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Feel like masks make it so you can't breathe? You are actually probably breathing fine unless you have dangerously weak lungs already (as in, unless you are currently winded from minor physical exertion, it is impossible for the mask to actually be damaging your breathing). However, it probably makes you FEEL like you can't breathe! Personally, while I don't like stuff on my face, I am mostly okay with a mask that fits when when I am sitting still or walking, and if I'm not hot. If I'm hot or exerting myself or both, masks start to trigger some nasty panicky shit. I still wear the damn things. Finding ones that fit better and don't get sweaty as fast helps a little. Practice helps a little. Not exercising as intensely helps a little. I still have some panicky moments every hike. I think that's worth it to protect and respect other humans. "With Covid-19 increasing in the South and West, the possibility of universal mask wearing is being discussed. But, not everyone feels comfortable wearing a mask and many feel anxious. This anxiety is real, physiologic, and normal. The good news is, there are ways to overcome it!"

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People shouldn’t be kept in jail solely because they are too poor to make bail. LA County has done just fine with $0 bail during the pandemic, so let’s make it permanent. "In response to the COVID pandemic, the California Judicial Council passed an Emergency $0 Bail order, which eliminated bail for certain charges. This decision has been instrumental in reducing the jail population and slowing the spread of COVID. In the last few months, LA County numbers have gone do..."

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4 days, 1 hr a day. May be useful if you’re trying to wrap your brain around abolition but could use structure/accountability/community. "By the end of this crash course, you will: Understand what exactly the demand “Defund the Police” means. Envision what a world without police could look like. Get ready to take action to defund police in your community."

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"City Council Meeting at 10 am You can watch live on Ch 35 or on the livestream"

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Please bother your representatives (all the time, about every issue that matters to you. But consider including this one.) This is in support of a bill that would form a commission to study the harms of slavery and ways to make reparations, not in support of a specific reparations plan. "It's a necessary step for America to advance racial justice. And momentum is building."

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"'The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.' – camus…documenting my liberation"

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“Iiberation work is exhausting but not nearly as exhausting as a life lived in apathy, which is a life lived against one’s heart, which is ultimately a life unlived.” "I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a 70 year old activist. What it means to witness so much change and so much not change and to hold all of that in one heart. Two decades ago I made my first true community in a group of activists a generation older than myself. Their houses were like liberation libraries. They gifted me “Trangender Warriors” when I had no idea what “transgender” meant. They gifted me “Are Prisons Obsolete?” when I had never heard the term “white privilege.” Art and activism were never separate worlds for them. Direct action was a part of everything they created, and if you didn’t know how to flush teargas out of your eyes they were suspicious of any poem you wrote about justice. In 2005, when I began being invited to perform at universities around the country, my friends were fierce in their inquiries about how I was justifying the use of jet fuel. None of my shaky reasoning satisfied them, and even in my insecurity it was utterly impossible to not love them more for it. When I attended my first protest 20 years ago I remember someone telling me my energy would one day run out. But I look at my friends, now almost 70, and know they are tired, but far less tired than those who have not spent their lives fighting for justice. I see in them proof that liberation work is exhausting but not nearly as exhausting as a life lived in apathy, which is a life lived against one’s heart, which is ultimately a life unlived. Thank goodness for all those who came before us, for the light they still are and will always be, and for the life-giving lesson of the long haul of love."

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This story just absolutely guts me. So do many stories of injustice... but this one hits very close to home. This young man got in a minor car accident, panicked and fled the scene, and then tried to immediately return but was so upset he got in another accident. When he got out of the car, he was assaulted and yelled at and panicked further. Matthew has autism and anxiety, and in his overwhelmed state said things that many people who have meltdowns related to these conditions say when in that state, such as “I want to die”. This was used as evidence that the accident was intentional and that he was trying to kill himself. This hits me close to home because it’s in part fear of reactions like this that kept me from driving for years. I struggled to learn to drive because I could not handle people getting emotional/angry at me while i was driving and i would get flustered and make stupid errors like hitting the gas instead of the brake. When i am emotionally overwhelmed, things that are usually easy or even automatic for me can become hard or impossible. I’m confident driving now only because I have spent a lot of time figuring myself out and am practiced at keeping myself calm AND because I just do not drive when i am super upset or exhausted, because it’s not safe. I have talked through with friends and rehearsed in my head what i would do in an accident or in a confrontation with a cop. I would still be really worried about these things if I were not a white girl, because even after a lot of work, being screamed at by someone (especially a man older/bigger than me, or even more so a male authority figure) is so emotionally overwhelming that it can be hard for me to respond rationally or coherently—usually my only recourse is to remove myself from the situation and return when I have calmed down. I once lost a job in a lab because my boss went on a screaming rant at me and my response was to freeze and not respond, then scream back, then run out of the room crying. I KNEW the whole time that I was having the wrong response, that I was screwing up, but I couldn’t make myself talk when I was frozen, i couldnt keep my voice calm when I found the ability to defend myself, and I couldnt hold back the tears. But as a middle class white girl, I could probably have an emotional breakdown in a stressful situation with a cop and not end up dead or in prison. It would likely be traumatic but it probably wouldn’t destroy my life. This young man deserved the same benefit of the doubt. He deserved to be able to have a strong emotional reaction without the worst things being read into it. We could argue that he shouldn’t have been driving if he wasn’t prepared to handle an accident, but how many young people do you know who handled their first accident poorly? Or older people, for that matter? Regardless, he shouldn’t be in prison. "Free Matthew Rushin (Autistic College Student @ ODU). 58309 signatures are still needed!"

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Heavy read. "I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were."

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Today's daily actions from JusticeLA are focused on pressuring LA county supervisors to support the Care First budget, which decreases funding to jails/law enforcement in favor of increasing funding to services that directly support community members. BTW, LA people, you may have heard about both Care First Budget and People’s Budget. The former is a COUNTY budget initiative, while the latter is a CITY budget. Here's all the info you should need to email or call your supervisor. There is a link to figure out who your supervisor is in the doc. If you're outside LA, you can still add to the volume of calls/emails. LA county jail system is the biggest in the WORLD and I think the whole country will benefit from the example of seeing LA county deprioritize policing and incarceration in favor of social services that actually improve lives rather than simply punishing and removing people from society. If you’d like to get text messages about these direct actions instead of hearing about them on Facebook, I’ll drop the signup link for JusticeLA in the comments. It’s usually three actions per week, on Monday/Wednesday/Friday, though occasionally they’ll push out other alerts for something super urgent. "6/24 JusticeLA+WP4BL Virtual Action Today’s Troubleshooting Contact: Gillian Zwick [phone] Context for Today’s Action: Urging the LA County Board of Supervisors to Support a Care First Budget Incarceration is itself an experiment, and it’s an experiment that has failed. Sup. Sh..."

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Really great summary of how racist ideas were created to make money for property-owning white colonizers. "Today is Juneteenth, a holiday that commemorates the end of slavery in the U.S. It also provides us an opportunity to educate ourselves on Black history in the United States. Get started with this video from Origin of Everything."

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A lot of the arguments we are having currently about police/law enforcement/incarceration are a result of many of us being unable to imagine other ways for society to handle conflict and wrong-doing. Learning more about how things like restorative justice actually work in the real world helps me a lot to start wrapping my mind around the idea of different futures. "What happens when instead of suspensions, kids talk out their mistakes?"

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Hello Friends! The big ask today from JusticeLA is a push to DEFUND SCHOOL POLICE. This petition is one step you can take to support, but I'll link some other actions you can take in the comments if you have the time. LAUSD is the biggest public school district in the country--if we can make this shift here it would be so huge. If you are not in LA but want to take action, please feel free to use your connection to me in a call/email. I only taught in LA public schools very briefly, but one of the things that made it difficult for me to succeed in that position was that our middle school had over 300 students, many of whom lived below or around the poverty line in an over policed neighborhood, and we had ONE full time school counselor, no school nurse, and the social worker that technically served our school I never met because she served so many local schools. I had an 11-year-old student witness a shooting in front of him at a convenience store on his way home from school and then share it in class the next day. That was intensely emotional, but was not anywhere near the most extreme event that occurred at my school that day and therefore the counselor could not be spared to support that student. The resources that went into having cops on campus at all times should have instead been going to SUPPORT my students. "Ask the LA Unified school board to vote yes to defund the LA School Police Department and redirect those funds to the highest-need schools in support of Black students. {LINK}"

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Effing beautiful, every single damn time. CW: discussion of suicidal thoughts/plans/attempts "“I have a few happy friends. I ask them about being happy the same way my high school friends ask me about being gay, ‘So, what do you people do exactly? How do you do IT?’” Get Andrea Gibson's book here: http://bit.ly/andreagibsonlb"

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Good news! "To satisfy a court ruling, Los Angeles city and county agree to shelter 5,300 people in the next 10 months."

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"It’s a Wednesday night at a bookstore in a well-off part of Washington, D.C., and every seat is taken. More than 100 people spill into the aisles or crowd the s…"

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Attended an orientation zoom event with White People For Black Lives / AWARE-LA tonight. They are a group that works in solidarity by BIPOC-leg organizations and I really appreciate their existence. As someone very new to activism/organizing, I have a lot to learn and this a community in which to do that without putting the burden of teaching me on organizers of color. This group is having a boom in membership, as you might expect (there were 1000 people at tonight's event, the largest one they've ever had), and they have new member orientations every Wednesday evening if you are interested in learning more. If you aren't in LA and are interested in this type of work, this group is part of a larger network of such groups called Showing Up for Racial Justice, and you can look up your local chapter. "Alliance of White Anti-Racists Everywhere-LA and Los Angeles SURJ affiliate. Showing Up for Racial Justice. White People 4 Black Lives."