I just read an article about a 11 year old Uvalde student who covered herself with the blood of her slain classmate in the hopes that this would fool the shooter into believing her already dead. Her quick thinking paid off, and she lived to tell the story. Her surviving is, of course, wonderful news, but I can't begin to fathom the psychological toll this trauma will have. She will be forever changed.

At 11 years old, I had no concept of mass shootings. The Columbine High School massacre wouldn't occur until two years later. My thoughts were consumed with which Backstreet Boy I would inevitably marry and how to be less terrible at math. These are the kinds of things 11 year olds should be worrying about, but not in today's America.

Hate crimes are rising at staggering rates, with the 10 largest metropolitan areas in the U.S. reporting a record 54.5% increase in incidents, and the year is not even over. There have been over 1.5 million gun deaths in this country since 1968 - that's higher than the number of soldiers killed in every U.S. conflict since War for Independence in 1775. And, as all of us know, mass shootings are becoming deadlier and more frequent nearly every year. While we did see a decline in 2020, the cause is not because of legislative or community action, but likely due to the global pandemic. What a wild concept - too many people were dying from a highly infectious virus to be able to commit and/or die from a mass shooting incident.

While the motivation behind Uvalde is still unknown at this time, we do know that the recent mass murders in Buffalo and Laguna Woods were motivated by hate against Black and Asian Americans, respectively. These horrific acts were also committed against the backdrop of the impending overturning of Roe vs. Wade, which will effectively result in women being forced to give birth, and will inevitably hit Black, Brown and impoverished communities the hardest. All this amidst a seemingly never-ending pandemic and a new Monkeypox virus that sounds like something too cartoonish to be true. Living in this moment is exhausting at best, dangerous and unsustainable at worst.

What's most maddening is the hypocrisy, willful ignorance, radical hate and simple lack of humanity that "Christian" Republican conservatives continue to show through all this. It is simply unbelievable to hear these people rant about the sanctity of human life, when every action they take or advocate for goes against its preservation - anti-choice laws will only result in dangerous, back-alley abortions that will lead to injury and death. Women and folks with uteruses will not only be criminalized, but they will die from dangerous pregnancies that could have otherwise been aborted. Children will be forced to have their rapists' babies, and swaths of people will lose access to live-saving, gender-affirming healthcare. The Republicans in Congress voting against emergency funding for baby formula while at the same time shouting that they are the pro-life party is so absurd you would think it's a tongue-in-cheek scene from The Simpsons.

What's more, in the wake of the shooting that killed 19 children and two adult teachers, the Republicans in Congress responded by voting against a Domestic Terrorism bill that would have set up special offices with the goal of better preparing the federal government to identify risks in order to take preventative action. The bill would have also called for assessments of the threat posed by White supremacists and neo-Nazis, which, when I think about it, would likely result in taking out a significant portion of Republicans in office...so I guess I can now see why they voted it against it after all.

Ted "Lucifer" Cruz is happily waddling to the NRA convention as we speak, because he loves NRA money as much as he loves Cancun, and he wants his blood stained dollar bills to be the only ones in circulation after voting against raising the federal minimum wage and the $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill. Of course, he will inevitably use that money to order some Chinese food from underpaid restaurant workers while he gleefully recalls the time he was one of only six Republicans to oppose strengthening the US government’s response to rising anti-Asian hate crimes in the wake of the pandemic. He'll probably wear an "I'm glad RBG is dead" t-shirt while doing it and reminisce about the Mexican border being full of brown babies in cages in between chews.

I digress, but it's motherfuckers like this that walk around in the wake of mass shootings saying things like "now is not the time for politics" when people ask them simple questions like, "Why does an 18 year old need an AR-15?" "Why can a person legally buy a gun before they're legally allowed to drink?" "Why is the U.S. the only nation in the world that has this problem?" "Why do you think abortion bans and book bans and critical race theory bans and 'say gay' bans would be effective, but gun bans wouldn't be?" "Did your mother not love you as a child?" "How small is your dick, actually?"

Cruz has literally run away from reporters asking these questions in recent days. He also said the solution to this issue is requiring all schools to have one door for entry and exit so we can add fire to the list of leading causes of death for children. Meanwhile other Republican cult members are out here talking about arming and training teachers for these situations when #1, trained police officers have proven that they cannot handle these situations (and in the case of Uvalde, made the situation worse with their cowardice, prejudice and seeming lack of humanity and brain cells) and #2, we are supposed to reconcile the fact that they don't trust teachers enough to make their own curriculum, but somehow trust them with guns?

I'd be remiss if I didn't also mention how absolutely rich it is that these elected officials act as if "talking politics" is some grand affront in the wake of mass shootings when politics quite literally is THEIR JOB. You are supposed to shape and enact laws that will help address horrific societal ills like these. The reality is, they don't actually care about their constituents or other human beings - they care about power, being re-elected and getting lobbying money. They will do whatever it takes in the name of wealth and self-preservation. As for the more backwoods among them, literal campaign slogans include things like, "I believe in Babies, Guns and God."

Speak of the big G-O-D...all these right-wingers seem to talk a lot about the dude while advocating for hate, bigotry and sexism and rallying against any measures that would give communities in need more access to basic human needs like food, shelter and healthcare. Have ya'll really not asked yourselves what would Jesus do? I'm pretty sure this isn't it.

What's worse is that there seems to be this idea that religions deserve respect simply by existing, which makes zero sense. If you know anything about history at all, you know that religion has been one of the main driving factors behind the oppression and murder of people across centuries and continents. Holy wars, honor killings, suicide bombings...not to mention other extremely weird and gross shit like marrying your 12 year old to a dude old enough to be her grandfather and genital mutilation - all in the name of some imaginary peeps in the sky. None of that sounds particularly worthy of respect to me.

And it's not like we automatically respect other belief systems, like racism or homophobia, (though some religious zealots may be fervently on board to do so). We interrogate them because they're based on sheer falsehoods. So why don't we have the same ethical and intellectual responsibility to interrogate religions? You can believe whatever you want to believe, but that shouldn't mean no one gets to criticize you or work to stop practices that are actively harming people.

When religious people say religions deserve respect, what they're really saying is #1 their specific religion (Christians, looking at you), #2 they actually don't mean respect, they mean deference. They want to have a privileged position that exempts them from taking accountability for their own actions and their churches actions. Organized religions essentially train their members to lie to themselves and everyone else, rather than to use science and observable reality to make informed opinions. They advocate for a blind faith in and authority to God and their religious leaders, resulting in dire consequences for democracy and public health and safety.

Organized religions are manmade institutions. They function in the same way that for-profit corporations do - their goals are to build wealth and power so that they continue to exist - by any means necessary. They're in the game of self-preservation too, society at large be damned. Salman Rushdie said it best after the Charlie Hedbo shooting - " ' Respect for religion' has become a code phrase meaning 'fear of religion'. Religions, like all other ideas, deserve criticism, satire, and yes, our fearless disrespect."

With that, I think I will end my rant for today. Until the next mass shooting or human rights violation...

TL;DR: America is a dumpster fire. Conservative Republican fundamentalist Christians are heavily to blame. Hate and hypocrisy are at an all time high. The #1 cause of child mortality in America is now gun violence. Organized religions are dangerous. Everything is rotten here.

"Can you provide a definition of the word woman?"

Republican Senator Marsha Blackburn from Kentucky recently asked Supreme Court Nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson to answer this question, not because she was looking for a personal answer - perhaps about the resilience and strength of women like Brown herself who rise in a patriarchal society despite its challenges - or because she suspects Jackson doesn't have a basic command of the English language, but because she was looking for a very specific answer about biology and chromosomes.

To start, we should all be able to recognize that the question itself is irrelevant in a Supreme Court confirmation hearing (much like most other Republican lines of questioning about religion and anti-racist babies), the purpose of which is to judge fitness for a life-long position on the bench. But more than that, it was a question not asked in good faith, one aiming to either A) catch Jackson in an answer that would somehow denigrate transwomen or B) get her to do exactly what she did - provide no answer - so that Republicans could froth over the mouth at it. Either way, what remained evident to me throughout those hearings is that what womanhood is most about is putting up with an exorbitant amount of bullshit. And sometimes, quite sadly, that bullshit is coming from your fellow women, whose internalized oppression endangers us all.

To be a woman is to wonder if your breasts make your shirt too tight for an interview, if you'll be able to walk home from the bar tonight alone, if you'll be heard at the doctor's office, if you'll be given the promotion even though you're pregnant, if your kids will resent you for the time you spent at work, if you're too quiet, too loud, too emotional, too aggressive, too ugly, too pretty, not enough. It is learning to exist and attempting to thrive in a world that was built for you to fail, because no matter what you do someone will notice you are trying to escape the confines of the cage built for you and they WILL have something to say about it. Your freedom makes men uncomfortable.

And yes, things are slowly changing. We can have conversations about gender as a construct, gender as performance, gender as fluid - all valid and complex assertions that deserve to be explored. But there is no erasing the experience of being a woman, which regardless of the anatomy you have, is irrevocably linked to the way you move through the world and are perceived. The treatment you receive (or are denied, if we are speaking of the reproductive health kind), the assumptions made (about your intellect, your desire, your capabilities), the tight rope you must walk that almost always requires a polite smile in the face of ignorance at best and outright sexism at worst.

Maybe to be a woman is to exist as the nexus of all these constraints and contradictions. And any moment of joy in the face of such a thing is both a triumph and act of resistance. Womanhood is war.