it turns out i can get madder

[darthfox]

Like many of us, I've been suffering from rage-and-despair fatigue for the past year and a half, and I have extremely limited confidence that voting (which I early-did on Sunday) will help worth a damn in the midterms or even, maybe, in 2020; it's great to reflect that the moral arc of history is long and bends toward justice, but I want to improve the bit of the arc I'm going to be using for the next thirty or forty years, you know what I'm saying? "This too shall pass" is not super helpful to me right now.

Anyway. While I've spent the entirety of this administration seeing breaking-news headlines or hearing people sigh or curse in frustration and automatically asking "What did they do now?" - because that's the only thing you can ask, most of the time - in the past two days I have broken down in tears twice over the separation of children from their parents at the southwest border. I continue to rage and despair, but today I am also trying to do other things:

• [eta: Oh, first, self-care: I am not listening to the Pro Publica recording of children sobbing. I have some guilt about the decision to protect myself from that, but I think it would tip me from having difficulty focusing or caring about much else into total inability to focus or care about much else, and that's not good for me or my family, so.]
  
• I am planning to take my kid to the Families Belong Together protest at the White House on June 30. It will be over his lunch time and his nap time and will thus completely disrupt his day, and he can handle one day of disruption goddammit. If it will not be actually dangerous to him, I'm taking him with me and pretty invested in his father coming along as well. Going to a "Families Belong Together" event without my family seems to miss the point rather.
  
• My Congressfolk are all sapphire-blue, so there's no need to yell at them persuasively or otherwise - but I wrote to my senators to thank them for supporting the Keep Families Together Act and to my representative to ask him what he's doing and what the living hell his colleagues are thinking, and I asked all three of them what else we can do. Busloads of Freedom Riders to overpower the CBP agents and tear open the doors, is what I'm working with right now. Open to other suggestions.
  
• I've made substantial* donations this morning to RAICES Texas, Al Oltro Lado, and the ACLU. If you have the means, I hope you will consider doing the same. *I can't give tens of thousands of dollars per family member like the Teigen-Legends, but there's a lot of room south of where they are that's still more money than I need, so.
  
• For many, many months, I've been resolved that the next time I'm anywhere the national anthem is played or sung, my knee is on the ground. That's not going to change until this does, that's for damn sure.
  
• At
  ellen_fremedon's suggestion, I also wrote to the governor of my state, who is not sapphire-blue, and urged him to follow the lead of the governor of Massachusetts in refusing to deploy the National Guard to the southwest border, "where they would have 'supported security operations' by separating children from their families. I have a 19-month-old myself, and he doesn't understand why lately I've been loading him up with extra hugs - but when I think about these children being separated from their parents, it is so hard for me to put him down. ... One thing you can do is declare in advance that you will not - and will not require the Maryland National Guard to - collaborate."
  
• Be assured that my use of the word "collaborate" was one hundred percent deliberate.