Deep Listening Day #71 — Carsie Blanton: Love & Rage (2021). returned to Buck Up b/c I remembered Mary liked it. then cued this up. I like her heart. I like her politics. I like her sense of humor. her music is warm, comforting, and fun.

#DeepListening #CarsieBlanton #LoveAndRage

De klimaatbeweging opsplitsen in ‘radicale’ en ‘brave’ activisten maakt deel uit van een repressieve strategie, maar WIJ ZIJN ALLEMAAL RADICAAL! 🌱🔥

We zullen niet verdeeld worden. Met liefde, blijven we verenigd.
Wij zijn solidair met iedereen die te maken heeft met toenemende repressie. EN JIJ?

#LoveAndRage #ExtinctionRebellion #RepostThis #XR #Activisme

Of course it should go without saying that those of us who are queer, trans, genderqueer, nonbinary, and other gender troublemakers are now routinely filled with rage. How could we not be?

But rage, when refracted through a queered prism of seeing the world, becomes something to pause and take note of, especially in a christofascist era when it feels like rage “is just love with no place to go” (to riff on an overused saying about grief that I find to be vapid).

There are not only places for our rage to go but our rage takes us places too. It isn’t (or shouldn’t be) something that acts on us but instead that we act from, drawing on the reservoir of love that rage—like grief—signifies so deeply and intimately.

The contemporary sense of no future, hope, or agency has many people enraged, but often in a machismo way in which one lashes out, “content” to merely pummel enemies, real and imagined, and with little strategic insight or deliberate and thought-out action, nor concern for the damage to themselves and others.

Counterpose that to queered rage, the kind that put smiles on the faces of Stonewall rebels, or saw Act Up fighting back with creative forms of direct action that included dancing, or Bash Backers reveling in the playful glee of “be gay, do crimes.”

The kind that seems to be mobilizing people—no matter their gender, sex, or sexuality, and not just queers—now that their initial frozenness has thawed a bit as the reality of the Musk+Trump regime settles into folks’ bodies.

Queered rage has a magic. The most unlikely of folks, such as (fired) state bureaucrats, park rangers, epidemiologists, Tesla (ex) owners, and others, are breaking the cages of assimilation and conformity, of obedience and compliance, transgressing boundaries, and opening up to the fluidity of transforming themselves and the status quo. It’s freeing people to engage in what we might view as a rowdy drag show—played out on public squares and reclaimed streets, in offices, schools, and hospitals—of myriad reimaginings, chosen affinities birthed of solidarity, endless possibilities of their own making, and riotous resistance, sometimes sprinkled with glitter-size pieces of joy.

#LoveAndRage

(photos: two different ways of asserting “queer rage,” one painted in now-fading black paint on a sidewalk and the other as pink-and-purple stencil on a wall, and both paired with a circle A, as spotted of late while walking the streets of Athens, Greece.)

We must read (and write) against the grain, not merely to illuminate all that must be fought and abolished, but to emphasize what we’re already doing to love and tend to each other.

Not simply to decry the absences we feel and experience so deeply under christofascism, but to declare all the countless presences we sustain through our solidarity in the here and now.

Not only to remind us of the dangers around every corner, but to keep in the forefront of our minds all the innumerable acts of individual and collective bravery, often arising from surprising quarters.

On this cloudy-cold day, with ominous omens swirling all around us, with German elections boding a further storm, with sieg heils becoming as “normal” as climate catastrophes, it’s good to spot signs of rebellious life, of “falling in love, not in line,” all the ways—in bold brushstrokes, visible and subterranean—that we articulate not merely what we are (and must be) against, but all we’re steadfastly for and already experimenting with.

#LoveAndRage
#TryAnarchismForLife

(photo: two tags, serendipitously sprayed on the same outdoor pillar, one in black and the other in red, illustrating the complementary dimensions within anarchism of wanting to destroy and create, fueled by our rage and love, as seen on the streets of Athens, Feb 23, 2025)

This sums me up on so many levels right now…couldn’t resist!

#LoveAndRage

Alt Text: black t-shirt with ‘Love & Rage’ rainbow coloured design.

#LoveAndRage
#FckIDF
#StonesOfSorrow
#StonesOfSolidarity
#MayTheirMemoryBeABlessing
#MayTheirMemoryMendThisWorld

(Image freely made and shared by @laser_bloc)

#LoveAndRage from #TheBigOne #Climate demo

Matthew rallying for our children’s future

#ClimateEmergency #ClimateCrisis #ClimateJustice