This will only be the start of a post. Things are madly spinning around in my head once again, and I might as well put things down here in order to get a little clarity.

It will become ever more important to resist falling into certain traps. I can see myself reacting to things when perhaps I shouldn't. Especially, there are more useful things to do than send angry tweets. Or think about the angry 'letter home' I feel like sending (but luckily haven't so far).

I found this interesting from "Die Zeit": Telling obvious lies was a tactic employed by the Soviet Union to create cogintive dissonance and eventually wear down the resistance to accepting things as opinion, as possibility, which were evidently false statements. http://www.zeit.de/politik/ausland/2017-01/alternative-facts-donald-trump-sean-spicer-media
When you look at the massive protests, it seems that humanity and good faith will prevail. But this is only the start. I have a feeling we are in this massive culture and propaganda war, and in the meantime really nasty things are going to happen, many away from our sight.

You can't win. If muslims are denied entry to America, something needs to be done about it, you can't simply ignore it. Maybe that is the tactic to lay so many fires that the opposition is constantly in need of reacting to something.

The thing is, in this country, we do not need to react to things all the time. Not even in America. You need to take breaks. Need to turn off the news for a while. Concentrate on creating things.

And now I need to sleep.. tbc.

I know though that it had Trigger warnings. Trigger warnings is something that took me a while to get my head round, but now I actually recognize how many times in my past I've been 'triggered', and that there is something to these warnings. (My mental health problems did not take as drastic shapes as those of these two women, but depressions were bad enough). In any case I'd be happy to drive them round Brexitland in a caravan as they are joking on the podcast.

Then I read Rebecca Solnit's Hope in the dark. And then, as the last book in 2016, Unspeakable things by Laurie Penny. Wow. That was pretty amazing. There is so much in that where I wholeheartedly agree. In fact, things that I had not heard expressed in that manner anywhere previously, but had held in the same belief. In short, reading this book felt like some recognition of my own ways of seeing things, but then actually went further, as she has some experiences I don't have (e.g. having some insight into the porn business, as apparently she shared flats with a porn actor, and she also went to an 'erotics fair' or something like that).

What I really like is that she gives equal room to men and women, the 'lost boys' as much as the 'fucked-up girls'. She says in confrontations of men with feminists, both come from a place of pain (this is what I have understood, might not be her exact words). One of the reviews quoted on the back of the book says she "takes no prisoners". [edit 15/01/17 I did not know this expression and at first took it to mean almost the opposite!] Yet there is compassion and I love that a lot. If there is anything that can help us in these messed up times, it is compassion.

Speaking of mess, I feel really trapped between the desire to read about politics, be informed, perhaps take some kind of political action, and the necessity to actually close myself off from the news instead in order to not spend too much time on them, and also not too become too depressed by their contents. I do not feel I can be an effective political activist at this point, so I think I will limit now how much I expose myself to the news, and also how much I tweet about politics. It might be that the most political I can do is become (even) better (haha) at coding and provide a space for others where they can do the same.

This was written on a little foldout keyboard on my phone, while I was waiting for my son to finish his football training. :) It worked really well. It is not a real turn-of-year post of course, only the start really. I will just have to stretch it out..