“Peaceful protests” are theater pieces and theater needs an audience. Do you think you can make a fascist sit down and watch your performance? like a child begging a parent to watch the new dance they made up?
Besides, no protest will ever remain peaceful under fascism. Cops will escalate. You’ll probably be tear gassed. You might even be arrested. If you wanna join the fight against fascism, you need to be ready to FIGHT.
I’d like to tell you a little story today about why a lot of problems need social workers, not cops.
a long long time ago…like 2010, I worked 2nd shift (2pm-10pm) in a homeless shelter. I worked on a floor specifically for men with addiction and mental health problems. For most of the shift, I was the only staff working. Most of the time, the job was chill to the point of being boring. My job was to do the little things that needed doing, and be always ready to respond if shit went down. Most of the time, nothing much happened.
So one day I’m sitting at my little desk, trying to get up the motivation to organize the food pantry a little bit, and I head SCREAMING.
By the time I’m on my feet, one of the residents was in view. Dude was 6ft 4, with a shaved head, and a SOLID build. He was screaming down the hall, and in his raised fist he had, I shit you not, a blood-covered meat cleaver. He was spattered in blood all over. I knew the man- I knew all the residents. He mostly kept to himself. Sometimes he’d talk to me about his hallucinations and paranoid delusions. (no question these ones were delusions, kids. Man eating pythons can not fit in a half inch radiator pipe.) He had a history of getting pretty worked up.
Switch the camera around 180 degrees. I was 120 lbs and 5ft 4 on a good day, and all by my self. Totally unarmed.
Ask yourself- what would an armed cop do in that situation- alone, with a huge man running at them with a huge bloody knife?
I’m not gonna pretend for one second that my fight and flight instincts didn’t kick in. The ancient parts of my brain that exist to protect me from danger by fleeing or killing something saw this and screamed a great big NOPE.
But by this point I had like 8 years of other training, to. De-escalation training. Training on keeping a cool head in a scary situation. Training that reminded me that I was responsible for the safety of the other 17 men who called this floor their home.
Training that told me that this man was my responsibility, not my enemy.
In short, the opposite of what many police departments train their officers in. They are trained to view people as hostile, to treat their beat like a war zone. To act immediately. I wont say none of them have de-escalation training, but I will say it’s a bit of a useless add-on when they’re taught to go with their gut feeling of whether or not a situation is dangerous.
Because my gut sure as hell perceived a danger.
Anyways, I didn’t run, and I didn’t attack. I rooted my feet and I asked him what was going on.
That was when I saw that he was weeping. He was terrified.
He had bought a new cooking knife off the tv- he liked cooking, and had been looking at it. But one of the side effects of his meds made him clumsy, and he’d dropped it. He’d sliced open the back of his knee, where there’s a huge vein or artery or something- and was bleeding a LOT.
He was understandably alarmed at the river-like quantity of blood gushing out of him, and had run to the nearest help- me.
In his rush and his fear, he’d just forgotten to put the damn knife down.
The other residents had, thankfully, all stayed in their rooms, because a month before I’d got on several people’s cases for coming out to defend me- with the very best of intentions- during a previous incident. Their motives were good, but de-escalating a situation when other people are ready to throw hands is WAY harder. I’d told them to keep their buts in their rooms unless I actually called for help, and God bless them, every single one of them had done it.
This is the point when I called for help. One of the residents got the first aid kit. One called an ambulance. One gave me the literal shirt off his back because our damn first aid kit didn’t have a tourniquet so we ripped the shirt up to make one.
We helped calm the poor injured guy down, and he got a few stitches, and everybody was proud of how we’d come together to help each other out.
Nobody was hurt beyond that one initial injury. Nobody was traumatized. If anything, the guy who’d been hurt was happier, more engaged with the rest of us, having seen that everyone here would take care of him when he was in need. He hadn’t had much care given to him in his life.
So when you see meme’s of “lol what are those social workers gonna do NOW huh?” please remember that 1) we’ve been out here doing this work ANYWAYS and 2) We’ve been doing it unarmed and level headed, which is better than the cops.
Now, does social work ALSO need reform? Does social work ALSO contain racism and ableism and every other social evil? You bet! Just look at…like anything to do with CPS to look at how these systems break down.
But do not use social workers de-escalation training as some kind of “gotcha” to prove we need armed and militant enforcers on every damn corner. And please don’t let others do it, either.
sorry to be like this and I’m very much not loving it, but tumblr loses around 30M a year. divided by the cost of yearly subscriptions, it means half a million ish people on premium undoes that loss. I saw stats claiming more than 300M users. That sounds super not right since even the sacred texts don’t often cross 1M notes. I know there are around 12M posts a day. Yeah, yeah, we post multiple times a day, but there’s a quantity of lurkers out there, and I’m trying to goldilocks a number to do math without having real data to pull from, leave me be.
If there are 12M users, it needs around 4% of users. If there really are 300M (still don’t believe this) it would be .16%
You know what portion of Spotify is paid accounts? 40% ish (can’t find data from the last year)
But, because we are the worst, and so probably will end up with a sundowning social platform… If someone knows of another platform that has this kind of reblog with added comments that doesn’t put your comment first, lmk, cause every alternative someone has suggested aint been it for me. Bluesky and pillowfort aint it. TT is video based. Reddit is…. almost? except that there’s a reason we got refugees.
I pay for Tumblr premium because 1) I have the money to do so, and 2) I want this platform to stick around.
If you’re out here with the money to spend on tumblr freaking out because you’re worried tumblr may disappear because of its yearly losses, there is 1 very real thing you can do to help. And that’s a premium subscription.
“OMG BUT I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO PAY TO BE ON THIS HELLSITE.”
Websites cost money. Period. It’s why AO3 does donation drives twice a year. Because it costs money to run a website. Tumblr needs money to run because it is a website. It can’t do a donation drive because it’s not a non-profit.
But you CAN give them seven dollars a month because you have seven dollars a month and also are very aware of how much time you spend here.
“BUT I HATE IT HERE.”
Then leave. Fucking leave. I’m tired of all this, “OMG, why would you pay for this stupid place?” Because I fucking like it here and won’t do some sort of anti-tumblr performative pantomime to seem, what? Cool? Disaffected? On fucking tumblr? The scream and reblog website?
Until tumblr heaves its last, I’m here. And I’m giving them seven bucks a month. Because giving them seven bucks a month is something I can do to hopefully keep the lights on a little longer and not have to contemplate where the fuck I’m going to be a loud, horny weirdo. I’m never going back to anything remotely like twitter; insta won’t let me set a permanent “followers only” timeline; communication options on Youtube aren’t meant for the kinds of interactions we have here; Dreamwidth is there and chugging along, but it’s a legacy build that does NOT have the same integration options as tumblr has.
Tumblr is the only thing like tumblr. You want tumblr, fucking pay up.
I would actually be more likely to toss money tumblr’s way if it had a tip jar or did a funding drive like ao3 does. My problem with tumblr premium is that I don’t want to connect my actual identity with my tumblr one which premium necessities. If I could just toss them $10 a year completely unconnected to my username like I do AO3 I’d do so.
you can also gift other people stuff on tumblr, I think? so you could just like. make a different account with a different email, then gift your main blog or someone else something? or maybe just blaze some posts? either way your personal info would only be on that account, not this one, and you’d still be giving them monies to help them run.
I WILL bring this up again. You will give yourself a huge leg-up by learning basic skills. Look up free YouTube tutorials, see if your library has training classes, take a computer literacy class if you can fit it into your class schedule.
You will do so much better at a job if you can use just the basic functions of Excel, Word, and Outlook. Interested in coding? Learn it! Everyone telling you that AI is going to get rid of the need to know how to do HTML is a damn liar. Take a step back to figure out what you don’t know, pick the first thing on the list, and go learn it. It will be worth it!
if you learn the very basic HTML commands, you can leave extra unhinged comments on AO3. Behold, by typing six characters into the box while I’m leaving a comment, I can turn the entire comment bold so I can yell my love.
Or slightly more letters and a little URL copy pasta and I can gif react to them. WIZARDRY.
continue the tradition of learning skills for hobby and fun reasons that you can then wow your boss with!
This also means they can spy on straight people just to make sure they aren’t lgbt. This is not just against gay people, it’s a cover up for violating human rights. It’s never just against one group of people, it’s always about controlling the masses while blaming a group of people so nobody looks at the root of the problem.
ALT
