Listening for strategies, rather than looking for failure...

"L'amour est à réinventer" - Rimbaud

"But I will not agree to be tolerated. This damages my love of love and of liberty" - Cocteau

"Question - How can I be sure I don't need an exotic consultant?" - Smith

"People are asking, 'If they won't do anything now, when will they?' If they won't do anything for those who are sick now, for whom will they? Getting no answers, people are mobilizing. Getting no answers, a movement is emerging. Picture a coalition of people who will end this epidemic." - Bordowitz

"I want a dyke for president." - Leonard

"But I was surrounded by people who who were suffocating under the burden of a normal life. I knew I'd rather be wrong than safe." - Hughes

"8. Oh Mama! We will glorify action - the only cure for the world. We will fight constricting morality, paternalism and all insipid opportunist and utilitarian cowardice!" - Mamaist Manifesto

"hope works best as a lie or calming device.
they call it future, they say it's useful for us.
everything is not ok.
don't give a shit about being an artist, give a shit about making someone mad maybe just making.
we die fast. and we don't hide." - K8

"LOVE is a strategy, medium, site and scene. Love is an act. Love is not a quantifiable element able to be parsed between politics and poetics for it constantly transforms the definitions of those very terms. Before I speak economy and resistance I must be explicit - Queer Love." - Roysdon

"And many-gendered mothers of the heart say: 'Just because you have enemies does not mean you have to be paranoid' They insist, no matter the evidence marshaled against their insistence: 'There is nothing you can throw at me that I cannot metabolize, no thing impervious to my alchemy' - Nelson


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Listening for strategies, rather than looking for failure...

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We're in the middle of an election, the largest mass shooting since 9/11 has officially claimed 50 lives of the people attending "Latin Flavor" at Pulse (a gay bar) in Orlando. 53 are wounded, but it's palpable that there is going to be a lot of heated discussion, and a continuing feeling of insanity, the kind where the same thing happens over and over again.

The news cycle is 24/7 and focuses on first-person accounts of their location to the sound of gunfire, but not to the relationship between the media and the location to violence. Most of the online chatter is about whether or not the labelling or non-labelling someone as a 'terrorist' is in some way part of why this violence is happening in the first place. 

So, sometimes I imagine a fictional conversation amongst people from different points in time, and there is still no agreement. I'd oversimplify the questions if I just said that it's about 'How does one, or how do we forge forward progress in society?', but it's the closest I can get.

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A few weeks ago, Rachel was commenting on the images of students at UCLA with their hands up (another shooting) as victims being treated as suspects. Less than a week ago we were voting for Bernie Sanders and honestly it didn't feel like there was any more momentum. It reminded me of how aware I was becoming about my ability to be persuasive. At one point, I struggled to explain that I don't believe that focusing on assault-style weapons is the right language to focus on, what about domestic violence? What about advertising the gap between polling vs. policy? What about urging people to relinquish their guns voluntarily, like a buy back? It was like two people tossing dirt at each other with shovels, not just digging ones own hole, but making a loose shitty wall in between. I felt like I could never get to a crux an argument, that gun ownership had everything to do with America's brand of capitalism, one in which materialism reaches the point of entitlement. I don't believe that people believe it's about protection, rights or even ever being able to use it on another human being, but it's about a special kind of personal property that was cleverly tied to the identity of being an American. The devastating consequences have more to do with our detachment from each other, creating more distance to what might constitute an "other". My neighbor is an "other". And why did we think it would be effective to say that guns are not toys, when war is still referred to as a game and ranging from rural to wealthy, men do play with weapons. I don't even think there's a problem with play fighting, because it also involves play consequences to engage with play empathy. It's the same falsehood that violent games make for violent tendencies. If we know anything about tendencies, it's that repression festers hatred of what you fear within yourself.