Thread by @VABVOX

THREAD📌
These middle of the night incursions on the psyche are so definitive of both COVID & Trump. I read in the dark. As a child I did this, flashlight under the covers. I really ache to return to some level of intellectual & psychological normalcy in a new administration.
1/x

The past 5yrs have been devoted to fighting Trump and everything he's wrought on my intersecting communities: queer, disabled, poor, my mixed race family, my Black neighborhood. It has been overwhelming, leaving no space to breathe and take in new intellectual challenges.
2/x

Two unfinished books sit waiting completion. But I can't get off this current hamster wheel to think those intellectual and historical thoughts because I am in this moment, this here-and-now, fighting for my life and the lives of others in a pandemic of #COVID & #poverty.
3/x

It was like this for me 30yrs ago when I was a frontline AIDS activist, switching between being a journalist on TV talking about that pandemic & being an ACT-UP member arrested in die-ins in different cities. The sense of urgency was so visceral. It's like that now, again.
4/x

It's not that I think life will normalize if Trump is voted out. That will take time and won't happen readily. But the urgency, the dailiness of the drama, the pounding fear always just on the periphery of my consciousness--THAT will shift. THAT will abate.
5/x

I look forward to going back to the fights that have framed my politics since adolescence--the battles for equity and fairness. Throughout the COVID #pandemic I have been stunned daily by how easily otherwise decent people who consider themselves left Dems Otherize the poor.
6/x

I wrote all these pieces early on in the #pandemic about food insecurity and I had to beg people to read them. Hunger is rampant in my city and we don't even talk about it. I have been homeless and penniless at points in my earlier life: you don't forget not having food.
7/x

Fundamentally, I want to go back to immersion in the left politics I was born into that don't demand obeisance or equivocation: I want clear, clean fights for justice and equity unmuddied by the relentlessness of a fascist, racist, misogynist and anti-science regime.
8/x

I was listening to a Cornel West podcast earlier. I fell in love with West and his free-wheeling eclectic philosophy in the 90s. I still hear that guy in some of what he talks about now--he can still mesmerize you like a preacher and a conjurer and take your breath away.
9/x

Cornel West is brilliant. His philosophy challenging as it is eclectic. When he gets off his inexplicable Obama obsession, his intellect & message are evanescent. But it's a rareified world West lives in--the world of clique-ish entré nous politics where $$$ is no problem.
10/x

I'm not in that world. I'm in the world of hustling for money--taking any work offered no matter how scant the pay. Last night I filled out my renewal forms for #SNAP and #Medicaid and thought about how much the language shames the poor. West talks about the poor; I live it.
11/x

This should be an essay, not a too-long Twitter thread. But I was thinking so hard about how much I love that life of the mind that West exemplifies and how intoxicating it is to be in that milieu. I fell into his rhetoric so easily, so readily. But it's not nearly enough.
12/x

There is that disconnect: the world those of us in poverty actually live in & the world in which people who never worry about paying bills or losing anything they value parse the "issue" of poverty. I want to get back to the fight against #poverty that has been eclipsed.
13/x

There was not one word about rage in this podcast. There was a lot if quotidian "lesser of two evils" rhetoric about Democrats and GOP that bores me to tears: all hierarchies are evil. Which ones can you work within is the real question never raised. Marx got that.
14/x

I don't fall in love with politicians, so I never have to fall out of love with them. I can admire aspects of someone's work & not be a devotée. So this podcast po'd me. WHERE WAS THE RAGE FOR PEOPLE WITH NO FOOD? West has so much to say about evil--where was THAT message?
15/x

So this is what I want you to remember: 16% of Americans live at or below the poverty level. Nearly all of them, like me, are working poor. Most people making minimum wage are adult women. Try living on $7.25hr--the federal min wage, unchanged in 13yrs. WHERE IS THE RAGE?
16/x

I look forward to a new admin that I can hold accountable because they are NOT, imo, evil. So I say to West, who still intoxicates me with his genius: We cannot work with evil. We can work with Democrats. Realign your rage to be FOR the vulnerable. THAT is our next chapter.
17/x

When West and Gray claim we are talking about the lesser of two evils, someone has to explain to me how a third party will be less evil. Because I grew up in the misogyny of the Socialist Party. Parties aren't the point. What we fight for is the point--the ONLY point.
18/18