this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2026
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IDK what the right course is either. I’ve been around long enough to have seen peaceful protest and eventually democracy validate the change we’re fighting for. I remember when being queer was a death sentence, whether it was Regan and his ilk celebrating AIDS as if it was a curse from God or Matt Shepherd’s killers claiming “he looked at me weird”, and I remember when gay marriage finally became official.
I’m also a person who was raised in bigotry and found my way out because on some levels I am the “ideal” (white male) and on others I’m not (queer af). I am also a believer in restorative justice. I volunteer at the local prison and have met plenty of people who have done bad things but are working to be better as well as people who’ve done bad shit and would continue to do bad shit without a second thought if given the opportunity. I’ve been accused of being misanthropic, an ecofascist, and delusional by both right-wingers and leftists. Personally I consider myself a disappointed optimist. Humanity is singular among animals and exceptional in their potential, but we keep being vile as a whole. Every one of us has the capacity for harm as well as the potential for selflessness, up to the point of trading our life in the hope someone who comes later will benefit because of that. I don’t hate people, but I hate some persons and have been increasingly put in situations where I have to make a judgement call on whether their potential for change outweighs the immediate threat of their ability to act on their beliefs and destroy someone more vulnerable than them.
“I’m condemned to use the tools of my enemy to defeat them. I burn my decency for someone else’s future. I burn my life to make a sunrise that I know I’ll never see.” It’s a quote from fiction, and a space fantasy at that, but I think it sums up exactly where I’ve landed in life. I don’t want to hate people, but I’m emotionally exhausted and tired of watching them choose harm without pushback. And that’s all I can offer, pushback. Whatever I do isn’t going to change the world, but it might change someone else’s world. What I have done, am doing, and will do is amoral by human ideals, but I don’t see a polite option left. We let them pick the battleground, they have the high ground and army, all we can do is make sure we’re giving better than we get and hope it clears the playing field so whoever comes next can live through their inevitable human struggles less painfully. We can all read our history as a species, we all can recognize there’s moments where we resolved our differences with violence, some of us can strive to learn from that and seek a different path in our own lives. But there comes a point where you have to accept the terms of your enemy and meet them with reciprocal force in the hope you do it better or accept annihilation.