Through Beauty 2 The Streetz, Shirley Raines gave Skid Row more than food and makeovers, she gave hope. She reminded us that dignity is a human right, no matter your zip code. A Sister to the people. Her impact will live on. Rest in Power, Shirley
I’ve said this before but: If a plane hit turbulence and the pilot panicked, aimed the nose to the ground and crashed, no one would say “Well, you try flying a plane in turbulence.” They would say “That is a bad pilot. That’s not how pilots should handle things.”
I feel sick being alive in this moment.
We have been watching children in Gaza be blown to pieces for over two years. I just watched a video of a father in the West Bank falling to the ground when he heard his child was beat to death with hammers in Israeli prison. We are watching immigrant children in the U.S. hunted, detained, and caged. We are watching Lebanese, and Iranian children killed by Israel and then erased by the news cycle. Disabled Palestinians in the U.S. like Wael Tarabashi effectively sentenced to death because the state abducted his father. Children imprisoned, at Dilly protesting just to be free.
And it keeps going. Sudan. Congo. Haiti. Yemen. Children starved, bombed, disappeared, trafficked. Some of it livestreamed. Most of it buried.
What’s breaking my brain is not just the violence. It’s that we are seeing it.
We watched Alex Pretti take ten shots to the face. We watched Epstein run a child trafficking operation for years with full elite protection. That alone should have collapsed this entire system. It didn’t. The abduction of Nicolás Maduro barely lasted a couple of news cycles. Children being slaughtered doesn’t get a second glance.
They’re buying platforms to censor us. They’re throttling reach. They’re criminalizing speech. But even when people do know, even when it’s undeniable, even when it’s right in front of us, what happens?
Nothing.
The world keeps functioning like this is background noise. Like mass death is just content. Like awareness without consequence is supposed to be enough.
I don’t know how people are pretending this is normal. I don’t know how we’re supposed to metabolize this much horror and still be okay. I don’t know what it means to survive in a world that keeps proving, over and over, that children are disposable as long as power is protected.
It feels like we’re being trained to tolerate the intolerable. To treat mass death as content. To live inside a feed where the truth is constantly visible and constantly consequence-free.
What the hell is going on?
part of the reason i get annoyed about the media's hand-wringing over the general mood/misogyny of young american men is bc NO ONE platforms anyone on the receiving end. imagine being a teen girl in hs stuck in a room with these screeching losers for 40 hours/week trying to learn