KMF: The News This Week

I don’t normally jump into the fray of things like politics, social issues, or anything heavier than my own petty simple struggles like the fat on my ass or my need for caffeine.

I don’t like to because I don’t like the debates that come with it. I’m not a fighter, I don’t like confrontation, and I never know everything about all the issues going on in the world so I don’t feel like I have the authority to talk about them.

But dumber people than me have weighed in, so here I am.

For the record, the hardest thing I’ve gone through is the death of loved ones outside of my direct family. And while all older than me, it still made a significant change to my outer family. They were still indirect hits on my immediate family of me, my parents, and my siblings.

I haven’t lost a grandparent yet. (Knock on wood.) My aunts and uncles are mostly all still here, and if they aren’t it’s because they were gone before I even met them.

All indirect hits.

Things always seem to happen around me but not TO me. I see sadness and heartbreak and devastation all the time, and I have that empathy where I can feel it to my core, but I also have the ability to shake it off at the end of the day and move on because it hasn’t impacted my small world where my biggest concern is whether or not I was a good enough person and caretaker to my cousins today. (For which I’m so fucking lucky and grateful.)

Where one of the next things on my list is to better myself by taking care of myself and my body .

Where the next thing on my list is to better my mind. Better my soul. Better myself while not completely engaging in the fights that happen in the world.

Which doesn’t in the end make me any better. But it also doesn’t make me worse.

I’m just in my selfish tiny safe bubble.

I once saw this picture online of a man and the question posed was ‘What do you see?” and under that ‘What one word would you use to describe this man?”

Now, the man had several piercings all over his face, he had tattoos, he was obviously from Latin descent. I saw all these things on my peripheral. I knew they were there, it was literally all over his face.

And reading the comments I saw words like “Degenerate” “Drug dealer” and a whole array of racial slurs.

Thousands of people had written things about this stranger on there. And for once I decided to respond. I wrote one word to describe this man.

I wrote,”Person.”

I’m not tooting my own horn for being an accepting human being, if I saw this person in real life alone in a dark alley, I definitely would turn tail and run. Because the same word I used is the same reason he would scare me in a dark alley. It’s another person and I don’t know what their moral compass is balanced at.

But I’ve been trained to not go into alleys because I’m female. And for good reason.

This week has been a serious news coverage week where I can’t escape reading things about the Stanford rape case. I read her letter, I ache to help her, I feel that rage in me over how the entire case went down, how that boy isn’t getting what he deserves. All of that. All I’ve heard after I first read her letter was everything concerning the rapist. Not her.

And after I read two or three I got the gist of it. I had to be done reading about it because I couldn’t keep stepping into that or I would never stop crying, or Hulk out. I still can’t decide which.

Then I finally read about the men who saved her. (Might be around the same age as the rapist, but in my eyes these are what men are made of. Not boys.)

That helped, there are good people in the world. I could shake it off while also learning from it.

I only say I could shake it off because I have to in order to be able to function for small kids every day.

This will help me to help my cousins raise better minded children.

Then I read about the shooting of the girl, Christina Grimmie, from The Voice. Another useless destruction of a human life and her families hearts. How this boy had made it cross country with two guns to shoot her should be an unacceptable reality. But it’s true.

But her brother responded with taking down this person and likely saving others from being shot as well. Another man taking action and helping.

Then finally, the shooting in Orlando. This one really breaks my heart. It has been such a positive year for the LGBT community in the U.S. with the law that they too can marry the person they love becoming nationwide. So for someone to so brutally murder those people and injure even more with the obvious hate that they bore, it feels to me like it can’t be real. It shouldn’t be real. This is 2016 for fucks sakes.

But it is. There are people dead or hurt and heartbroken. And I saw an article on that Westboro church of Fuckery saying that God sent an angel to do that.

No. You guys can shut the fuck up. No one needs to hear from you at a time like this. God doesn’t do this. God doesn’t punish people trying to live their lives and have a good time.

Putting them aside because we should always ignore them. (Westboro, not the LBGT people.)

Do you know what is happening now? Thousands of people are lined up to donate blood for the people injured. Humans helping humans.

In the media blitz of shouting the worst I did the only good thing I could think of.

I looked for the helpers. There are always people somewhere helping. And when the media coverage is depressing as hell talking about the murderers stats like they should be on baseball cards, when they are talking about the body count while not talking about the peoples lives, when they are showing footage of the police doing their jobs like it’s an action movie, that is the one thing we can look for.

Beneath the barrage of shit, we can see the people with the shovels.

I was raised to love people for being people, to protect the weak and stand up to the bullies. I was raised that no means no. To use my words instead of violence to say what I want to say. That when things get tough you don’t get going, you stay to help those left behind. To be kind, thoughtful, and treat others how you want to be treated.

Fight the good fight,yeah? (Okay, that’s a quote from Angel but I need Joss Whedon this week.)

I can’t do much from here but give some comfort using my words.

I can’t donate blood, I can’t fly over to help, I can’t do all the lovely fantastic things I dream would be so helpful to all the people in the world suffering.

But I can say I’m here. You have my support. You have my ear. You now have my voice.

And you have always had my heart.

Love more, hate less. Be kind.

And keep moving forward.