Phosphor [&]

also fyi I DO plan to be shamelessly obnoxious at my fellow USAmericans about voting this year. I will tag all of my voteposts with #current events and #uspol, but that is the only concession I will make

I'm pretty sure most people following me share my stance wrt the importance of getting incremental change where we can and preventing things from getting worse where we can't, so I'll spare y'all the lecture about how every eligible USAmerican must vote this election. Instead, here's some resources if you're not sure where to begin:

• Register to vote! https://vote.gov/
  • (the above site also contains election dates, things you need to bring on Election Day, and other important information)
• If you're disabled, go to school out-of-state, or otherwise doubt your ability to vote in person on Election Day, it's possible that you can put in an absentee ballot or vote by mail. There's some details about that here: https://www.usa.gov/absentee-voting
• Living outside the US right now? You can still vote!! https://www.votefromabroad.org/
• If you want to see who's on your ballot (please vote for your legislature and local offices as well!), Ballotpedia has a neat tool: https://ballotpedia.org/Sample_Ballot_Lookup
• Finally, if you want to get involved beyond the vote (by volunteering, donating, and so on), look for local opportunities! I've also heard good things about https://sisterdistrict.com (which has local chapters), though I don't have any personal experience with them myself.

Please feel free to recommend other resources!

I very much recommend reading Akwaeke Emezi's On Worldbending in its whole, but here's an excerpt if you can't:

This is the last story. It is a short one.

I used to be consumed by despair. The world was always too loud with its suffering, seemingly pointless, and I was always haunted by the knowledge that no amount of beauty or joy could justify a fraction of the horrors inflicted on the most vulnerable of us in the name of greed and capitalism and white supremacy. I tried to die multiple times so I could escape this hell I had been born into, this insane dystopia. I failed every time, until it became clear that I would always fail.

My assignment from God is to live. To live. Amidst the death and the repugnant atrocities, without dying or trying to die, with the pain and the betrayal of my own flesh, with the joy of love and the grief of loss. To live and to witness and to do my job, because this is what it means to have a human experience in this world—the sky slashing pink sunsets over rubble, laughter continuing, beauty refusing to stop for endless deaths, the world marching on. I know it is grotesque, but it is also just true.

I have learned that despair and apathy are also stories, ones that impair our ability to worldbend, ones that serve our oppressors, not us. So we must become hunters, tracking down other stories to counter these insidious ones. We who want a better world, we learn to start at home, in our families and relationships and communities. The revolution begins in spirit. None of us can save anyone alone. We simply do our best, within our capacity so we can stay alive to do our best another day. We try and we live, we witness and we grieve, and together, we bend another world into being, slowly but with bloodstained certainty. It is coming, just over the hill.

I can hear it breathing.