I gotta keep this short and sweet. I’m working on something more complicated for tomorrow, so tonight you get this piece of NAM puffery.
I got an IM tonight asking me what keeps me going in this game. Well, I don’t know. Not really Many times I’ve felt like walking away, but don’t. I have an overactive need to be dutiful and responsible to the movement (but not myself particularly, as my unchosen lifestyle proves). After Oregon, I thought we would win it all. Sometimes I’m not sure if we will win. Sometimes I’m convinced we won’t at all. There is so much about this fight, not about us or adoption, that’s foisted on us by outsiders and outliers, to fit their own social and political agendas. It’s hard enough fighting the adoptacrats and their fellow traveler droids in the system without fighting the abortacrats, christacrats, entitlecrats, and Republicrats who know nothing about adoption, and Class Bastard, and don’t want to know, cuz, let’s face it–our fight is all about them and their weird, special interests. We just get in the way.
There are probably several reasons I keep it up:
- I was dropped on my head as a baby (I dunno, but I do remember a dresser falling on me when I stepped in the bottom drawer of what used to be called “bureau drawers “(or as I thought, “beer drawers”) my mom was cleaning out. It tipped over when she turned her back for a minute to answer the phone. Kids do the darndest things!
- I have nothing else to do.
- I’m a sadist. I like causing the enemy pain.
- I’m a masochist. I like getting beat up by wingnuts.
- I hate everyone, and adoptee rights give me a chance to exhibit my total disregard for the feelings of others. I enjoy annoying people, especially do-gooders, Grundys, and entitled whiners.
- I’m a bully. (see above)
- I love to fight
- I think Adoptee Twitter is fun. Undecided about Adoptee TIkTok.
All of those are partially true, but the real reason is adoptee rights is just something I believe in. Even though I got my own records 41 years ago, and am still building on that information, I never forgot what it was like to Major-Tom- it out there our big black adoption blackhole. There are so many other adoption problems to explore and work on.
Adoptee rights also intersect with so many of my other rights gripes I’ve worked on in the past: abortion rights, women’s rights, prisoners’ rights, racism, industrial unionism, syndicalism–and basically just the right to own yourself and live without state oversight. Or authority in general. BTW my bdad, Jack Reese, hated authority, even if he was the commander of his local American Legions and VFW posts. He frequently referred to George W Bush as “that SOB.” Trump would have been “that motherfucker.” My focus in graduate school was organized crime–a good introduction to adoption I am a huge fan of Kropotkin, Emma Goldman, Nestor Makhno, and Sam Dolgoff whom I was lucky to know back when I hung out with Oberlin Wobblies. Adoptees sit at the bottom of the Adoption Pyramid. We hold up the system. When we pull out, the ratfuck system will crumble.
On a more personal note, I feel I have nothing left to lose The running theme-song of my life for many years has been It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding.) As luck would have it, it showed up on one of my playlists earlier today and smacked me in the face again. I think it’s difficult to embrace that you have nothing left to lose (especially when you do,) but it sets you free. The only things I have left to lose are my mind and my cat.
You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks they really found you
A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit
To satisfy, insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not forget
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to
Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to
Actually, we–you and I and all of us–stick with this depressing, unrewarding gig is a good question that needs more serious thought, which I’m not up to tonight. We’re wronged and we are re-righting ourselves.
we
Day 16 of 30–
14 to go
