Pulse nightclub, Orlando.

I won't have to link to the referenced story here. This is now infamous. A historical mass-shooting. And once this is published, this story will exist in the archive of the internet, more information will be available to you, the future reader than to me, the present writer.

My heart wrenches for those in Orlando. The family and friends. The community. The ringing cell phones, unanswered.

This is absolutely soul-crushing. pic.twitter.com/x10BEuqzsl

— Kami Mattioli (@kmattio) 12 June 2016

Fuck homophobia. Fuck racism. Fuck misogyny. Fuck automatic weapons. Fuck toxic masculinity. Fuck fundamentalism. Fuck your set doctrines. Fuck your bathroom laws. Fuck your trans-phobia. Fuck your prayers. Fuck your inaction. Fuck your ignorance, your arrogance, your entitlement. Fuck you for supporting a culture that's so proud of its own idiocy. Fuck you for creating a culture where satire and deep, cynical sarcasm is our way of pointing out your inanity - and you don't fucking get it. Fuck your entitlement to our bodies. To violence. To space. I am insanely angry. I am unbelievable horrified. But today, the day after such deep engulfing sadness, I'm also indignant to the point of unrelenting opposition. Progress is coming. We're all fighting for it. You are desperate and angry and afraid, and we're sick of dealing with your hatred and your bullshit. Fuck you. Get over yourself. Your words affect lives. Your policies police bodies. Your homophobic jokes keep people in closets. Your homophobic church, pastor, temple or shrine, your homophobic leader, your synagogue, mosque or statue, your homophobic, misogynist fear-mongering religion is dated, it comes from a hateful history and you should know the fuck better. Read a fucking book. Meet fucking people. Go outside. Experience the lives of other. Learn. Better yourself you fuck.

And to my LGBTQ brothers and sisters. To the a-gender. To the sexless and to the sex-full. To every possible denomination of gender, sex, race, culture, class and ability. To all of us, I say I'm so fucking sorry.

I wish I could do more.

All I did today was make my contour especially sharp. I highlighted a little more. I walked out my door resolute to be myself.

I wish I could do more.

Update - 15/06/2016 - So I'm less rage-y right now, and want to point to the stories of those helping, those being brave, those being amazing in an awful time.
star

Sandra Bland and the suicide narrative.

Since the suspicious death of Sandra Bland the media coverage has been a real swamp of information/misinformation/red herrings. The brutality of her interactions with the police have become increasingly transparent through video and transcripts.

There's also talk about mental illness, and the way it's being talked about in the media and on social media makes me worry about the intent behind using mental illness as a villain instead of focusing squarely on the police force.

Don't talk at me about depression and suicidal ideation when every instant of her experience with law enforcement was demoralizing, dehumanizing and hate-based.

I've been trying to stay abreast of this on twitter, Yves comments got me, because there's a lot of misrepresentation of suicidal ideation by the assumption that as they pointed out "someone that smart, passionate, determined, revolutionary etc wouldn't kill herself."

This is dangerous and hurtful.

I hate that so much of the defense of #SandraBland is "Someone that smart, passionate, determined, revolutionary etc wouldn't kill herself."

— Call Me Yves (@Adamant_Yves) July 24, 2015

You're posting videos of #SandraBland's brightness and photos of her smiling to prove she wasn't suicidal. It's problematic.

— Call Me Yves (@Adamant_Yves) July 24, 2015

I'm afraid it pins us to the wall. If it comes out that #SandraBland killed herself, then what? Is she less woke? Less revolutionary? Etc.

— Call Me Yves (@Adamant_Yves) July 24, 2015

I am no expert on #suicide either but our focus should be how she was brutalized by police

— Fetty Schomburg (@DanTresOmi) July 24, 2015

If she did kill herself (which seems highly unlikely) that doesn't mean she wasn't brutalized by police, in a long, seemingly never-ending shit-show of racism and aggression.

If she did kill herself (which seems highly unlikely), that doesn't mean she isn't deserving of support, and that her death shouldn't be mourned as being devastating.

If she did kill herself (which seems highly unlikely), it doesn't mean that the entirety of the stress, violence and vitriol focused on her is a symptom of a racist, systemically unjust justice system.

There is a lot going on here, and there are fantastic writers and journalists writing on the subject. I'm going to try and educate myself the best I can. Black twitter and activist twitter is a fantastic resource for discussion and insight.

It is increasingly disheartening to see story after story of police brutality and murder coming up from the states. I just want to send my love and solidarity to those feeling directly targeted. It's just so overwhelming.

The murders of Caroline Small and Sandra Bland.

Caroline Small was a woman living through a mental health "breakdown" of some kind. Whether afraid or overwhelmed, she slowly drove away from police who were questioning her, and what followed was a brutal, unnecessary shooting and her murder. Then of course, the cover-up, as this happened in 2010 and it's only making national news now.

Daily Kos' Shaun King has an overview of what happened. I don't watch the videos of these things any-more. I find them too upsetting. They make me sick. You're watching someone being murdered. I trust the journalists who do watch them, and I think it's important to circulate these stories, these names, and these videos.

It seems every day there's a new name, immortalized to hash-tag status. A murdered man or woman. Predominantly black.

Another name is that of Sandra Bland. She was arrested for a ridiculous traffic infraction (not using her blinker!?) and was violently arrested by an insanely aggressive police officer. Three days later she was found dead in her jail cell.

Why was she even in jail for 3 days? This makes no sense to me. What kind of traffic laws are these!?

There is an ongoing investigation into Sandra Bland's death, and so far it's being treated as a homicide.

In Caroline Small's case, they didn't even consider the possibility there was a non-violent way to approach her, totally dismissing and ignoring her mental state (and considering these same officers waved-away the EMTs after she was shot multiple times, you get a sense of their value for life). Her mental state, and her need for aid was completely overlooked.

With Sandra Bland, mental illness is being used as a red herring for her death. Police officers have said she committed suicide in that jail cell. Everyone is calling bullshit. She was never told why she was being arrested, the arresting officer was hyper-aggressive, she was violently handled - it's just a whole shit-show.

For Caroline small, her mental state was ignored. There was no consideration for her.

For Sandra Bland, quoted as being "argumentative and uncooperative" by the arresting officer (she kept asking why she was being arrested and was never told), mental illness is used to discredit her as a victim.

The real sickness in all of this is the palpable aggression of the police towards those they encounter. It seems in several cases there was a real desire to shoot and kill. I don't know what the answer is. Police reform? Community involvement? Community-based peace officers?

I hope the outrage fuels real change.

Baltimore.

What's happening in Baltimore, the protesting and rioting, is necessary. The absolute devastation of black experience is unarguably historically rooted and needs to be actively addressed and corrected.

I don't feel discussing racism is my place, since there are fantastic writers out there covering what's going on. You can go on Twitter and follow, in real time what's going on. You can watch guerilla journalism happening, and see what is and what isn't being represented by the media. 

I post on Pushing Hoops with Sticks' Tumblr just tore at me. 

i don’t think people will ever understand how tolling this shit is on black people. during the bulk of the ferguson/eric garner protests during november i fell into the deepest depression. i couldn’t fall asleep until 6 or 7 in the morning, my jaw was permanently clenched, no appetite. i had ridiculous migraines and i’m someone who rarely has headaches, i would cry out of nowhere, i felt paralyzed/paranoid in public around any white people even my own mother/friends. no one will ever understand how draining this is for us.

This is brutal. I feel so deeply for this. I don't know what it is to be black. But I've known discrimination, and I know pain. Not like this though. 

I might not be super effective at discussing everything that's going on, but I want words of support and kindness to come from me, and to be expressed outwardly towards all those marching, all those protesting, all those doing what they can while they can to fight the systems of oppression and corruption. 

Montreal has a big, thick history of protesting. We're big on unions, we're big on student strikes. There's a lot of racism here as well, the Montreal police department is part of that, as is the long history of the indigenous people of Canada. The Oka Crisis wasn't that long ago. There are ongoing reparation problems. There was a cultural genocide of natives here, and people consistently choose to ignore that. Hérouxville is still fresh. Our hands in Canada are just as dirty as the white majority of the U.S. There's a lot of work to be done. 

MLK said that riots are the voice of the unheard. We're seeing that now in Baltimore, and all across the United States. We're also seeing that locally here in Montreal, and globally as a show of support. 

I've read a few articles on how to show support and solidarity for people of colour, as a white person who lives with a certain type of privilege, and it seems the consensus is using your whiteness to confront the racism in white spaces. 

11 things white people can do to be real anti-racist allies

Dear white Facebook friends: I need you to respect what Black America is feeling right now

There's just a lot out there. I'm trying to stay abreast of the situation. It's just such a brutal time. It seems every-time I log into Twitter, there's a new name, another black man immortalized by a hash-tag. 

#Freddie Gray
#Michael Brown
#Trayvon Martin

I cannot imagine the way this demoralizes a community. I listened to Part 1 of This American Life's pod-cast on how Cops See it Differently, this disconnect between how police see what's going on, and how "regular people" see what's going on. 

All I hear in the pod-cast is the pain in the voices of those being interviewed. It's just so personal and raw. 

I just don't want to be silent and complicit in this. 

Baltimore riots: How the Western media would cover the unrest if it happened elsewhere

It's just so fucked. 

On and around Germanwings.

The last few days have been odd for me. The news coverage has been all about the Germanwings crash, the 150 people aboard who died, and the co-pilot who crashed the plane deliberately. As things usually go following something horrible happening, we’re soon inundated with information about the perpetrators of the crime, we see their facebook profile photo, we hear about them from acquaintances. Usually we hear about them being radicalised by a cult or group of some kind. Instead, this week we've been privy to the mental health history of Andreas Lubitz.

There is a lot of talk about his treatment for “suicidal tendencies” and for an apparent doctor's not that told him not to go to work. The validity of these things will make their way to the public soon enough.

This isn't a suicide. He willingly, and with intent, killed 150 people. It took him several minutes to crash the plane. Though he may have been in a dissociative mind set, or maybe was having some type of psychotic break, this was not a “normal” suicide.

Michelle Cornette over at the American Association of Suicidology likens this type of mass murder/suicide to school shootings. I can see that link. Through there seems to be something way more intimate about hunting people in a closed space. Pot-ay-toes / pot-ah-toes of murder/suicide I guess.

Also, as an aside (though linked) the existence of an American Association of Suicidology and the application of a science to studying suicide as a cultural phenomenon will be increasingly important as time goes on. Just last night I was on the edge of discussing the pervasive culture of depression and anxiety with a friend. We broached the subject, but both capitulated to the enormity of the discussion due to the late night hour.  But this is important. And it makes no sense that so many in my age-group live with anxiety and depression. 

Where does this come from? How is it so generationally situated? How do we address it? How do we prevent it in the generations following us?

Everything is linked.

I hate to be so clichéd but I can't help but think of  Chuck Palahniuk's / David Fincher's Fight Club.

Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need.We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.

But here's the thing... Anger is exhausting. Often what comes next is despair. Is it spiritual despair? Is that what this is? Are we a generation (or generations) of people who just don't see the point?

What I'm seeing now in the coverage of Germanwings is loose talk about stigma. The fact is if you start obstructing people with depression from doing their jobs, the system will fall. We're everywhere, we sad fucks, we mopey folks, we with our glasses half-empty.

When I see anything about Germanwings, I see ways systems failed. I see stigma. I see a lack of follow-up. I wonder about his treatment and what he needed. As more comes out about all of this, I hope the dialogue becomes more engaged, more critical, because right now it's stagnant and over-simplifying depression.

Statistically speaking, of the 150 victims of the crash, some also lived with some sort of mental illness. Many live with it. Those who die by it are often under-represented. In the case of Germanwings my only hope is that the surviving families are able to get support and care, the way most living with depression also require.