do you ever wish you were somewhere else?

Anyways here is the official gofundme set up by sonya masseys surviving family if you have the ability to give her family real tangible support

A 22 yr old in my org got drunk tuesday night and kinda shit on the fact that I'm running a community cleanup for our chapter. Said something along the lines of "i didn't join up to pick trash." Which really bothers me and it took me a while to figure out why. The whole point of the community cleanup is that we're returning to the neighborhoods where we knocked doors for A4 to help clean up their streets and provide material improvement for free in an effort to build inroads with those neighbors.

Like... if your socialism doesn't include picking uo trash, I'm guessing it also doesn't include doing the dishes, babysitting, or anything else that is important but not prestigious. Idk man, fuck off with that shit. You'll pick up trash and you'll like it until you understand why picking up trash isn't anyone's job but your own. I hate that attitude. If helping and doing activism was always fun and visible and impressive, everyone you know would already be doing it.

The first thing the new york chapter of The Young Lords (Puerto Rican American communist civil rights group(Worked alongside the black panthers))did upon forming their group was reach out to their community in east harlem, they asked their community what problems needed to be addressed and consistently the number 1 problem brought up was the trash.

In their chairman Felipe Luciano's words, “So we’re on 110th Street and we actually asked the people, ‘What do you think you need? Is it housing? Is it police brutality?’" Luciano says. "And they said, ‘Muchacho, déjate de todo eso—LA BASURA!” [Listen kid, fuggedaboutit! It’s THE GARBAGE!] And I thought, my God, all this romance, all this ideology, to pick up the garbage?”

And so the young lords responded to their communities needs and they picked up the trash. This was at a time (1969) when there were literal tons of garbage lining the streets, trash collectors would pick up some garbage every now and then but would leave most of it behind, they also refused to sweep the streets, and only allotted 6 big dumpsters in that entire 40 block area. This was due to racist/classist stances held by the almost exclusively italian american trash collector union.

The young lords stepped up in this situation, they go and ask for brooms and bags from the trash collectors union and get refused and insulted. They go back later and steal the brooms and bags, and get started cleaning their neighborhoods. This is a band aid and it doesn't fix things but it does show their community these people care, these people will listen and put in the work, these people are our people, it was the basis of community organizing, building trust and responding to people's actual needs.

While this did help and build trust the problem persisted and so the young lords came up with a program they called the garbage offensive (or maybe the trash offensive i forgot). They started sweeping all of the trash onto the side of the street and waited for the trash collectors to come by, when they refused to pick it up, the young lord would pile that all into trucks and haul it off to 3rd avenue in Manhattan(a much richer whiter area that gets high traffic). They dumped the trash into the middle of the street (not just bags of trash, we are also talking furniture, broken sinks, etc.) and then hauled off and they did this almost daily. They forced people to pay attention. The whole community started to get involved in this, kids, young men and women, and older community members too. They all started to join in on dumping the trash in the richer parts of the city to make people care and pay attention.

These protests got larger and bolder, they would sometimes pile up the trash high and then light it on fire, over turn cars and make a party out of it sometimes too. Police were called and showed up and attacked as they do but the protests persisted.

The Young lords published their demands and sent them out in a press release and their demands were listened too. In that years mayoral race every single candidate had to address the trash problem and promise solutions.

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This is an important lesson that direct action often pushes reforms, if we want reforms the best way to get them is to act and make the state react to us and catch up with our demands.

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Their demands included increased sanitation workers, hiring black and puerto rican sanitation workers, increased dumpsters, increase in pay to sanitation workers, end having to pay off your sanitation workers to ensure your trash gets picked up etc. Many of these demands were met and in the coming years the trash does end up getting picked up regularly and the problem does get dealt with.

The Young Lords end up going on to do so much more. They occupy hospitals, steal supplies from the government, and try to build towards a revolution in america. But it starts here, it starts with the trash it starts with all the small menial hardships. We can talk about revolution all we want but if our neighborhoods are unsanitary, our neighbors hungry, our needs uncared for nothing will come of it. The revolution you want to build however radical you are must start rooted in your community, their wants and needs. And part of that is picking up the trash, starting a community run daycare, and all the little unglamorous day to day struggles that weigh people down.

Thank you for this addition! I'm going to read it to the volunteers who come out to trash pick with us today 🤘

I embroidered a jean jacket for my soon-to-be sister-in-law’s birthday, and then finally finished it just in time for Candlenights, 6 months later 🎉

Sade - “Smooth Operator”

evan, getting hit with twenty-seven emotions at once as he realizes that not only did tadershecourt accept his offer but is now going out of its way to keep him safe

joint custody? i think i can smoke this thing myself

me time.

my baby

fuck this house

The basketball fits in this show are unreal.

Weird that Oklahoma, famously full of Reservations for our indigenous population, is doing bad in education, healthcare, quality of life, and poverty.

Weird that it went red when, like a lot of states that have a lot of Natives, it has laws that make it harder for indigenous people to vote. Like how you can't register to vote if you don't have an address the Post Office delivers to, PO Boxes don't count, but also there are laws that say you can't get US mail delivered on the Rez and have to have a PO Box.

It's almost like there are systematic reasons for places with large populations of PoC often look more conservative than they really are.

Gerrymandering, voting and ID restrictions that make it hard to register to vote, few polling places that have been purposely given not enough machines, carceral rates to strip voting rights, and other factors I can't think of right now because I'm so angry at this kind of smug self-congratulating othering bullshit all play into why this happens. No one wants to be last in education and first in poverty.

Additionally there is a significant size difference between these two states and their population densities are very different. Massachusetts has 7,001,399 people in 10,554 square miles. Oklahoma has 4,053,824 in 69,899 square miles. I wonder how population density affects availability of resources. I wonder how many of those red counties have fewer than 100 people in them.

But, honestly, it's mostly the blatant racism in this post that's pissing me off.

the audacity of this owl.

"Ok, ma'am that'll be $226.03."

I take my wallet out of my pocket and unfold it. It is empty other than a single moth that lazily flies out. The moth lands on the tap point of the card reader. There's a beat, and my payment is processed. The moth flies back into my wallet and I put it back in my pocket.

Me on my way to make bad financial decisions 🐛🛍️✨