anything is a very different scene than "300 folks in a Nazi town put themselves out there & show others in that town that not everyone supports or agrees with the fuckin Nazis."

I think those two protests, though organized on the same lines, have achieved (or maybe just, put into motion) very different things.

Personally, I'm severely over the whole protest scene. But as a historian, I also know that context can alter meaning significantly.

Still incredibly dystopian to me that so many political arguments against ICE raids come down to, "but we need 'illegals' to do our farm work for us!"

The constant throwing-around of terms like "hard-working" is fucking grim to me. As though the elderly, children, disabled folks, or folks who otherwise don't or can't break themselves working 18 hour days for the American Dream don't count as people who deserve to live their lives.