FINALLY: Combining and distorting a meme does not mean I was not touched to be tagged

So Kevin, who I love, and Ilyka, who I love, tagged me for the Much Obliged/Helping Hand thing, I think it’s called.  And I have wanted to talk about/comment on many posts at many places lately.  In lieu of doing either thing right, I’m going to post a bunch of links now to posts/blogs that I love and/or feel challenged by and/or wish got more attention and/or deserve every bit of the lots-of-attention they get.  I give you:

Joan Kelly’s Links of Tomorrow, Today, except for the part where they’re really from yesterday and a little farther/further back:

The link where you can read about BFP and Jess Hoffmann and Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore being saluted by the Utne Reader.

I know there are a lot of reasons *why* Kevin’s statements in this post end up being so inflammatory for so many people, instead of simple to see and accept.  Knowing why the resistance goes up and/or persists does not make it any less of a head-shaker.  For me anyway.  See why I had a hard time just doing the original meme like everybody else?  I wanted to fawn over Kevin, and if I’d done it in the meme, next thing you know we’re having a mutual admiration society that only one party consented to.  Moving on…

Someone else who talks about loving books and longing for (I paraphrase, and this is what I got out of what she says here) stories of humans having sex, and a break from book-length punchlines meant to simultaneously cast the teller as sooper-sexy, and sex as a depressing/denigrating/empty endeavor.

Okay this is not even the start of why this post mattered to me, but can I say that it, in a strange coincidence, converged here with something I had been wanting to talk about a few times when I saw the “drink the koolaid” references but feared I was being uptight/annoying to want to say anything about it:

To hear people wax ” funny” about saying shit like “drink the koolaid” ( no seriously little children killed, non participants murdered and used to judge a country that was barely involved thanks to inbred American racism and laxness) like it’s not one of teh few things in your life you have ever seen make your mother truly existentially sad

And what I think about every time I hear people use that phrase is the fact that the People’s Temple was formed – had its origin – in response to white people in Christian churches not wanting/allowing black people in the same congregations as themselves.  And then beyond it’s formation, the People’s Temple, while, yes, in my view, was culty even while it was good, gave its participants a sense of being able to live, and love, and be loved, within and yet also separate from the white supremacist society that surrounded them. 

And when they moved out of the country, Jim Jones’ already-troubled and troubling behaviors did not preclude many people who moved from believing, hoping, feeling that they had moved to paradise on earth.  That all the – yes, community organizing – which the People’s Temple had been well known for when they’d resided near the Bay Area of Northern California – would kind of be something they never *needed* to do again, because social justice would just *be*, in this paradise land.

And my understanding of what drinking that Koolaid meant was either a) forced on people who wouldn’t voluntarily take it and b) taken voluntarily by people much the same way I sometimes imagine I’d like to get my hands on one last huge dose of heroin, were I ever to hear that the nukes were irreversibly headed this way – life, the world, your world as you know it is ending.  All the people you love, live with, know, all the people in your world are dying or dead, and destruction from without is speeding straight for the rest of you regardless.  What the fuck would you still want to be alive for?

There is nothing weird about that, to me.  There is nothing, unfortunately, alien or sensational or culty about flat out murder and soul-scorching grief and resignation and terror.  And there is, for sure, nothing funny or apt about referencing those things in connection with anything else I have ever seen it likened to.  Again, that is not the only thing I got out of BA’s post/letter back to BFP, but it was one thing that also jarred me, and put words to something that had been bothering me for a while.

I love Angel, both here and here.

This post gave me a boost on an otherwise so-far tense day (today, election day). 

I love harrietsdaughter all the time, and it’s the fact of someone with her heart and mind being in the world that makes all of her posts = posts I am glad to get to read.  This post also has links to Pam’s House Blend and Profbw, and I love what they wrote, too.

If you haven’t ordered any of Noemi’s zines or other writings, please consider doing so before some jackass(es) cure her of the will to keep selling them.

I have an ongoing blog-crush on her.

Damn it, now I am out of time again.  So I will make a part two.  I do want to say in the mean time – as frequently as I may complain about some parts of my own experiences with both individuals and groups when it comes to various kink populations, I *am* touched by it – I wish there were a less cheesy word – that people who are not into it will try to be sensitive about not making me, as a perv, feel judged.  I’m thinking of recent and semi-recent posts by both Renegade Evolution and BFP, as for instances. 

And I’m not even of the same mind about the topic as either of them talk about in their posts!  I say again, I am not offended by and I don’t feel oppressed by and I am respectful of views of BDSM that do not include worrying about whether it’ll hurt my feelings if/when it’s criticized.  Or even condemned.  It’s what’s behind the other – whenever that impulse is there, when people are trying to look out not to hurt others, I am touched by that.  I don’t think it’s always possible to say the truth and look out for that, nor even desirable.  But I am still touched by people trying to be kind when there’s nothing in it for them, and that’s separate for me from the politics – good or bad – of kink itself.  And I would like to note also that I see a fair amount of it in the blogosphere.  The negative may be louder sometimes and get more attention, but the sweetness is not going unnoticed, just so you know.