Breaking my self-imposed Nothing But Cats And Fic just now: Oh hey, the last time I had this tantrum I had to go look up shit myself, but this is all nicely organized.
They’re also really important. Why? Because almost every single one of the things on this list came from a huge fight against really bad odds. People did not wake up one day out of the blue and go “huh I think I’ll magically stop the atmospheric acid pollution levels and decrease them to 1930 levels!” Taiwanese society didn’t wake up one morning and go “maybe we should be okay with same sex unions.” Malawi definitely didn’t just up and yesterday make decisions that brought it’s child HIV infection rate down 67%.
And fuck knows Honduras didn’t reduce its violent crime rate overnight.
The negative echo-chamber is really bad. Everywhere I look people are yelling at other people for even noticing successes, because somehow if we realize some shit worked, apparently we’ll stop trying for anything. That’s not actually what I see: what I see is people getting so overwhelmed with the awful that they give up. That they can’t deal anymore. That they retreat from everything, because the awful is so big and so all-encompassing that there’s nothing they can do.
Or they start thinking it’s time to do stupid, dangerous, violent shit because clearly nothing else is working right???? So maybe we need to kill a few people to Save The World.
Actually, a lot of stuff is working. That doesn’t mean we go “oh, it’s all okay then, let’s all go home.” But it does mean that no, the world is not an endless hopeless shithole inevitably going to collapse into grim dystopia. There is nothing fucking inevitable about that. And in fact the most likely thing to cause that is if people stop fighting to make things better.
And the most likely thing to make people stop fighting is them getting the feeling there’s no point. There is a point. We actually win a lot. The fights are hard and unglamorous and don’t come with a Hollywood soundtrack swell on The Moment Everything Got Fixed. They take place over lifetimes, they’re gradual and full of compromises, but they happen.
This year we had a FIGHT, a big public all across the news fight about gender neutral bathrooms. We had a fight about letting adolescent students have access either to gender neutral bathrooms (preferred) or at least to use the bathroom assigned to the gender they live as (problematic if they live as something other than the big two, but still an issue). This wasn’t even on the radar when I was a teenager. It was a non-issue. We did not have any out transgender students. This was not a thing that happened; this was not a thing that crossed anyone’s mind for a moment. Either you were still in the community where you grew up as your assigned-at-birth gender, or you were a newcomer to the community and lived as your gender and prayed to whatever gods you believed in that nobody would find out, because there was pretty much only one outcome for people finding out.
Is that everything fixed forever? No, of course not. Does that mean fighting for transgender rights and safety is over? Don’t be deliberately obtuse. Is it still a huge fucking victory from where we were when I was a teenager? YES.
I don’t know what it is, especially with the US media: it seems like there’s an active allergy to talking about victories or positive moments, even in organizations supposedly known for being all about the world getting better. But it’s as much bullshit as anything else. Are there huge fucking problems facing everyone in the next years? Of course there are. Some of them are utterly terrifying.
That just means we have another reason to find victories, another reason they’re important: they help us figure out strategies to fight the fights we have now. What worked, what didn’t, what worked but had consequences we didn’t want, what worked accidentally because of something else we did – making the world better is a process that involves work, not something that if everyone wishes hard enough the right way will just happen.
The lessons of history are not simplistically predictive. It’s not an issue of “hey this situation shares characteristics with this other situation, ergo the same outcome is on the horizon!” It’s “shit when we didn’t say ‘oh fuck no’ and dig our heels in and fight over every inch of everything before, bad shit happens, so let’s do that this time instead.”
Protect yourselves. Find the defensible places and then defend the shit out of them; find out who else is fighting and figure out how to make more efficient use of the both of you. Remember that all victories are imperfect: literally every single fucking step that got us to the point where the vast majority of women and babies survive childbirth, healthy has been an imperfect victory, because it’s still imperfect. But it’s sure as fuck better, and that matters, and means we should keep trying.
Also holy crap do you see some of the things on that list they are a big fucking deal okay.
(No, it doesn’t make up for the bad stuff. Nothing makes up for anything. This isn’t a scale. There is no balance. The good stuff and the bad stuff continue to exist regardless of one another. That’s not what this is about.)
PS: If you are already engaged in all practical activity you can (and when I say “can” I mean that with full acknowledgement of limitations of time, energy, health, level of ability, mental health, whatever: trust me, I get it), and are not part of the chicken little echo-chamber that I seem to end up surrounded with, please disregard the frustrated ranting and merely enjoy the article. I am very happy you exist. In fact, please enjoy this kitten gif:
PPS: This is sort of rant-stab into the void and then going back to my self-imposed avoidance so.
Tumblr Exodus 