Anarchen, our beloved Auntie Fa

Have I said how grateful I am for Blip-friends? How generous, how thoughtful, how kind, how funny and dear? I am a perpetual student of Blip U, the source of book and movie recommendations, travel diaries, histories (local and otherwise), memoirs, quotations, music, humor, insect science, and I could go on.

Today an encomium to @Soozaday, knitter of Emotional Support Chickens (click on the tag). Soozaday had the great kindness to make and mail to me this superb Emotional Support Chicken: star-spangled philosopher (note the shiny yarn in the stars), radical, black-and-red wonder chicken. (Wikipedia does a good job of explaining how black-and-red became associated with anarchists and antifascists.)

Dunnie posted a brilliant article by a Canadian journalist who says we should stop describing the Trump administration as merely right-wing and call it what it is: a Fürhrer democracy, an oligarchy, a mafia state led by a mob of billionaires who have tossed out the constitution and are engaged in totalitarian takeover. I don’t mention this in every post, but I am constantly aware of it. 

While I await the consolidation of a critical mass of people who will rise up and say NO to this oligarchy at the risk of imprisonment and death, it is helpful to have an Emotional Support Chicken. We need ESCs just as we need the beauty of nature, music, hope, comfort: so that we find the energy to go on being kind to those we meet, putting love into the world, being anti-racist, standing up for justice, compassion, and yes, diversity, equity, inclusion, and people of all abilities. We are all deeply interconnected. What harms one of us harms all of us. 

For clarity: Antifa just became a term used by anyone and their grandma [that would be me] to describe somebody who was opposed to the open fascism that was being paraded around in all kinds of media…. It simply describes people who are anti-fascist or people who are against racism and are willing to protest against it—Alexander Reid Ross, Portland State University. Source.