I still don't want to die. Or kill anyone.

[sabotabby]

It's incredible how people across the political spectrum are trying to make me feel guilty because I don't want to die or kill anyone else.

It's not working. I don't feel guilty about wanting to live.

Comments

[minoanmiss]

Guilt is stupid and useless and you have every right to live.

[sabotabby]

They should know better than to guilt a Jewish person anyway. It doesn't work. I have way too much practice at it. That's my secret; I'm always guilty.

[franklanguage]

Runners-up for Familial Guilt are Catholics, of course; we invented Original Sin.

[robin_iamar]

As someone w/ a Ukrainian babushka grandmother, I know a thing or two about feeling guilty! (also anybody guilting people for not wanting to endanger others is... something else)

[gingicat]

Gah, I'm so sorry.

Our Sunday school for disabled students is going entirely virtual and we are adding more activities, like virtual Kabbalat Shabbat, to make up for it.

[sabotabby]

That is lovely.

I hate that everything is going virtual. I hate more that I need to be on the phone with a lawyer for half an hour figuring out if I need to update my will.

[annie_r]

I really need a dental cleaning but not before I get my will done. And I don't know who I can get to take care of my pets. I don't want to die and don't want you to die. Esp. not for a job.

[sabotabby]

Especially not for a job that most of the kids don't care if I'm good at or not.

[dewline]

I have no problem with this.

[sabotabby]

I'm not guilty for wanting to survive.

[dewline]

Nope. Not at all.

[redbird]

There are people whose deaths I wouldn't mourn, but I am not convinced this is a virtue.

[sabotabby]

Oh, there's lots of people I actively wish death upon. And I'm making mental tradeoffs like, I would prefer the second wave to happen with bar re-openings, because at least some of those people will have had agency in their fates, unlike me and my kids and their families.

[mallorys_camera]

I'll talk to the other members of the cabal, and we'll try harder with the guilt! 😀

[sabotabby]

I come from a long line of Jewish women! WASP attempts to guilt me will inevitably fail.

[mallorys_camera]

Why do you assume we're not Jewish? 😀

[lapinlunaire]

Shit, I'm sorry. I can'tbe on the computer for long because my laptop's overheating, but let me know if you need to talk. You're 100% right about this.

[sabotabby]

Thanks. Mainly I'm just venting; I'm probably going to be fine, but I'm only probably going to be fine because the things I fear happening to me are going to happen to someone else.

[rdi]

Living is the best revenge

[sabotabby]

For sure. Though dying and haunting the fuck out of people who think I should die for their kids (left) or the economy (right) is a decent backup plan.

[marahmarie]

Unless you're a terribly active ghost that probably gets old after a while.

The left thinks you should die for their kids? I wasn't aware of this being a left-wing viewpoint. I think kids shouldn't go back to school this fall, this year, possibly not through the winter (and if I was any more left I'd be you).

[sabotabby]

Oh, I have a loooooong list of people to haunt.

There are absolutely left wing viewpoints. They're all bad takes imo, informed by a phenomenon that I should, at some point, expound upon. They include:

Argument 1 Online learning will widen educational gaps; rich families can afford tutors, poor families can't afford wifi.

This is true. Amazingly, this is now also argued by our right-wing government, which forced my union at gunpoint to sign a collective agreement mandating two online courses for kids to graduate. But now online learning is a bad thing because we've all experienced it and yes, it sucks and kids don't learn anything.

It disregards two things: Firstly, that kids are going to learn anything at all this year. Most of class time will be taken up by telling kids to stay in their goddamn seats and not lick the kid next to them or spit on their teacher. To keep social distancing, kids are only going to be doing seat work and it'll basically be the same as online learning but with the teacher there, very stressed and very muffled through a face mask. Rich kids will still get private tutors.

Secondly, nothing widens gaps in education more than illness and death, and the kids who have the biggest gaps in their education now are the most likely to get it, suffer more from it, lose family members to it, and experience compounded trauma. The schools that will close first are in marginalized communities because that's where outbreaks happen.

Kids will not learn shit this year no matter what happens. That's okay. We have to be at peace with that. It's a global pandemic; it's not like they're having to compete with test scores in China. Lost learning can be recovered; lost lives can't.

Argument 2 Depriving families of childcare is booting women out of the workforce and setting women's rights back in the 1930s. Again, this is true but like...there's no good solution here, other than paying parents to stay home and opening up the largest, most open concept spaces to warehouse the children of essential workers.

Weirdly, everyone making this argument around me has been a white, middle class woman who can theoretically work from home. One of my friends is a Black single mom who works in grocery stores and retail and she's like, no way am I sending my kid into a death trap so that he can wipe out the whole family. That's not to say that the argument doesn't have weight, but I side-eye the motivations of the people making it.

Argument 3 This is my favourite one. Forcing mask rules on children from diverse cultures is oppressive, and it will be unevenly applied to BIPOC kids. Instead, we must gentle and non-oppressively educate kids about the need to wear masks in the death traps we're sending them into, and be flexible and forgiving when they fuck up.

Of course, if they fuck up, I can die. This isn't like forgetting a pencil where we can learn over time.

Also, it's bizarre and shows a lack of understanding about cultural norms. I'm actually feeling pretty good about the chances of BIPOC kids complying with mask rules, just judging by the people I see walking around in my neighbourhood. I'm worried about middle and upper-middle class white kids who feel entitled (who then spread it to BIPOC kids...and me).

The underlying current is what the class reductionists call identity politics, but it's really not that. It's an issue of imposing Christian values on absolutely everything. If someone is suffering, that is virtuous. If someone is not suffering, they are not virtuous. Because other workers have suffered, it is now the time for teachers to suffer and be virtuous too. (Never mind that it is much easier to enforce social distancing in a grocery store than in a classroom.) Dead and martyred is the most virtuous thing you can be.

[marahmarie]

It's an issue of imposing Christian values on absolutely everything. If someone is suffering, that is virtuous.

If that's so then they ought to wear some damn masks and stop telling everyone else not to - often at the threat or else performance of actual violence. Suffering, right, every person eschewing them is suffering having to wear one which is why they don't, oh cry me a river mofos, indeed.

They sure are hypocritical about what counts as virtuous "suffering" considering the suffering they won't endure while they demand others die doing their bidding.

If they're so fucking virtuous then where was/is skipping haircuts, pedicures, where was/is social distancing, where was/is not attending church or packing themselves like the lemmings they are into restaurants, where was....? What counts as "suffering"? Why don't they have to "suffer", too?

(All said from a US perspective, where almost anyone calling themselves Christian, dragging the sweet name of our tender Lord Jesus into the convo about their "freedoms" and so on, is a Republican.

They don't wear masks, don't skip haircuts, pedicures or their restaurants, don't social distance, don't keep their kids at home - I mean talk about a) entitlement to the extreme and b) the virtuousness of their fragility in all things - they cannot go without life exactly as it was before the plague or they will all DIE DIE DIE DIE.

Never mind that's exactly backward!)

[sabotabby]

So, I don't really mean Christian in terms of self-identified Christians. They're a whole other story, and less of an issue in Canada.

What clarified what's happened to the left for me in terms of absorbing Christian values was, ironically, the Zizek-Peterson debate. In which they were both wrong but accidentally hit on a point. Peterson was talking about how Marx framed it as workers=good, owners=bad, and Zizek was like the fuck??? no he didn't??? It's about who has the economic power to transform society. He didn't tell the proletariat to lose its change because they were suffering and he felt bad for them, he did it because that's the class able to wield economic and political clout. He wasn't concerned at all with Christian notions of good vs evil; that is imposed by idiots like Peterson.

But now that I'm aware of it, I see it everywhere, in both class reductionist and identity politics tendencies on the left. We should sympathize with X because they're oppressed and not with Y because they are not. So if you are middle class, you are Evil if you're not always feeling guilty about your privilege, and if you are poor, you are virtuous. The suffering, rather than analyzing economics and power relations, becomes an end in itself.

So what I'm seeing now on the left is essentially "grocery workers have been suffering, and teachers have been protected, so now it is time for teachers to also suffer for the good of everyone." Rather than working on ways to help grocery workers and not add to the suffering.

[marahmarie]

We should sympathize with X because they're oppressed and not with Y because they are not. So if you are middle class, you are Evil if you're not always feeling guilty about your privilege, and if you are poor, you are virtuous.

Not going to be a popular opinion, but I'm tired of it. I found it weirdly self-conscious to begin with, such a close cousin to humble-bragging I can barely tell them apart. I'd throw in its close likeness to virtue-signaling but I don't think the majority of people engaging in this stultifying variant of the humble-brag have any idea it comes off as playing for brownie points, though technically it does qualify.

So if you are middle class, you are Evil

This is how the Right gets away with saying those who aren't middle class or rich are just jealous. I can't deny their point. Also, total bs: the poor are not virtuous. I'm no more virtuous now than I'd be with a bit more money in my pocket and a bill for the mortgage hitting my mailbox every month, and people with the mortgage are no less virtuous than those at my income level. It's all false equations.

Yet I have to endure Beckys writing so much about how they're SO PRIVILEGED to have the house, car, job, jewels, clothes etc. just to tell me how to make a fucking mask or cook their recipe because it has such HIGH QUALITY INGREDIENTS the poor are not PRIVILEGED ENOUGH to have access to that yeah, I just want to scream.

We eat decent food, too. Sometimes we even own our own sewing machines or else can sew by hand so you don't have to detail your entire life of economic abundance from three generations back until five minutes ago to apologize for owning the sewing machine you assume I don't have.

So yeah, having (white women especially) engage in performative well-offness like so adds nothing helpful to the conversation, it's just maddening *strong fist-bump of solidarity on that*

So what I'm seeing now on the left is essentially "grocery workers have been suffering, and teachers have been protected, so now it is time for teachers to also suffer for the good of everyone." Rather than working on ways to help grocery workers and not add to the suffering.

Yeah, like a) give them a hefty raise b) reduce their hours to reduce their exposure, c) provide/increase PPE, d) insist customers respect social distancing with their employees, and not duck behind their plexiglass and so on, e) increase automation for those willing and able to use a self-checkout, f) give them low-cost, low or no-deductible health insurance. At a minimum, there's probably more to be done (ensure they're getting adequate rest periods and meal breaks as there has never been a more stressful time to be in retail; probably other things).

[sabotabby]

So yeah, having (white women especially) engage in performative well-offness like so adds nothing helpful to the conversation, it's just maddening *strong fist-bump of solidarity on that*

Yeah, I think for me it's also that I identify privilege as power and to some degree responsibility and complicity, but not guilt. I dunno if a lot of people who do this really feel guilt as intensely as I do, but that seems to be their primary motivation, whereas for me, that's my secret I'm always guilty.

Yeah, like a) give them a hefty raise b) reduce their hours to reduce their exposure, c) provide/increase PPE, d) insist customers respect social distancing with their employees, and not duck behind their plexiglass and so on, e) increase automation for those willing and able to use a self-checkout, f) give them low-cost, low or no-deductible health insurance. At a minimum, there's probably more to be done (ensure they're getting adequate rest periods and meal breaks as there has never been a more stressful time to be in retail; probably other things).

And especially, for all workers, paid quarantine leave. You or your kid gets a hint of exposure, you are home for 15 days and can't be fired and you're still drawing a paycheque. Otherwise people are going to be forced into a nasty calculation.

[marahmarie]

Yeah, I think for me it's also that I identify privilege as power and to some degree responsibility and complicity, but not guilt. I dunno if a lot of people who do this really feel guilt as intensely as I do, but that seems to be their primary motivation, whereas for me, that's my secret I'm always guilty.

I don't think performing "guilt" over one's abundance in relation to the socio-economically disadvantaged does anyone any favors, either. And anyone can do it - even the poor.

I could be like, when I post recipes, "Of course, I'm writing from a place of privilege wherein I have secure housing, a fully stocked kitchen with all the appliances and utensils needed to make anything, and access to pretty decent food. That said, a lot of people don't have these advantages so their mileage with this recipe may vary", or something to that effect.

So now a) I *do* feel guilty writing all that out (which is not a place I normally dwell in unless I'm thinking about, say, my relative advantages) because perhaps some people reading my blog *don't* have what I do and b) it hasn't helped anyone reading decide if or how or when to prepare my recipe, either. It's a sideshow, an unproductive one at that.

Yet! I've seen recipes worded more or less exactly so, sewing tutorials worded more or less exactly that way.

Steeping in guilt over my place in a capitalist society bound to screw others more than it's so far screwed me isn't helping me help those who need help, nor is it helping them feel any better. It's calling their attention to what I've got that they don't, which might just might make them feel worse than if I hadn't brought it up.

(It occurs to me in edit that some disadvantaged might read the blurb I wrote on privilege as "showing humility", which they might find comforting on some level? Maybe worded in a non-humblebrag way such disclosures *could* serve that purpose, if they seem genuine enough. But how does that help anyone? At best it might tell you the author's not a monster, but if I'm checking in for your recipe or sewing tutorial, I probably don't care if you are one?)

And especially, for all workers, paid quarantine leave. You or your kid gets a hint of exposure, you are home for 15 days and can't be fired and you're still drawing a paycheque. Otherwise people are going to be forced into a nasty calculation.

Yes! Thought of that later and was going to add if you or someone else didn't get there first. Knew it was something pretty important.

[sabotabby]

I think in a lot of cases it's actively harmful. Like where the humility and privilege acknowledgment feels like a political act, but isn't.

I see it so much in this country, where we have a culture of apologizing but not one of accountability. Land acknowledgments are a ritual; we recite the rote text and even stand for it, and then we continue to profit off the land we stole. Yay? It substitutes for actual political action that does something.

I'm also a former editor and cringe at extra words. So if I'm in a physical meeting (not that I go to any these days) and I hear "speaking as a white middle-class settler cisgender woman with English-speaking privilege, I [actual question or comment]" when like, I can look at her and see that, I get itchy.

[marahmarie]

Haha, I'm a former (high school) copy editor myself so I cringe the same - though I do so at myself just as much. Either written or oral word-stuffing gets me, but being guilty of it as well *does* make me a bit of a hypocrite in that regard. Do as I say, not as I...lol

and then we continue to profit off the land we stole

Same as us here in Murrica re: indigenous Indians. Talk about foundational issues. Damn shame, and not something I ever really get over or stop thinking about. Seems almost no one else does.

[marahmarie]

...and it's damn good work if you can get it, these days.