Governor Brown's answer to close to 100 days of protests against police violence is to pressure the DA to prosecute protestors while giving $ to cops and inviting feds here.

Meanwhile, DHS and DOJ are teaming up to look into "violent leftist uprisings."

63 days to the election.

I'm not an alarmist, and I don't like fesr-mongering. This isn't a klaxon so much as it is a very, very sobering snapshot of an intersection of social divisions, state violence, and exigent top-down threats to progressive peoples carried out in plain sight.

We are in crisis.

Wealth gaps at an all-time high. A doddering, autocratic Muppet in office
— with a murderous minority cult following, surrounded by cunning, antihuman yes-men— openly disassembles our already deeply flawed democratic Republic. His fans from other towns attack us in our streets.

But it's not all doom and gloom. We are witnessing a surge of social awakening *like the world has never seen* because in the Information Age, we're all connected.

We're growing closer on a shrinking world, and growth always hurts. All this pain is us growing up, together.

My mom said "growing up is hard —that's why so many people don't do it."

It is hard, but we're doing it, y'all. We choose to do it or we freeze in time and we hold it all back.

We demand change and justice, and it's working. The backlash we see betrays our oppressors' fear.

So let's keep coming together, learning about each other, how to respect each other, heal the damages that have been done, hold truth to power, all that shit. Do better, be better —literally because we can; absolutely because we should.

I'm a lot more angry than scared.

Yeah, the election matters, but it's not what's gonna fix things. We don't just need real representation, extensive systemic overhauls and actual leadership. We need to grow the fuck up.

We have everything we need to take care of everyone, so let's shed our shadows and do it.

Remember: reaching down to help up a person on whose back you've been standing —whether you knew it or not— isn't doing them a favor. It's humankind's mandate.