I have wasted years of my life agonizing about the fires I started

Comment if you want in. If you're here to complain or inquire about feminist_rage or any other community I mod/participate in, e-mail me.

Also!

kiss for the sake of kissing. it's nice.

It is strange to think that I was standing outside of the engineering building at Gonzaga 10 years ago, holding a candlelight vigil for the women killed in the Montréal Massacre.

10 years after that, it's still horrifying.

20 years ago, there was a man who had been denied entry to l'École Polytechnique, an engineering and science school in Montréal. On December 6, 1989, he walked into that school with a legally-obtained gun and started in a classroom where he separated the men from the women. He screamed that he was "fighting feminists," who had ruined his life, and shot all 9 of the women in that room, fatally injuring 6. He moved through the school, targeting women, eventually shooting 28 people, killing 14. All 14 were women.

20 years ago, a man walked into a building and killed women because they got the education that he felt should have been his.

And it might be easy to say that was then, we should remember this day, but it would never happen now.

But really, what has changed?

Rates of violence against women have stayed stable since 1989, rising in areas of ongoing violence or war. Women disappear every day, they're harmed in their homes and their schools.

Every day, women wake up in a world where we are statistically likely to be harmed because we are women. If you spent 15 minutes on your computer this morning, in the time it took you to read your email, 2 woman were raped and 60 were battered.

It's important to remember the Montréal Massacre, not only to honor the lives of 14 women that were cut brutally short, but because it could happen again. To some woman somewhere, it could happen again today.

But to these women, it happened on December 6, 1989:
Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student

Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student

Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student

Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student

Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student

Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student

Maryse Laganière (born 1964), budget clerk in the École Polytechnique's finance department

Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student

Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student

Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student

Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student

Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student

Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student

Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student

Okay, I just stopped watching almost all of my communities and cut about 100 people. It is, I swear to god, about time. When the idea of opening my LJ just makes me want to sigh and see if I have 3-4 hours, it's gotten too big.

Love.

I'm not online as much as I used to be and, therefore, I just can't keep up with everything anymore. So. I went on a big defriending spree - friends, communities, and feeds - to clean things up. Mostly, it was either a "let's be real, we don't really interact" thing or an interests diverging thing.

Just so ya'll know. And, you know, every day is defriending amnesty over here. I'd be sad, maybe, but it sucks to have that person who you feel BAD about defriending. Don't let me be that girl!

So, as many of you know, my good friend magnificentmndi's son has been undergoing treatment for Juvenile Myelomonocytic Leukemia (JMML). Everything in their world changed in February and it's about to change again. Gregory is undergoing a bone marrow transplant tomorrow morning, a procedure that could save his life.

Bone marrow donors are too few and far between. Please, if you're not registered to be a donor, sign up. It takes very little to change everything for someone else.

Register to be a bone marrow donor, free for the first 46,000 registrants between June 8 and June 22.

Sometimes, in conversations about race, I wonder what is going through people's HEADS. I mean, I'm white. I get assloads of white privilege every day and in every way. And I fuck up. TRUST me, I fuck up bad sometimes and I feel like an idiot and people call me on it and I apologize and I try to learn.

And then I see shit like Patricia Wrede's Thirteenth Child, a book that takes the premise of an alternate version of our world which is full of magic, and where America (“Columbia”) was discovered empty of people but full of dangerous animals, many of them magical.

No people. Fully erasing the genocide and slavery that America was built on, but no. No, there are ANIMALS. AND THEY'RE MAGICAL. AND DANGEROUS.

So let me get this straight. To begin with, there is a complete erasure of indigenous peoples in North America - they're simply gone. It's certainly possible (even likely) that the author did not know about or intend to fall into it, but this furthers a longstanding pattern of invisibility, silencing, othering, and ignoring of indigenous peoples in North America.

Because, largely, Americans act as if our country has no history before Christopher Columbus. We act as if the beginning point of this landmass, of "our people" starts when white people landed, when white people killed, when white people destroyed. Sure, a part of the reason we do it is because we're trained that way and part of the reason we're trained that way is because of racial and cultural shame about the widespread genocide that built this country.

So we kill entire tribes, decimate families. We take lands. We treat indigenous people like animals for most of our country's history. We lie, we cheat, we steal. We give them smallpox blankets.

And then we make them invisible. Children in many large cities may never see a person who is a tribal member or an American Indian. Most American children will never know the name or anything about a tribe that is not represented in a bad mainstream movie. They will not know about the American Indian Movement and Leonard Peltier, they will not know about Chief Cecilla Fire Thunder and the fight for reproductive freedom on the Pine Ridge Reservation.

They won't know anything about native people in our country except a deafening silence of information that is offset largely only by factually-incorrect Disney movies (I'm look at you, Pocahontas) and mainstream movies and the occasional paragraph in their history books.

An entire book of that furthers the invisibility of indigenous people, one where Europeans are the first peoples, is a premise that continues that silencing. It's made worse, of course, by allowing the "presence" of the "magical Indian" through the dangerous, magical animals - the same things that Europeans originally thought of many of the tribes they encountered.

I don't care how well it's written, this whole premise is gross. And I'm disappointed in Tor for publishing it at all.

As soon as I wrote, that I bet about half of your eyes glazed over.

But it's going to be short! I do have a DW account and I'm trying to think about how I might want to change my journaling experiences. So. A poll!

Okay, so my girl wrote this book, right? And you should all order it, because it came out TODAY and she's amazing, so therefore, it will be amazing.

It is simple mathematics. Order Salt and Silver (or here, at Amazon.)

Also, since I'm already ordering THAT, I'm thinking ... why not order an LSAT prep book? Because, um. Maybe I'll take the LSATs this year? I don't know!

I've read a lot of Daphne's stuff in the last few years, but this poem remains memorable to me. Maybe it's because I've never seen her live - but her voice makes this real, makes it matter more to me.

I wish I knew the title. I've looked a lot and cannot find it.

(Warnings for possible sexual assault triggers)

Daphne Gottlieb in Big Sur, California - 7/15/00 from Slam America

I love you.