You have all the weapons you need.

Mar 22, 2012 22:09

I've spent the last 48 hours--you know, really, the last few months--in a pit of helpless, hopeless rage and disgust and then I just read this and it kind of made me want to cry because of All The Feelings.
I have been getting pretty visceral lately with my anger and it comes up in strange ways, hot wide surges of fury as unthwartable as magma, and I don't always like it either but what else do you do. The older I get the fewer fucks I give. These days I am an open wound, a walking gash--oh, do you see what I did there--a woman whose anger radiates outward like a heat haze. I am angry about a lot more than Jonathan Franzen--I am an ace at anger, a real multitasker of fury. I am large, I contain multitudes. I have energy to spare, believe me, I have energy to fire up a nuclear bomb. I can be angry about so many things at once, I can be angry about the big things and the little ones, the massive injustice of Trayvon Martin and the gnat that is Jonathan Franzen's opinions, I can be angry about the abortion ban that just passed in Mississippi and the books that are being banned in Arizona, and I am not in any way saying that these things are the same things, that they are weighted equally, but we have to live with all of them, and here's the thing. Nobody, but nobody, gets to tell me what to be angry about. What it is and is not okay to be angry about. I think you know how to be angry about a lot of things, too. I think you know anger is not a pie: there is always more to go around. Let us never be less inventive than the people who hate us, do you understand? Our thoughts be bloody or nothing fucking worth.

I don't know how to do anything else other than be angry and if I had the answer I would give it to you, believe me, if I had the secret, the secret that would make it okay, the secret that would make sense of all this shit, I would give it to you, but I don't have that. What I have is rage and also maybe some love. Love for the warriors, the fools, the people who are also crazy, the people who are giving up but never, ever giving in. Fucking Cool Hand Luke, all of us. We're not going to win but we'll die trying. And I am telling you that if you are fighting I love you, if you are standing up I love you, if you are refusing to back down I love you, and we will find each other, we will. I promise. I can't tell you how to make sense of it but I can tell you there are more of us than you think. What I am saying, really, is that I want you to be angry, all of you, I want you to be angrier than you have ever been in your lives, I want you to be a fucking beacon of white-hot rage burning so bright no one around you can miss it. Whatever it takes to stoke the fire. I want us to be so loud and so angry and so visible and so terrifying that we cannot be mistaken for anything other than the future, a future that looks like us. In all our kinds of bodies, in all our kinds of love. Waiting for the time when none of us are angry anymore because the only thing left is the world we want to live in. When the hardest thing any of us will know is teaching ourselves how to live without anger altogether.

Until then: whatever it takes and fucking fight.

I have a lot to say about all of this but I think it has to wait.

This entry was originally posted (with
comments) at my Dreamwidth.

politik, feel all the feelings

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