I listened to "Kryptonite" by Three Doors Down on loop all the way home today. I'm waiting on several letters from publishers on my fiction, my boss is pissed about the state of a project I'm on, and the country is ran by fascists. Still, I know that I'm working towards fostering and adopting teens and that is the North Star. Sometimes I look at the world and see how little I can really change, or at myself and see how flawed I am, how precarious my life is. I sink to the floor, lean against the fridge, and pet my cat about it, knowing that she's mortal and that loving her means lighting my soul on fire with grief. But I still love her. And I'm gonna still bring those teens into this home.
So I listened to that song and thought about the kid. In my state, foster youth are sleeping in state parks. That's their life. That or a shitty group home. I'm on a state taskforce for child welfare and nothing has made me hate the people in power like that has. The orphan grinder is real and the legislators will kill as many kids as they must to give a billionaire a tax break. I hate them like AM, the word hate stretched across every nanoangstrom of my being.
But hate doesn't build a gentler world for children.
So I go to this job that has no upward mobility because it covers the weekly trauma therapy I need to be the best coregulator possible. I bring people to the local Unitarian Universalist congregation because I know they're going to ask me if I go to church during the home study and because that organization feeds the people of my community and stands up to landlords and fascists. I write because it might bring in money and because I'm a hypocrite if I tell someone to follow their dream and bury my own. I connect all the different groups across the city and help them work together to make this a better place for families because I want this to be a place the kids can be happy.
There's going to be a report next year naming the landlords with the worst code violations. We're getting data centers banned at the county level. I've written letters to imprisoned refugees next to teens.
And sometimes I cry where no one can see about how dire things are in this country. Because I can't show panic or fear or other people will panic. Panic gets people hurt, killed even. So I keep the fear to myself.
Because if there is one thing that history has taught me, it is that when and wherever there is injustice, someone is standing up to it. That no matter how much cleansing fire authoritarians use, they can never sterilize the future.
You have to have hope. They only win when you lose it.