Justin Lonas

“just being perceived, all the time being perceived, was itself exhausting.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“The questions which one asks oneself begin, at last, to illuminate the world, and become one's key to the experience of others. One can only face in others what one can face in oneself. On this confrontation depends the measure of our wisdom and compassion. This energy is all that one finds in the rubble of vanished civilizations, and the only hope for ours.”
― James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name

“It seems very American to expect grief to change something. Like a token you cash in. A formula. Grieve x amount, receive y amount of comfort. Work a day in the grief mines and get paid in tickets to the company store.”
― Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!

“[Trump] and his ideas are not exceptional. He and the people who support him are just the latest examples of the country's ongoing betrayal. . .When we make Trump exceptional, we let ourselves off the hook. For he is us, just as surely as the slave-owning Founding Fathers were us, as surely as Lincoln with his talk of sending Black people to Liberia was us, as surely as Reagan was us with his welfare queens. When we are surprised to see the reemergence of Klansman, Neo-Nazis and other White Nationalists, we reveal our willful ignorance about how our own choices make them possible.”
― Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Begin Again: James Baldwin's America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own