Pgh Lesbian Correspondents

I haven’t posted much about the political/electoral world this month.

Frankly, it hurts my heart to even try to keep up with it. I’m not burying my head in the sand. I’m reconstituting my political self. On Instagram.

I scroll every day, searching for content that’s uplifting, humorous, and absolutely representative of the many cultures of this world. We are so fortunate that they create and share wisdom of survival, guidance on thrival even. We don’t deserve it – and by ‘we’ I mean white folx.

I’m not talking about appropriating sound bytes and snippets of cultures we can’t understand. We can mimic, but that just reinforces this white culture carved on the backs of so so many other people. Don’t mimic.

Learn. Lean in to the video or the lecture or the book. Lean in and honor the vitality and defiance of Indigenous cultures around the world. They aren’t teachable moments, they are the future as much as they have always been past and present.

Take what is offered, not what you want. Honor those lessons by actively de-colonizing your mind, owning the effects of anti-blackness on your soul. That’s going to look different for each of us. But it feels like a genuine path forward to learn how to endure from those who have had no choice, no matter who was in the White House.

There are other examples – the residents of East Palestine, the families of Sandy Hook, the trans community. I don’t want to reduce their lived experiences to survival or resiliency or inspirational. It is more about building a healthy respectful connection.

No, I am not going to curate a list of accounts to follow. If you use the platforms, you know how to find it. And I have confidence that you are smart enough to sort the wheat from the chaff.

I am not a content creator, at least not on social media. I am an amplifier. I share, repost, link, and all of the other social media verbs. People follow me because of what I don’t say, because I get out of the way of the content I value. So I guess you could follow me to see what I passively curate?

Finally, I’m not here to tell you to hope or be angry. I don’t know what is going to help us survive the next four years. I suspect it will vary with mileage. My eyes roll in my head with people demand unity, even when it is dressed up as allyship, accomplice (ing?), solidarity. That’s fine, but is not compulsory.

Fitting perhaps that I can’t find the words to wrap up this post?