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The shooting of Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, believed to be the first environmental defender killed in the US, is the culmination of a dangerous escalation in the criminalization and repression of those who seek to protect natural resources in America, campaigners have warned.  …

Georgia’s response to the protests follows an alarming pattern of environmental and land rights defenders across the US being threatened, arrested and charged with increasingly drastic crimes, including terrorism, for opposing oil and gas pipelines or the destruction of forests or waterways, advocates claim.

“This was meant as a chilling deterrent, to show that the state can kill and jail environmental defenders with impunity. It reflects a trend towards escalation and violence to distract from the real issue of advancing corporate interests over lands,” said Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance.

The current crackdown on environmental and land rights defenders can be traced back to the aftermath of 9/11 and the expansion of the definition of terrorism which sparked a wave of arrests known as the “green scare” targeting so-called eco- terrorists.

This then spurred the subsequent proliferation of state legislation criminalizing – or at least attempting to criminalize – all kinds of civil disobedience including Black Lives Matter protests and opposition to fossil fuel projects like gas pipelines, defined as critical infrastructure, essentially to protect business interests over environmental and Indigenous sovereignty concerns.

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When a comrade gets arrested

If you’re new to actions with an arrest risk and you don’t have experienced protestors with you, there’s stuff you can find online about having a legal team, writing the name of a lawyer on your body, saying NOTHING to the cops except the name of your lawyer, etc. That’s all good advice.

But let me give you a bit of advice that is just as essential as all that:

If one of your comrades gets arrested, and you know they can be held for 6, 9, 12 hours, depending on where you are, you get a group of people together and you wait outside the police station.

You may be tired, you may be stressed, it may be freezing, you may need to take turns, but you take whoever can still physically and mentally bear it and you go to that police station and you wait for your comrade. You can spend the time taking care of each other, drinking hot drinks, doing whatever gets you through, but you wait.

And when your comrade gets out, you make sure they do not walk home alone in the dark thinking about the fucked up experience they just had, you make sure there’s a big fucking crowd of their comrades there to greet them with hugs and hot drinks and a cigarette if they smoke.

And whether the arrested comrade that just got out is happy or sad or pissed off, you take that for what it is and give that space and you support that. And you get them a hot meal and you hang out with them and you offer to let them stay at your place or you stay with them so they don’t have to spend that night alone with their thoughts.

You do this every damn time, regardless of whether you really like that comrade and regardless of how you feel about the thing your comrade got arrested for, regardless of how often they’ve been arrested. Because you never know how shitty their experience is going to be in there this time. 

Trust me. This is absolutely essential. Once you’ve been arrested and have felt the difference between walking home alone or having your friends waiting for you, you’ll understand.

#my partner got arrested a couple months ago for defending me from an assailant - shes trans and the assailant was a cis white man #so of course in the state of idaho theyre going to arrest a trans person whenever they can #i didnt know if she'd make it out of jail given her community activism and it was absolutely one of the worst traumas of both of our lives #and if we had been able to get the kind of support talked about in this post we would have been so much better off #i was working with nothing but horrible call quality of the 5 minutes we has to talk and the police had taken my car and home keys #(they took my keys even though my partner on several occasions asked them to bring them to me before taking her to jail #so i was just stranded in the snow with a kind lady helping me get to the jail so i could get my keys and go home #i so desperately wish we could have found community support like this post talks about - we were both so scared

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Girlies! Remember on feb 1st a green comet will be passing by earth's orbit!!!!!!! Make sure u take a sneak peek at her bc she only comes around every 50000 yrs!!!!!!!!!!!! ☄️

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Something that I first applied to working with children, and have applied in a limited form to working with adults: you don't need to tell someone when they read your instructions wrong. Sometimes it's enough to point out what they did right and then whatever they didn't do? You ask them to do it in more precise words, and you make it sound like it's a new request. Remarkable how fast things get done this way.

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take a chance

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beep beep sometimes when you have been in survival mode for a long time the parts of you dedicated to Wanting Things atrophy and you forget how to envision a future that feels rewarding because you are busy with the business of staying alive, and it can seem like your life must be pointless because you can’t imagine any long term goals. sometimes even when you leave survival mode you can’t remember how to Want Things. that doesn’t mean you need to give up on having a good and fulfilling life, it just means that Wanting Things is a muscle you need to gradually strengthen. the part of you that has dreams and aspirations is still there, it just fell asleep, but if you wiggle it enough it can and will regain feeling. it’s okay to start small

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a little comic about healing.

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God aren’t you tired like the cops killed another Black man in Memphis just trying to go home and now there’s troops in the streets because god forbid we say enough is enough. Last week they killed a protestor in Atlanta trying to protect the forest from being turned into another site where they train cops to kill us. There were so many mass shootings this week that I can’t remember them all. More people have died in mass shootings this year than there have been days of the year, and that line doesn’t even hit me anymore. Texas prosecutors are investigating a teenager for a miscarriage, and the Alabama AG is trying to walk back earlier comments saying they’d use the state’s chemical endangerment law to prosecute people for self-managed medical abortions. 30,000 people were hospitalized this week with a virus the country is determined to pretend is over. Aren’t you tired? The Supreme Court is about to overturn affirmative action and make it easier to do racial gerrymandering and get rid of the Indian Child Welfare Act and make it so businesses can discriminate against gay people. Aren’t you tired of being scared of what the conservatives would do if they thought they could get away with it—the fetal personhood bans and the contraception bans and the criminalizations of trans & queer people and the attacks on the unhoused and all the other monsters under the bed that get realer every day? Aren’t you tired of being scared for your life, if you’re Black or Asian or trans or queer or disabled? Aren’t you just so tired some days?

#not to mention huge mass evictions all over the country #i work in idaho and we're trying to get folks to california so they cant be prosecuted for having trans kids or getting abortions #we live in extraordinary times #but theres no where to live except in the woods in RVs and tents

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really really not enough people in the united states understand that the reason there is a free breakfast and lunch program in US schools is because of the Black Panther Party's Breakfast for Children program. it's so important to know this. you can't be educated about US history or about the relationship between the US government, US poverty, US formal education, and Black resistance movements without knowing this.

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Friendly reminder that the goal of good therapy isn't learning to be "normal." It's to learn how to live with whatever form of "abnormal" you've got.

Any form of therapy with the end goal of making you "normal" is just conversion therapy, and that shit's always harmful and destructive.

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Was reading on wikipedia about how lots of ancient cultures had beliefs and traditions where you had to offer prayers and/or sacrifices if you wanted to cut down a tree because you were basically killing the spirit that lived within the tree and if you did that without good reason bad stuff would happen to you

we should bring that back. if you want to clear cut a forest you have to pray and sacrifice on behalf of every single tree

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*through gritted teeth* you are not a child taking a test with the purpose of getting the highest score, you are an adult trying new things and finding ways to enjoy your life, make mistakes, be a beginner, be mediocre, be where you need to be, be unlikeable, just. be.

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in reference to that last post i reblogged, i should also mention:

PLEASE LOOK OUT FOR ANTISEMITIC PROPAGANDA IN ANTI COP ART/POSTS. PLEASE PLEASE LOOK.

right now, being anti-cop is NECESSARY, but some people use “anti cop” art to actually depict EXTREMELY ANTISEMITIC, DANGEROUS propaganda

look for:

references to “lizard people”

references to “zealot” “world controlling organizations” etc etc

SIX-POINTED STARS (MAGEN DAVID) ON POLICE UNIFORMS OR SIMILAR POSITIONS OF POWER

large, hooked/downward-pointed noses

kippot/yarmulkes on police/other authority figures (this one should be more obvious, but.. you’d be surprised)

references to israel

triple parentheses

iron crosses on “punks”

i totally, 100% understand the temptation to rb all the anti cop stuff you see. it’s a good instinct. but goyim NEED to look out for these dogwhistles. IT IS NEVER INNOCENT. IF YOU SEE THESE THINGS, IT IS NOT TRULY ANTI COP, IT IS ANTISEMITIC. IT IS COMPARING JEWISH PEOPLE TO POLICE.

just make sure the message you’re spreading is a good one. be safe, and keep your community safe (including the jewish ones).