I am very conflicted about posting about anything besides the border crisis. Our collective mental agitation is necessary to mobilize people to take part in the activism and resistance to end a humanitarian crisis like this. We're supposed to feel internally agitated (as long as it translates into action and isn't just hand-wringing, and I take the point made earlier that social media can be a legitimate form of action.)

On the other hand, we're still going to work, and cooking dinners, and going to exercise classes, and sitting at traffic lights, and part of my daily routine is to generate a post a day here, and there's no need for another prompt necessarily if I don't have a new, distinct angle and the old post hasn't drifted that far away. (My solution is evidently to provide you with my loose stream-of-consciousness in lieu of a well-constructed thought.)

Furthermore, all other sources of news seem to have shriveled up in light of this current horror - no one's talking about preexisting conditions and health insurance, no one's talking about oddball sociological studies or Graeber's latest plea for help - the only other topic seems to be the continual disintegration of the administration. Cohen flipping, Trump hugging the motherfucking flag at the end of his speech, midterms and political fallout of the immigration crisis, etc.

I remember during Hurricane Katrina, I described it as "a slow-motion 9/11", by which I meant that I didn't have many reference points for a national-level trauma of that scale. The major difference (as far as my real-time experience) was that destruction on 9/11 was relatively quick and then over, and clean-up and response began very soon, whereas with Katrina it felt like a week had passed and it was still escalating. This feels like the third national trauma in this series.

The hugging-the-flag thing is just so dumb, what with that shit-eating grin.

I think thread below is probably still where most of the action will be today, but here, maybe the Space Force? Trump is actually picturing a Five Man Squad of Heros, you know. He gets to deliver their mission to them at the beginning of each episode, but doesn't actually have to deal with a demanding filming schedule.

My facebook feed is literally 100% posts connected to ICE and family separation. It certainly is something that calls for immediate action from citizens far more than it calls for conversation and blog and facebook threads. I think all online conversation right now is for the benefit of the talkers - we're emotionally flooded by this whole thing and people who cope by sharing things online are doing so.

As far as conversation goes - given that it's largely for our own benefit - I don't know if it's better to have an action thread (share what you're doing to help!) or if that gets braggy and obnoxious. Or if it's better to have a thread just to compartmentalize discussion for the sake of the fact that we're all still functioning adults living in mainstream America, physically far away from these camps. (Uh, besides me, I suppose. There must be someone closer than me to a camp?)

If this is to be an action thread, I'll save mine for the comments, because it feels too virtue-signaling obnoxious to write it on the front page.

I know that building more public housing is not really part of the conversation right now about the housing crisis, but is it a priori a bad idea? What needs to be in place to be good public housing - many different price points, perhaps? Is there any reason you couldn't have mixed income public housing, where the top tier is market-priced? That plus being well-maintained over time - is that sufficient to make it a good idea?