More hope, please.
May. 15th, 2008 12:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gementSo, California has declared discriminatory marriage policies based on sexual orientation unconstitutional.
You could have learned this from a number of other journals on my friends list, or probably by walking outside. It's not why I'm posting.
I'm posting because this feels like a bit of a sole bright spot lately. I've been researching history. A lot of history. A lot of how people have treated each other. And the more I read, the more I think I shouldn't bother writing anymore.
I don't even have to go looking for it. When I see themes from my writing in the news, I can't help but look, and see the parallels. I'm not going to link, because I don't feel like making the car-wreck fascination as easy for my friends as it was for me. But in the last month I've seen...
A definition of "picquet" (picket) which was not the definition I was looking for, but was an old punishment for junior officers(!) in the military. Control of information in North Korea. The logistics and political theory of modern hostage exchange. An article in the P-I on the psychological effects of solitary confinement in our current prison system. An LJ entry where someone wrote down her second-hand Holocaust survivor story, one she has not seen elsewhere in the public media on the topic, involving the Auschwitz brothels (public record says the women were not Jewish, and does not mention the adjoining boys' brothel at all).
Today I did a little math and adjusted my mental understanding of a British pound during the Regency period to be more like $1000 (I had been thinking of it as $100). Doing the math about what people were living on led me around to calculations on what people are living on now.
I can't take this anymore. At least my vampires have an excuse. And they usually pay for what they take. Because, well, hell, they can afford to.
Sorry to go all emo here, but...
How do we stand it? As humans, how do we stand what we do to each other?
Can I please have some more links like the marriage news? I need to understand why we keep going right now.
Edit: I would also appreciate links to the bright spots of history, times and places where women have owned property and had more than decorative authority, where different cultures have mingled without bigotry in polite society, where people have carved out corners of sexual freedom, where those above have served those down below (to borrow a line). Where people have been decent to each other, and found joy.
You could have learned this from a number of other journals on my friends list, or probably by walking outside. It's not why I'm posting.
I'm posting because this feels like a bit of a sole bright spot lately. I've been researching history. A lot of history. A lot of how people have treated each other. And the more I read, the more I think I shouldn't bother writing anymore.
I don't even have to go looking for it. When I see themes from my writing in the news, I can't help but look, and see the parallels. I'm not going to link, because I don't feel like making the car-wreck fascination as easy for my friends as it was for me. But in the last month I've seen...
A definition of "picquet" (picket) which was not the definition I was looking for, but was an old punishment for junior officers(!) in the military. Control of information in North Korea. The logistics and political theory of modern hostage exchange. An article in the P-I on the psychological effects of solitary confinement in our current prison system. An LJ entry where someone wrote down her second-hand Holocaust survivor story, one she has not seen elsewhere in the public media on the topic, involving the Auschwitz brothels (public record says the women were not Jewish, and does not mention the adjoining boys' brothel at all).
Today I did a little math and adjusted my mental understanding of a British pound during the Regency period to be more like $1000 (I had been thinking of it as $100). Doing the math about what people were living on led me around to calculations on what people are living on now.
I can't take this anymore. At least my vampires have an excuse. And they usually pay for what they take. Because, well, hell, they can afford to.
Sorry to go all emo here, but...
How do we stand it? As humans, how do we stand what we do to each other?
Can I please have some more links like the marriage news? I need to understand why we keep going right now.
Edit: I would also appreciate links to the bright spots of history, times and places where women have owned property and had more than decorative authority, where different cultures have mingled without bigotry in polite society, where people have carved out corners of sexual freedom, where those above have served those down below (to borrow a line). Where people have been decent to each other, and found joy.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-16 05:28 am (UTC)I think rather than diggging around in history for those, though they *are* there, I'm just too sleepy to provide such excellent links as some of the commenters above me did ... I tend to fall back on my own life.
My life is full full full of joy, sweet ferret, and just as full of good people doing the best they can to be kind to each other and do the right thing. And it almost always has been, even when I was small and we had no money to buy groceries (though, lucky me, I never actually went hungry); even when I was older and thoroughly engrossed in the attempt to break my own heart (though, lucky me, I didn't quite manage that self-destruction); the joy and the decency were always *there*, though sometimes it was hard for me to see them. And I'm not so special that I can believe that it hasn't always been that way for many people much of the time ... I'm lucky, but I'm not *impossibly* lucky, you know? People find joy and love in the direst of circumstances, not just in our spoiled ones.
That might be pale consolation - logically, I know it doesn't prove *anything*, and it's still true that the world is horribly broken and might fall apart any day now, really - but:
When I really think about how bloody grateful I am for my own life, for the joy and laughter and sweetness and affection in it, and for the amazing shiny people I see every day - both the heroic ones and the ones who are just, like me, doing the best they can with their small and worthy lives - I'm so delighted there isn't any room for all the Big Serious Problems I sometimes tie myself up in knots over. I'm not sure it's moral to be so self-absorbed that my own happiness overwhelms the world's woes, but on the other hand, I'm a lot better at helping when I'm not miserable.
no subject
Date: 2008-05-16 05:33 am (UTC)