"Never Forget"

Every year around this time, people always bandy about the phrase "Never Forget."

"Never forget," they say with wistful sadness or a steely undercurrent of yet-unresolved anger. "Never Forget" gets emblazoned across pictures of flags and rubble. Never forget, the news people tell us.

I always want to ask everyone that says this what they remember. What is it you are not forgetting? Do you know? Can you tell me?

These are the things I will never forget:

I will never forget watching people jump from impossibly high windows on a grainy-screened tube television in my high school history class. We took turns holding the antenna out the window of the steel-reinforced building to get a signal strong enough to see anything more than snow.

I will never forget being at work that evening, the two cops that walked in to my corner drugstore, just to buy water, and the way everyone made space for them, the way everyone looked at them out of the corners of their eyes, until the cops stood in front of the registers and announced to the store that everything was okay, they were just buying water.

I will never forget this picture.

But most of all, what I will never forget is a young man I knew a year later, when I went off to college, a fancy liberal arts college that I did not graduate from. I was deeply unhappy there for a long laundry list of reasons, and I was an insomniac. I couldn't sleep at night, only during the day, when I had other things to be doing.

This young man, he was also an insomniac. He couldn't sleep. So we took to hanging out, in the wee hours of the morning, when even the hardest partiers had passed out. The two of us, sitting in his room, smoking joint after joint, stereo on so low we could barely hear it, lying together in his bed staring at the ceiling, only touching incidentally.

It was comforting to be with someone else during those hours. So we were together.

Once, I asked him why he couldn't sleep. It was probably 5 am. We were both tired. The sun was due to come up soon; it was almost time for us to separate and sleep what little we could. This is what he told me.

"I'm from New York City," he said. "I'm from Manhattan. And I slept through 9/11. The whole thing. I didn't wake up until after midnight, until 9/12. I feel like I haven't slept since. I can't. What if it happens again."

I will never forget this young man, irrationally convinced his sleep had caused the world to fall apart around him. I wonder how many others there are, like him. I will never forget the pit that opened up in my stomach when I realized what kind of darkness he was stuck in, and that I had no way to help him, other than to keep sitting with him, there in his room, when the rest of the world was asleep, and neither of us could.

This Is Defiance

For more than two years, people have gathered every week day in the Rotunda of the Wisconsin Capitol at noon to sing. Every day, Monday through Friday, for more than two years, they've been there. Singing. For five weeks, the Capitol Police have been randomly arresting an arbitrary number of participants each day. The justification for these arrests are new administrative rules that require gatherings of more than 20 people in the Capitol building to obtain a permit. These new rules ignore that the Wisconsin State Constitution designates the Capitol as a public building. These new administrative rules upend the basic right to freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.

I went to the Solidarity Sing Along on Monday, August 26, the day that this and this both happened. The Capitol Police reached for new levels of low, and brutality, and they achieved them. Spectacularly. Damon Terrrell is (as I write this, on my lunch break on Wednesday, August 28, with the livestream of today's sing playing in the background) still in the Dane County jail, having neither been charged nor released. The blatant racism on display is breathtaking. The more than 150 arrests in five weeks (and counting) is chilling, and is intended to have a chilling effect on the exercise of speech.

But you know what? It's not working.

The Solidarity Sing Along has swelled in the five weeks since arrests started. What was 25 or 30 people has grown to hundreds.

This is defiance. "Arrest Us And We Multiply," said a homemade t-shirt. The new rules prohibit the holding of signs on sticks or poles or standards; a woman was arrested for carrying a sign in her hand and was told that she, herself, was the standard, and thus in violation of the rules.

Signs declaring "I Am The Standard" have appeared. Signs demanding the release of Damon Terrell. Signs decrying the brutality used against CJ Terrell. Signs demanding Medicaid expansion. On 8/26, signs in support of Planned Parenthood as participants in the Women's Equality Day rally outside the building came in for the sing along. Signs quoting the Wisconsin State Constitution. A homemade t-shirt denouncing ALEC.

This is defiance. We are the standard. Our bodies are the pike on which we will raise our demands, our
bodies are the ground for our voices, and we will raise them up with our fists and we will defy you. You do not govern by fiat, no matter who you are. You do have to listen to us. You will not shut us up with money, you will not shut us up with violence.

We demand the right for everyone to live. We demand the right to petition our government without reprisal. We demand that every person be recognized a person. We demand the right to economic security.

And if you attempt it? We will sing louder. More of us will be the standard. There will be more bodies, there will be more voices. Courage is contagious, and this is as evident in the Solidarity Sing Along as it is in the Fight For 15 strikes, as it is in the Energy Exodus marchers, as it is in fight for reproductive justice, as it is in the antiwar movement in the wake of Chelsea Manning's bravery and incarceration.

This is defiance, and we are the standard.

The Revolution of Nonmonogamy

There's been a lot of talk about nonmonogamy recently, what with Laurie Penny's piece in the Guardian and this somewhat horrifying bit of commodification at Jezebel. As earnest and elegantly stated and nuanced as Penny's piece is, it still presents nonmonogamy in light of the heteronormative standard: "Just another way of organizing life, love, and who does the dishes" which replaces old relationship problems with new ones, of terminology and how to "make sure you're spending enough time with each of your partners."

Penny herself acknowledges that this isn't the point of nonmonogamous relationships: "The truth is that there is no magic set of rules for love, sex and home economics that works for everyone – and that's why it's so important that there are other options out there." Presenting nonmonogamy as just another set of rules to follow is severely limiting in its possibilities. "Polyamorists and monogamists alike," she notes, "fall prey to the delusion that their rules are the only proper way to organize relationships[.]"

The revolutionary nature of nonmonogamy comes not from being a new and exotic, esoteric set of rules to follow (because, let's face it, that's vaguely racist) but in the idea of creating your own rules. Creating your own rules *in concert with other people.* Creating rules that work mutually for both of you, so that everyone gets what they need. It's not about doing "whatever you want" because no one wants to hurt people that they care about. But it's never assuming the emotional state of someone else; it's always letting them tell you whether they're ok or whether they're hurt, and then listening to the answer. It's respecting the answer. It's working towards a better way of doing things if hurt happens. Between the two of you, to the benefit of both of you so that no one gets hurt and no one unintentionally hurts anyone else.

All of this sounds like some pretty standard, run-of-the-mill couples therapy stuff. Because I keep saying "the two of you" as if it is a couple, two people, and that's not nonmonogamy, right? As if relationships between just two people didn't exist in nonmonogamy. But that's not true. I say between the two of you because no matter how many people are in your relationship, or in a relationship with you, you have to think of them as just themselves, each one person, an individual being with thoughts and feelings and features unlike any other that are completely irreplaceable because this person is a person, a whole person, a single person.

(sidebar: You should view everyone this way, not just people you're sleeping with. Being sexually attracted to someone shouldn't be the deciding factory in whether that someone is a complete human being, because everyone is, regardless of whether you want to sleep with them.)
(secondary sidebar: You have to view yourself this way, too. You, also, are a unique and complete human being that deserves a complete life like any other, in ways that make you happy.)

If you start to falter in this unassailable belief that each of your partners is a whole person, a complete person, an individual human being with feelings and thoughts and dreams unlike any other, what happens is that you gradually cease to weigh their own feelings and pains equally with yours and then you end up "doing whatever you want" which (inevitably) causes pain and suffering for someone, usually not yourself the worst. You cease to care about your partner, because they're not a whole person, just a thing you use. And maybe you're sorry about that thing becoming worn because you're using it because it's not a person anymore, it's an it.

The thing about pre-made rules for interacting with people is they create whole systems that revolve around people not being people, not being individual and complete human beings.They replace individuals with characters, with scripts to follow. You're supposed to wait three days before calling. You're not supposed to talk about your dreams. Or your period. Be thin, white, symmetrical, of normal neuro-functionality, secure in your gender and seeking an opposite gender as if gender were binary. Find one mate to raise children with according to those nonexistent gender binaries. Make lots of money.

These are the rules, right? Those are the people that are held up as beacons of success, of stability, of doing-it-right-ness. This is the script. There are so many people that don't even *get to be in the play* because they're not thin or white or symmetrical or neurotypical or cis or hetero or rich. So, like, hey, even if you're thinking about nonmonogamy as a way to be all those things because you think it's possible to play out the script, that's cool. I guess. I'd sort of like to meet you, because it must be nice to never feel as if there are parts of yourself that just don't fit and that's got to be a weird experience because I don't think I know anyone that wouldn't cop to feeling like a square peg in a round hole sometimes no matter how wedged into their round holes they are.

But inevitably, some people don't follow the script. And rules mean that even when the script doesn't work for you, you're supposed to follow it instead of change it. Rules mean that when you're not in the script at all, you're not supposed to trod the stage of life, complete life, fully human life.

How terrible. Terrorizing.

So throw out the rules. Throw out the roles. Work out your own rules. Be nonmonogamous.

And then, when you've tried that for awhile, you can start to blow apart all your relationships. Monogamy and nonmonogamy are for sexual partners, specifically. But what are the other things we're supposed to be doing with sexual partners? Or not doing with them? Raising children, living together, working. Why should those be tied to who you sleep with? Why should you have to live with someone you're fucking? Why should you have to live with someone you're raising kids with? Why should you have to raise kids with the person you're fucking? Why shouldn't you work with a sexual partner? Does the kind of work matter? What about the rules for relationships between work and parenting? 

Pick all of your relationships apart and put them back together in the ways that work best for you. And demand a system that lets everyone do that. Pretty revolutionary, that.

Words Are Harder Than Images

This past weekend, I went to see an artist I admire greatly perform. It was a spur-of-the-moment, oh-shit-this-is-happening-tonight?! sort of decision and I rushed through my evening parental duties and drove across the city and sat in the backroom of a bar and listened.

The music this artist creates, the sound poems or stories or the intricate weaving of noises, are meditative. Someone once told me that it's "not the most accessible" music, and I was very quietly surprised. It's not what you hear on the radio, any radio, no matter how indie, but I find it instantly accessible because of that meditative quality. The sound wraps you up and engages the attention-paying parts of your brain; I sink into it like a sensory deprivation tank, and suddenly images come into the other parts of my brain, unbidden, uncontrollable. I find the music instantly accessible in ways that most of what I hear is not.

What happened when I sat in the back of that bar with 30 or so other people paying rapt attention was this:

I had a conversation in my head with this artist that I admire greatly. And he asked me why I hadn't been writing.

And, in my head, I said to him, "I've been taking a lot of pictures lately, I've been focusing on that, I guess."

And, in my head, he looked at me quizzically, expectantly. "But you're better with words than images," he said to me in my head.

And without thinking about it, in my head, I made this confession to him:

"Words are harder than images. I've been too lazy for words."

So here I am. Pushing past the laziness. Telling stories in words.

Focus On Your Empathy, Not Your Anger

Early yesterday morning, this picture crossed my feed and I thought about it. Then a different image of the same event popped up yesterday evening. And I want to talk about it.

The background here: on Tuesday, a right wing nationalist in Paris shot himself at the altar of Notre Dame. He had been a member of a militant nationalist group in France, had recently been focused on France's recently passed law legalizing same-sex marriage and adoption, and left a suicide note on the altar that was "political," and is quoted as saying,

"I believe it is necessary to sacrifice myself to break with the lethargy that is overwhelming us. I am killing myself to awaken slumbering consciences."

Yesterday, a FEMEN activist was arrested at Notre Dame. FEMEN says the act was a call for the death of fascism, and that "It is a message addressed to all those who support fascism and those who have expressed sympathy for the extreme-right militant who killed himself in Notre Dame[.]" I was uncomfortable when the image appeared in my timeline because it felt wrong. It felt exploitative and as if the point was merely to get attention. But then I read and realized there was a point, and the point was far worse: that expressing sympathy at the sad loss of another person, even a vile person, makes one a fascist. Sympathy makes one a fascist? I wonder what empathy makes one.

Three days ago a massive, mile-wide, utterly devastating tornado ripped through Moore, Oklahoma. Very quickly I started seeing tweets about Oklahoma's senators, conservatives both, that opposed relief packages after Hurricane Sandy. Some were neutral; some were taunting. And then today I saw a blog that literally spelled out, "No relief funds for Oklahoma. If they can't help, they don't get help." The author even acknowledged that people would see that as cruel, although he had some clever reason why it didn't actually apply to him.

I guess "an eye for an eye" is a popular idea. The thing about it, though, is that it's not justice. It's retribution, but retribution and justice are not the same thing. The people of Oklahoma didn't cause the destruction wrought by Sandy any more than they caused the destruction they're facing now. Some of them didn't even vote for these senators, and even the ones that did are still people, still living breathing utterly devastated people. How does not helping them solve anything? How does not helping them make anything better? It doesn't. It might make you feel better about not being able to control the world. It might make you feel as if you can control it. It might make your anger lessen. But it doesn't help. 

The progression, from pointing out the votes of Oklahoma's senators in a seemingly neutral way, to taunting Oklahomans about their senators, to advocating for denying aid is so clear to me. They grew out of each other. I watched it happen. I tried to tell someone why it was wrong to be talking about the votes of the senators instead of any number of other things, why can't you talk about the importance of fully funding the National Weather Service or promote mutual aid relief efforts or anything constructive, why this wasn't helpful, and I don't think I made myself understood because I'm sometimes not eloquent at all, but I did try. 

Hurting people helps no one, whether you're hurting one person or a thousand people or a million people, whether you're torturing them or bruising their feelings. Clearly, there are worse hurts and minor hurts, but even the smallest ones matter. The big ones should make you sick. The small ones should make you stop. And when you've stopped, you should think about what you're doing. Let the knowledge you're hurting someone wash over you, and you'll feel sick then, too. 

Hurting people is never okay.

I can also see a line from this "an eye for an eye" conception to FEMEN's comment. "Anyone expressing sympathy at the death Dominique Venner." Anyone expressing sympathy for suicide. For feeling so trapped you see no other way than to end your life. If you're not with us, if you don't hate our enemies, you are against us, and you are our enemy. It's the same feeling fueling Islamaphobia and the EDL and the American media's narrative of everything. If you aren't with us, completely and in all things, you're against us. You will conform in all things or we will destroy you. Sounds like fascism, doesn't it?

So FEMEN employed the tactics of fascism to denounce it. Because sometimes you internalize all the awfulness of the world and to protect yourself you get angry and lash out. You become harder than the thing that's trying to crush you and end up crushing everything in your path. But the point shouldn't be to crush anything. The point is to live, and be happy, and for everyone to have that same experience. To live. And be happy. Without fear. Without reprisal. Without being hurt.

Hurting people is never ok, whether a large hurt or a small hurt, whether they've hurt you or someone else or never hurt anyone at all. Deliberate harm is never ok. 

Don't hurt each other. Don't destroy. Be gentle. Be patient. Help. Build. Heal. Offer comfort. These are the things worth doing. Focus on your empathy, and not your anger.

"I Do It For Me"

This morning, for no good reason, I shaved my legs. And then I put lotion on them. I almost never manage to  do both of these things at the same time; I'm too easily distracted and there are a lot of shiny things in my living space. So I'm generally either hairy and well-moisturized or clean-shaven and ashy as hell.

Sometimes this bothers me. Like, yesterday. Riding my bike in all my shorts-wearing glory I was pretty embarrassed about my legs. So this morning I shaved AND moisturized.

And then I got to work and was all, "Fucking patriarchy."

It's real easy to say that it's "totally fine" for women to go through grooming procedures "for themselves" but how, exactly, do you tell what you're doing for yourself when everything you do and don't do is scrutinized and judged? I was embarrassed about the state of my legs so I did something to relieve that embarrassment and that is certainly making me more comfortable and confident today rocking out in my bright orange dress but the real question here is "Why was I uncomfortable in the first place?"

Fucking patriarchy, that's why.

My somewhat stubbly legs with their scratches of white against the fading tan I picked up over a week of vacation are NOT ATTRACTIVE. Doesn't matter that they're sort of oddly proportioned with all the muscles I've built up by using them combined with my weirdly tiny joint structures. Doesn't matter that they're my legs and I use them for things. Doesn't matter at all. All that matters is hairlessness and consistent color and making a dude think that rubbing on them would be a pleasant aesthetic experience.

My vanity is well-documented. The fact of the matter is that I am more comfortable when I know that I can be considered attractive, so I do things to be attractive. I'm more comfortable this way, so it can be argued that I'm doing them "for me." But I'm also doing them to be more comfortable in a system and a culture that will always judge me on my appearance, so it's impossible to actually do anything "for me."

This is the inherent problem of patriarchy. No matter what you do, you're in it and you can't get out. Any choice you make is influenced by it, whether you conform or rebel, because you have no way of knowing how you'd feel about anything without the constant and omnipresent system indoctrinating you.

I cannot define myself without patriarchy. And that makes me so depressed I sit and stare slackly at my computer screen for awhile until someone walks by and I realize I'm at work.

Apparently, even self-medication methods are subject to patriarchy, because smoking weed makes you skinny, and we all know that skinny is desirable. Now there will be hordes of neurotic girls toking up to get skinny instead of enjoying their lives. And if you can't even get high without pressure, what do we have left in the world? I ask you. WHAT IS LEFT.

Leave Angelina Alone

On Tuesday, the New York Times published an op-ed written by Angelina Jolie on the subject of her recent pre-emptive double masectomy. And then everyone went nuts. In at least three different ways.

Some of the crazy was entirely predictable and almost too cliche to even mention, except that objectification of women is still a very serious problem, so I'll mention it. Over at Public Shaming, you can get a round up of all the awful people offering condolences to Brad Pitt on the loss of Angelina Jolie's boobs. Do I need to break down why this is wrong? One, it's Jolie's body, not Pitt's. He doesn't actually own her. They're not his boobs. If you're going to offer condolences, offer them to *her.* But (and this is two), maybe think twice about offering condolences at all. Because, you see, Angelina Jolie is not merely a pair of breasts. Honest. There's a whole body attached to those breasts, and a head and a brain and AN ENTIRE PERSON with complex thoughts and feelings and the ability to make choices. She made a choice. She exercised her agency, and lamenting the pieces she lost to retain that life and that agency is pretty despicable.

Just a brief tangent, because I find people that feel like they have the right to hold forth on other women's bodies to be hilarious in their rationalizations for why they get to opine at all: I do wonder what the "Natural Beauty!" criers will have to say. Jolie did elect to have reconstructive surgery after her masectomy. But, like, is that wrong, Natural Beauty Aficionados? She's now got not-natural breasts. Should she not have done that? Or is it ok because she just went back to the way she was? But isn't natural supposed to be totally natural? Oh, right, except for all the false eyelashes cleverly and permanently glued on your eyes and the impossible skin care routine for the dewy-fresh look and 6 hours a day at the gym to tame whatever your natural body shape is into a perfect temple of "Natural" Beauty Male Gaze Aesthetics.

Wait, but now I really do want to know what the Natural Beauty Aficionados have to say. Please, define "natural" for me. Because I'm pretty sure you don't actually mean "However a woman finds herself." Pretty sure without that reconstructive surgery, none of you'd find Jolie attractive anymore. BUT WAIT. Those aren't real, so she's not attractive anymore anyway. CATCH-22. Getting sick means you're a worthless person, right? Yeah, maybe you should just not talk about "what's beautiful." It always backfires, no matter how nice you think you're being because guess what? Beauty isn't everything. So quit making it everything. Just. Shut. Up. Women do not need your validation.

But, there were other kinds of crazy. There was the ubiquitous, seemingly endless stream of commenters that wanted to talk about the fact that most women don't have access to and can't afford even the test for the gene mutation that Jolie found she had, much less the treatment option she chose.

"Can we talk about how most women can't afford to make the same choices she did now?" I feel like I heard 100 times in about an hour. "The choices SHE made." Maybe I'm just projecting, but there seemed to be a petulant quality to the question, a grudge held. But what I don't understand about this is that Jolie up-front and matter-of-factly acknowledged that most women don't have access to the gene test. And she said we have to do better.

So, yes, guys: We can talk about this. LET'S TALK ABOUT THAT. Jolie kick-started that conversation for us! Someone pat that woman on the back! I get that she's pretty and rich and a celebrity and so that makes it really hard to give her credit for anything because everything is just so easy for rich, pretty celebrities, but the woman has spent three month having her breasts removed and reconstructed because there was an 87% chance she would develop breast cancer (which she watched her mother die from) and maybe, JUST MAYBE, we could cut her a little slack and give her credit for proactively managing her health, being open about her decisions and what they mean to her, AND ALSO advocating for every woman to have the same access to healthcare she does as a result of being rich (and pretty and a celebrity)?

It can't be that hard. I know everyone wants to hate rich, pretty people. But even rich, pretty people are just people. So maybe try to contain your jealousy and treat her like a person? Just a thought. Maybe you could try it.

But maybe my favorite bit of insidious, awful misogyny that got flayed out there in the world for everyone to see were the "This is such a distraction!" people.

A conversation about the things that we value women for, the inequities of the healthcare system in the US, and a discussion of the fact that human genes inside of human bodies are patented is a "distraction?" Fucking really? Private corporations are patenting our genetic material and barring us from access to life-saving information, and now there's a floodlight on that, and still this is a "distraction?" Look, I get that maybe none of these issues are your pet issues. We all have the things we care about more than other things, even broad-spectrum activists. I, for example, rarely blog about things that aren't related to feminism or compassion. But I still pay attention to other things, even ones I have only a tenuous grasp on. I still think they're important. I don't call them "distraction" when they push my pet issues to the background for a day or two. I lend my tiny voice to support them and the people that know about them.

Try returning the favor. I don't know why you would be so dismissive of a woman's lived experience, and the actual life-or-death choices that is healthcare in our country. I don't know why you'd be so dismissive of a spotlight on the reality of corporate power, patent law, and blocking the free-flow of information. I suspect it's because you don't like Angelina Jolie, or you don't like celebrity culture, and that's fine. But *this* is still not a distraction. It's a serious conversation that Jolie graciously started for us by sharing a series of experiences that she took great pains to hide from prying eyes while they were happening because they were PAINFUL, both physically and emotionally. That's an act of generosity that you could try to respect. At least a little. At least enough to keep your mouth shut if you have nothing nice to say.

Check your biases, world. And think about why you're heaping so much hate on a woman that's doing her best to navigate between her privilege and her life. Maybe you don't agree with all her choices, but they're still hers to make, and she's not doing a horrible job of it.

Misogyny at the Oscars

So, I'm real late to this party by internet standards, but I got involved in a facebook argument about this, and this morning I wrote this as a salvo in that argument (don't judge me for getting into facebook arguments, ok? Thanks.) and I decided I might as well just put it up here no matter how late to the party I am. 

Seth MacFarlane at the Oscars did not, as Victoria Brownworth and a lot of other people claim, “rip the status quo a new one.” And if you think he did, you probably grossly misunderstand both the status quo and the concept of satire. Ironic hipster racism is still racist, and ironic juvenile misogyny is still misogynist. Let’s start with the boob song, since that’s pretty simple to understand as it’s really just straight-up misogyny, as opposed to discussing dear Miss Wallis, which is a horrific intersection of racism and misogyny.

So, like, Seth MacFarlane sang a song about seeing women’s boobs, and you want me to believe that his point was that we strip female nudity of context and simply gawk at it. How did he do this? He did this by… stripping female nudity of context and simply gawking at it. Oh, wow, that’s some real clever satire there. I mean, the edginess of taking the status quo and just… regurgitating it. God, someone please explain to me how edgy and awesome it is to use the status quo on a billion-person platform, and how it’s so subversive to the status quo. My poor, feeble female brain must just be not getting it.

No, really, I’m waiting. Explain to me how vomiting up the status quo of a misogynist culture that objectifies women’s breasts regardless of context is subverted by replaying the trope of objectifying women’s breasts regardless of context.

See, the thing about satire is that it’s supposed to do that: subvert the status quo. So, whatever MacFarlane did, it wasn’t satire.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the boob song, for two very distinct reasons. One was the inclusion of Jennifer Lawrence.  Setting up a dichotomy, a competition, if you will, between those whorish actresses that have done nudity and those awesome pure ones that haven’t is part of misogyny 101: divide and conquer. Get women to police their own behavior, and each other’s behavior. Get them to think they are each other’s enemies. Then they’re a lot easier to exploit.

BUT THE REALLY BIG PROBLEM WAS SCARLETT JOHANSSON. The inclusion of Ms. Johansson in that  song basically wipes out any attempt at saying MacFarlane had any sort of point about double standards for women in film. Wanna know why? Scarlett Johansson has NEVER (I repeat, never!!) bared her breasts on film. She’s never done it. MacFarlane’s seen her breasts because someone hacked into her phone and stole and then published private pictures she took of herself.

Please, go ahead and tell me that she shouldn’t have taken the pictures. That the existence of the pictures means she’s a slut that deserves whatever happens to her. I will laugh and then I will put you on my private mental list of probable rapists, because if you can honestly say with a straight face that anyone deserves such an invasion, you probably think women that wear mini skirts deserve whatever happens to them, too.

But let’s talk about Quvenzhane Wallis now. MacFarlane turned a nine-year-old black girl into a sexualized object to make a joke about George Clooney’s dating habits. I don’t give a fuck what you think about her, or Clooney, or his dating habits. HE TURNED A NINE YEAR OLD GIRL INTO A SEXUALIZED OBJECT TO MAKE A JOKE ABOUT A VERY POWERFUL MAN. Worse than that. He turned a nine-year-old black girl into a sexualized object to make a joke about a white man.

Is there a better way to telegraph to someone that they don’t matter? Again, honestly asking. We’re going to just completely ignore the fact that you’re a person and reduce you to a thing so we can make a joke about this other guy, who is immensely powerful and is the one we actually care about. You, you mean nothing. You’re less than nothing. You, nine-year-old black girl, can be ridiculed globally for all we care. That white man over there is the one that matters.

The thing about comedy is, if you’re going to claim it’s socially conscious and progressive and edgy and groundbreaking, is that it has to reverse power relationships. MacFarlane objectified the person who was probably the most powerless in that entire theater to make a “joke” (and I use that term loosely) about one of the most powerful. Miss Wallis is going to spend her entire life being turned into an object and being sexualized so that *someone else* can do something to her, both in real life and on film. MacFarlane does not get “props” for kicking off that process way ahead of schedule and on such a big stage.

You can claim all you want that everything MacFarlane has done has been done before by other people. What you don’t get to do is follow that up with, “So why be mad at him?” Because that IS, in and of itself, why people that don’t like to see other people objectified are mad at him. We’re mad at him in EXACTLY the same way we’re mad at ALL THOSE OTHER PEOPLE that do it. Because whether you’re the first person to do it or the last, doing it at all is still wrong.  It’s not funny. It’s not cute. And the fact that he was using jokes that have all been made before by other people in other ways proves that MacFarlane is not edgy or original or even a good comedian.

He’s not satirical. He’s not subverting the status quo. He’s supporting it. As evidenced by the fact that all those tired, clichéd, trite jokes resulted in a big boost in the target demographic: 18-45 year old white men. The ones with the power. The ones that "really matter."

RADICAL

At some point in human history, being "radical" became a bad thing. Radical is an epithet. It's an insult. It's meant to convey dangerous ideas, a lack of gravitas, some kind of fundamental unseriousness about solving problems. The stigma of radical is such that people bend over backwards to avoid identifying with any sort of radical ideas. I don't understand this. If you believe a thing, watering it down in the name of moderation seems like the worst thing you can do. We live in a time and a place wherein our governance is by compromise. If you come to that compromise having already compromised yourself, how will anything ever change?

Last month, I got a tattoo. It might seem strange, to some, that two years after #wiunion, after Act 10 was passed, after Scott Walker survived the recall election we forced, after Act 10 was upheld on a second appeal, I would choose to get this symbol tattooed on my body. It doesn’t seem strange to me. It isn’t strange to me because for me, this fist is a symbol. It is a reminder of that time, absolutely, and it is tied to it, but it is a symbol of something much larger. #wiunion was my moment of radicalization, and I chose this tattoo because I don’t want to forget it. I don’t want to forget what it was like to stand up with 200,000 of my fellow human beings and demand to be heard. I don’t want to forget what it was like to be ignored anyway.

I’ve always been liberal. I was raised in a very liberal, post-Vatican II Catholic church. My parents are liberal: my mother is a state employee who was directly impacted by Act 10 and former steel mill worker from Gary, IN; my father is a borderline socialist that spent large swaths of the 60s protesting the Vietnam War.

But me? I no longer consider myself simply “liberal.” I’m not a Democrat. I’m something else. I’m a radical, wild-eyed and imbued with a sense of purpose. And that change occurred during the Madison uprising.

I remember, on February 11, 2011, after Walker introduced Act 10 that my mother came home. It was a Friday. She was angry. But she was also tired. “No one but us will care,” she said to me. On Valentine’s Day, hearings on Act 10 were being held. The unionized teaching assistants at UW-Madison marched from the University to the Capitol and delivered hundreds and hundreds of Valentines to Governor Walker. “Don’t break our hearts. Don’t break our unions.” I was on Twitter. I saw. I went home to my mother after work, and I said to her, “I think you’re wrong. I think people do care.”

The next morning, we sat at the table drinking coffee. We decided that instead of going to work, we would drive to Madison. I knew the hearing had gone all night. People were camped in the Capitol. We went to see. We went to see, and to be heard. We live in a democracy, both of us thought, and we have a right to be heard. Two hundred thousand people stood outside the Wisconsin State Capitol one day weeks later, all thinking the same thing. “We have a right to be heard.”

Inside the Wisconsin State Capitol Rotunda, February 15, 2011.

Over the following months, through the capitol occupation, through the fleeing of our Democratic senators over state lines, through the passage of Act 10 in the middle of the night in a vote so fast that not even all of the bill’s supporters managed to get their votes registered, I learned. You could say my eyes were opened. You could say I developed a sensitivity to oppression, to oppressive tactics, and to the silencing of people. When Wisconsin’s historically open Capitol building was closed, I cried. When Wisconsin’s incredibly strong, deliberate open meetings laws were violated in favor of back-room dealings, I seethed.

While all of this was going on, Egypt was in the grips of the Arab Spring, growing out of Libya and Tunisia. Through the internet, I found people deeply involved in those events. That fall, Occupy hit America, and that, too, was a thing I watched, and cheered, and lent my voice to, and supported.

I came out with one crystal clear idea in my head: People over everything. People over profit, people over national interest, people over faith.

People are more important than profit. If your profit demands that hundreds of millions of people live in poverty and wage slavery to it, your profit is wrong. If your profit demands that you be exempt from environmental standards designed to protect all of us, your profit is wrong. If your profit demands that we lock up an ever-increasing number of people for nonviolent crimes for their entire lives, your profit is wrong. If your profit demands that the freedom of the internet be curtailed, your profit is wrong. Money is a means to an end, and not an end. Money itself is not a good reason for anything. And I will fight to strip these profits falsely earned on oppression and human misery.

People are more important than national interest. If your idea of national interest demands that you create an apartheid state and consign millions to fear and abject poverty, your national interest is wrong. If your national interest demands that people be surveilled at all times “just in case” they’re doing something wrong, your national interest is wrong. If your idea of national interest cheers the automated killing of children and adults because it makes you feel “safer,” your national interest is wrong. People everywhere are people, and no person is inherently better because of the geography of their birth or the blood in her veins. And I will fight to smash a state that purports to do any of these things in my name and that builds its concept of safety and power on oppression and human misery.

People are more important than faith. If your faith demands that women be kept covered from head to toe and kept at home, your faith is wrong. If your faith demands that little girls have their clitorises cut off so that they don’t fall into “sexual temptation,” your faith is wrong. If your faith demands that women not have basic bodily autonomy, your faith is wrong. If your faith demands that men and women that love differently than you love be relegated to second-class status, that they be harassed and hounded and even murdered, then your faith is wrong. God forgives. God loves. And if you cannot forgive, and if you cannot love, your God is false and your faith is wrong. And I will fight to make sure that your faith does not have the power to spread its oppression and human misery through secular laws.

I have become radicalized. All of these many, many wrongs are other faces of the wrong done to the people of Wisconsin. There is nothing I will not question save that one crystal clear idea that’s been indelibly burned into the whorls of my brain matter: People over everything. There is nothing I can look at without straining to see how it fits into the systems we have constructed to control each other over millennia. There is no document and no institution that I hold sacred. There is only that one bright light that’s burned away everything else: People over everything.

I have become a radical, and the thing that led me to it was #wiunion. And for that, I will be forever grateful. Two years after the Madison uprising, I realize that I am forever changed. And it’s a good thing. For that, I had its symbol inked into my skin.