i know i shouldn’t be doing this, but i’m fantasizing of this potential job at people’s as a way out. this past year has been really hard and i lost two people close to me throughout it (not lost as in died but like people who dropped out of my life). became more alone. i also became less alone in other ways. when i left for detroit and was saying bye to the teens at shelter before i took a week off A said “when you leave it’s like one of our mommies is gone.” these teenagers care for me so much. but my nonprofit is rife with hierarchy and i’m tired of being powerless. i’m resilient. but i am tired. so i’m seeing this coop job as a way out of that powerlessness. i’m being contracted to create five workshops over the course of next year for the QSU at L&C. that feels like a way out, too. it’s important for me to feel possible right now as i wade through dissociation and grief and anxiety. i’m trying to build. and recover some things i lost. probably need to read some dorothy allison. and play minecraft. i don’t know what to do with myself when i’m not burning myself out.
wow throwback to before i started working at peoples
(via violentwavesofemotion)
In 1989, George Bush gave a speech about crack. During the speech he pulled out a bag of crack and said “this bag was seized right across the street from the White House in Lafayette park.”
Turns out, his speech writers had the idea to pull out a prop during his speech and in order to make it believable they had the DEA plant crack on this random 18 year old black kid. They lured him there. He didn’t even know where the White House or Lafayette park was. When he got there, they arrested them.
The plot was discovered by a journalist.What journalist
Gary Webb
And then Gary Webb killed himself after he revealed that the CIA let crack infiltrate black communities through drug cartels making deals with the CIA. His wife left him and his career was ruined for exposing the drug war as a war against people of color.
There’s a really well done movie called Kill the Messenger (x) I suggest everyone should watch. It was done in partnership with his family and details the events from beginning to end.
Reminder that this was not some conspiracy theory or urban legend but really happened and happened practically yesterday, not during some bygone era we’ve learned or grown from as a country. Bush senior was only four presidencies ago. He left office in 1993 when I was eight or nine years old and almost everyone in control of the government then is still there now or passed their position down to immediate family.
