Kat Gale > Recent Status Updates

Going without someone touching you lightly, a hand on a shoulder, fingers picking lint in places you can't see, nodding at your slippers and telling you, put 'em on right so you don't trip–not having that kind of care is like starting to die. Going whole days without having a single person in the world look at you with sugar in their smile is a worse sentence than what any judge can give you.

The period of upheaval that journalists have begun to refer to as “the Apocalypse” or more commonly, more bitterly, “the Pox” lasted from 2015 through 2030—a decade and a half of chaos. This is untrue. The Pox has been a much longer torment. It began well before 2015, perhaps even before the turn of the millennium. It has not ended.

The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren’t any other kind and yet I found myself thinking how beautiful that glint of water was through the trees.

I feel simultaneously too soft and too hard for this world. I can't let people in, but somehow, still manage to be hurt by them all the time.

When our unquestionably dominant, white culture takes from cultures we've ritually subordinated, with zero context and giving zero credit, then profits from it, it's not sharing-it's cultural appropriation.

The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist. Persisting isn’t always safe, but it’s often necessary.

To comfort one who remains willfully ignorant of what he has done is to provide no comfort at all, he said. If you truly wish to comfort him, bring him to admit his sin, then repent of it.

Cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science fiction novels. The company-city subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped “the company.” I’ve never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that’s the way it will be. That’s the way it is.

"There would be all those guards,” I said. “I’ve noticed that people who have a little bit of power tend to use it. All those guards KSF is bringing in—they won’t be allowed to bother the rich people, at least at first. But new, bare-bones, work-for-room-and-board employees. … I’ll bet they’ll be fair game.”

I’m still learning how dogged people can be in denial, even when their freedom or their lives are at stake.

Anyone KSF hired would have a hard time living on the salary offered. In not very much time, I think the new hires would be in debt to the company. That’s an old company-town trick—get people into debt, hang on to them, and work them harder. Debt slavery.

Food prices are insane, always going up, never down. Everyone complains about them.

“Live!” Dad said. “That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times.”

It’s better to teach people than to scare them, Lauren. If you scare them and nothing happens, they lose their fear, and you lose some of your authority with them. It’s harder to scare them a second time, harder to teach them, harder to win back their trust. Best to begin by teaching.

He should have jumped out the window. But he realized the mistake too late. Years of living under Per's heavy fists had taught him the finer points of survival: keep objects between you, don't make noise (Per thrived on the sound of pain), run, never look back, return only when hunger prevented him from sleeping in the marsh or the cold became so deep that breath billowed through the rain.
–Such a familiar list.

In the summer of 1990 he offered to bet a roomful of fellow-scientists a hundred dollars that either that year or one of the following two years would be the warmest on record. To qualify, the year would have to set a record not only for land temperatures but also for sea-surface temperatures and for temperatures in the lower atmosphere. Hansen won the bet in six months

That’s what we’ve got to do now. Get ready for what’s going to happen, get ready to survive it, get ready to make a life afterward. Get focused on arranging to survive so that we can do more than just get batted around by crazy people, desperate people, thugs, and leaders who don’t know what they’re doing!

I knew how much it hurt to be let down by the people you should've been able to count on.

I knew how much it hurt to be let down by the people you should've been able to count on.

I knew sometimes you couldn't count even on family to come through for you. Sometimes the people who are supposed to love you walked away when you needed them most.

When one person steps forward to speak truth to power, it does more than just redeem them or atone for wrongdoing. It adds to a collective whole, a larger wave of fresh outrage and demands for our government, our representatives, and everyone to not just #BelieveWomen but to do better.

Maybe it’s the scientist in me, but I’d like to believe that we’re in the middle of a revolution that will only be recognizable in years to come. If it takes countless survivors to tell their story despite personal risks and consequences on an individual level—all of us slowly stacking on top of one another until there is finally a collective response—I’m proud to have contributed.

Additional allegations came out against Kavanaugh...but every time more information came to light about Kavanaugh or the way the confirmation was handled, contacts in DC told me the harsh truth: there's zero chance that anything will be done. I now know the difficulty of asking a bureaucratic organization to disrupt itself when everyone involved—even the people on my side—want to keep the processes going as they are.

We are still in mourning
The children were stolen from these beloved lands by the government
Their hair was cut
Their toys and handmade clothes ripped from them
They were bathed in pesticides
And now, clean, given prayers in a foreign language to recite
As they lined up to sleep alone
In their Army-issued cages.

Working through this alone, I’ve reached my greatest sense of empowerment in an unlikely place: the abyss. Where even if no one on earth were to believe you, you know it still happened. No one can take that away from you.
–To everyone who didn't believe me, I responded, "your disbelief doesn't negate the truth."

An example of White genocide theory imagines a political plot to bring on the genocide or extinction of White people. “The Great Replacement is a genocide by substitution,” Camus wrote. The supposed tools for this White genocide? Open borders. Immigrant “invasions.” Transnational gangs. “Radical Islamic terrorism.” Vaccines. “Black on White” murders. Jewish “cabals.”
–It's an emotionally immature, fear-based view.

"Here’s how it would have gone down. Opposition researchers would have discredited you within a week. By July 15, no one would have spoken your name again. Staying anonymous for as long as you did was what allowed you the chance to tell the truth.”
It was ugly but true, gruesome but comforting. I had to stop underestimating the evil that these people were capable of. And the reality that they would never give up.

Camus’s conspiracy that a cabal of powerful elites is plotting a great replacement to ensure the exploitation and domination of low- and middle-income White people is nothing short of a grand distraction. Low- and middle-income White people are facing supercharged efforts to exploit and dominate them at the hands of the very economic and political elites conjuring up fictional tales of the great replacement.

What surprised me more than anything was how quickly everything had changed. In an instant, our lives could be irrevocably altered-and even ended. And the future? There was no predicting it, no taking anything for granted anymore. No one knew what lay ahead.

–Security & safety is an illusion. You're always one unexpected event away from being in a vulnerable circumstance yourself, so be compassionate towards others.