A Fascism Sundae with Racism On Top

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This Is What Happened:

-There was a horrible massacre at a school in Nashville. Six people shot and killed, 3 of them were 9 years old.

- In response, many kids and teens in Tennessee were rightly angry and peacefully protested to demand that something be done to protect their lives.

- Three legislators in Tennessee, Democrats all three, supported the kids and teens in their peaceful protests. Two of the legislators are Black men, Justin Jones and Justin Pearson. One is a white woman, Gloria Johnson.

- Republicans in the Tennessee legislature voted to expel the two Black men for protesting, but not the white woman. To be clear, the white woman was protesting right alongside the Black men.

- In contrast, in 2019, Republicans in the Tennessee legislature did not choose to expel the legislator who was accused of, and later admitted to, sexually abusing 3 underage girls. Nor have they ever expelled legislators who are members of the KKK.

- If your blood is boiling right now, that’s the appropriate response.

For about 24 hours before the legislators were expelled, there was quite a bit of online chatter about how undemocratic — how fascist — it would be, to expel legislators, simply because they stood with their constituents against the ruling majority. Some people speculated that surely, the Republicans would not do something so extreme, so un-American.

But the speculations were wrong. Not only did the Republicans embrace fascism and expel two legislators, they also made their actions as racist as possible by expelling only the two Black legislators, and not the white one. And yes, as I already mentioned, all three legislators were protesting side-by-side, so the idea that two of them behaved badly, but one was fine, just isn’t going to work.

This story developed while I was asleep last night, and when I woke up, the commentary I read included a lot of people who were shocked by these actions. People know that the GOP has embraced racism, so that wasn’t shocking, but usually there’s some pretense when they act on their racism — they build in something that could look like an excuse; some sort of plausible deniability about the racism.

But this time they didn’t. They chose to be openly and directly racist. No hiding it or shielding it or attempting to soften it. Just outright racism in plain sight.

If Republican racists are this open about it? If they have no instinct to hide their racism? That means we’re going to see more and more of these kinds of actions.

We have to wake up and pay attention. It’s a stomach-curdling bowl of un-democratic, un-American fascism, topped with a horrible dollop of racism. We should be very angry about this.

We must be vocal. We must vote out the racists. We must vote out the fascists.

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More News I’m Angry About

Black Couple Says Texas Authorities Seized Their Newborn Because They Chose a Midwife Over a Hospital. Rodney and Temecia Jackson say their pediatrician reported them to Dallas CPS when their baby developed jaundice, and Rodney was arrested for not giving her up. This is such an infuriating story. Please read it.

For decades, Justice Clarence Thomas has secretly accepted luxury trips from a major Republican donor. The extent and frequency of these apparent gifts to Thomas has no known precedent in modern SCOTUS history. WHY IS HE STILL ALLOWED TO BE ON THE SUPREME COURT I AM SO MAD.

Related: Back in 2004, the LA Times reported on Justice Thomas taking gifts from right-wing billionaires, so he just stopped disclosing them(!) as required by law.

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Small House Bathroom Floor Plans

Shifting gears now. The bathroom subfloor was installed this week, so I really need to decide on the floor plan for the Small House bathroom because the walls will go up as early as next week. The floor plan will determine where we build the doorway and place the plumbing and electrical lines.

A few basic factors about the bathroom:
- The room is 2.5m x 3m (roughly 8 x 10 ft).
- We can put the door in two different places on one wall — in the center or to the right.
- The ceiling is low — at least compared to the ceilings in every other room. It’s tall enough for someone tall (like Gijsbert) to stand in comfortably, but it’s low.
- The room has no window, so we’ll need to light it really well to make sure it doesn’t feel cave-like.

I’ve tried about 50 different layouts and narrowed it down to two. Here’s the first one:

The door is centered, the vanity is to your right when you walk in, and the bathtub is to your left. There are partitions at the end of the bathtub and vanity that divide the space. One partition creates a shower space, the other hides the toilet.

I’m probably favoring this layout, except for one issue: for the bathtub, the max size we can use here is 150cm (5 ft). That’s not tiny, but it’s not big either — most freestanding bathtubs available these days are 170-180cm (though there are a few in the 150cm range).

Here’s the second floor plan:

The door is to the right, the vanity is to your left as you enter the room, and the bathtub is straight ahead. There is a partition between the bathtub and the shower. The toilet is next to the vanity cabinet, which also semi-hides the toilet.

In this layout, the room is less divided, and we have space for a 170 or 180cm bathtub, the shower has a bit more space as well. But, we lose counter space on the vanity and can only have one sink. (Two sinks is not important to me personally, so that’s not a dealbreaker for me.)

Do you have any thoughts? Can you picture yourself in either of these floor plans? Are you seeing any red flags? Once the layout is decided, I can choose the style and fixtures and finishes for the space.

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That’s all for now. I hope you are looking forward to the weekend. Feel free to comment on anything I mentioned above, or whatever’s on your mind.

kisses,
Gabrielle