Balloon Juice

If you’ve ever tried to train a dog, you’ll know the moment when they know you want them to do something different, but they don’t know exactly what that is or how to do it.  Do you want me to sit?  I can sit!  Lie down?  I can do that!  Here’s my paw, here’s my paw, is that what you want?

John hit it out of the park last night with an important piece.  And in a wise and thoughtful comment, Eolirin points out the part of the story that Cole missed, and explains that missing piece in a clarifying way.  I now have an inkling of what many of us need to learn to see, and we owe Eolirin a huge debt of gratitude for that investment of time and energy.

Eolirin

I hate to have to post something like this on a thread intended to try to move us toward good feelings and that’s probably going to be dead by the time it goes up, but I feel like it really needs to be said and at this rate I’m not sure I’m going to have many other opportunities to say it.

I think something really core is missing in this analysis of why things have been getting so bad. The way minorities get treated here has been a problem for a very long time and it’s at the core of even what happened with the Biden thing. There’s been a reason why the attempts to get more diverse voices front paged have failed.

Those of us who are really vulnerable tend to view the world in very different ways, and tend to view our places in communities in different ways, and that bleeds into politics just as much. The reciprocal nature of having the back of the people who have yours tends to be a lot stronger for us because almost no one has ours and we really need that to survive. That means attacks on our politicians are a lot more personal.

We also tend to be more sensitive to whether or not we will be supported in conflicts, whether or not it’s safe to express our difficulties and frustrations, whether or not we can make complaints against the way other people are treating us. We’re sensitive to a lack of support, to that support being conditional.

Lots of you get instantly defensive when whiteness is critiqued. Lots of you get dismissive when we talk about how we’re affected by our minority status. So most of us stop doing it eventually. The ones who don’t tend to be very vocal to the point of belligerent about it.

For those of us that are vulnerable, with the conditions we now face out in the world, the way we’re being treated, the level of existential threat to us and our communities, it’s all so bad that having to deal with the microaggressions and the lack of being listened to in a supposed safe space is not something that’s so easy to tolerate anymore.

I have already come this close to not wanting to be here because of Mix, and it wasn’t because of the post about Jeffries. It’s been nearly everything he’s been posting since the election.

A lot of my communities are in crisis. If the Medicaid cuts go through a lot people in one of my communities are going to die. I very well may be one of them. I really don’t need to see people spending more time tearing down Democrats, who will at least have our backs a little bit even if they ultimately fail, than talking about anything productive.

I don’t need to see people spending time spinning their wheels pretending to be political consultants focusing on messaging and social media presentation, despite having the ear of no one who could implement their demands for how Democrats need to talk, while Republicans get ready to cut off food stamps which will push a lot of my peers into starving to death. Or while they move toward criminalizing our very existence as trans people. It isn’t helpful, it comes across as tone deaf, and it’s more than a little offensive.

People who are in my situation are dealing with so much unpersoning right now that subtler forms of erasure like that, where the focus of two out of every three posts is talking about talking, about how Democratic leadership needs to clap louder to bring tinkerbell back from the dead, that are confusing basic concepts like the difference between how well you can speak and how well you can lead, the role of a movement and the role of Congress, and spending zero time focusing on how we’re affected, or on actual things people can do to help anything at all, are difficult to stomach. They reek of privilege.

To then retreat back into demands for everyone to be more civil, no matter how well intentioned and genuine, compounds the hurt, because what that is saying to those of us who are going to bear the worst of what’s happening is that we need to shut up about how the things people do are hurtful to us, but none of the people causing that hurt need to engage with the ways in which they’re hurting us.

Our positions are asymmetrical; whatever hurt you may experience from, say, being called a racist by people over the internet when you say a dumb thing, even and especially if you don’t think it was dumb, is literally nothing compared to the reality of our situations right now.

If unity and avoiding people like Mix having to be uncomfortable and feel unfairly attacked because the people who have the right to define racism decide to apply that label to an action, and especially despite his having a long history of being antagonistic, we have a problem.

If unity is more important than grappling with Kay driving away Planet Eddie by engaging in transphobic rhetoric and not listening to anything any of us were trying to tell her, and never having to apologize for it, while continuing to maintain status, then we have a problem.

The Mix blow up was an echo of that same dynamic. They will be centered before us. They will be tolerated more than us. We will be asked to forgive and move past, but they will not be asked to change.

Moments like these are telling us that our viewpoints aren’t things that can be given space. At the end of the day we’ll always be the ones that just have to get over it. We cannot upset the rest of you or it’ll be a fight and the kind of fight that’ll eat up enough space and focus that the blog will feel like it’s coming apart and ultimately we need to be the ones to drop it.

Because it’ll never be the Mixes or Kays who will stop and reflect that maybe, even if the response was too extreme and feels unfair there may have been a point to it, and maybe there needs to be an acknowledgement that there was a wrong, even if unintentional, and maybe there needs to be a change, and maybe there needs to be more listening, and maybe there needs to be a greater allowance of space even that means they have to give up some of theirs.

And this is true also of the way Kay has sometimes been treated. There have been places there in which I was the one who needed to be better. Our individual status does not invalidate others similarly struggling.

But the difference in response to what’s happening now and what happened when we lost ABL and Planet Eddie isn’t something that is so easily missed for those of who have been here a long time.

That difference does not feel good.

Without reconciliation, without a real grappling with our behaviors, there can be no healing.

No one else has to apologize, or reflect, or change their behaviors when it comes to the subtle disregard for our points of view and our struggles.

We just have to get over it. And the worst part is you don’t even realize that that’s what the ask here really is.

And I want to be clear, Cole I respect the hell out of you. I think you put in far more work than most on these issues. I think you genuinely care. And I know you want to make this space work. I think Anne and WG and Adam do massive and important work here. This isn’t meant to tear down or attack any of that.

But no one here can ask trans people and blacks and jews and the disabled and immigrants and brown people and women, especially of color, to maintain the same level of civility and assumptions of good faith when we’re operating in an environment in which we are being systematically assaulted, erased and eliminated without asking us to do more than you do.

Do not ask those of us with the most burden to carry to carry even more. We are already tasked with bearing our pain in silence, with ignoring any microaggressions and subtle attacks on our communities and on the people who keep those communities safe, with ignoring the subtle and occasionally gross forms of erasure that keep being thrown our way, and to do so without being impolite or judgmental or angry. It is already too much.

You cannot fairly ask that just because the ways in which we are affected are invisible to the rest of you and bevause of that invisibility you are not acting with intention that we should treat them like they do not exist, or that you should not be held to account for them.

We are hurting more than you can understand and we aren’t just afraid, we are being marked for death.

All of you, if you’re going to give us space, you need to be serious about that, and if you’re not, and you really don’t have to, because it’s going to be uncomfortable for you to do so, because it’s going to cause conflict, because we may at times flail and rage and you will sometimes get caught up in that and it often won’t be fair to you, if that’s going to be too much of a distraction for the rest of you, if it’s going to make you too defensive, if it’s going to upset you to the point that it tears the community apart, then we shouldn’t be here.

And that’s very much where I’m ending up after all of this. I’m questioning my continued participation.

Yes, people are doing dumb ass shit and it’d be cool if it stopped. That goes for everyone. But that’s not really the larger problem.

We cannot continue to paper over the way in which whiteness fundamentally distorts what is acceptable here and how it places a far greater burden on those of us who do not recieve it’s protection and the advantages of its defaultness.

We cannot continue to ignore the ways in which that remains invisible to far too many of you.

Not and still have a genuine place in the community. If we’re not willing to have that conversation, if we’re not able to have that conversation, if we’re not able to grow and become better through having that conversation, then I’m not sure what we’re doing here.

If we can’t have fights about important things when we need to, if we strive only for the fights to end, or to not happen, instead of allowing those fights to carve proper space for those of us who need it, if privilege is perpetually allowed to dominate the nature of these conversations, instead of those with it choosing to listen, even when they feel attacked, even when they feel like they’re being treated unfairly, if when we get angry and lash out there is no attempt to see past that to the pain and hurt behind it, to accept the truth of that, to do what can be done to accommodate it, to step back and question whether you are playing a part in that pain, especially when you don’t mean to, then there can be no real space for us.

Even without realizing it you’re all asking us to create that space for you and denying us the same latitude. That has to stop. You aren’t experiencing what we’re experiencing. It can’t all fall on us.

Thank you, Eolirin.

Update: I have added both posts in the sidebar under the heading Everyone Should Read These.

Also, this post will be pinned at the top of the blog until sometime later this evening.

The Missing Piece, Provided by EolirinPost + Comments (380)

A peek behind the curtain.

So before we risk chasing another front-pager off, please indulge me and walk in our shoes for a minute.

You put a post together.  Sometimes it’s a quick “looks like we could use an open thread” and sometimes you put heart and soul into your post.

Let’s say no one steps on your post.  More often than not, the first comment out of the gate is a criticism about something.  Or maybe it’s the fifth, but either way, it’s early in the game.  Maybe it’s a throwaway line that gets the criticism, but that doesn’t matter, there’s a good chance that the whole comment section becomes about some tiny little thing that had almost nothing to do with your main point.

All those links you took the time and trouble to find?  They don’t matter because half the people don’t read the post, not everyone has time to click the links, and chances are good that the discussion won’t end up being about your topic anyway.  That’s okay, no one needs to read the post.  Some people will learn something or have some fun in the comments, or something you wrote will spark a good discussion, and that’s good.

But way too often anymore it doesn’t matter what you’ve written because the comments turn into the same fucking arguments over and over and over.  So if you’re anything like me, you think “what’s the point?”, and you post less often.

Worst case, a valued front-pager like mistermix says fuck it, life’s too short, and then an important voice is gone.  Maybe we could stop doing that?

Commenting

As someone who reads Balloon Juice, what wears me down most is the bullshit passive aggressive comments we have started seeing more and more.  You know what I mean, where someone is talking behind someone else’s back, right in front of their face.  It’s not clever to be dissing someone else in the comment thread (or worse yet, dissing someone who is not even in that thread) without naming names.  Sure the people who are tuned in know who you are talking about, but it’s like mean girls in junior high; it’s petty and it’s ugly.  We used to be better than this.

I used to describe Balloon Juice as like being at a get together with really smart and interesting people. Every day.  We can be that again.

Stress by definition is not pretty.  Stress and anxiety coming out sideways can be downright ugly.  Many of us are stressed beyond what our coping mechanisms can handle.  Quibbling with our online friends and attacking our allies cannot be the solution.  It just can’t.  And no, I’m not talking about everyone.  For everyone who is still their best selves, I salute you, and I want to be you.

The rest of us can do better.

Remember this?

‘The talk focuses on politics, pets and animal rescue, gardening, pop culture and more, but what it really does is serve as a meeting point for interesting, like-minded people to talk, argue, share, and cope. We pride ourselves on being a real community — we get to know each other, help one other and serve as a (mostly) friendly refuge in an often ugly world. Like all families, we sometimes fight.”

Who else wants to get back to that?

CurtainPost + Comments (253)