Today’s comic was written and penciled by my wife! (I did inks and colors)
I am very proud of her and want to encourage her to make more art and speak her mind.
The neighborhood my wife and I live in is a battleground. Dueling graffiti marks the signposts, walls, and pavement. Messages of love and mercy to the Palestinians being starved and murdered, vs insults against these messengers and calls to bring home the remaining Israeli hostages. Messages get written, posters and stickers go up, and then, within an afternoon, those same messages are scribbled out or washed away, and those stickers ripped down or covered up. While I have sympathy to the families of those held hostage under Gaza (all of whom remaining are soldiers, by the way), I’m sorry, but at this point of over 730 days of genocide in Gaza with a death toll of over 600,000, if your primary concerns are about the remaining hostages rather than the massive scale of death, destruction, and suffering, that speaks volumes about what kind of person you are.
My wife was moved to write this comic after witnessing these two years of atrocities, and seeing countless instances of messages of love and mercy being rubbed out or washed away. Images of little children who have been killed in Gaza being scratched away so onlookers can’t see the human faces of this ongoing atrocity. What kind of person does that? What kind of person is only concerned about a handful of prisoners of war, and about the power and sovereignty of a settler colonial religious ethnostate, when hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in bombings, shootings, and intentional starvation?
As you read this independent platform, deals are being enacted to hand over control of most of the major media outlets to vocal, out and avowed Zionists, such as Larry Ellison and Bari Weis. Their stated goal is to further shift messaging to a pro-Israel lens, and prevent anyone from seeing the reality of the mass atrocities being committed, or from seeing the victims as human beings.
Make no mistake, there is a psychic war being waged against your very soul and humanity.
They want you to not care about the oppressed and the downtodden, to think that they deserve their fate, that there is only one valid vector of sympathy, and it is the western aligned settler state that our governments benefit from. They want you so desensitized that, when these tactics come home, you won’t have sympathy for those victims, either. Even if you do happen to see some independent outlet, or grafiti, desperately trying to tell you otherwise.
If you want to save your soul, the first thing you have to do is look.
I’m not exactly sure what I’m trying to say with this cartoon.
I guess I’ve been thinking about how out of touch the upper echelons of society seem to be. From the complete lack of awareness of just how many people recognize the genocide in Gaza for what it is and are outraged that their governments are supporting it, to the utter disbelief that Kamala Harris would lose to Donald Trump by running solely on preserving a system that fails so many, to the absolute legions of everyday people cheering on the assassin of a health insurance CEO responsible for countless deaths – media figures, politicians, and business leaders continually show themselves to be out of step with the circumstances and beliefs of everyday people.
I’ve been interested lately in this apparent phenomena of those who succeed in spite of any mistakes or failures they’ve made along the way, taking their current success as validation of all their beliefs and actions – including their mistakes. They come to believe that they succeeded not in spite of those mistakes, but because of them.
Donald Trump spending $200,000,000 in anti-trans ads is being taken by both Democrats and Republicans as evidence that anti-trans attacks work – despite all other election data showing that it’s a losing issue. It’s awfully convenient to be able to blame a scapegoat like trans people when it covers up your own failure to run an effective campaign. This goes for both Harris and Trump.
Harris lost not because she was “too woke” – she ran a completely unwoke campaign that refused to push back on any identity politics based attack that Trump took – she lost because she offered nothing to nobody except more of the same as what has been screwing people over for the past… all of American history. They just took it as a given that Americans would want to preserve their precious institutions and would vote purely on their fear of a second Trump presidency.
Meanwhile, Trump won far less because of people’s investment in his bigotry, and more because the was a loud, famous strong man saying he’ll change things.
Both these sides are taking Trump’s victory to mean that what he says must be what people want. And they will be acting accordingly.
These same people are now telling people that they shouldn’t want health insurance CEOs to face repercussions for their evil business practices. They seem to have been caught completely off-guard by so many people having this much animosity towards a system that has been openly discussed across the culture and media for over 20 years as being broken and inhumane.
When they enact their policies based upon the assumption that what Donald Trump says is broadly popular, I wonder if they will be just as caught off-guard when people don’t like the results?
I have been sitting with a deep dread in the pit of my stomach since Tuesday night that has only gotten more intense with each day after. This election is a pivotal moment in human history that is going to have long lasting, global consequences.
There’s a lot of blame being thrown around. People are angry at those who didn’t vote, or those who voted third party, and even at those who held their nose and voted for Kamala Harris but weren’t publicly enthusiastic enough leading up to election day (gross).
For my part, I am sickened and flabbergasted by the hapless normie Canadians around me, acting as though we are entirely separate from what has happened in the US.
As though the insane policies that Trump says he will enact won’t affect us here.
As though we won’t have to watch as millions of people are brutalized and immiserated.
As though we don’t have our own version of Trumpists up here who are watching and learning and already employing the same methods.
It’s a scary time to be anything other than the in-group right now. We have not only witnessed the rise of a truly evil political movement in the last decade, but also the very public failure of the people and institutions that were supposed to protect us.
But, as I said in my previous post on Monday, THEY chose this.
The liberal politicians who claim to stand against injustice, who insisted that they were what stood between freedom and fascism, ran a campaign that appealed to nobody. They continued the unpopular status-quo policies that caused so many people to be tempted by the honeyed lies told by Trump, and many more people to feel like it just didn’t matter to show up. If this truly was the last, most important-est election ever, they sure didn’t run like it.
It’s easy to feel alone right now. Like there’s no adults in the room. Like nobody is going to save you. Like it’s just you against a big, scary, unstoppable world that has it out for you.
But the one thing that has helped me during this time has been simply talking and spending time with friends. Even if we don’t have any concrete answers for one another, just being in another’s presence allows us to feel like someone has your back.
This is going to become increasingly necessary for survival, especially if you are a member of a marginalized group currently on the hit-list of Project 2025. Truly, it was always necessary to our survival. But just as the liberal welfare state post-World War II was a temporary oasis that was always doomed to be dismantled by greedy capitalists once they no longer had to placate an entire generation of veterans returning from Europe and the Pacific, that world’s atomized, individualistic mindset was also a temporary illusion.
The world many of us grew up in no longer exists, and while the future is a foreign land, it may also mark a return to the tried and true survival strategies of our true human nature. Not the false “human nature” that capitalists use to justify greed and exploitation, but the actual observed ways that humans survived both in the past and still today. Humans survived and thrived not just because we were capable of making tools or inflicting violence, but because we banded together and cared for one another. There is all manner of archaeological evidence that prehistoric humans cared for the elderly, the chronically ill, and the disabled. Contrary to survivalist fantasies, one human alone cannot survive in the wilderness. There is a reason why the most common form of severe punishment found past societies and in present day hunter-gatherer cultures isn’t execution, but banishment. By necessity, cultures and societies of the past were far more communal than ours is today. While this could often come with restrictive orthodoxies imposed by the group upon the individual, particularly once patriarchal religion was introduced into the power structure, it also meant the individual often didn’t have to face any significant challenge alone. That has increasingly been discouraged as the capitalist order took hold – it’s easier to control workers with no support, and there’s more money to be made off every individual person paying for single serving survival needs.
You should look up STAR House and what they tried to do for trans women during an era where we had absolutely NOTHING
In my own experience, nothing is truly difficult if you don’t have to face it alone. Errand buddies, work parties (meaning parties where you get together with friends to accomplish a task, not “parties” at your workplace), and body doubling (no, not like in Dragonball Z) all make difficult things so much easier and less stressful. All of us – but trans femmes, BIPOC, and newcomers, in particular – are going to need to be there for one another in the coming years. If we are going to survive, it is going to be through mutual support networks and showing up for one another. Even if we can only offer meager support, even if we can’t fix the system or solve all of each other’s problems, our world will be that much more bearable, the fear in the pit of our stomachs that much less overwhelming if we aren’t alone. Voice or video calls are great, too, but in-person is better.
May I suggest a community martial arts dojo or self defense class as a way to build community and develop personal safety skills?
And if, like a great many people these days, you don’t have friends, in most places there are all manner of clubs, unions, and societies that can be opportunities for connection – many of which are engaged in charity and mutual aid already.
Even before this election, I firmly believed that the key to expanding trans acceptance in society lies in our participation in the world. If people can meet and see a trans person as just another human being who shares common interests and goals with them, then it becomes that much harder for them to believe the lies that are told about us, because they know a real, live human being.
Which brings me back to the blame slinging. I think it is important to resist narratives that lie in blaming our fellow citizens and voters. If you look at the turnout, Trump got fewer votes than he did in 2020, it’s just that Kamala got even fewer still. Most people don’t even seem aware of what Donald Trump is actually talking about doing. Hell, a large number of people apparently were so checked out that they didn’t even know Joe Biden had dropped out of the election until November! You can call that privileged, but given how many of them will also suffer under Trump, I might call it terminally distracted by a system designed to do just that.
Imagine not knowing that Joe Biden dropped out on November 4th!!
While it is true that there are a disturbingly large number of either cruel or indifferent people who outwardly support what Donald Trump says he’s going to do, so long as they see themselves as benefiting from it, I still believe that most people are fundamentally good. Most people don’t *want* to do “evil”. 60% or Americans were polled as supporting mass deportation, but 60% of Americans ALSO polled as supporting mass amnesty for Dreamers. This tells us that many people just do not understand what they have voted for, and what this terror regime will look like. However you might feel about this level of ignorance or apathy, these people make up our communities. They will be facing many of the same hardships as us, and those hardships will not be made easier by giving in to a narrative of division. I’m not saying that we need to come together with nazis – I’m saying we need to be open to regular people being woken up by their situation and learning from their mistakes. We are not going to get through this by fighting against one another AND an oppressive system. The system is the enemy, and our fellow citizens are its victims as well, even if they don’t realize it, yet. The blame is and must always be on the nazis, and the coward liberals who decided they’d rather compromise with them than resist them. If the way to survive the next few years will be in trusted networks of mutual support, then the long term way to defeat our oppressors will be in a broad coalition of regular people who want change. They can mutate society into a fucked up nazi vision of universal competition, but we can build our own parallel societies of trust and cooperation. You don’t HAVE to buy into their fake delusions about what we are and how we should live our lives.
Ghost sums up my feelings on this about as well as a lengthy blog article.
As an introvert, alone time is basically a requirement for me. But these days I’m feeling like what I need more is to not be alone with my thoughts and fears so much. I know that in the coming era I am going to be making a point of opening my home up and spending a great deal more time with my friends and loved ones.
Because whatever happens in the future, it won’t be so scary when you’re not alone, because you’ll be with your friends.
Life of Bria 