Lydia > Recent Status Updates

“If your only goal is to break the glass ceiling, consider whom all those shards of glass will be falling on if you’re not bringing the most marginalized people up with you.” (Ch 3, Reimagining Feminism)

You take your material where you find it, which is in your life, at the intersection of past and present. The memory-traffic feeds into a rotary up on your head, where it goes in circles for a while, then pretty soon imagination flows in and the traffic merges and shoots off down a thousand different streets. As a writer, all you can do is pick a street and go for the ride, putting things down as they come at you.

In late 1945, counting the occupations, 51 percent of the population of the Greater United States lived outside the states. But by 1960, after Hawaii and Alaska entered the union, that number had fallen to around 2 percent, which is roughly where it has been ever since. Today, all U.S. overseas territory, including base sites, comprises an area smaller than Connecticut.
How did this happen?

“We have to learn how to imagine the future in terms that are not restricted to our own lifetimes.”

“The soaring numbers of people behind bars all over the world and the increasing profitability of the means of holding them captive is one of the most dramatic tendencies of global capitalism. The obscene profits obtained from mass incarceration are linked to profits from the health care industry and from education and other commodified human services that actually should be freely available to everyone.”

“When you're not remarkable in any way or shape, when you're short on special smarts or looks, wealth or talents, charisma or virtues, when you're not even plain vanilla ice cream but an experimental flavor that people will readily take a sample spoon of but never end up wanting, you don't wig out like most would when picturing oneself and coming up blank.”

Dishwashing can be worthwhile, if not for the usual reasons. Sure, you can't help but develop some grit in the face of being shat upon hour after hour, and come to realize how exploited most people are, but the main thing you learn about yourself and everyone else toiling away is how much of your mental activity and chatter is about dreaming of doing something else, whether noble or debauched or downright silly.

“Remember that you do not need to earn your right to the precious minutes you have on this planet. They are already yours.”

“All these years spent thinking that I had superhuman self-control, and now I realize I just never put anything I wanted too badly in front of myself.”

“You are breaking your own heart every time you exaggerate your importance in their life.”

“You’re the one your words reach and strengthen. You can think of it as pressing to that part of God that’s within you.”

“I want to trust these people. I like them, and… they’re all I have left. But I need more time to decide. It’s no small thing to commit yourself to other people.”

“God can't be resisted or stopped, but can be shaped and focused. This means God is not to be prayed to. Prayers only help the person doing the praying, and then, only if they strengthen and focus that persons resolve. If they're used that way, they can help us... They help us to shape God and to accept and work with the shapes that God imposes on
us. God is power, and in the end, God prevails.

“For Black women today and for all their working-class sisters, the notion that the burden of housework and child care can be shifted from their shoulders to the society contains one of the radical secrets of womens liberation. Child care should be socialized, meal preparation should be socialized, housework should be industrialized—and all these services should be readily accessible to working-class people.”

“As the violent face of sexism, the threat of r*pe will continue to exist as long as the overall oppression of women remains an essential crutch for capitalism.”

“White women were learning that as mothers, they bore a very special responsibility in the struggle to safeguard white supremacy.”

“How can I possibly die when I am this afraid of dying?”

On the Civil War: “The Northern capitalists sought economic control over the entire nation. Their struggle against the Southern slaveocracy did not therefore mean that they supported the liberation of Black men or women as human beings.”

“The MS-13 gang… was originally started in the United States by paramilitary-linked exiles from Central America, and gained a foothold in El Salvador and elsewhere after anti-immigrant politics led to the mass deportation of Central Americans in the 1990s. Denying asylum to refugees fleeing gang violence and domestic abuse meant denying an entire history of American culpability in the region.”

“For a long time, it was too painful to be here. My mind preferred to be dissociated. I used to believe the goal was forgetting. It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing, it is about returning repeatedly to forage something. Writing this book allowed me to go back to that place. I learned to stay in the hurt, to resist leaving.”

“The friendly guy who helps you move and assists senior citizens in the pool is the same guy who assaulted me. One person can be capable of both. Society often fails to wrap its head around the fact that these truths often coexist, they are not mutually exclusive. Bad qualities can hide inside a good person. That’s the terrifying part.”

“Maybe they’d always be disasters—but couldn’t they support each other and grow together? No one was perfect! And maybe that was what real, adult love was. Being fearless enough to hold each other close no matter how catastrophic the world became. Loving each other with enough ferocity to quell the fears of the past. Just fucking being there.”

“I lean into the mirror… and touch my face: I am still here. It bothers me that I can never really see myself as someone else can. I have to trust that the reflection is right. I have to trust that seeing in reverse is close enough to seeing straight on.”

“But I remember I thought, for the first time, ‘My God. Nobody asked you either, Mary. Nobody asked if God could build a temple out of you, if you wanted to turn your life into an offering.’”

“Beginning at the end of the Civil War, government funds from Indigenous land sales or royalties were not distributed to reservation citizens or held by their governments; rather they were held in trust and managed in Washington. The Bureau of Indian Affairs, without Indigenous people’s consent, invested Indigenous funds in railroad companies and various municipal and state bonds.”

“The essence of true love is mutual recognition—two individuals seeing each other as they really are.”

“Queerness isn’t about individual answers as much as collective questions.”

“It was crucial to make the reality & significance of Indigenous peoples’ survival clear throughout the book. Indigenous survival as peoples is due to centuries of resistance & storytelling passed through the generations, & I sought to demonstrate that this survival is dynamic, not passive. Surviving genocide, but whatever means, is resistance: non-Indians must know this…to understand the history of the US.”