six weeks from my surgery consult is April 7th. I will likely hopefully hear back from my surgeon’s office this week about whether or not my insurance has accepted the pre-auth.

I already know my blood pressure is gonna spike whenever I get a call.

I really hope they call and I don’t have to wait another week or longer

ivebeentravelling:

I’m disgusted, I have a big ol’ mason jar full of wine, and this Southern motherfucking Democrat is about to go off on some rude ass fuckers up in Philly tonight.

I don’t give one single fuck about your moral purity. I don’t give one single fuck about how much you think the DNC is corrupt or that Hillary is a liar or that she’s a fucking war hawk. I don’t give ONE SINGLE FUCK that you can’t support someone who didn’t support same-sex marriage until 2013.

I spent a whole fucking week listening to people laugh about how Trump’s third wife plagiarized a speech. I spent a whole week listening to people joke about how the Republican convention was a dumpster fire. Y’all didn’t give a shit that their platform is going to literally fucking kill queer people, young people, people with disabilities, and people of color.

Y’all wanna stand in Philadelphia at the fucking Democratic Convention and shout down those who are standing up against the tyrannical, antediluvian beliefs of the pasty-ass GOP who decided, last week, they wanted to send people like 14 year-old me to a camp where I’d be tortured into believing I wasn’t worthy of life.

Y’all gonna shout down the fucking black man who’s on stage advocating for a future that includes a president that believes that his life matters, while y’all spent a whole damn week quiet about how Donald Trump couldn’t care any less about the lives of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Philando Castile…

Y’all were invited into this room. I was at a Trump rally. I saw that shit. You know what happened to protestors there? They didn’t get to hold up signs and shout down the speakers. They were hauled out on their heels by off-duty cops getting paid to take out their aggression on protestors. Your voices are welcome, your voices are heard.

But now is a good time to shut the fuck up and listen.

My life depends on keeping Trump out of office. The life of my friends, my family, the people I love, depends on keeping that rat away from the White House. You know what your choices are this November? Depending on your state, you got up to four choices:

1) The libertarian who supports deregulating banks and healthcare and vaccines, who would lead to a future America that features such hits as corporate slavery and inaccessible healthcare.

2) The green who has no experience and also doesn’t believe in vaccinations and called the racist, xenophobic Brexit a victory for British people.

3) The fascist, xenophobic, homophobic, hateful demagogue who genuinely has a chance of winning this election because 50% of this country is disgusting and awful.

4) Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In many states, you don’t even get choice number 2.

I’m scared that so many of you are gonna go out and vote for 1 and 2 that y’all gonna let 3 win and then guess what?

14-year-old me is dead. You killed him.

When these people stand up to address the country this week in Philly, you know what you need to do? Listen. Learn. Understand. This is the most progressive platform in the history of American politics. There have been queer women of color, women with disabilities, black men, children of undocumented immigrants, sharing the stage with the first lady and the president. This is a platform that includes raising the minimum wage, eliminating college debt, ending police brutality, standing up for the rights of queer Americans and children.

And y’all wanna shout NOW?

Go home. Get the fuck out. You do not own this country. You do not own this struggle. You do not get to decide how the fight is fought.

You need to listen.

Bernie Sanders ran a messy campaign on clear, powerful ideals and I respect that shit. But the people on stage, the people with the microphone, those are the people who are going to lose everything because you won’t let this shit go.

You won’t vote for Clinton? You won’t stand up for the party of people of color, of people with disabilities, of queer people, of women?

Okay, fine, but don’t you fucking speak to me. Your moral high ground means shit to me when it could mean leaving my loved ones in graves.

I’m not done. I’m never done. But I’m tired. I’m scared. I wanted to see Michelle Obama speak to me and my heart and give me hope, but I couldn’t get the fear out of my heart. Ask me a month ago and I would have said that there was no way that we’d see Trump in the White House, but ask me tonight and I just don’t know. I don’t know.

jaanfe:

artielu:

kata-speaks:

swanjolras:

endquestionmark:

swanjolras:

okay jesus fuck this conversation has gone far enough so:

hey, so you like bernie sanders! i like bernie sanders too! i agree with his politics! he is doing better than people expected in the democratic primaries, which is cool!

what are you going to do if he loses?

because given the tone of the conversations i hear on this website right now– given the sheer hatred of hillary that’s emerging, given the overwhelming feeling that bernie sanders is amazing and the messiah and the only candidate that’s worth voting for in america– here’s what i see happening in mid-2016:

• bernie sanders, who despite his better-than-expected performance still has an unbelievably low chance of winning the primaries, loses the primaries to hillary clinton
  
• the leftist wing of the democratic party (that’s us– tumblr, yeah, but also the whole occupy-black lives matter-third wave feminist-young educated millennials crowd), having spent the past 10 months campaigning against hillary clinton, is overwhelmingly disappointed
• while a few people are willing to bite the bullet and campaign for hillary, energy is low, disillusionment is high, and many leftist americans don’t campaign, don’t donate, and don’t vote (or vote for third-party candidates, like the green party or the peace and freedom party)
• the republican party wins the presidential election.

(i literally shivered as i typed that last bullet point, btw– i know there are people voting in 2016 who were ten years old when obama was elected, and y’all may not remember much of the bush years. i was only 13 when bush left, but jesus christ– remember when hurricane katrina was overwhelmingly badly handled? remember when the patriot act passed? remember when the housing bubble collapsed? remember when the president said god told him to invade iraq? y’all wanna do that again?)

so what are you going to do if bernie sanders loses?

i need you to think about that now. i need you to not be surprised when it happens. i need you to not put all your hopes in one basket.

you think the gop won’t be pouring all their resources into this election? you think the superpacs and the koch brothers and the oil lobbyists won’t be throwing their money at ballot boxes until they spit out the result they want? you think the rich and powerful and conservative won’t be bringing their best game? 

they will, and if we don’t work twice as hard as they do– no matter who the democratic nominee is– we are fucked.

i need you to be okay with the idea of hillary clinton being president of the united states, and i need you to make peace with that before she wins the primaries, so that you’re prepared and ready to campaign for her with all your might if she’s the democratic nominee.

because i honest-to-god believe this country will not survive another four, eight, twelve years of a republican administration.

#remember ralph nader? #I FUCKING WELL REMEMBER RALPH NADER #WE’RE NOT DOING THAT AGAIN. (via swanjolras)

my hand to god i have seen so many posts on my dash that have been both heartbreakingly optimistic and absolutely mind-bogglingly uninformed (and naive, but that comes with time; information comes with googling the way the government of your own country works. fun fact: not all primaries are open primaries! i know! this is inconsistent! it is also the world that we live in and i don’t think we’re going to get around to redesigning the electoral system before november 2016. just saying) and, like every election year, i have sat down and thought, albeit briefly, about this possibility:

• the republican party wins the presidential election.

that is not a possibility that i can or will accept. i know we like to mythologize our figures here and put them on can-do-no-wrong pedestals, but, for god’s sake, to paraphrase: can we live in the real fucking world here, please? by all means, know that we can do better. by all means, know that we should. but here are some facts:

• the us electoral system is not going to change by november 2016.
  
• the notes on your tumblr post about bernie sanders’ ideology are not going to translate to votes.
• those votes are not as big a percentage of the voting population as you think they are.
• even if they were, bernie sanders is not going to be able to wave a magic wand and:
• turn those ideas into policies
• get those policies signed into law
• get those laws implemented
• they aren’t going to be perfect anyway.
• can you imagine the reactionary voting in the election immediately following that anyway.

this is not how politics works. you don’t vote a politician into office and then stand back and watch the world fix itself! you don’t get to do that. it takes work and it takes time and it takes, sometimes, the willingness to accept and keep pushing through lowered expectations. i’m happy for your optimism and i’m happy for your energy. we need those! don’t lose them. do, however, remember that there is context to this, because we live, again, in the real fucking world.

#i have read posts calling hillary clinton problematic.#i fully expect an edit of bernie sanders in a flower crown to cross my dash sooner or later.#real. world. (via endquestionmark)

THIS.

FUCKING THIS.

FUCKING EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS.

And this has an embarrassingly low number of notes.

I know how a lot of people here feel about Hilary. If I had my druthers, I would MUCH rather have Bernie Sanders as president because his politics so closely align with my own. Like, stunningly close. A-breath-of-fresh-air close.

But consider these words from an ancient, jaded, 34 year old fuck who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000…

NONE OF US agreed with Gore. I mean, not really, at least. He was Republican-lite. First off, his wife Tipper was a friggin’ censorship Nazi, Gore was a Southern Baptist who was mum on gay rights, and while he gave lip service to climate change, please note that An Inconvenient Truth had not been produced or filmed, and there wasn’t much in the way of supporting the Kyoto protocols in his platform. He supported the limited military action in Iraq, supported NAFTA, and supported driving our production overseas. There wasn’t much to his platform other than “less scary alternative to Bush”. In other words, he was problematic as hell.

Then there was Ralph Nader, a consumer rights advocate, a proponent of gay marriage before it became a mainstream cause to champion, against NAFTA, spoke out against the military industrial complex, was pro-union, and anti-corporate.

And I voted for him. Proudly. In the general election. My reasoning was that nearly everyone I knew was voting for him (and everyone I knew were fellow college age leftists) so if enough of us got together and enough of us wanted that change to happen, then it would, right?

“Well, we’re talking about the primaries,” I can already hear you say. And yes, we are. But consider this: if Bernie ends up not winning the primaries, and no one turns out to the polls to vote for Hilary so they can “make a statement” or because she’s “problematic”, or turns out and votes Green or some other third Party for those same reasons, then history will repeat itself with disastrous consequences.

Here’s what happened on election night, November 7, 2000:

We waited.  We watched Gore lose in battleground state after battleground state by just about the same number of votes that went to Ralph fucking Nader. Bush took all the dip shits who thought he’d be a swell feller to have a beer with. And then Florida and the recount and the Republican Party-led coup that stormed the voting recount, triggered the Supreme Court ruling and handed George W. Bush control of the country.

The first thing Bush did was reverse each and every executive order Clinton had put in place over the protestations of a crybaby Republican Congress, and most of those executive orders were designed to protect the middle class from corporate America and protect our budget surplus from the military industrial complex. Then Bush instituted legalized class warfare: the tax cuts that benefited the wealthy and still do to this day.

Then 9/11 happened.

If you’re 22 right now, then in 2001 you were 8 years old. In 2001, I was 20. I watched friends of mine who had joined the military because there were few other opportunities for them after high school get shipped to Iraq and Afghanistan and get their limbs blown off by IUDs. There are people I knew, people I ate lunch with every day, who are FUCKING DEAD right now.

This country was an unchecked fascist dictatorship for six years. Don’t believe me? Here’s the dictionary definition of fascism. And here’s what happened during the Bush regime.

Torture. Suppression of the press. Siphoning the nation’s wealth to the upper 1%, creating our current aristocracy. Investments made by principle members of the Bush regime in for-profit military-industrial corporations that were tasked with murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Sunsetting the assault weapons ban. The Defense of Marriage Act. The creation of the Department of Homeland Security. The loss of an entire city and fucking nothing done about it as people were drowning and starving to death in New Orleans. No Child Left UnTested Behind. A color coded number system on every day of the news telling Americans how frightened they needed to be that day that hilariously enough coincided with how far Bush dipped in the polls that week. He dipped, we went up to terror threat: orange. His poll numbers went back up. Like clockwork.

Between 2001 and 2005 us leftists who thought that there was no different than center-left Democrats and right wing Republicans got hit by a giant clue by four and watched the fucking Republicans dismantle our safety, economic security, and our entire way of life. No, the centrists are not the same. THE DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS ARE NOT THE SAME. One faction sort of listens to us. The other doesn’t give a shit about us and actively promotes policies designed to kill and silence us.

…

So for all the “problematic” that you imagine a Hilary Clinton presidency could be, I want you to imagine a Republican presidency (pick one) in which they want people like us fucking dead as pawns in their war games or fucking dying because they’ve stripped away the Affordable Healthcare Act.

So please Support Bernie Sanders. Support him because if enough leftists make their voices known through his candidacy, then NO MATTER WHAT it will influence the DNC platform next summer. Support him because we’re all passionate about returning America to a thriving, working democracy and flushing out the corporate lobbyist corruption that has held our entire government hostage for a decade.

But if he doesn’t win the primaries then you need to support Hilary Clinton. And I’m not kidding, I’m not being hyperbolic.  If the Republicans win, then you need to start preparing yourself for life under a fascist state.

Hint: it will help if you’re fundamentalist Christian, wealthy, white, straight, male, and cisgender. 

Otherwise, you’re fucked.

All of this. Read it. I also lived through the Nader debacle. Vote for Bernie in the primaries if you agree with him. I like a lot of his politics too. But then you MUST SHOW UP FOR HILLARY IN THE GENERAL ELECTION OR WE WILL END UP WITH A THIRD PRESIDENT BUSH.

Three Supreme Court Justices are very old and may die in the next Presidential term.

www.rockthevote.com

#RockTheVote

hyfr-hawkeye:

Remus Lupin and Bruce Banner

no9jazzst:

teamrocketing:

Y’know when people use the Tolkien quote “Not all those who wander are lost” as inspirational.. It’s just.. That line was referring to Sauron’s evil servants being around in Middle Earth.. Not about your boho journey to South Cali in a rented minivan..

I mean, if you ignore the entire rest of the poem I guess it could reference them, but it’s in a poem including the lines “renewed shall be blade that was broken / the crownless again shall be king.” It’s about Aragorn.

ofstarlord:

You’re in the theater watching previews for mildly interesting movies when all the sudden the screen goes dark except for a date. A woman’s voice says, “This is just like Budapest all over again” amidst sounds of gunfire.

A man replies,”You and I remember Budapest very differently”

silence

On screen the date moves backwards through time until it stops not too far in the past and a different, lightly accented woman’s voice says, “Welcome to Budapest Mr. Barton, I hope you enjoy your stay.”

Silence again as the date transforms into “coming summer 2016.“ 

The screen goes dark. The next preview begins.

pinkvelourtracksuit:

what if we lived in a world where u could go out without wearing a bra and everyone was mature about it.