gpoy
(Source: thugzmansion)
felix gonzalez-torres @ the MoMA - feeling so lucky to have seen/experienced this
“Poverty is not simply having no money — it is isolation, vulnerability, humiliation and mistrust. It is not being able to differentiate between employers and exploiters and abusers. It is contempt for the simplistic illusion of meritocracy — the idea that what we get is what we work for. It is knowing that your mother, with her arthritic joints and her maddening insomnia and her post-traumatic stress disordered heart, goes to work until two in the morning waiting tables for less than minimum wage, or pushes a janitor’s cart and cleans the shit-filled toilets of polished professionals. It is entering a room full of people and seeing not only individual people, but violent systems and stark divisions. It is the violence of untreated mental illness exacerbated by the fact that reality, from some vantage points, really does resemble a psychotic nightmare. It is the violence of abuse and assault which is ignored or minimized by police officers, social services, and courts of law. Poverty is conflict. And for poor kids lucky enough to have the chance to “move up,” it is the conflict between remaining oppressed or collaborating with the oppressor.”
—
Megan Lee
(via youcanhaveitall)
(Source: docs.google.com, via youcanhaveitall)
“Pain is important: how we evade it, how we succumb to it, how we deal with it, how we transcend it.”
— Audre Lorde (via grrrlstudies)
(Source: loveyourchaos, via grrrlstudies)
hope
If we look at this conflict as a straightforward eye-ball to eye-ball confrontation between Empire and those of us who are resisting it, it might seem that we are losing. But there is another way of looking at it. We, all of us who have gathered here, have, each in our own way, laid siege to Empire. We may not have stopped it in its tracks-yet-but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world’s stage in all it’s brutish, iniquitous nakedness. Empire may well go to war, but it’s out in the open now- too ugly to behold its own reflection. Too ugly even to rally its own people. - “Confronting Empire”, War Talk Arundhati Roy
