feeling like a don - Trump | unloved & unloving

Every citizen of the United States of America is affected by Donald Trump. Whether we voted for him or not we are stuck with him for now.

This recent rally of his in North Carolina  was yet another powder keg. Setting off fireworks in many camps and dividing an already fractured country even more.

“Send her back” echoed Trump’s widely criticized tweets from over the weekend, when he said Ilhan Omar and three other congresswomen of color should “go back” to their home counties, where the “governments are a complete and total catastrophe.”

It was just so wrong on so many counts. 😭 We need to be better than opting to chant derogatory insults like #SendHerBack. 

#damnTrumpism 
#shameonTheDonald 
#pretendpresident
#foreverlyingfool
#STOPthisbully
#endhisWHITEsupremacy

Typical of the Donald to ignore that fact that these same women are not just American citizens but that they are elected officials of this country too. 

It is hateful behavior and demeaning to all human beings when our country's leader is such a petty puny tyrant. Picking away at so many with utmost impunity is an absolute abuse of authority. 

Whatever this buffoon expects to achieve by such dastardly behavior stumps us all. Even his own party's most expert spin artists have failed miserably to cover his fat ass and potty mouth. 

Every waking day in office he poisons our well. Long after he is dead and gone we will have all his horrors to recount. Whether we can outlive them or heal the rifts of this nation will really be up to us. 

Not him. Never the likes of him. 

patriarchy | kill or be killed

Is your God male? Have you ever even posed this question to yourself? For those who may wish to here's a recommended read. 

Co-authors of Why Does Patriarchy Persist? (Polity, 2018) Carol Gillian and Naomi Snider are asked, "What is patriarchy?" 

Read their full interview here. 

According to Gillian, patriarchy is an age-old structure that has been near universal, and yet there is an incoherence at its core because in reality men can’t have selves without relationships and women can’t have relationships without a self. 

According to Snider, breaking this gender binary continues to have real consequences: sensitive men are ridiculed as weak or passive, not “real men”, while woman who assert their own needs and desires—or refuse to serve as objects for the needs and desires of others—are labeled aggressive or selfish, so-called “nasty women". 

Given its toxicity, how then do we smash the patriarchy? 

As a culture, patriarchy exists as a set of rules and values, codes and scripts that specify how men and women should act and be in the world. However, patriarchy does not simply exist out there as something concrete and external, to be smashed and destroyed. Patriarchy also exists internally, shaping how we think and feel, how we perceive and judge ourselves, our desires, our relationships and the world we live in. 

Patriarchy persists because it shames this resistance, rendering it unfeminine in its expression of anger, or unmanly in its expression of tenderness and care. In order to move out of patriarchy, we can join and provide resonance for these voices of healthy resistance. We can challenge the frameworks and scripts that make selflessness a requisite of femininity. We can challenge the idea that emotional stoicism is what it takes to be a real man. 

We agree with them that the move out of patriarchy is a path of cultivation rather than destruction—the forging of healthy democratic relationships in which all voices are responded to, not necessarily with agreement, but with respect.