hydrateddesertflower

Prompt 1: What does justice-centered professional success look like to you personally? It looks like thriving not surviving. It looks like being part of a community that is anticapitalist and all my needs are met so I can keep doing this work sustainably without burn out. Success is recognition for my work, appreciation for my insights, collaborations that result in improved outcomes for the community. Progress on our goals. Deeper relationships with the people who help make it happen. Until we are free from the facisim we are all part of the struggle. I want to not be in this and only experience struggle and suffering. I am not interested in self-flagellation or whatever the fuck people think is needed to be a freedom fighter. I want to thrive. I want to be fed and nurtured and cared for. I want to do collective actions, bring hope and inspiration, have wonderful discussions and beautiful experiences. I want to enjoy live and see the magic and whimsy in it everyday. I want to spend time with my lovers, my family, my friends. I want to see others success, others not struggle, I want to see others thrive. I want to help them get there too if I can. I want to make the lives of the people around me easier and have them take care of me for it. because it takes a village to raise a child and a village to keep them alive when they grow up. The goal is not self sufficiency, it is communal sufficiency. We are not going to get there by continuing to reproduce the systems of supremacy culture. We are not going to get there by talking about it and still clocking into our wage-theft jobs everyday. We find ways to replace the systems with our own...but people wont build them until they are broken. Until food stamps were threatened, until they are homeless too, until thousands can't get work so the capitalist class can lower wages even further so the desperate will keep working...which is almost everyone right now. Here in the imperial core we are at a worse poverty that both the Great Depression and the French Revolution and we are still clocking into work. They laid off 300K black women to try to erase DEIA and claim only 4% unemployment rate. They shut down the CDC wastewater tracking of COVID while we are still in an ongoing Pandemic during MECFS awareness month, they are taring down placards the mention slavery or any Black or Native History across the country at schools, memorials, national parks. There are 500 and growing people in hunger strikes at the concentrations camps run by the Imperial Concentration Enforcement thugs that were bribed off the street to enact violence on anyone they want, senators, protestors, the press. They are proposing and passing anti-trans laws as fast as they can prompt them wasting gallons of water using Generative LLMs while in a water shortage crisis. They build datacenters and concentration camps as fast as they can while sending millions of our tax dollars to IsNOTreal to continue the ongoing genocide here while pushing for the ongoing genocide here. They enjoy the benefits of public office while doing insider trading their way into enriching themselves while making sure the next generations can't read or be taught critical thinking skills or media literacy. They put violent officers of the state in schools to harass and harm children in schools. They cut healthcare benefits and poison our food and we still keep clocking into to work two, three, jobs with three side hassles and then wonder what are we doing wrong to be so tired, so isolated, so alone in this struggle. We gave up on justice and are trying to not drown, panicky reaching for air. In survival mode your brain's "thinking" or "logic" centers are not on. You are moving on instinct, you are moving in adrenaline and hoping that whatever your body decides will bring you to safety. But when you have been raised your whole life in that state, normal is constant drowning and we have been conditioned by supremacy culture to be adverse to discomfort, and life is so hard already, why would I want to make it even more uncomfortable by doing something that is against the norm. Justice centered work looks like collaborating with people who understand this reality and are doing and building and dreaming to show others the bridge to the liberated future.