I was fighting fascism with the power of love and kindness and just really getting my ass handed to me. A total bloodbath. The referee would have stepped in by now but they had knocked him out with a steel chair. The only others watching were either fascists themselves or the people trying to fight fascism with the power of love and kindness and they weren’t having a great go of it either. I kept trying to explain in between haymakers that we were better than this and on top of that it wasn’t likely to be ruled on favorably as far as the courts. None of it helped. I was on my knees now bleeding profusely from the mouth and nose. It spilled out of me onto the snow in a pattern that if you sort of squinted at it from the right vantage looked like a cartoon heart. See that I pointed. Look how beautiful the world can be I tried to say through my broken teeth. Alright well now he was pulling out a gun. I didn’t think we were allowed do that.

- The Rules, Luke O'Neil 

 “Children you are about to be told one more time that you are America's most valuable natural resource. Have you seen what they do to valuable natural resources? Have you seen a strip mine? Have you seen a clear cut in the forest? Have you seen a polluted river? Don't ever let them call you a valuable natural resource! They're going to strip mine your soul. They're going to clear cut your best thoughts for the sake of profit unless you learn to resist, because the profit system follows the path of least resistance and following the path of least resistance is what makes the river crooked!“

Utah Phillips

"It was handed to you and you had no other choice but to take it for your own survival."

I don't send food back at restaurants. Even if it's horrible. I was once served a veal piccata that I was pretty sure was rancid. And it was so oversalted that it made the inside of my mouth sting. But I still ate half of it thinking that maybe it would get better or maybe I just didn't know how veal piccata should taste. Then, I finally just gave up and sat there still hungry until the server came over.

"Everything OK?"

"Yeah, it's great. Thank you."

I should have sent it back. I should have said, "No. This is, in fact, the worst thing I've ever tasted. I'm sure it's not your fault, but this is awful."

That's what I should have said.

But, instead, I sat on my hands, paid, and tipped the server generously. I'm just not a "Take a stand" guy.

I think it's like that with liberals. I think, way down deep, many of us have been considered freaks our whole lives because of the way we are or the way we think. We have suffered the consequences of not falling in line so many times that it cows us. And we want people to like us, so many of us tend not to make a fuss.

If this is you, I'd like to talk to you.

Let me begin by saying that I know it may be uncomfortable for you. You see all that's going on and it feels overwhelming, but you don't know what to do. So, instead, you just wait. Or, worse yet, you eat that rancid veal piccata and smile. Something inside you makes you doubt yourself. But I'd like you to know that that's not YOUR doubt. Somebody else put that in you and it's not yours. It was handed to you and you had no other choice but to take it for your own survival. Or at least that's what they told you.

I have never called an official's phone in my life to tell them what I want. What I won't stand for. What I need them to do. But I've been using the 5 calls app just to do that. At first, I was disappointed that it wasn't like Resist Bot where you don't actually have to talk to anyone. Resist Bot does it for you. The 5 Calls app means you have to talk to somebody. They even provide a script if you need one.

My first call to Fetterman's office ended with me being on hold for a half our and when it finally clicked over, they seemed to have hung up on me. I was momentarily relieved, actually. But I stuck it out and called again.

My delivery was clunky.

"My name is Brian Broome and I...uh...I have some things I want to say. And I uhhh... I need John Fetterman to...uh...listen."

I was legitimately rattled.

I went on like that sounding unsure of myself. Like I owed him money and called to tell him that I wasn't going to be able to pay him. That's what I sounded like because that's how they've taught us to think.

But, since then, I have found my voice. I don't need no script. I just need them to know what the fuck they seem to be supporting.

What I need you to know, shy person, is that nobody else is going to do this for you. There is no calvary on the way. And what we're facing now is so dangerous that even I put my insecurities away and made my voice heard.

And I will keep doing so.

If this is you too, I beseech you to swallow hard and make those calls or do something that will make a difference. Be braver than you're used to being or maybe never were.

Your first call will be clunky.

But by the third, fourth, and fifth, you'll realize that all those people who've made you think your voice doesn't matter were dead wrong. Because, again, nobody else can save you right now, but you. If you have children, do it for them. Hell, if you even LIKE children do it for them because this will affect the world they grow up in.

We are in the midst of an authoritarian takeover and no amount of scrolling on your phone is going to help it. And, I get it. You don't know how to make a fuss. But I also remind you that dumb is loud. Dumb is so very fucking loud.

Don't eat what they're trying to serve you.

Send it back.

Writer Brian Boome, Facebook post Feb. 19, 2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1XKVoZfCZu/

Somehow we survive

We are in a new age, for now. We are all going to get what's coming. Masses rescinding in advance. I feel a violent whiplash from Jan. 6th 4 yrs ago to now. This is all on Biden, Weekend at Biden's team and the Democrats but I'd like to take a moment to curse out the Dem primary voters of 2020 who saw Biden on display for over a year and said 'this is the man who can save us, we want to go back to sleep' and look what has been wrought. If he had never been VP Biden would have never even broke 5% in the primaries.  

What keeps me up is not what Trump and the GOP have planned, because that has been on my mind the past few years since 2021 (yes seriously), but the lack of mainstream resistance and on the ground in comparison to years prior. It's like an abandoned mine town. Now one could claim the mainstream resistance wasn't built on a solid foundation other than American institutions and exceptionalism is great "America is already great!" which isn't wrong but I'd prefer it to this. A new grotesqueness is the pop culture acceptance of him. To Carrie Underwood and Snoop Dogg and Jeff Bezos and Oscar DeLa Renta and Dior, etc rolling their tongues out and wagging. And sure we shouldn't be looking to figures like this for guidance and I don't but this acceptance that was unthinkable eight years ago is chilling. Like the 1930s, as they say history doesn't repeat but it often rhymes. I guess the Hays Code is coming back with Gibson, Stallone, and Voight leading the charge. Back to reactionary white hetro American masculine classics of The Golden Age of Hollywood. The GOP ghouls in Indiana are putting up a bill to make divorce harder and states are trying to get abortion as a death penalty punishment. These other groups and orgs who weren't mainstream resistance libs where are they? They have been hollowed out the past few years and many people have seem to have exited.

Trump is the luckiest motherfucker that ever lived and Biden is the biggest loser on earth. 

What an unspeakable tragedy we are being strapped in and lowered into, a new reverse Operation Warp Speed.

Though I do want to pause outside of myself and I am thankful even if it's temporary for the relief of the ceasefire for the Palestinians. 

Free them all.

I think of this poem "Somehow We Survive" by Dennis Brutus a survivor of South African apartheid often since I came across it around 7 years ago. We will need these words to move through what comes.

Somehow we survive
More terrible than any beast
that can be tamed or bribed
the iron monster of the world ingests me in its grinding maw:

agile as ballet-dancer
fragile as butterfly
I eggdance with nimble wariness
-stave off my fated splintering

Somehow we survive
and tenderness, frustrated, does not wither
investigating searchlights rake
our naked unprotected contours;
over our heads the monolithic decalogue

of fascist prohibition glowers
and teeters for the catastrophic fall;
boots club the peeling door.
But somehow we survive severance,
deprivation, loss.

Patrols uncoil along the asphalt dark
hissing their menace to our lives,
most cruel, all our land is scarred with terror,
rendered unlovely and lovable;
sundered are we and all our passionate surrender
but somehow tenderness survives.

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