Published

The best first birthday present

If you live in the US and want to give B🌱 a great first birthday present, the perfect present, here’s what you can do.

Use the link below to find your congress members using your zip code (to find your full nine-digit zip code, visit usps.com):

https://www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member

Then use the contact links that show up and ask your congress members to enact a country-wide ban on assault weapons and high capacity magazines.

It is such a basic, pragmatic step we could take to reduce deaths from these sorts of events.

There are many, many other factors that also contributed to this event, mental health chief among them, and those events absolutely need to be addressed. But had this 18 year old not been able to walk in to a shop on his birthday and buy such an incredibly high-powered weapon, more children and teachers would be alive. The event may not have happened at all. It is painfully, mind-numbingly simple.

When you’re done contacting your representatives and senators, tell your friends, colleagues, and family to do the same. Especially people that you think might be more conservative. You’d be surprised how many people agree about banning assault weapons. They just need a little encouragement to be vocal about it.

And then ask those people to do the exact same thing with everyone they know.

I am not looking forward to explaining what an active shooter drill is when B starts school.


This is a condensed version of the message I wrote to my representative and senators, in case it is useful.

There are many, many factors that contributed to the tragedy in Uvalde, mental health chief among them, and those events absolutely need to be addressed.

But banning assault weapons and high capacity magazines is the simplest and most pragmatic step we can take to avoid more death. It *must* be the priority.

Had this 18 year old not been able to walk in to a shop on his birthday and buy such an unnecessarily high-powered weapon, more children and teachers would be alive. The event may not have happened at all.

Please, I am begging you, do everything in your power to ban assault weapons and high capacity magazines. Make the bill simple, inarguable, unavoidable, unassailable.

It is utterly shameful that Congress has not acted sooner. Make it happen.

Published

To read: “Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country” by Cristina Rivera Garza

A friend+co-conspirator from FemOS recommended Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country by Cristina Rivera Garza recently, looks incredible. In her words:

It discusses histories of trauma and violence in Mexico, but I think also speaks to people encountering trauma in their work or daily lives, and how to process or experience that through collective grieving. She posits Mexico as a “visceraless state,” where the government has assumed a solely administrative function, and thus has left the citizens are disembodied. Apt language to describe how states around the world are grappling with the pandemic…

Feminist Press (publisher) | Biblio.com (secondhand) | Bookshop.org