#I live in GA and am unable to avoid Christianity
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i’ll walk through hell with you
chapter 2: i guess truth is what you believe in
read chapter one
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Amy and Leah visit family, a holiday is celebrated, and illness takes over the Santiago-Peralta household.
december
If there is one thing Amy is certain of, stuck in the car with 97 miles to go and an overtired toddler in the back seat, it is that something must be seriously wrong with her.
No one in their right mind says yes to a family weekend upstate with all siblings and their families nine days before Christmas. Not when it’s a three-hour drive. Not while they’re already left alone to care for their child for the weekend due to a time-sensitive and crucial opportunity coming up in a case Jake has worked for two months. Not when previously mentioned child is recovering from a cold and is ten times more cranky and attention-craving than normal.
Except - apparently - Amy.
She doesn't know what the fuck she was thinking.
She knows some thought went into her plan, such as the idea to drive late at night so Leah could sleep in the car. She simply wishes it could have worked, because right now the toddler is singing Wheels On The Bus for the seventeenth time in forty minutes and Amy feels like her head is going to explode. It's a quarter to ten, over two hours past the kid’s bedtime, and so far she refuses to fall asleep. She's wide awake in her seat, chatting and laughing and singing like there’s no tomorrow. If Amy had as much as a spare drop of energy left -even better, if there had been another parent in the car to focus on entertaining their child - the whole thing would have been adorable, but tonight it’s exhausting above anything else.
“Maaa-maaa?” Leah shouts the word from the back seat, wildly kicking her legs against the back cushioning, and Amy has to take a deep breath before she can reply in a calm tone.
“Yes, baby?”
“Are we there?”
“Not yet, Lee.”
Amy can see the reflection of Leah scrunching her forehead in the baby car mirror. “Why?”
“Because we still have a little way left to drive. We’ll be there soon, I promise.”
“Soon?” Leah shines up, kicking her legs again. “When is soon?”
“It will go faster if you close your eyes for a while,” She tries, using one of the oldest parenting tricks in the book. “I promise.”
“Not tired!” Her daughter responds in her cheeriest voice, and Amy gives herself a mental pat on the back for stifling a groan.
They repeat this exchange about ten times or so before Leah tires of it and returns to her singing. At that point, Amy’s counting it as a win. As much as she loves being this kid’s mom, there are indubitably times - and late-night drives with an overtired two-year-old in the back seat - when she loves it less.
Then Leah falls asleep for the last ten miles of the drive and clutches her arms and legs around Amy like a koala to a tree when she’s lifted out of her car seat and carried to bed, and it’s easier than ever to love being a mom.
-
There’s never an uneventful day with all of the Santiagos in the same house, and it’s not any more relaxing with the extra presence of six partners, twelve grandchildren, and one dog. From the moment Amy and Leah make their way down to the kitchen for breakfast, and the toddler finds out there might be a cookie baking session with grandma happening today, the day is in full swing. Leah joins her in facetiming Jake for a few minutes to say good morning, but after that, Amy barely sees her daughter for more than a split second in several hours.
The chaos is a welcome distraction. She plays Cards Against Humanity with Luis’s teenage daughters and Julian until Simon starts begging them to help him make a YouTube video, and she teaches five-year-old Noah how to draw the perfect portrait of a horse. She reads a story to three-year-old Maisie, and she laughs heartily at the sight of Leah chasing Oscar the Bichon Frise around while yelling Kitty Cat!. For a few, wondrous hours, Amy manages to live in blissful oblivion over the two starkly negative pregnancy tests she unceremoniously shoved in the bathroom trash can before leaving yesterday, and it feels like heaven.
It feels like heaven up until she joins the crew of brothers and partners currently taking up space in the kitchen. Her brother Isaac is parked in the middle of the kitchen couch, feeding the youngest Santiago member, just-turned one-month-old Milo, with a bottle; around him Camila, Luis, Tony and his wife Clara all fawn over and admire every aspect of the newborn’s appearance. Christian, Julian and Julian’s husband Lucas are at the other end of the kitchen cuddling with and doting on the exhausted dog, and Amy silently curses her allergies for making her unable to join them. Simon just brought out his camera in the living room and she refuses to risk another unwilling YouTube appearance, so her only option is to sit down with the team of awestruck baby-admirers.
“You forget how tiny they are,” Luis says, watching the infant with a nostalgic glance in his eyes. “I’ve had five, and you never get used to it.”
“You don’t,” Camila confirms with a small laugh, reaching out to stroke the baby’s closed fist with her thumb and index finger. “Not even I do. I’m shocked every time!”
“I thought I remembered everything from when Maisie was born.” Isaac grins, giving the empty baby bottle to Camila and carefully lifting the infant upright against his shoulder. “But then he comes out, and I think he must be several pounds lighter because surely Maisie was never this tiny, but he was bigger!” He shakes his head. “It’s insane.”
“He’s so cute,” Tony chimes in. “Do you get to sleep anything? I’m nervous about that.” His left hand is resting next to Clara’s on top of her visible baby bump. Amy lets out an audible snort upon hearing about her brother’s main cause for worry, but Isaac just grins.
“You get used to it. It’ll probably be worse for Clara anyway.”
“Great.” Clara grimaces, turning to Amy. “I can’t even sleep now! I either have a baby sleeping on top of my bladder or kicking me in the ribs for the whole night.”
“I remember.” She smiles, thinking back to the few times late in her pregnancy she’d made Jake sleep on the couch only because she couldn’t stand listening to his snoring on top of it all. “It sucks, and then everyone keeps telling you to sleep while you still can and you’re trying not to punch them.”
“Exactly!” Her sister-in-law laughs, tucking a strand of red-blonde hair behind her ear. “At least everyone says it’s worth it.”
“If it wasn’t, I wouldn’t have done it so many times,” says Camila, and Clara looks relieved. “Oh, Amy, you need to hold Milo for a little while! He’s been in everyone’s arms except for yours today. Isaac, send him to Amy.”
“Oh.” She squirms in her seat, a nervous feeling in the pit of her stomach. “It’s okay. I was just going to look for Leah anyway -”
“Leah’s upstairs doing puzzles with Sarah and Samuel,” Isaac explains, referring to David’s two-year-old twins. “She’s fine. You can hold him, Ames.”
“I think I’m good… okay, no choice, I see.” Her younger brother’s already holding out the infant to her, and before she can adjust to the thought, there’s a tiny, yawning baby in her arms.
It’s achingly familiar, yet it feels like it’s been forever.
At first, it’s like every muscle fiber in her body tenses with the sudden awareness that there's a fragile, helpless human in her arms and the weight of terrifying responsibility resting with her for a moment. It's been two years since Amy last held a newborn, and she certainly forgot how breakable they feel when they haven't learned to support their own head. Then Milo lets out a content sigh, his mouth twitching like he's smiling at her, and although she knows he's too small and it's likely just gas, the brief facial expression makes her feel chosen.
She's missed this, she realizes. Noting the classic Santiago baby appearance traits, the head of dark hair and the little button nose, she thinks of countless hours spent holding her own clingy newborn two years ago, and bites her lip when she remembers that she still has no idea when she’ll get to do it again. Milo’s adorable, and Amy's secretly wishing he could stay in her arms forever or she could steal him and take him home with her, but he's also a painful reminder of what she wants most and doesn't have yet.
“He likes you,” Isaac comments, nodding towards the infant. “You and Jake haven’t thought of having another one?”
She freezes at the sound of his question, instantly clueless about what constitutes a good reply. She could tell him the truth, of course, and probably receive a flood of well-meaning advice about the best ways to conceive, but doing so would lead to expectations. Santiagos aren’t known for struggling to have kids, and she’s terrified of handling a hoard of family members subtly trying to figure out whether or not she's pregnant every time they see her. It's enough pressure coming from herself. She doesn't need people adding to it - least of all her family.
“Oh,” she says instead, avoiding eye contact by playing with one of Milo’s fists. “Well, we’re not sure yet.”
“Two years is the best age span between siblings,” Luis chimes in. “We always tried to aim for two years and our kids are super close.”
“Yes, yes, two years is perfect,” Camila agrees, nodding eagerly. “The adjustment is much more difficult when they’ve turned three, or four, and suddenly they’re not the youngest anymore… Sometimes I think Tony never got over his grudges against Simon!”
“I’m telling you, mom, that’s not it, we have a grudge because four years ago he made me do that awful cinnamon challenge that almost gave me an asthma attack and filmed it -”
“Two years is great,” Christian interrupts his younger brother’s story without remorse. “We went for two years between Isabel and Noah and it was perfect. You do want to have more than one kid, right?”
Amy has never wished harder for a baby in her arms to start crying.
She needs to get away, out of the situation where she has to hear and answer these sudden intrusive questions, but Milo shows no signs of waking. She’s stuck with a panicky, claustrophobic sensation in her chest and a forced smile on her lips.
“We do,” she replies to Christian’s question, weighing every word carefully. “We’re just not sure when.”
“No point in waiting,” says Isaac, looking at the baby in Amy’s arms. “I wish we’d had Milo earlier!”
There must be a lack of air in the room, or her allergy medicines have stopped working and are making her react to the dog, because she can’t shake the feeling she’s suffocating. She's feeling trapped even in the spacious kitchen, and although she knows everyone has their eyes fixed on Milo, she can't shake the feeling it's her they're staring at.
She wonders if they're seeing right through her; if they somehow know about negative pregnancy tests of yesterday, or if they can sense her desperation and frustration in the fake smile plastered on her face.
“I suppose you never know,” she answers somehow, heart pounding too quickly. “I, uh… have to go to the bathroom. Do you want to hold him for a little while, Clara?”
Amy senses eyes on her as she sneaks out the kitchen, hurries through the hallway and grabs her coat before heading out and sitting down on the porch, but she can't bring herself to care. She has to fill her lungs with fresh air and get away from well-meaning but prying questions, or she’s going to have a full-on breakdown.
There’s a layer of snow on the ground, too thin for any children or adults to be playing in but enough to give a sense of hope for a white Christmas. She scrapes her fingers through the minuscule ice crystals gathered on the wooden decking, drawing an uneven heart with her index finger and following it with another.
You do want to have more than one kid, right?
She draws a third, smaller heart below the two bigger ones.
You and Jake haven’t thought of having another one anytime soon?
She draws a fourth tiny heart next to the third one.
No point in waiting.
She hides her fist in the sleeve of her winter coat, rubbing it over her drawings and turning them into nothingness. She curses the fact that Jake’s working, that he and Rosa are following up some highly important leads today and their mission would likely be sabotaged if she called and interrupted her husband now, and she curses the fact that Leah’s having the time of her life playing with her cousins and would probably scream in protest if Amy tried to steal her for cuddles.
It’s not too cold outside with her warm coat keeping her comfortable, but she’s still shivering, so she wraps her arms around herself and tries to blink away the tears taking form in her eyes.
She’s aware she’s being ridiculous. Having a baby takes more than a couple months of trying in many, many cases - the majority of them, even. She’s far from unique, yet a sneaking suspicion and vexing anxiety are lingering with her.
No point in waiting.
She puts one hand on her chest and one hand over her stomach, trying to focus on the fresh air flowing in through her nose and out through her mouth, filling and leaving her for each inhale and exhale.
“Just relax,” she whispers to herself, pretending it's Jake's voice saying the words, his unwavering belief that it will all be fine she's listening to.
“Are you sure you’re still my sister? Have you had some kind of personality change?”
“Huh?” Amy almost jumps at the sound of Julian’s voice, bringing her out of her focused breathing and forcing her to look up.
“You’re willingly outside in the cold weather,” he declares, slumping down next to her. “Even with a coat on, that's impressive for you.” She notes that he's only wearing a hoodie himself and seems unbothered by the temperature.
“I needed fresh air.”
“Because of Oscar? I swear his breed is supposed to be allergy-friendly, we researched that stuff in depth. Maybe your allergies are just undefeatable?”
“No, it’s fine as long as I don't pet him.” Amy places a hand on her brother's shoulder, squeezing it. “Oscar’s great. Leah's in love with him.”
“Isn't he amazing?” Julian's grin is comically wide, his eyes sparkling with undiluted pride. “He can sit, and roll, and catch, and play dead if he gets enough candy! Parenthood is incredible. I’m so glad our kids get along.” He doesn't entirely sound like he’s joking, and Amy can't help but laugh at his excitement. “So if it wasn't Oscar, why did you leave?”
“Were you listening to the conversation?”
“Eh, bits and pieces. How so?”
She sighs. “They - mom, and Isaac and Christian, mostly - interrogated me about whether we’re planning to have another baby anytime soon.”
“And you’re not?”
“We are! We’re actively trying for it.”
“Oh! Cool,” Julian nods, scratching the stubble on his chin. “I can get behind that. I wouldn't have anything against reproducing with those Peralta genes either if I could.” Amy elbows her brother in the side at that, probably way harder than necessary, and it makes him gasp in offense. “Hey! It’s just objective facts that he's attractive!”
“I’m telling Lucas you said that.”
“Lucas agrees. Either way - if you actually are trying, what's with the tears and the sudden storming out?”
“I didn't storm out,” she protests, and he gives her a meaning look of judgment as if to say yes, you did. “And it's nothing.”
Julian snorts. “Sure it is.”
“It's not a big deal.”
“Mm-hmm.”
“It's just making me a little stressed is all.”
“A little.”
“Okay, okay, fine.” Amy groans, placing her head in both hands and quickly running her fingers through her hair. There's a knot in the back of it, and she busies herself trying to pull it apart as she speaks. “We are trying. It's just not going very well yet, I guess. It’s making me nervous, and it's not something I want to tell everyone in our family about, because, well… we’re not exactly known for struggling with that.”
Julian is silent, and there’s a moment where Amy wonders if she’s managed the impossible. For all their countless petty fights and differences, Julian has always had a reply to offer her. Sometimes he’s supportive, sometimes questioning, and sometimes he’s all over judging her decisions, but he never ignores her worries when she chooses to confide in him. It throws her off to see him take so long to answer her now, and she watches him twist the white gold wedding ring on his finger absentmindedly while he grimaces.
“No,” he says right as she starts to consider tapping him on the shoulder to make sure he’s conscious. “I guess we’re not known for struggling with anything. Has this… been a problem for a long time?”
“A couple of months.”
“...Is that a long time? I’m not great with this heterosexual business. I’m much better with waiting times for adopting a dog.”
The corner of her mouth twitches. “It’s not that long. But it’s longer when you don’t have a lot of time to begin with.” Julian looks about as perplexed as if she’d been trying to explain the intricate details of quantum physics to him, and she clarifies. “Fertility decreases as you age.”
“Right. Yeah.”
“I’m thirty-nine. Maybe I shouldn't panic yet, but in a year, or two…” Amy shakes her head. “It gets really low. Higher chances of miscarrying. Chromosome variations. Premature birth. You name it. Basically, the sooner I get pregnant now, the better and safer it is for everyone.”
“I see.”
“So there's some time pressure,” she explains further, connecting her hands inside the coat sleeves to eliminate the cold that's started to seep in. “And it’s making me terrified something's wrong with me already. That it's not going to work. That we’ll never be able to have a second kid. I know that's maybe not the end of the world, but… I really, really want it, and I’d be heartbroken if it didn’t happen.”
A pair of stubborn, humiliating teardrops make their way down her cheeks at the thought, and she untangles her hands to quickly wipe them away.
“I’m sure it'll work out, Ames.” Julian's smile is partly sympathetic and partly insecure when he speaks, like this subject is miles out of his comfort zone but he's trying his best anyway. “As you said, two months is nothing, right? Mom was like, 42 when she had Simon. Surely if anyone's got the genes for this, it’s our family.”
“Yeah. It's never a guarantee, though, and I can’t handle their questions. Two years is the best time between siblings,” she imitates in an exaggerated high-pitched tone, and Julian laughs heartily. “As if I wasn’t already pressuring myself about the same thing. But I can't tell them that, because then they’d start asking.”
“Mm, our family does lack all understanding of what privacy is sometimes.” Julian grins. “There are several options even for gay men! Surrogates! Adoption! I read this article in a magazine where a pair co-parented with lesbians!” His shrill imitation tone is awful and hilarious at the same time, making Amy snicker. “I think she was mad at me for weeks after I told her we were happy with a dog. She means well, but it just becomes a lot.”
“Doesn’t get easier when it’s something you already want, either.”
“You’ll be fine.”
“Maybe. I hope so.”
“If not, I’m pro-dogs. They’re pretty much like children, except you don’t have to create a college fund for them. A win-win situation if it weren’t for the fact that owning a dog could probably kill you. But other than that!” Julian stretches his arms over his head, looking mighty proud of himself. “Solid.”
“I’m already busy trying to talk Jake out of buying a cat,” says Amy, massaging her temples at the thought. “But he’s managed to get Leah obsessed with them, so I think I’m losing.”
“That’s why she’s calling Oscar a cat! Wow. Jake’s a genius.”
“Well, that and she’s two. And please don’t ever tell him that, because his ego would literally explode.”
Amy can feel her face going numb from the cold outside, a sudden gust of wind coming at them and making her eyes tear for a new reason. The fact that she’s lost track of time hits her, awakening an uneasiness and a sudden need to get inside and check up on how her daughter’s doing, so she gives Julian a quick, rare hug, and is surprised when he squeezes her back for a long time.
“Thanks for coming out,” she mumbles, and he nods.
“Of course. I just don’t like seeing you cry.”
“Aww, that’s kind of sweet.”
“You look so weird when you do,” he says with a smirk, and she rolls her eyes at the mock insult. “No one should have to see that.”
“Fuck off, Jules.”
“Yep. Now let’s go make sure our kids are still alive and haven’t eaten any couches. Is that a thing with human children too?”
~
january
It’s a good Christmas.
It’s a Christmas where Amy can allow herself some time to relax and unwind, put her worries aside and focus on her family during the ten days both her and Jake manage to garner off work. It’s a long-awaited and dearly welcomed break from early daycare drop-offs, ten-minute-dinners, and infinite planning to make sure nothing is forgotten.
Instead there is time for slow wakeups, snuggling with Leah when she crawls into their bed in the early hours of the morning and giving in to her request of watching iPad in their bed only so they can keep their eyes closed for a little while longer. There's time for late-night conversations over a glass of wine that don't feel rushed because at least they don't have somewhere to be tomorrow, and there's time to properly see friends outside of work for the first time in what feels like forever. They go to dinner at Terry’s house, watch Rosa enjoy the indoor trampoline park even more than Leah does, and they gratefully accept Charles’ offer to babysit their daughter for a night. Amy figures the man has a specific motive in mind, but then Jake suggests they spend the night at a hotel and Leah gets ecstatic at the mention of watching Disney movies with her uncle Charles and Nikolaj, so she ends up saying yes. She’s only human, after all, and she’s not going to neglect the rare and precious chance of a sleep-in.
(The date also times mysteriously well with when she should be ovulating.)
(She does not want to ask.)
Even the yearly Christmas dinner with the Santiagos ends up being survivable. Although there are kids crying, odd snarky comments between Tony and Simon, and Leah outright refuses to wear anything but her sequined dinosaur shirt and glittery tights to the event, things proceed smoothly and Amy’s stress levels remain on the healthier part of the scale. She watches Jake hold and make funny faces at Milo and can feel her mom giving them meaning looks from across the room, but she breathes through it and silently thanks the Universe when Leah chooses that exact moment to climb onto Amy’s lap and ask if they can read one of her new books. Sure, part of her wishes she could be gifting her husband a crafted announcement with a baby onesie and a positive pregnancy test much like the ones she’s pinned on Pinterest, but the tender way he hugs her thank you after he opens his gift and sees the photo book filled with pictures with him and Leah, is more than enough to ease her sorrow. He gifts her a gold necklace with the letters J and L in separate miniature hearts, and when he tells her it’s so she can always be keeping them next to her own heart, she tears up and kisses him so long and ardently that he looks a little dazed, blinking with surprise when they part.
It’s a good New Year’s Eve, too. They spend the first part of the evening at the Holt-Cozner New Year’s Party, listening to their daughter proudly tell every guest she’s going to stay up until midnight, and then they try not to laugh when she passes out the moment she’s in her car seat at half-past nine. Jake and Amy end their year in pajamas on the couch, toasting in champagne just for the sake of it and going right to bed afterward.
Next year we’ll have another baby, she thinks to herself before falling asleep about fifteen minutes into the new year, a new sense of shimmering optimism lingering with her. It has to have worked by then.
January is hell. Everyone knows it, specifically, everyone who’s had children at daycare, because January means no one is healthy and neither Jake nor Amy manage a full week at work without taking time off to care for a sick child or themselves. Amy prays they’ll make it through without any cases of stomach flu, but such seems to have been too much to ask, because she’s woken up by devastating crying from Leah’s room on the one night Jake’s doing a night shift and she knows before the two-year-old’s even started retching.
She doesn’t get any sleep that night.
She doesn’t get any sleep the next night either, because when Leah stops throwing up and Amy feels like she can breathe again when the child keeps some applesauce down and asks if she can watch Doc McStuffins, it only takes three hours before Jake starts complaining about feeling sick.
January must surely be some twisted sort of a joke, she thinks, and disinfects her hands an extra time before she goes to remind her very miserable husband that he’s not actually dying.
It’s only natural, amid the virus-filled havoc, that it takes her a few days to realize she hasn’t gotten her period.
Come to think of it, she is feeling a bit nauseous. The excessive fatigue and emotional imbalance she knows were early symptoms in her first pregnancy is harder to distinguish from the exhaustion after two intense days of caring for poorly family members, but she’s a mom and a Santiago and she categorically never gets sick.
She gives the nausea a day, waiting for it to break out into the same flu Jake and Leah are already victims of, but it doesn’t. It stays the same.
Amy’s never been so excited about nausea in her life.
She waits until Leah’s gone to bed, falling asleep in Amy’s arms on the couch. The two-year-old’s still not quite her energetic, bubbly self and has been stuck to her parents like a needy band-aid for most of the day, and it could have been tiring if it hadn’t also meant lots of cuddles. Right now, though, Amy's arms and back are happy to get a break from carrying the kid around while she lays down next to Jake instead, spooning him and receiving a grateful smile when she starts playing with his hair.
“How are you feeling, babe?”
“Dying. I think I might be dead already,” he groans before turning his head and looking her in the eyes with feigned seriousness. “Please say something nice at my funeral and promise me you'll take care of Charles when I'm gone.”
“You're not dying, Jake.”
“How d’you know?”
“Because you haven't thrown up since last night and you only have a slight fever,” she reminds him, feeling his lukewarm forehead. “You're fine.”
“I am definitely much better with a hot girl draped on top of me,” he says with a smug expression, his hand gently stroking under her old NYPD shirt up her back. She rolls her eyes, because looks haven't exactly been the top priority for the last three days and she's not sure when she last washed her hair, yet Jake never stops making an effort to charm her. “How are you feeling, Ames?”
“Actually, I've been kind of nauseous all day. But I'm not sure it's stomach flu.”
“Huh? What else would it be?”
“I'm thinking,” she presses her index finger to his chest, “maybe I should take a pregnancy test.”
“Oh.” He squints at her. “Why?”
Amy gives him an exasperated look.
“Okay, yeah. But you’ve also spent the last three days taking care of your sick family. Leah was throwing up on us. Are you sure you're not just ill?”
“I have a good feeling,” she insists, because she does - there's a renewed sense of hope and blind faith that perhaps this could be it, resting with her. “And I never get sick.”
“Once again, your daughter was vomiting on you and I'm still convinced I might be dying. This is a brutal virus, Ames.”
“Clearly.” She runs her fingers through his messier-than-usual curls again, and his mouth shapes into a content smile despite his still worried eyes. “I’m still going to take that test, though. In case.”
“In case,” he repeats slowly. “Well, it’s your body.”
“Exactly.” She kisses his forehead. “You get it. I’ll be right back.”
Amy takes these tests with ease now. She’s been doing them two, three times extra following every first negative in a desperate hope for the result to change. False negatives are common, test results are safer the longer after a missed period they’re taken, and there’s no reason not to test an extra time. Long story short, she's becoming a pro at taking pregnancy tests, but so far the single lines and minus signs are staying the same.
She says a silent prayer this one will be an exception.
Plastic cap off, pee for five seconds, plastic cap back on, lay the test flat and wait while trying not to freak out. She manages all steps but the final.
She carries the little plastic stick out to the living room coffee table gently as if it had been made of glass.
“Three minutes,” she informs Jake, and he nods while she sets a timer on her phone. In three minutes, they'll know whether her good feeling is right or dead wrong, and the nausea increases but this time Amy thinks it's nerves.
She doesn't want to stare, but she does anyway, waiting for a second line to appear no matter how faint. Jake sits up next to her, taking her hand and rubbing his thumb over her knuckles, and she manages a weak smile without lifting her eyes from the test.
The timer goes off without a second line appearing.
Amy lifts the test to inspect it closer, but there's not even a hint of anything. She gives it to Jake for a second opinion, and he inspects it just as closely before shaking his head and mumbling a quiet sorry, babe.
She's not pregnant this month either.
“It’s okay, Ames. Three months is nothing.”
She doesn’t realize there are tears in her eyes until they’re trailing down her cheeks and Jake’s hand is there, wiping them away. She presses on his wrist to move it, make him stop because she’s not okay and she doesn’t want him pressuring her to feel anything but the searing disappointment coursing through her veins.
“It’s not,” she says, shaking her head. “I just feel so stupid. I thought I was feeling something.”
“You’re not stupid,” he tells her, and the tenderness in his voice erases her annoyance. “You want this really bad. I do, too, but… well, it’s not my body.”
“Not your body being a massive failure.”
“Hey!” Jake holds up one hand like he’s making a stop motion. “No one talks that way about my wife!”
“Ha-ha.”
“I’m serious! You don’t get to say those things, okay? You know it’s not true.” She hums a doubting sound, and he sighs, placing his arm around her shoulders. “Ames, we’ll just try again. We already did a great job once, and there are moments I wish we hadn’t, because if we didn’t have a toddler in daycare I would be so much healthier… okay, I still don’t regret it,” he adds. “Except maybe the daycare part, because I swear I’m sick all the time.”
“You love our daycare! Without it, you’d never get to eat that Scientology-guy’s chocolate chip cookies at every parent meeting.”
“Fair point. Craig, right? Weirdly good baker. Fine - I guess I don’t regret the daycare either. But you’re about to.”
This time, she’s the one squinting at him in confusion. “What do you mean?”
“Still feeling nauseous?”
“Kind of, why are you… oh, no.”
“Oh, yes. Your immune system isn’t undefeatable!”
“It’s still better than yours,” she counters, and Jake just grins.
“But not undefeatable.”
She gives him a slow nod, trying to hide the despondency on her face as she takes the negative test from his hands.
“I’m just going to throw this away.”
Amy is certain of it when she wakes up three hours later, almost throwing herself out of bed to make it to the bathroom in time - January is officially and unquestionably hell.
~
#my writing#b99#brooklyn 99#brooklyn nine-nine#peraltiago#jake x amy#b99 fic#brooklyn 99 fic#brooklyn nine-nine fic#b99 fanfiction#brooklyn nine-nine fanfiction#jake x amy fic#jake x amy fanfiction#peraltiago fic#peraltiago fanfiction#sorry for being so rude about january don't take it personally if you love january#it's just.. everyone's sick
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Let’s Make it That Deep: Thinking about the Surveillance State, Racial Politics, and Humanity in Terminator: Dark Fate
This week I watched Terminator: Dark Fate, which carries forward from the second Terminator film, Terminator: Judgement Day (1991), wisely ignoring everything that happened in movies 3-5. Dark Fate is set in the year 2020 and follows Dani Ramos, humanity’s new hope to survive the future robot apocalypse, as she, Grace (an augmented human from the future), Sarah Connor, and Carl (a T-800 model terminator) fight against a Rev-9 sent back in time to kill Dani. Overall, to quote my sibling, the movie “isn’t a literary masterpiece,” but it is fairly enjoyable--especially if you’re thirsting over the main leads. However, because I have a feral academic-garbage brain I also wanted to spend some time unpacking what I saw as the film’s three major discourses: surveillance/technological inevitability, race politics, and human exceptionalism. These are fraught discourses, often represented in contradictory and confusing ways over the course of the film, but I think it is generative to sit with them and to try to work out what messages are intentionally and/or unintentionally being conveyed through the movie, as well as what the potentials and limitations of these messages might be.
Spoilers ahead.
i. Surveillance & Technological Inevitability
Before getting into the content of the film, one thing which may be useful to consider is how the movie previews shown in the theater before the start of the movie contextualize reception and engagement with the actual story Terminator: Dark Fate tells. There were quite a few trailers before the movie--enough so that one patron a few seats down in my row loudly commented “is the movie going to start now or what??” as yet another trailer started playing, the majority of which were either for war or horror movies. The two in particular I am interested in discussing are The King’s Man (2020) and Midway (2019), and the way that they both glorify and justify the imperialist/security state. The King’s Man trailer, for example, positions the titular agency as being an “independent intelligence agency” which essentially is able to actively “protect” people while governments fall short. In between clips from the film, title cards read "witness the rise...of the civilized," a shockingly open and yet seemingly unconscious connection between the King’s Man narrative and British colonialism/imperialism. Immediately following this trailer is one for Midway, a WWII moving centering on the aircraft carrier USS Midway immediately after the events of Pearl Harbor, which a character in the trailer calls “the greatest intelligence failure in the history of the US”. The reason why these trailers are important to keep in mind is because they implicitly respond to some of the anxieties articulated in Terminator; if Terminator films speak to fears of technology and surveillance, these trailers argue that really technology, surveillance, and military power are all important aspects of “civilized” nations, necessary for security and safety.
This actually ties in immediately to the opening of Terminator: Dark Fate, and the death of John Connor which can be interpreted, in one sense, as a failure of surveillance. This actually specifically made me think of Inderpal Grewal’s article “Security Moms,” and the rise of the neoliberal female citizen subject as an agent of security through motherhood in the post 9/11 U.S. The “security mom, essentially, is a “conceptualization of women as mothers seeking to protect their innocent children - a figure that is not so new in the history of modern nationalisms, or even American nationalisms and racism” (Grewal 27). Much like the King’s Man trailer suggestion that private intelligence is better suited to save lives than governmentalized intelligence, “neoliberalism suggests that the state is unable to provide security and thus it disavows its ability to protect all citizens”--only in here, it is the figure of the mother rather than a private agency which becomes the new and better fitted agent of surveillance, always watching for enemies in order to protect their children (Grewal 28). In a voice over, Sarah Connor tells us that she “saved three billion people but [she] couldn’t save [her] son”; a T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger) model Terminator which had been sent back before Skynet was destroyed and continued carrying out orders “from a future that never happened” walks right past Sarah and shoots John. While Sarah leaps in to action after she recognizes the threat, she is unable to stop the T-800 from killing her son in seconds. This might actually be a key difference between Sarah Connor and Grewal’s “security mom”: while security moms are a largely a post-9/11 construction of neoliberal/nationalist motherhood, Sarah Connor was a successful security mom in 1991, constantly vigilant and constantly surveilling her surroundings for concealed enemies who could kill her son. In the post-9/11 era, Sarah Connor’s belief that the apocalypse has been averted causes her to believe that she and her son are safe, resulting in inadequate surveillance/vigilance and her son’s death. Much like the framing of Pearl Harbor in the Midway trailer and 9/11 in real life, disasters happen because of failures to appropriately surveil.
Technological state surveillance itself is reflected in strange ways in the film, which seems to be at once critiquing and accepting constant surveillance. Sarah Connor keeps her cell phone in a chip bag to avoid being tracked and tells Grace and Dani that they will not last without her help because they are not aware of the constant surveillance occurring at every traffic light, every store, every gas station, etc--information the Rev-9 terminator chasing Dani will certainly have access to. Terminator: Dark Fate expresses fears of technological abuse/control and surveillance, but constantly frames these fears as the failure of the government to control these technologies--the threat isn’t what the government will do or is doing with these technologies, but rather that these technologies are uncontrollable or might be used by enemy agents. While one could argue that the fear being expressed here is actually a critique of the existence of surveillance technologies--that technologies exist for a reason and will do what they are programmed to do--this framing overwhelmingly still imagines a kind of governmental neutrality, where the threat is the located exclusively in the technology itself, not in those creating and using it. Here I also want to emphasize that while in Judgement Day there’s a deeper critique of the military industrial complex and the role of private corporations, in Dark Fate it appears to be the government alone engaged in constant surveillance and the technologies which result in the robot apocalypse, with the role of capitalism largely obscured from the connection between the new evil AI, Legion. In this same vein, while it seems that Legion is built as a weapon by the government, but we do not even explicitly know which government--again, the threat isn’t government construction of Legion (although Sarah does comment “they never learn”) but rather the technology itself.
In the original movies, Skynet was a defensive surveillance software--but this is no longer science fiction; as Edward Snowden revealed/confirmed in 2013, constant mass surveillance is a real thing, and there are real ways people can avoid it (using VPNs, encryption, covering webcams, anti-facial recognition makeup (called CV dazzle), wearing disguises, etc). Despite this, and despite Sarah Connor’s awareness of constant surveillance, the characters don’t do much to avoid surveillance and just as Sarah originally predicted, the Rev-9 easily tracks them through governmental surveillance apparatuses. In the same way, surveillance and the technological abuse/carelessness which bring about the robot apocalypse are largely imagined inevitable. While there is a constant argument for agency and the idea that people can and must make choices in the present moment that determine the future, nothing is done to disrupt surveillance in the present moment, and the future seems to be unstoppable. While we can certainly think about the switch from Skynet to Legion, and the way this articulates a different set of social concerns and anxieties in 2019 than in the late 80s/early 90s, stopping Skynet delays but does not prevent what seems to be, from a material standpoint, the same future. In this same vein, when Grace dies so that Dani can use her power source to destroy the Rev-9, Grace tells Dani “we both knew I wasn’t coming back”; this frames her death as predetermined and fixed. Similarly, at the end of the film Sarah tells Dani she will help her to “prepare”, implicitly suggesting that the future cannot be prevented--further legitimizing the reading of the Skynet to Legion switch as an inability to meaningfully change the future. This brings us to the line used both in Judgement Day and Dark Fate: “there is no fate but what we make for ourselves”. While this line seems to suggest that we have agency and can make choices that change the future, the inability to actually enact change might instead lead to a counter reading of the line: is it that we make fate, or that the fate we get is the one we “deserve”?
ii. Race (& Gender) Politics
There’s actually quite a bit to think about in terms of the racial politics of Terminator: Dark Fate. One the one hand, we can certainly think about the underlying savior discourse and the transition of this role from a white man to a Mexican woman. There is some fairly heavy handed Christian symbolism involved in John Connor as the white male hero—John’s initials parallel him to Jesus Christ, and Sarah comments “let her play Mother Mary for a while” when she thinks Dani has become the new target because a son Dani will someday give birth to will be the new savior of humanity. Sarah also comments that Dani isn’t the threat, it’s her womb. I want to go two directions on this comment: first, while it of course turns out that Dani is the hero herself, the idea of Latinx wombs as a threat is intricately tied to U.S. immigration policies and histories of eugenics, with the imagined threat being to the preservation of the (white) nation, so to here articulate the idea of Latinx reproduction as a kind of weapon to protect humanity is to offer something very different from a discourse of salvation through white reproduction/motherhood. Second, this line offers a kind of meta commentary on the way the previous movies claimed John as the savior (despite Sarah’s own heroism) to convince viewers that Dark Fate is more politically aware than previous Terminator movies, since Dani is the one destined to save the world (which of course ties back into my previous discussion of the unresolved tension between fate and agency), not her son and not a white man.
Moving beyond the switch in hero, one of the main things I want us to consider in thinking about the racial politics of Dark Fate is the question of collateral damage: while it’s nothing unusual to see large amounts of collateral damage in the background of an action movie, here this damage seems to be located exclusively in the Global South (specifically Mexico). Most (but not all) of the destruction is disassociated from individual people--for example, in one scene the Rev-9 drives a bulldozer down the wrong side of a freeway, crushing or crashing into numerous cars which obviously have people inside, even though we do not see most of them. Scenes of damage or interactions between populations and the Rev-9 in the U.S. do not result in death the same way that they do in Mexico/along the border. When the Rev-9 is knocked off of a plane after take off and crashes into a backyard in Texas, for example, he picks himself up and apologizes to the white people barbecuing in the yard for destroying their shed before continuing on his way. Similarly, when he flies over a military base which is actively attacking him, he ignores them and continues his pursuit of Dani without fighting back. While in both of these cases, one might argue that this is connected to the Rev-9’s obsession with fulfilling his mission without needing to kill anyone who is not actually preventing him from reaching Dani, a) this is a work of fiction so someone decided that the Rev-9 could fulfill his mission with minimal collateral damage in some spaces but not others, and b) in the final fight at the dam, the workers simply disappear when the fighting begins, removing them from any risk of becoming collateral damage.
Although there are action scenes throughout the movie, the last scene to involve mass violence against background characters is in the detention center. Before I get into the discussion of collateral damage/background character death at the detention center, I want to start by discussing border crossing and the representation of the detention center more broadly. There are some ways in which Dark Fate does attempt to address the violence involved in detention centers and U.S. immigration policy, but overwhelmingly it falls short. One of the ways we see this is in the actual crossing of the border and the way that it’s not particularly difficult or dangerous for Dani, Grace, and Sarah to cross. Certain popularized images of border crossing are deployed in ways which might suggest this is an authentic look at what it means to cross borders without documents (Dani, Grace, and Sarah ride on the top of a train with other migrants, which I suspect draws from the documentary Which Way Home, and Dani’s uncle, a Coyote, helps them cross the desert and enter the U.S. through a tunnel under the border wall), however the way these images are used as a shorthand undermines the danger undertaken/violence experienced by real undocumented migrants as the result of U.S. border policy. Riding the freight trains, called El tren de la muerte or La Bestia (the Death Train or The Beast) in real life, is highly dangerous and many people are killed or suffer serious and long term injuries as a result, and although we are told that Dani’s uncle is a good Coyote who gets people across safely (and he is of course helping his own niece), crossing the desert is extremely dangerous and many people die. Representing this crossing in maybe 10 minutes of screen time makes it seem easy and safe, obscuring the very real dangers faced by migrants in real life. Similarly, in the detention center border patrol agents are represented as apathetic but not particularly violent/dangerous, and the depictions of the cages migrants are kept in do not come close to reflecting the overcrowding experienced by the people who are being imprisoned in detention centers in real life. Furthermore, the imprisoned migrants do not have speaking roles and become non-agentive; the real suffering of undocumented migrants becomes nothing more than a setting, offering no significant or useful critique of U.S. border policies/politics. This brings us back to that question of collateral damage in the detention center. After Grace breaks out of the medical room she was being held in, she unlocks all of the cages and detained migrants begin to flee; although I have seen this described in some places online as her “freeing” them, escaping migrants become a distraction which aids in Dani, Sarah, and Grace’s actual escape from the detention center and the Rev-9 which has caught up with them. While most of the violence is enacted on border patrol agents rather than migrants (which is good), the Rev-9 does kill/harm some of the migrants who block his path as they attempt to escape, and the only border patrol agent we can identify as a speaking character to be killed is the Black woman who was pointedly apathetic to Dani’s pleas for help during the intake process. Most, if not all, of the other border patrol agents with speaking lines at the detention center are white, and seem to be framed as almost more sympathetic; the medical personnel fixing Grace’s wounds, for example, notices the metal interlaid in her body and are horrified by “what’s been done to her,” viewing her as a victim to be sympathized with. While one of the guards insists “we call them detainees” when Grace escapes from her handcuffs and demands to know where the prisoners are being kept, which offers an attempted commentary on the linguistic obscuration of violence and white apathy, we again must come back to the fact that the white medical guard is left unharmed while the Black guard is very pointedly killed.
We might push back on this overall interpretation by thinking about the ways that in real life people of color can become complicit in systems of white supremacy which will ultimately harm them while continuing to overwhelmingly protect white citizens, as well as the way that the Global South so frequently is a site of collateral damage, and experiences the displaced violence of the Global North. However, what I want us to think about is that this kind of intervention is useless when it is left latent, and overall only feeds into the constant racialized violence which plays out in movies and television programming. Furthermore, I want us to think about James Cameron’s comment about Judgement Day when he said that the T-1000 looked like an LAPD officer because “the Terminator films are...about us losing touch with our own humanity and becoming machines, which allows us to kill and brutalize each other. Cops think of all non-cops as less than they are”. While some have argued that Dark Fate picks up this legacy by making border patrol the villains, and the Rev-9 does clearly represent a military/border patrol kind of threat, the Rev-9 is also always a person of color. The base appearance, played by Gabriel Luna, is a man of color, and every single person it transforms itself to look like (which we are told kills the person being copied) is also a person of color. Because of this, there is a way in which the critique of border patrol is divorced from white supremacy and people of color become part of what is imagined as the threat.
iii. Thinking About Humanity
Finally, this ties into the discussion of humanity and the idea of human exceptionalism and purity articulated throughout Dark Fate. As with much of what I have previously talked about, this is a frequently contradictory kind of discourse which simultaneously broadens and constrains the idea of what “humanity” is/means. One example of this is the way in which augments and terminators that grow a conscious queer the boundary between “human” and “machine.” When Sarah demands they shoot Carl in the face to see what he “really is,” Dani insists “I don’t really care what he is”; through this there seems to be, on some level, an articulation that there’s more to being “human” than literally being a human being. Furthermore, these characters are queer in multiple dimensions--Grace is a very butch, very queer feeling character, and while I don’t want to say that the reformed murderous robot said Ace Rights, Carl’s character does push back against the heteronormative coital imperative by through his relationship to Elisa and his adopted son Mateo, which offers a model of meaningful romantic partnership and family commitment which does not involve biological reproduction or sexual intimacy. However, despite these queer potentials, we are constantly pushed back towards a privileging of “human” through frequent assertions that Grace is human (not a machine, just augmented), that augmentation is unstable (Grace’s frequent metabolic crashes and dependence on a cocktail of medication to keep herself going), and Carl only has the approximation of a conscious and cannot love the way humans do. Furthermore, Carl and Grace both die, suggesting that this queering of the human/machine boundary is untenable.
So what does “humanity” mean in Dark Fate? Ultimately, it seems to mean protecting the vulnerable and being willing to sacrifice yourself to do it. During the final confrontation between Dani, Sarah, Grace, and Carl, the Rev-9 says “I know she’s a stranger, why not let me have her”; Sarah responds: “Because we’re not machines you metal motherfucker”. While I obviously think the film offers a confused message on agency and that we need to be critical of the racial politics of the film, this ties into what I think (or what I would like to think) the movie hoped to say about border patrol and detention centers: we need to do better by refugees and undocumented migrants. It doesn’t matter whether we know someone, whether we imagine they are deserving or undeserving, what it might or might not cost us to do the right thing; we can choose, in this moment, whether or not we step up and fight against the detention of undocumented migrants, whether we resist ICE, whether we advocate for refugees. There is no fate but what we make for ourselves.
#terminator dark fate#terminator#dark fate#critical race theory#neoliberalism#essay#review#spoilers#i am white#as always i wrote this in one mad go & will fix any errors as i find them#also as always pls feel free to respond & engage
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In an effort to be empathetic recently, (literature on the subject describes good listeners as empathetic, and one way to be empathetic is to affirm someone’s emotions), I told a friend of mine who has been dealing with a lot of physically and emotionally draining and difficult things in the last… over five years, that I was sorry that walking into (a certain place) brought her tremendous anxiety and that I didn’t know what to say to that.
This particular friend has had encounters with racism, to add on to everything else she had to deal with in her personal and family life.
It would seem that empathy no longer cuts it these days, as my effort backfired. I was lambasted by a friend of hers, no one I know, a complete stranger, who chastised me with this:
“You could start by apologizing for not realizing how your privilege can further wound the people around you that don’t have it. When you can’t look outside your own experience to be able to understand why so many people are overcome with profound anxiety at the idea of walking into (said place) in America that today is indeed a hidey-hole for all manner of white supremacists, it’s a problem.”
I would just like to point out right now, that this person has NO IDEA what my experience has been; absolutely no clue. But she probably took a look at my profile picture, and assumed, from the paleness of my face, that I was a white person who’d lived in white privilege in a white community all my lovely white life.
Let me tell you about my white privilege. I didn’t grow up in a white community. I grew up in a Cree community where I was almost always the only non-Cree child in my class. I was very privileged to be called “white-man” every day for years, the worst insult anyone could throw at you, on the same level as a swear word. I can still hear the contempt in the other kids’ voices as they spat out that word. I was a CHILD. I did not know what my people; my government had done to their people. I didn’t understand the reasons behind the hate. More importantly, I myself had done absolutely nothing to them. It wasn’t MY fault.
What I DID understand is that when I was in grade four, my father had to come to meet me every single day, twice a day, at noon and after school. If he didn’t, other children would be waiting at the doors for me, ready to beat me up, because I was white. I understood that my mother was at her wit’s end, trying to keep me in mitts and a hat because other children consistently stole them away from me. I understood that people put worms and burdocks in my hair, because I was white. I understood that no boy would ever want to go out with me because I was undesirable. I was a loser. My classmates found out that my first name is Mary, and they laughed. Mary Jeanne Chabot… no one would ever want to marry Jeanne Chabot.
I understood that I could never be proud of any of my achievements, because that brought on the next worse accusation: “Ever proud that one.” I learned to never be proud of myself, to never cry for anything, to never show happiness.
I was an outsider. My very presence was a burden on my classmates. They were obligated to tolerate my existence at school, on sports teams and on class outings. For years, I tried to figure out what was wrong with me. If I reread my diary from my teen years, entry after entry sounds like a constant self-critique. “Did I laugh too much today? Maybe I should just not make jokes anymore. People don’t like my jokes. I shouldn’t have said this, I shouldn’t have laughed at that. I was too happy, or too talkative or too something. I am too gross.” Many of my peers made fun of my hair, or my clothes. It took a long time for me to realize that THIS WAS NOT NORMAL and that most people (elsewhere at least) did NOT automatically hate me on sight or think that I was a homely, repulsive excuse for a human being.
THIS was my white privilege. A word to the wise please, DON’T assume you know what anyone else’s experience is, especially not a stranger’s, because you don’t. That’s just not something you can tell about someone by the colour of their skin or their profile picture. In fact, that could be considered (*gasp*) racist.
As an adult, I found out that I was not the only one who dealt with this kind of bullying. Any child who was paler-faced or who had mixed parents also had similar experiences, although to a lesser degree. These others, after all, even those of mixed race, could all claim to belong there, could all claim their Cree heritage, whereas I could not. They had their extended family; aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents, in the community, a kind of support circle, while I did not.
I have since heard the stories of some of my peers who grew up with parents and grandparents who had either gone through residential school, or were the children of those who had gone through residential school. Stories of parents unable to show affection to their children because they didn’t know how. Stories of parents saying the cruelest things to their children because of the pain they kept bottled up inside. Stories of broken families and multiple half-siblings from different step parents because people had never learned from their parents how to have a relationship and stay together. Stories of substance abuse brought on by depression and a feeling of worthlessness. Stories, many, many stories of suicide.
When a WHOLE population grows up in institutions, no one has their parents’ example to go back on. You don’t get individual attention or affection or care from adults in an institution when there are a hundred more children with the same needs. Children need their parents. What happened to First Nations people is exactly what would happen to ANY society if you put all the children into State run orphanages or boarding schools instead of letting their parents parent them. Try to imagine the social dysfunction that would cause. This is what, ironically, most conservative Christians are against. This is why so many choose to home-school. We should be the FIRST to recognize what a huge mistake residential schools were. We should own that, and recognize that social dysfunction is passed on from one generation to the next. It is NOT just something that happened years ago, it is STILL happening. We need to recognize that and support them in their efforts to take back their culture and their lives, to deal with their hurts and become strong people, capable of mature relationships, communication, showing affection, and building each other up instead of tearing each other down.
When I moved away from my community, I had to relearn social norms. I grew up in a place where you don’t offer money for a favour because it is understood that what comes around goes around. I moved to a place where my new friends would constantly be upset with me because I didn’t offer to pay for their gas, or for some other thing. It didn’t occur to me because I, in turn, did things for free for them. I learned the hard way that you have to at least OFFER or people will think you are profiting off them. Had I been from an obvious ethnic minority, my friends might have been more understanding, might have explained things to me. But I was WHITE. I was supposed to know these things.
Even now, I have to consciously make myself do things a certain way in certain circumstances, because it doesn’t come naturally to me. Although I know this is how it is done here, it is alien to where I grew up. Job interviews are bad, because I dislike trying to sell myself. I grew up learning never to be proud of myself remember? This also makes it hard for me to insist on getting something I am due, (at work or elsewhere) if someone doesn't feel like giving it to me. Bargaining is another thing I have a hard time with. (I usually leave that to my husband - yes a boy finally DID want to marry me, imagine that!) Where I grew up, you don’t try to pay people less for what they are selling. It makes you seem cheap.
“You could start by apologizing (for your white privilege).” so I am told. I am sorry, but I already spent half my life trying to avoid aggravating other people simply by the paleness of my face. If there is ONE THING I REFUSE TO APOLOGIZE FOR, it is for being white. I’m pretty sure I know what racism is. As ironic as it may seem, not only have I seen it first hand, I have experienced it first hand. If you think my white privilege is so great, you’re welcome to it.
What is more, dear friend-of-a-friend who presumes to know my experience despite being a complete stranger, I COULD HAVE BEEN CREE for all you know. Yes, you looked at my profile picture, and you assumed I was white, and white-privileged, and while you were assuming that I, in my narrow-minded white experience and white privilege couldn’t understand the anxiety of being a victim of racism, it NEVER OCCURRED to YOU to look past YOUR own experience. Not all pale-faced people are “white”.
You see, I grew up with children who had one Cree parent and one white parent. Some of those children weren’t any darker than I was, but they were STILL Cree. Some of them grew up to have children blonder than the blondest of my own children. They are STILL Cree and being brought up as such. Had that been my case, for you to tell me that I needed to look past my experience and white privilege would have been quite hurtful.
Actually, to be honest, it WAS rather hurtful to me. I go back to visit my community and even now, years later, I STILL doubt the sincerity of people there, through no fault of their own. I remain not quite convinced that they really want to spend time with me, and are not just being nice. I have no rational reason to doubt. But I do. I still cannot quite believe that you can genuinely like a “white-man”. It’s unnatural. I just do not belong. Thanks for bringing all that up again. Sorry, still not sorry for being white.
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2019 Academy Award Best Picture Nominees Guide For Those Who Haven’t Actually Watched Them
It’s the 91st time Hollywood comes together to pat themselves on the back and this year marks the 5th time I’m bringing you the rundown of every Best Picture nominee so that you aren’t the “goddamn idiot” someone at your Oscars party is referring to when they ask, “Who invited this goddamn idiot?” Only, as in 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015 and 2014 (check out the hyperlinks for previous years’ rundowns - and likely some jokes that don’t age very well) - this is all based on the name of the film, the poster for the movie, or things I’ve heard while flipping past Extra or E! So take it all in and enjoy my tips on things to say to other guests so that your party has an ending that is more like Ally’s and less like Jackson’s!
Black Panther
After Creed loses in embarrassing fashion to Ivan Drago’s son, he tats up, grows that hair out, and heads to outer space. After landing on a planet right between the planet from Avatar and Naboo, pissy Creed picks a fight with a space prince who was bit by a radioactive space panther in the movie that had audiences saying, “I bet Forest Whitaker is in this movie. How is Forest Whitaker not in this movie? I’m honestly shocked that Forest Whitaker is not...oh, yup, there he is.”
3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:
A little insider Easter egg here - Wakanda backwards spells Adnakaw, which happens to be the name of Thor and Loki’s OTHER brother who is going to save everyone in Avengers: Endgame. He’ll be played by...Forest Whitaker.
In a deleted scene, Black Panther’s brother, The Pink Panther, visits to check out the Wakandan castle’s attic and then installs fiberglass insulation.
Spike Lee really turned the super hero movie genre on its head with this didn’t he? (Pause.) Oh. That was...um...oh, well um... (Slowly walk backward out of the room and do not return.)
BlacKkKlansman
The Chapelle’s Show’s first skit-to-feature length film gives the big screen treatment to the story of Clayton Bigsby. Based on the success of this film, 2019 also saw the big screen adaptation of The Chapelle’s Show’s “What Men Want” skit to a movie starring Taraji P. Henson. In 2020, anticipate a feature length Rick James biopic, a Playa Hater’s Ball film, and “Game, Blouses: The Movie”.
3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:
This film marks Ricky Jerret’s first acting role after he was cut from the Miami Dolphins by Charles Greane - who he thought was his friend - for his use of PEDs.
This film holds the distinction of having the highest number of different spellings on social media - just barely edging out Bohemian Rhapsody and The Favourite (well, in America).
Reggie Miller purchased a seat in the front row of the Oscars and is planning to wear a The Favourite jersey and baseball cap, then spend the entire show heckling Spike Lee and screaming, “See?! How does it feel the other way around?!”
Bohemian Rhapsody
Bohemian Rhapsody is a French film with a title that can be loosely translated into English as “The Sassy Singing Lad With The Donkey Snout”.
3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:
A bit of trivia for you. Did you know that Freddie Mercury wasn’t his first choice for a stage name? It was actually Fred Mercury.
A bit of trivia for you. Did you know that Brian May wasn’t his first choice for a stage name? It was actually Brian February.
A bit of trivia for you. Did you know that Queen’s first band name was actually Princess and they didn’t become Queen until they married Prince...and enjoyed a Purple Reign? Yup - I will show myself out now.
The Favourite
Rain droups on rouses! This perioud piece stars Oulivia Coulman, Emma Stoune, Joue Alwyn and Nichoulas Holt! It’s abot a grop of people in the contry of England that’s two hors long and y will find fabulos!
3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:
This is the movie about a Queen that doesn’t end with an AIDS diagnosis...I think.
Wigs and bodices accounted for 48% of the film’s budget.
The film’s title has nothing to do with the plot or characters and is instead a sly attempt to influence the outcome of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences members’ voting.
Green Book
In this sexual thriller, we see the raw, animal side of Kermit the Frog as he provides details from his Little Green Book of every single Muppet he’s fucked. With an original working title of Fifty Shades of Green, we’ll see how Miss Piggy was at first a mousy and demure fill-in interviewer whose sexual spirit was awakened by Kermit’s dominant yet mesmerizing magnetism. Kermit also does some butt stuff with Bunsen Honeydew and gets down group style with all of The Electric Mayhem.
3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:
There’s an odd cameo halfway through the movie where Mahershala Ali enters a gas station on the road and encounters a man in his late 20′s/early 30′s who says in a southern drawl, “I’m Stephen Dorff and I’m your partner,” then another Stephen Dorff, this one in his 40′s limps up and says, “And I’m Stephen Dorff. I’m also your partner,” then finally an old drunk one in his 70′s hobbles up and says, “I’m Stephen Dorff and I too am your partner!”
Mahershala Ali generally tried to avoid Viggo Mortensen, who continually would run up saying, “Dude, Mahersh! We have to get matching tattoos of the number two - for the two of us to commemorate this journey that we’re on together. It’s what you do with your cast mates!” When Mahershala would decline but say it was nice what Viggo and the cast of the Lord of the Rings trilogy did together, Viggo would walk off grumbling, “Hidalgo got a tattoo with me...”
*Before the next comment - be sure to do a thorough research on Google and on social media to determine the prevailing public opinion of if Green Book is a remarkable cinematic achievement faithful to the story of Don Shirley and Tony Vallelonga’s relationship and an examination of the complicated issue of race and its impact on friendship and business OR if it’s just another white savior movie before you speak, so that you can make sure that you’re aligned with whatever is currently the popular thing to say at that moment in time about this movie. Then say...
Ahem. This is the same director who wrote and directed a scene in Movie 43 where Hugh Jackman is on a blind date with Kate Winslet and has prosthetic testicles hanging under his neck which go into her mouth - and that’s, like, it.
Roma
Set in a world with no color, this movie is about a bunch of people (mostly children) hugging on a beach who may or may not be related to each other, may or may not be involved in some kind of national tragedy in either Italy or Mexico, and may or may not be sick, dying, sad or overcome with joy. I honestly have no clue on this one. But it IS on Netflix.
3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:
They say that Alfonso Cuarón painted a realistic picture of his childhood in Roma which is the exact same tactic he employed in making Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.
Netflix forced Cuarón to cross promote other Netflix titles throughout the film, so there is an odd scene in which Cleo’s son meets his Big Mouth Hormone Monster to talk about masturbation and then later on the family enters The Upside Down (or Al Revés de Abajo). Also, every single cast member gets a stand-up comedy special.
Yalitza Martínez plays a housekeeper here and after this star-making turn, she’s got it MAID!
A Star Is Born
Jackson Maine wants to create a star. But after consulting a high school astronomy textbook, he learns that the only way that a star is truly born is to squeeze atoms of light elements under enough pressure for their nuclei to undergo fusion. He closes the book and says, “To hell with that science shit,” then gets drunk and just hires Lady Gaga to write a song that sounds like she’s a child screaming at her mom to watch her do a dive at the community pool.
3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:
As a first-time singer, Bradley Cooper devoted countless hours over several months in order to unlock the instrument of his voice to become a mostly-inoffensive singer. As a first-time director, Bradley Cooper bought one of those chairs with “Director” on it.
Bradley Cooper refused to urinate for the duration of filming until the big Grammy’s scene so it played better on film. He did poop a lot during filming though.
The young actress from Eighth Grade is already planning her Oscar bait remake of A Star Is Born to come out in 2043 where SHE plays the aging star and enters a romance with a young male singer played by Boy from Bird Box.
Vice
As the DC Comics universe continues to expand, we finally get the origin story of Batman arch nemesis and super villain, The Penguin.
3 Things To Casually Inject Into Conversation To Prove You Saw The Movie And Sound Like An Expert:
Unable to shake his Saturday Night Live roots, Adam McKay decided to insert a scene late in the movie where - unannounced - the real Dick Cheney walks in to surprised applause from the audience and Christian Bale acts flustered before stammering out that it is an honor to meet him. Cheney pauses for the awkward “oh my god, can you believe this” murmur to die down in the audience and then stiffly delivers, “You know, Christian, you could have just worn a fat suit for this role.” The audience erases all memory of the terrible atrocities that the man has committed during his lifetime and erupts into wild clapping and bark-laughing like seals while Christian and the rest of the cast just have to hand it to the guy for being such a good sport about it all.
Dick Cheney is just happy that A Star Is Born is in the field this year so that in defiance of Vice he also doesn’t have to root for any movies about gay guys, black people, immigrants, or foreigners.
While watching the film, Laura Bush continually had to remind a startled and frightened George W. that no, he was not trapped up in the big movie screen.
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Text
Who Made My Family Shattered
By Zhang Xin
“What are you doing here? Are you holding a gathering? And who are you? What are you doing here?” howled a cop, seizing the arm of my fifteen-year-old nephew, who was thoroughly frightened and at a loss. My wife hastened to explain, “These are all my relatives, and the boy is my nephew. They came to see me because I am sick.” Hearing this, the cop loosened his grip, and then threatened us for a while before leaving.
Ever since my whole family believed in God, the CCP government has never relaxed its persecution on us for over twenty years. The police have frequently come to our house, searching, interrogating us, or carrying out the arrest; my family members were once arrested, tortured, and imprisoned, and some of them were forced to take flight outside our hometown, which made my once-happy family shattered.
Suffering the CCP’s Persecution and Pursuit, I Was Forced to Flee My Hometown
In 1995, the CCP government carried out a large-scale arrest of Christians of the Stream of Recovery. At that time, my eldest son and daughter and some relatives had just begun their faith in the Lord. Unfortunately, all of them eight were arrested by the CCP police and suffered cruel torture to different extents in the detention house. According to my eldest son, in the detention house the police jabbed him with the electric baton. Seeing that he refrained from crying out as if he hardly felt pain, the police commanded him to open his mouth, and then poked the electric baton into his mouth. Immediately his mouth bled, and my son cried out due to the unbearable pain. How malicious these evil cops were! Later, they eight were all detained, some for one month, some for two months, and weren’t released until the police extorted over 18,000 yuan from them.
Fortunately, my younger son, who at that time was a church leader as well as a prime target of the police, was not caught then. To arrest my son and me, the police often broke into our house at midnight. Under such circumstances, my younger son had no choice but to hide himself in a deserted hut on the riverside for the night, and I stayed in my neighbor’s house. One night in May, 1995, I slept at my neighbor’s while my daughter and wife were looking after the kid at home. In the middle of the night, my daughter heard the sound of cars and barks, and then immediately took her kid to her sister-in-law’s house. There was only my wife left in the house. Not for a while, a wicked guy in our village led the police to our house. Kicking the door down, the police rushed into our home, but failed to find us. Seeing the quilt was still warm, a cop said, “They can’t have run far. Go after them!” After the police left, I came back home. Listening to my wife’s description, I knew I couldn’t stay at home any longer. So, before the dawn, I set off for a relative’s outside of our village.
The Lord’s Words Led Me in Time When I Fell Into Pain Due to the Persecution
During the two years when I wasn’t at home, the police focused lots of efforts on me and my younger son. A cop said, “In order to catch the two Christians, we have put in a lot of manpower and material resources in the past two years, and just the gas has cost us much, but we got nothing.” To arrest us, the CCP police often lurked around my house at midnight, observing and waiting for us. Sometimes they just broke into my house, forcing my wife to tell them where my younger son and I were. As the police would come at any time, every night my wife slept in the clothes she wore in the day, no matter in severe winter or hot summer.
As I was on the run and couldn’t reunite with my family or share the burden of farm work with my wife, I was so sad that I often shed tears on the quiet. Thinking of how my whole family had been persecuted and separated from each other, and lived such a bitter life because of our faith in the Lord, I became quite upset and fell into darkness and pain. Then the Lord’s words came into my mind, “He that finds his life shall lose it: and he that loses his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 10:39). “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you” (Matthew 5:10-12). In pondering the Lord’s words, I was bright inside. “Right, if I want to gain life, I should not fear the sufferings, but rather risk my life to satisfy the Lord. Though I am enduring the persecution and chase from the CCP government, suffering some pain in the flesh, the Lord will approve of this. Haven’t there been a lot of martyred saints who have devoted their lives to following the Lord, and preaching and bearing witness for Him? I should follow the example of them and bear strong and resounding witness for the Lord.” After understanding this, I felt much better in my heart. Thank the Lord! But for His words leading me in time, I couldn’t have stood those hardships. Such experiences made me understand that to believe in God in China where the atheistic CCP exercises its dictatorial rule, we have to tie our head to the waistband, despite the risk of being arrested or put into prison. As I had such experience and knowledge, my faith in the Lord wasn’t destroyed when my younger son was captured and sentenced to three years of reform through labor in 1997.
The Police Searched My House and Threatened Me When My Family Members Were Spreading the Gospel
All my family members successively received God’s work of the last days from 2004 to 2012. One morning in the winter of 2012, my daughter-in-law led six brothers and sisters to spread the gospel in our village and the nearby villages, which was reported to the police by the vice secretary of our village. And soon the police broke into my house; they searched each room and interrogated me.
At that time, I was so worried, thinking, “If my younger son and daughter-in-law come back now, they will certainly be caught.” I could do nothing but pray to God in my heart, “Oh God, I entrust this incident to you. I shall obey whatever you will do. The CCP cops are in your hands however rampant they are. May you protect my son and daughter-in-law.” After prayer, my heart calmed down a lot.
Failing to seek out whom they wanted, the police vented their anger on me, questioning me, “Are you still believing in God? What you eat and drink comes from the CCP, so you’d better behave yourself and obey the CCP. Tell us where your son and daughter-in-law are. Have they gone out to preach the gospel? If you don’t tell us while you know where they are, you’ll be punished for harboring criminals!”
I was kind of scared by their threat, worrying they would send me to prison. And I earnestly prayed to God, thinking, “Today God gives me such a trial to see if I have faith in Him; Job’s trial was the temptation of Satan, and so is the thing befalling me. However, all is in the hands of God; without His permission, the police could do nothing to me; if God allows me to be put into jail, I shall obey Him.” Having this faith in God, I wasn’t scared anymore. Failing to get anything from me, the police left finally.
My Younger Son Leaving Home to Avoid the Arrest, My Family Endured the Cold Looks of Others
In the fall of 2014, the police came again to ask the villagers about my younger son. It so happened that my neighbor was there watching others playing cards, and he told the police that my younger son had gone out for work and was not at home. Actually, my younger son was just at home that day; it was God who kept him from being arrested through the words of an unbeliever. And from this I saw God’s omnipotence and sovereignty over all things, and offered my thanks to Him in my heart. As God says, “The heart and spirit of man are held in the hand of God, and all the life of man is beheld in the eyes of God. Regardless of whether or not you believe this, any and all things, living or dead, will shift, change, renew, and disappear according to God’s thoughts. This is how God rules over all things.”
I thought to myself, “The CCP’s arrests of Christians have become more and more outrageous. It seems that my younger son cannot stay at home any longer. But there are the aged and young as well as the farmland needing to be taken care of. If he leaves, how will we deal with these? But if he doesn’t leave, he will probably be arrested and stay in jail for several years, and even could lose his life.” Later, to avoid the arrest of the CCP, my younger son had no choice but to leave home.
After he left, the heavy burden of family life laid on my daughter-in-law’s shoulder. In addition to taking care of my wife and me and three kids, she had to do all the farming work. Our life was pretty hard, but to walk the right path of believing in God, we endured the hardships in silence. In those years, my wife and I suffered both physical and mental agonies because of the persecution from CCP, and came down with many diseases. In 2012, my wife became ill with cerebral thrombosis, and after that she could hardly look after herself, and needed to be taken care of day and night.
In 2016, my daughter-in-law was forced to flee due to the CCP’s persecution. In 2017, my wife passed away without seeing my younger son and daughter-in-law in her last moments. There were only me and my three grandchildren left in my home then. Falling for the rumors and lies of the CCP, the villagers all ridiculed and slandered my grandchildren, which greatly wounded their young hearts. Unable to bear the gossips as well as the sarcasm and odd looks of others, my two granddaughters stopped going to school after graduation from primary school.
Seeing Through the Demonic Substance of the CCP, I Will Always Follow Christ
After suffering the persecution of the CCP, though my family were separated from each other, I deeply appreciated that everything of us is in the control of God, and that He protects and cares for us all the time. When we encountered danger, God preserved us from it; when we suffered persecutions and tribulations, God comforted us with His words. It was God who led my family through those rough days. Every time I thought of and pondered God’s love, a warm feeling would rush into my heart. What’s more, God had me gain some discernment of the essence of the CCP by its persecution. God says, “Religious freedom? The legitimate rights and interests of citizens? They are all tricks for covering up sin! … Where is the true freedom and legitimate rights and interests? Where is the fairness? Where is the comfort? Where is the warmth? Why use deceitful schemes to trick God’s people? Why use force to suppress the coming of God? Why not allow God to freely roam upon the earth that He created? Why hound God until He has nowhere to rest His head? Where is the warmth among men? Where is the welcome among people?” “How could this devil, fuming with rage, allow God to govern its court of power on earth? How could it willingly admit defeat? Its odious countenance has been revealed for what it is, hence one finds himself not knowing whether to laugh or cry, and it is truly difficult to speak of. Is this not its essence? With an ugly soul, it still believes that it is incredibly beautiful. This gang of accomplices! They come down among the mortals to indulge in pleasures and stir up disorder. Their disturbance causes fickleness in the world and brings panic in the heart of man, and they have distorted man so that man resembles beasts of unbearable ugliness, no longer possessing the slightest trace of the original holy man. They even wish to assume power as tyrants on earth. They impede the work of God so that it can barely move forward and close off man as if behind walls of copper and steel. Having committed so many sins and caused so much trouble, how could they expect anything other than to wait for chastisement? Demons and evil spirits have been running amok on earth and have closed off the will and painstaking effort of God, making them impenetrable. What a mortal sin! How could God not feel anxious? How could God not feel wrathful? They cause grievous hindrance and opposition to the work of God. Too rebellious!”
Outwardly, the CCP government advocates religious freedom, but in reality, it frenziedly persecutes and arrests Christians, which made my family shattered. My children were forced to flee our home, unable to visit their mother in her last moments, much less take care of us in our old age. As believers in God, we were taking the right path of life. Yet, the CCP slandered and attacked us. Even the unbelievers such as our neighbors and relatives were deceived by the rumors of the CCP, ridiculing and slandering us, following the CCP in denying and resisting God. The CPP government persecutes Christians by all kinds of methods, disturbing and disrupting God’s management plan of saving mankind, from which I see clearly that it is a devilish organization that resists God and hates God, and I will be its sworn enemy. The CCP has been going against God all along. As long as it takes power for just one day, the Chinese people will not be able to get rid of the sufferings it brings them. Having conducted numerous evil deeds, the CCP is bound to receive the righteous punishment from God. Only God is the truth, the way, and the life, and only He can point out the bright way of life for us. Therefore, I will follow Christ till the end!
0 notes
Text
Who Made My Family Shattered
By Zhang Xin
“What are you doing here? Are you holding a gathering? And who are you? What are you doing here?” howled a cop, seizing the arm of my fifteen-year-old nephew, who was thoroughly frightened and at a loss. My wife hastened to explain, “These are all my relatives, and the boy is my nephew. They came to see me because I am sick.” Hearing this, the cop loosened his grip, and then threatened us for a while before leaving.
Ever since my whole family believed in God, the CCP government has never relaxed its persecution on us for over twenty years. The police have frequently come to our house, searching, interrogating us, or carrying out the arrest; my family members were once arrested, tortured, and imprisoned, and some of them were forced to take flight outside our hometown, which made my once-happy family shattered.
Suffering the CCP’s Persecution and Pursuit, I Was Forced to Flee My Hometown
In 1995, the CCP government carried out a large-scale arrest of Christians of the Stream of Recovery. At that time, my eldest son and daughter and some relatives had just begun their faith in the Lord. Unfortunately, all of them eight were arrested by the CCP police and suffered cruel torture to different extents in the detention house. According to my eldest son, in the detention house the police jabbed him with the electric baton. Seeing that he refrained from crying out as if he hardly felt pain, the police commanded him to open his mouth, and then poked the electric baton into his mouth. Immediately his mouth bled, and my son cried out due to the unbearable pain. How malicious these evil cops were! Later, they eight were all detained, some for one month, some for two months, and weren’t released until the police extorted over 18,000 yuan from them.
Fortunately, my younger son, who at that time was a church leader as well as a prime target of the police, was not caught then. To arrest my son and me, the police often broke into our house at midnight. Under such circumstances, my younger son had no choice but to hide himself in a deserted hut on the riverside for the night, and I stayed in my neighbor’s house. One night in May, 1995, I slept at my neighbor’s while my daughter and wife were looking after the kid at home. In the middle of the night, my daughter heard the sound of cars and barks, and then immediately took her kid to her sister-in-law’s house. There was only my wife left in the house. Not for a while, a wicked guy in our village led the police to our house. Kicking the door down, the police rushed into our home, but failed to find us. Seeing the quilt was still warm, a cop said, “They can’t have run far. Go after them!” After the police left, I came back home. Listening to my wife’s description, I knew I couldn’t stay at home any longer. So, before the dawn, I set off for a relative’s outside of our village.
The Lord’s Words Led Me in Time When I Fell Into Pain Due to the Persecution
During the two years when I wasn’t at home, the police focused lots of efforts on me and my younger son. A cop said, “In order to catch the two Christians, we have put in a lot of manpower and material resources in the past two years, and just the gas has cost us much, but we got nothing.” To arrest us, the CCP police often lurked around my house at midnight, observing and waiting for us. Sometimes they just broke into my house, forcing my wife to tell them where my younger son and I were. As the police would come at any time, every night my wife slept in the clothes she wore in the day, no matter in severe winter or hot summer.
As I was on the run and couldn’t reunite with my family or share the burden of farm work with my wife, I was so sad that I often shed tears on the quiet. Thinking of how my whole family had been persecuted and separated from each other, and lived such a bitter life because of our faith in the Lord, I became quite upset and fell into darkness and pain. Then the Lord’s words came into my mind, “He that finds his life shall lose it: and he that loses his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 10:39). “Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you” (Matthew 5:10-12). In pondering the Lord’s words, I was bright inside. “Right, if I want to gain life, I should not fear the sufferings, but rather risk my life to satisfy the Lord. Though I am enduring the persecution and chase from the CCP government, suffering some pain in the flesh, the Lord will approve of this. Haven’t there been a lot of martyred saints who have devoted their lives to following the Lord, and preaching and bearing witness for Him? I should follow the example of them and bear strong and resounding witness for the Lord.” After understanding this, I felt much better in my heart. Thank the Lord! But for His words leading me in time, I couldn’t have stood those hardships. Such experiences made me understand that to believe in God in China where the atheistic CCP exercises its dictatorial rule, we have to tie our head to the waistband, despite the risk of being arrested or put into prison. As I had such experience and knowledge, my faith in the Lord wasn’t destroyed when my younger son was captured and sentenced to three years of reform through labor in 1997.
The Police Searched My House and Threatened Me When My Family Members Were Spreading the Gospel
All my family members successively received God’s work of the last days from 2004 to 2012. One morning in the winter of 2012, my daughter-in-law led six brothers and sisters to spread the gospel in our village and the nearby villages, which was reported to the police by the vice secretary of our village. And soon the police broke into my house; they searched each room and interrogated me.
At that time, I was so worried, thinking, “If my younger son and daughter-in-law come back now, they will certainly be caught.” I could do nothing but pray to God in my heart, “Oh God, I entrust this incident to you. I shall obey whatever you will do. The CCP cops are in your hands however rampant they are. May you protect my son and daughter-in-law.” After prayer, my heart calmed down a lot.
Failing to seek out whom they wanted, the police vented their anger on me, questioning me, “Are you still believing in God? What you eat and drink comes from the CCP, so you’d better behave yourself and obey the CCP. Tell us where your son and daughter-in-law are. Have they gone out to preach the gospel? If you don’t tell us while you know where they are, you’ll be punished for harboring criminals!”
I was kind of scared by their threat, worrying they would send me to prison. And I earnestly prayed to God, thinking, “Today God gives me such a trial to see if I have faith in Him; Job’s trial was the temptation of Satan, and so is the thing befalling me. However, all is in the hands of God; without His permission, the police could do nothing to me; if God allows me to be put into jail, I shall obey Him.” Having this faith in God, I wasn’t scared anymore. Failing to get anything from me, the police left finally.
My Younger Son Leaving Home to Avoid the Arrest, My Family Endured the Cold Looks of Others
In the fall of 2014, the police came again to ask the villagers about my younger son. It so happened that my neighbor was there watching others playing cards, and he told the police that my younger son had gone out for work and was not at home. Actually, my younger son was just at home that day; it was God who kept him from being arrested through the words of an unbeliever. And from this I saw God’s omnipotence and sovereignty over all things, and offered my thanks to Him in my heart. As God says, “The heart and spirit of man are held in the hand of God, and all the life of man is beheld in the eyes of God. Regardless of whether or not you believe this, any and all things, living or dead, will shift, change, renew, and disappear according to God’s thoughts. This is how God rules over all things.”
I thought to myself, “The CCP’s arrests of Christians have become more and more outrageous. It seems that my younger son cannot stay at home any longer. But there are the aged and young as well as the farmland needing to be taken care of. If he leaves, how will we deal with these? But if he doesn’t leave, he will probably be arrested and stay in jail for several years, and even could lose his life.” Later, to avoid the arrest of the CCP, my younger son had no choice but to leave home.
After he left, the heavy burden of family life laid on my daughter-in-law’s shoulder. In addition to taking care of my wife and me and three kids, she had to do all the farming work. Our life was pretty hard, but to walk the right path of believing in God, we endured the hardships in silence. In those years, my wife and I suffered both physical and mental agonies because of the persecution from CCP, and came down with many diseases. In 2012, my wife became ill with cerebral thrombosis, and after that she could hardly look after herself, and needed to be taken care of day and night.
In 2016, my daughter-in-law was forced to flee due to the CCP’s persecution. In 2017, my wife passed away without seeing my younger son and daughter-in-law in her last moments. There were only me and my three grandchildren left in my home then. Falling for the rumors and lies of the CCP, the villagers all ridiculed and slandered my grandchildren, which greatly wounded their young hearts. Unable to bear the gossips as well as the sarcasm and odd looks of others, my two granddaughters stopped going to school after graduation from primary school.
Seeing Through the Demonic Substance of the CCP, I Will Always Follow Christ
After suffering the persecution of the CCP, though my family were separated from each other, I deeply appreciated that everything of us is in the control of God, and that He protects and cares for us all the time. When we encountered danger, God preserved us from it; when we suffered persecutions and tribulations, God comforted us with His words. It was God who led my family through those rough days. Every time I thought of and pondered God’s love, a warm feeling would rush into my heart. What’s more, God had me gain some discernment of the essence of the CCP by its persecution. God says, “Religious freedom? The legitimate rights and interests of citizens? They are all tricks for covering up sin! … Where is the true freedom and legitimate rights and interests? Where is the fairness? Where is the comfort? Where is the warmth? Why use deceitful schemes to trick God’s people? Why use force to suppress the coming of God? Why not allow God to freely roam upon the earth that He created? Why hound God until He has nowhere to rest His head? Where is the warmth among men? Where is the welcome among people?” “How could this devil, fuming with rage, allow God to govern its court of power on earth? How could it willingly admit defeat? Its odious countenance has been revealed for what it is, hence one finds himself not knowing whether to laugh or cry, and it is truly difficult to speak of. Is this not its essence? With an ugly soul, it still believes that it is incredibly beautiful. This gang of accomplices! They come down among the mortals to indulge in pleasures and stir up disorder. Their disturbance causes fickleness in the world and brings panic in the heart of man, and they have distorted man so that man resembles beasts of unbearable ugliness, no longer possessing the slightest trace of the original holy man. They even wish to assume power as tyrants on earth. They impede the work of God so that it can barely move forward and close off man as if behind walls of copper and steel. Having committed so many sins and caused so much trouble, how could they expect anything other than to wait for chastisement? Demons and evil spirits have been running amok on earth and have closed off the will and painstaking effort of God, making them impenetrable. What a mortal sin! How could God not feel anxious? How could God not feel wrathful? They cause grievous hindrance and opposition to the work of God. Too rebellious!”
Outwardly, the CCP government advocates religious freedom, but in reality, it frenziedly persecutes and arrests Christians, which made my family shattered. My children were forced to flee our home, unable to visit their mother in her last moments, much less take care of us in our old age. As believers in God, we were taking the right path of life. Yet, the CCP slandered and attacked us. Even the unbelievers such as our neighbors and relatives were deceived by the rumors of the CCP, ridiculing and slandering us, following the CCP in denying and resisting God. The CPP government persecutes Christians by all kinds of methods, disturbing and disrupting God’s management plan of saving mankind, from which I see clearly that it is a devilish organization that resists God and hates God, and I will be its sworn enemy. The CCP has been going against God all along. As long as it takes power for just one day, the Chinese people will not be able to get rid of the sufferings it brings them. Having conducted numerous evil deeds, the CCP is bound to receive the righteous punishment from God. Only God is the truth, the way, and the life, and only He can point out the bright way of life for us. Therefore, I will follow Christ till the end!
0 notes
Text
My deconversion via /r/atheism
Submitted July 04, 2017 at 04:19AM by klepticskeptic43
(Via reddit http://ift.tt/2uEO7TM)
My deconversion
So, I thought I'd say howdy from the southern state of GA and tell ya'll my de-conversion story.
My wife and I grew up in religious families, both with missionaries as aunts/uncles/grandparents. My wife's family included theological professor's, one who taught at Princeton and whom we just recently realized taught agnostic biblical scholar Bart Ehrman and even influenced him to realize there indeed are mistakes in the Bible (complete surprise to us, turns out his wife was at our wedding). We both went to Christian colleges and both attended and were involved in church regularly. We even led a church 'small-group'. We also struggled with infertility. For almost 10 years. We met many many many other couples who struggled with this and 'prayed' with them and then 'rejoiced' with them when 'god' blessed them with children and then we went back to languishing. Church is an awful place when you struggle with infertility. Year after year, you see the litters of children as all the young wives are impregnated and it never works for you. Mother's day is basically a no-no. Usually the pastor will ask mothers to stand and the audience claps for them. My wife would remain seated and smile/clap for them and die just a little bit more inside.
We tried everything. Doctors, failed foster-care situation... that was the lowest place I've been. Shortly after, I came home and my wife was collapsed on the floor unable to move as she had herniated a disk in her neck. Just before her spine surgery the church we attended fired the pastors who were 'ministering' to us and we left in despair.
We joined another church cautiously but, all the while, a splinter of doubt was growing in my mind. 'What if this is all bullshit?'. I had comforted and prayed with a number of men who were in Christian leadership of churches who were facing infertility and after only a mere 6 months (we were in at 6 years) they were already losing their faith and questioning 'god'. I had always felt my faith was very strong but I suddenly had this feeling, the same feeling I had when I found out the tooth-fairy wasn't real when I was a little kid. 'Am I being bamboozled???'. I began to read the bible in a less 'theological' way and in a way that asked the question 'if I got into a time-machine and went back to X time would I see exactly what's written in the Bible?'.
I re-examined stories like 'Samson' and 'The Tower of Babel' and 'Noah's Ark' and 'Balaam's talking ass' and I asked myself 'do I really believe this?'. My wife is a veterinary technician and I sat her down one fateful night and asked her 'do you really believe 8 people built a bigass boat and penguins/polar-bears right along side of African Giraffes and Australian Koala Bears got on board with fucking Dinosaurs and 8 people took care of every animal species on the planet X 2 for a full year!?!?!?!'. She contemplated and slowly shook her head 'no'.
I had discovered Dawkins/Harris/Kraus but there was definitely something about Hitchens lol. I just loved the guy. I listened intently to countless hours of online atheist/theist debates trying to keep an open mind.
We hadn't quite left the church but we were on the verge when our pastor preached a message that talked about 'praying with expectation'. Basically we should pray with expectation that one way or another god WOULD answer our prayers. My wife tapped me on the shoulder and whispered in my ear 'I have to get out of here right now'. I immediately escorted her out of the building and comforted her as she cried. Praying with expectation... as if we hadn't tried that. It's this strange way of putting the problems of our infertility back on top of us in the form of a guilt trip. Maybe we just didn't have enough faith?
I was at the end of my 'spiritual' rope when one of the guys in my small-group started an online conversation about the story of David and Michael. For those unfamiliar, David is the King of Israel and the 'Ark of the Covenant' was being retrieved from the Philistines (enemies of Israel) and David dances outside in little more than a loin cloth. One of his wives, Michael, sees this and is embarrassed and tells him so referencing the 'maid servants' indicating her jealousy. The bible says she never bears him children. This was perfect (so I thought). I was in a position in which I couldn't ignore the pain I was feeling so I asked the question of the group:
'If you were in church and singing/praising Jesus and you stripped off your shirt, your wife then tells you it embarrasses her that you did this and 'god' strikes her down with infertility so that you two never have children... are you ok with this???'
The responses to this were my first real example of what I call the 'Christian Wiggle'. It's a dance in which the religious person dances/wiggles/jiggles/jumps around and does everything possible to avoid the difficulty that is glaring at them. I heard 'well I think it just means they didn't have sex and it's a warning to stay close to god' or 'are you questioning god???'. It was clear to me, at this point, that Christians are useless and they were all living these lives of luxury in which they didn't have to face what I couldn't turn away from. I needed some mechanism to help them see what I was going through but they couldn't face loosing/not-having their perfect families/children and I realized how weak their faith truly was.
This was about a year ago and since then I've had about as many debates as you can imagine. People try weak versions of the Transcendental argument, Ontological argument, argument from Design, Special pleading etc etc (you know how it goes).
The more conversations/debates I have and the more books I read the more I realize that the people I looked up to for 30 years are charlatans. This is a very very hard pill to swallow. It's been a very tough road but I'm happy to say that ultimately this has been the greatest renaissance of my life and my wife has never been happier/freer.
We've lost almost all family and friends but for this level of freedom I wouldn't trade it for anything. No more do I wonder what 'god' is trying to teach me. I just know that the cosmos is a massive place, I'm puny and no one said life is fair. Sometimes shit happens, and that's it. No one to blame/question, we just have to make the best of every day.
I hope this inspires/helps someone else knowing they are not alone.
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