Saturday, October 26, 2024
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Confluence

M.J. Hegar: This Woman is Running for Office and You Should Watch Her Ad

Reading Time: < 1 minute When women run for office the reasons they do it are far and wide more personal than political. More women are running for office than ever before. Record numbers of women making the very vulnerable decision to run for office, many without the support of the systems that have elected their career politics opponents.

Most political ads are a bunch of campaign mumbo-jumbo intended to build name recognition. This one is different. This candidate is different. Buckle up, buttercup. Meet MJ Hegar, she’s running for Congress in Texas District 31. It’s personal for this woman on yet another mission.

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Relate
Confluence

The F*ckboy Filtration System – Patented and Tested Method for Weeding Out the Man-children

Reading Time: 3 minutes When I got a bit older, I tested and patented a new system I like to call Fuckboy FiltrationTM. It’s where you ask for what you want when you want it. For example: If I didn’t feel secure, I would let the person I was dating know, and tell him what I needed to feel better. If I wanted a relationship to move forward I would outline my expectations: where I wanted things to go, when I wanted that, and what would happen if those expectations weren’t met. I even sometimes went out of my way to be terrifying, like “Hello, hi, are we dating, is it serious, it puts the lotion on its skin.”

The result? Singlehood. Glorious, powerful, elective singlehood. Also, some (lots of) crying.

The men that were spooked by these conversations faded away. Almost every time I did this I was ghosted within a month. And…I loved it. Obviously, it was frustrating at times, but I knew that I was successfully filtering out people who didn’t want what I wanted, or who just didn’t want to be with me.

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Informed
Confluence

This Is Not Who We Are – Except It Is and It Always Has Been

Reading Time: 3 minutes The unrelenting pressure on the Trump administration to stop the family separations may pay off. More importantly, it may signal that this is not who we want to be anymore. For those families, and especially for those children, it’s an unconscionably high price to pay for us, as a nation, to find a moral compass that won’t allow that kind of human mistreatment moving forward.

However, generations of black and brown people in our country are still paying the price for a reality most of us do not want to remember. Until we own our past, it is unlikely we will ever fully learn how to stop the cycle of history repeating itself.

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Engage
Confluence

Peace on Earth

Reading Time: 4 minutes Spiritual practices are not just for us. Spiritual practices and beliefs are personal, yes. Often we are born into specific belief systems and taught certain practices when we are very young. We then grow into adulthood and come to a place where we adopt those beliefs and practices by choice. We make them our own, or we don’t – we drop them and choose new beliefs and new practices, and our choices are deeply personal.

But as personal as those choices are, (I cannot choose yours and you cannot choose mine), we still do well to understand why we’ve chosen the specific beliefs and practices that we have.

Why?

I can’t answer that question for you. But I do want to ask it, of you, and of myself.

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ElevateThrive
Confluence

Activism begins at home. Literally.

Reading Time: 3 minutes Cleaning can be a magical act.
 
Every spell in history is made up of an intention + action. Many’s the wise woman who turned her floor sweeping into the sweeping away of troubles and troublesome people.
 
Do not discount the potency of house-magic, just because you’ve always seen housework as a chore. As with politics and opinions, perspective is everything.
 
You get to decide what each and every action ‘means’. If you decide that by literally taking out the trash,  you’re metaphorically tossing out everything that feels like crap …. boom! You’ve cast a spell.

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News
Confluence

Breaking: Trump to Sign Executive Order Ending Family Separations at Border

Reading Time: < 1 minute President Donald Trump said he plans to sign an executive action on Wednesday that would end the administration’s policy of separating migrant families crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. This is contrary to his previous position that only Congress could fix the problem, thus functionally an end to extorting Congress for wall funding with the lives of children. 

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Informed
Confluence

Prison, Justice, and Abuse by Power

Reading Time: 5 minutes What came to my mind was a definition I read earlier this week by Ijeoma Oluo in “So You Want to Talk About Race.” She says how we are unable to talk about race in this country. She says one definition is: “Any prejudice against someone because of their race. Or any prejudice against someone because of their race, when those views are reinforced by systems of power” (pg. 26.) This second definition is how I define racism and how I invite you to define it as well.

My friend was a black immigrant and the judge represented the system of power. The disdain the judge had for this person was palpable in the courtroom. You may say that the judge’s disdain had nothing to do with race. Maybe not. But I know that the punishment did not fit the crime.

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