More from @MsKellyMHayes

Puff the Magic Hater

@MsKellyMHayes

18 Nov

Trump is out here paving the path for the next would-be authoritarian, who will be much better at this than him.

Imagine if someone w more support from state legislatures had a government shutdown, paramilitary potential & an about to expire eviction moratorium in their back pocket. The Dems didn't have a plan to top that outside of people hating Trump enough, which we thankfully did.

So the GOP will continue shopping for their antichrist. There is no way forward for them that doesn't involve the eventual restoration of pre-VRA voting dynamics. Anyone who thinks they won't do what they are ALREADY DOING to maintain power is in denial. They have an end game.

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Puff the Magic Hater

@MsKellyMHayes

18 Nov

These numbers are making me physically ill.

I felt like I was surrounded by death last spring. This will be much harder. But pls resist the urge to let yourself harden in the face of this. Take emotional shelter when you need to, but also defend the parts of yourself that remember how to grieve for the people we've lost.

There are moments when I beg my brain to embrace the numbness or denial I see everywhere & when I think there is no way forward but to develop new, tougher layers. But it's never as simple as hardening or martyring ourselves to grief. It's just easier to think of it that way.

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Puff the Magic Hater

@MsKellyMHayes

18 Nov

My main comfort right now is that I have spent the better part of a yr preparing for this moment & I do not feel helpless the way I did in Feb, when the virus was closing in and no one would listen. All of our organizing back then was frantic improv. I feel less disoriented now.

I always knew we were buying time, and that eventually things would reopen and things would get bad. Without massive relief and a national testing apparatus, this was coming. We did buy scientists time y'all. There is a vaccine in the works. People said that wasn't possible.

But now, some of the bad scenarios we are fighting off last spring are here. That doesn't mean the entirety of the story has been written. Every choice we make matters. Every chain of infection we interrupt counts. Every life we save is worth it. But these will be dark times.

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Puff the Magic Hater

@MsKellyMHayes

16 Nov

We will be doing some extra episodes of Movement Memos around the escalating COVID-19 crisis in the prison industrial complex. I would appreciate any help uplifting those interviews & calls to action as they come. We need to get people out of those places as quickly as possible.

If any other building in the U.S. were becoming as deadly as those facilities are, it would be evacuated, and probably destroyed. That was true before COVID to be real, and it is more true than ever now.

Frightened people on the outside also have a way of forgetting that what happens inside the prison industrial complex doesn't stay inside. Guards are vectors and they will recirculate the disease steadily. What's incubated in prisons flows outward, always. It can't not.

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Puff the Magic Hater

@MsKellyMHayes

14 Nov

I was originally premed in college & one of the things that has stuck w me over the years was an intricate discussion of what protracted stress does to the human body. Most people don't understand the level of destruction. There are so many ways premature death is manufactured.

This is another reason I have no time for the fools who shamed folks for taking a breath last weekend. If you do not give yourself space for relief and joy, your insides will rip themselves apart. Your body wasn't made for that level of strain.

The people who shame you for resting or experiencing joy might, in fact, understand that you will destroy yourself without those things. They just don't care what happens to you and also want to talk down to you. Keep that in mind when they speak.

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