Thread by @JuliusGoat

They're talking about a military coup right now and if it doesn't happen we're going to be told the best way to heal is pretending it never happened.

This is how abuse works.

3,000 people are dying a day and after nearly a year of this Congress is releasing the barest fraction of the economic relief needed to keep people safe and only in exchange for the promise that we can't sue those who endangered the dead.

This is how abuse works.

We have a president who spent 4 yrs lying every time he opened his mouth, obvious lies everyone knew were lies, which his followers believed mostly because the sight of them believing lies caused the rest of us distress, and they loved our distress.

This is how abuse works.

We've endured the sight of police brutalizing our fellow citizens for years, a horror magnified by the knowledge that for Black people this brutality has been a constant way of life, but we're told change must wait, because we aren't asking right.

This is how abuse works.

We have been menaced and lied to and confronted with a daily litany of atrocity that has only made the Republican rank and file happier, and the only message we ever get is that we need to be better at relating to the feelings of people who find comfort in suffering.

It's abuse.

The undergirding load-bearing superstructure upon which our entire society is built is abuse and enablement, and it's sick, and it has to stop.

We need to stop this deadly unreasonable practice of expecting people to accept unacceptable things in order to be thought reasonable.

In order to have healing, we first need to cleanse the wound.

This healing needs rage.

Rage, and consequence, and a real reckoning.

Anything less is just pretending it didn't happen. It's how abuse works.

They're going to ask you to pretend that none of it happened. It's appropriate to be angry about that, because it was real, it was abuse, asking you to pretend otherwise is enablement, and it's always appropriate to be angry about enablement.

Enablement of abuse is abuse.

They're going to tell you that your anger makes you just as bad as them, as if it's anger that is the problem, rather than the reason for the anger.

It's appropriate to be angry when you're told that, because that is enablement.

Enablement of abuse is abuse.

They're going to tell you to look ahead, not behind—as if their unconcern with the trauma is maturity, which you can only share in by matching it.

It's appropriate to be angry, because making people pay the cost of their own trauma is enablement.

Enablement of abuse is abuse.

This shit happened, it was absolutely unacceptable, and anybody supporting it, or anybody wanting to ignore it to avoid a reckoning of real consequence, should not be allowed in polite company.

Refuse to pay their tax of abuse.

Your rage is yours, and it's appropriate, and it's necessary right now. The reason abusive enablers want it gone is simple: It's evidence.

Abusive people and their enablers dislike evidence.

Evidence leads to conviction.

Conviction, to consequence.

Reject the abusive notion that your anger is the problem, not the abuse that made your anger appropriate.

Reject the enabling notion that abuse is an unfortunate necessity, changing it is unrealistic, and demanding better is immature or divisive.

Refuse to pay the tax of abuse.

They're going to tell you that your anger is causing the abuse:

*Your anger demonizes abusers.
*Your anger leaves no room for them to be redeemed.
*Your anger makes abusers angry.
*It's forcing them to be abusive.

All this is how enablement of abuse works.

Enablement is abuse.

The redemption of abusive people is their project, not yours.

Your anger is appropriate. It's evidence. It mustn't be hidden, and those who suggest it should should be rejected.

Those who suggest a reckoning is unrealistic, or badly timed, or divisive, should be rejected.

This is how we break this cycle.

Refuse to pay the tax of abuse, as proxy for those who were harmed, to the benefit of abusers, all in the name of healing.

That is how abuse stops working.

Sure.

It looks like a million things. I'll list some soon.

All of them involve refusing the lies: that abuse is unavoidable, that the response to abuse is the problem rather than the abuse itself, and that healing abuse involves avoiding a reckoning.

https://twitter.com/MizrahiJane/status/1341010896366280705?s=20

Sometimes, restoring order is inappropriate.

Sometimes, maintaining order is abusive.

Sometimes, your sister is bleeding and frightened for her life.

Sometimes, the only appropriate thing is to change the locks—whatever that might look like.

armoxon.com/2017/08/bubble…

Maybe changing the locks looks like this: Refusing complicity. Speaking up.

Not letting people infer through your silence that you think their abusive beliefs are good and just and true, rather than unjust and harmful and abusive.

Maybe changing the locks looks like this: Refusing distraction.

Not allowing the existence of a person’s good qualities to distract from the fact that a person’s beliefs and actions are unjust, and will make abuse not only likely, but also inevitable.

Maybe it looks like this: Refusing to be confused. Insisting on the truth. Not accepting a deflecting flurry of lies. Not accepting a false reality.

Maybe it looks like this: Refusing to ignore. Not giving in to the temptation of comfortable apathy.

Maybe it looks like this: Refusing debate with someone whose methods and purposes are abusive, simply on the grounds that their premises are abusive and harmful to others, and you will not lend unacceptable premises the respectability a debate provides.

Maybe it looks like this: Putting your body between somebody who might be harmed and the person who intends to harm them—without violence, if possible, and if you possess sufficient physical bravery.

Maybe it looks like this: Listening to somebody talk about their lived experience of oppression without deciding the conversation needs your perspective. Understanding that some conversations only need your ears, not your voice.

Maybe it looks like this: refusing to scold a person who happens to live under daily persistent threat from powerful people for the tone or methods they use to cope and survive.

Maybe it’s supporting people whose family faces separation, marriages face nullification, children faces bigotry and hatred, who represents a presumed danger to armed authorities oriented upon violence—and supporting them even if their responses are not as polite as you prefer.

Maybe it looks like this: allowing yourself to absorb some of the criticism, and even some of the daily persistent threat, and maybe even some of the abuse, by associating with people who have been made vulnerable by an unjust society.

Maybe it's recognizing the places where you are society's accepted and preferred default, and the ways that other people are not.

Maybe it looks like a sincere apology to somebody you hadn't realized you'd wronged.

Maybe it's realizing that in any story, the person who persists and overcomes injustice is the hero, and that means that the real hero of our country's story is somebody other than yourself.

Maybe it looks like taking to the streets in protest. Maybe it looks like calling your representative every day. Maybe it looks like a sign in your yard. Maybe it looks like a post on your Facebook page.

Maybe it looks like writing a massive Twitter thread on Monday morning.

Maybe it looks like this: Listening to somebody explain the lies they’ve believed, presenting you in detail the exact contours of their chosen abuse, and then asking them: “But aren’t you aware that every person is a unique irreplaceable work of art carrying unsurpassable worth?”

Maybe it looks like not being able to be around somebody for a while, not because you no longer love them, but because things are not the same, now that you know what they are willing to accept.

Maybe it means letting things get uncomfortable and stay that way.

Here’s what it always, always, always looks like: Insisting on keeping the frame of the discussion at all times on the issue of justice— refusing to pay the tax of abuse, or forcing others to do the same.

Insisting that we all belong to each other.

Insisting that life is not earned.

Insisting that violence does not redeem.

Insisting that human value is not determined by human profitability.

Insisting that all people—ALL people—are unique and irreplaceable works of art carrying unsurpassable worth, who possess inherent dignity, and who deserve equal consideration under the law and access to basic human need, simply because they exist.

Insisting that all other good things are only good insofar as they are not elevated above this essential truth.

Insisting that any good thing that is elevated above this essential truth ceases to become good, is perverted into an injustice.

Insisting that any order that would preserve injustice must be dismantled and rebuilt.

If we do that, we will become people reframed.

No longer framed upon abuse, but upon a justice based in love and regard for one another.

It is a justice based on love recognizes all mediums of human art.

Insist upon this new frame. Reject all others.

Remember: doing so will offend those of us who have different priorities.

Good.