This post is not about knitting or food.  If you read this blog for either, and don’t care about anything else, the following may or may not be of interest.

It turned out to be good on me that I missed WisCon this year, for one because of the plague that went around, and for two because of all the Hot Mess that’s happened because someone decided to play spoiler and ruin a good (not quite perfectly safe, but a better place than the world usually is) space.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about, my Smith bud Sheana has a decent synopsis and links from an outside perspective.

I should say this: I am a middle-class white able feminist of average weight, and my gender identity isn’t particularly interesting.   But I know and love people who aren’t, and I respect their causes both individually and as they dovetail to my own.  And I have been ragged on for various identity issues enough in my time that I do not want to stand around while more good people, talented artists/writers, and their kids no less, get very nastily dumped on so that someone out there on the intarweb can have momentary lulz.

So generally speaking, to RM and those who perpetuated this, I hope you get the karma you deserve.  There’s not really anything else I can say that’d penetrate that armor of loathing you all have on, so y’know, whatever.  I trust that in time, the universe straightens things back out to neutral.

What this has made me think about is something that has been bugging me throughout the last few months, in terms of politics and feminism and fandom–from the Wright fiasco to the OSBP to the Seal Press issue.   When crap rains down on us or our friends, should we fight back, or should we not say anything because we’re better people than they are?  The latter is how a lot of liberals operate most of the time.  If we ignore it, the problems will go away because we’ll have shown that we have the moral high ground.

Unfortunately, only using the moral high ground only works for the Doctor and then only some of the time.  And I’ve fallen into this trap before myself.  The answer isn’t violence, of course, and the answer isn’t anger, exactly.  We’ve got to fuel that anger into productivity.  Gandhi led his people on a march not for freedom, per se, but for something the people wanted and needed that they weren’t getting, and in doing that, in saying that things were wrong but not acting in returned pain, they ended up getting salt.  And at the same time they ended up with a step towards a greater goal of equity.

Obviously none of this works out perfectly, and we have plenty of problems with phobias within our own community of feminist fandom.  But the answer isn’t to sit on our hands when something like this happens.  We should rise to the occasion, both as it illuminates our internal issues and outwardly in defense.

The question now is where to begin, and how.  But don’t just let it slide.  Don’t say it’s not your issue.  It’s everyone’s.