Because I Needed The Reminder And Maybe You Do Too: The Best Way To Deal With Political Frustration Is

Because I needed the reminder and maybe you do too: the best way to deal with political frustration is to do something.

A real and immediate impact you can have that will directly help a Palestinian is to buy an eSIM and send it to gazaesims@gmail.com. This allows Gazans to access mobile data so they can get news out and keep in touch with their friends and family.

If you have never done this before, here is a step by step guide, complete with discount codes. It is slightly technical but still fairly easy (imo, ymmv). If you can't/don't want to buy one directly, you can donate to Crips for eSIMs and they will buy one on your behalf.

You don't have to top up the eSIMs when they get low/run out, but I find it comforting to do so. It means somebody is still alive, and that you've made a hellish experience a tiny bit less terrible.

Catholic academia in October:

old rosary tangled with earphones in your pocket, reassuring texture of the beads between your fingers. cold hands and hot coffee. late blooming roses reminding you of st. Thérèse. scribbling latin phrases on the margins. reading The Interior Castle on rainy afternoons. going to the evening mass at sunset and leaving when it's already dark, crunchy leaves under your feet.

Seraph Angel

R. Lentz

Holy Card

african migrant workers are being abandoned by rich lebanese families who have evacuated the genocide. some employers have denied them access to their passports and forced them to stay in their houses in lebanon. when these workers escape to shelters they are kicked out. some of those workers have died in the israeli bombings.

the anti-racism movement (arm) is fundraising to help support migrant workers during this time.

arm-lebanon's instagram

donate here

larger document compiling fundraisers for marginalized people in lebanon who will be hit the hardest by this wave of the genocide

all prisoners on death row are political prisoners. capital punishment is part of both the afterlife and presentlife of lynchings and slavery. the myriad of issues including the permanence of death as punishment, how death sentences are deployed in an overtly discriminatory manner, how capital punishment does nothing to actually prevent crime, denies people any chance of restorative justice all of these are secondary to the simple fact that the state should not have the right to kill human beings. some of y all keep missing the point and focusing on the dichotomies of guilt versus innocence when it comes to the liberation of prisoners on death row and otherwise). regardless of whether or not an individual is "guilty" of the crime they have been charged with, the state should not be able to detain them indefinitely before murdering them. full stop. rest in power marcellus williams and may we, in the words of george jackson, "rage on aggressive and free" until no human being is murdered by the state again

DECOLONIAL ACTION READING

I recently compiled these to add to a comrade’s post about Land Back, but actually I think they deserve their own post as well.

Amílcar Cabral - Return To The Source

Frantz Fanon - The Wretched Of The Earth

Hô Chí Minh - archive via Marxists.org

Thomas King - The Inconvenient Indian

Abdullah Öcalan - Women’s Revolution & Democratic Confederalism

Edward Said - The Question Of Palestine

Thomas Sankara - archive via Marxists.org

Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang - Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor

Other key names in postcolonial theory and its practical application include:

Sara Ahmed

Homi K. Bhabha

Aimé Césaire

Albert Memmi

Jean-Paul Sartre

Léopold Séder Senghor

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

All of these will help you interpret and confront the realities of colonisation, and ideally help us understand and extend solidarity to comrades around the globe. Decolonise your mind, and don’t stop there!