J.S. Park @jspark3000 - Tumblr Blog

My book on grief is nine months old and it’s 40% off right now. ❤️‍🩹

There is a chapter on the grief of loneliness which describes grieving the communities in which we no longer feel safe. I wrote it about 2016 and 2020 and it sadly feels relevant today. It’s a very hard grief to lose the people you once trusted.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400336848

#As Long As You Need #grief #book #grieving #loneliness #mental health

My heart is with every soul who did not make it through this year,

every child and mother and father and sibling buried under rubble,

every family detained and separated and starved,

every student l*nched or k*lled in another preventable sh**ting,

every child without meals and medicine,

every tender spirit whose mental health needed better.

I applaud those of us who made it,

but so many didn’t.

I grieve and honor every soul who should still be here.

#grief #new year #2025 #2026

Shout-out to every person still creating and writing and drawing and singing and choreographing and building and sculpting and imagining in this anxious and overwhelming time.

Far from being “trivial,” your art is needed, it is medicine and protest, it is a reminder of what we can be. Every line is a wave pushing against the current. Even if you create while screaming: please keep creating. You remind us why we’re alive. You’re giving life.

Here I fixed it.

#Trump #black out poetry

“Nobody's free until everybody's free”

— Fannie Lou Hamer

“If a society permits one portion of its citizenry to be menaced or destroyed, then, very soon, no one in that society is safe.”

— James Baldwin

“Just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else.”

— Toni Morrison

Free immigrants.

Free children.

Free Palestine.

Free Sudan.

Free Congo.

Free Yemen.

Free Somalia.

Free Lebanon.

Free Venezuela.

Free the wounded,

the weary, the oppressed.

I just finished writing my third book and I’m proud and happy to say that not a single word of the book was generated by AI. Neither were my other books.

I also disabled AI search on my browser so I had to dig into the results any time I searched through them.

This is probably an insignificant brag since AI is almost the norm now and I’m just one tiny author so maybe it doesn’t matter.

Just wanted to share as it feels important to me that my writing and my story is my own.

(Anyone else? ✍️)

It is tragic that so many people are more offended by a victim’s cries of pain than the source of the pain itself.

If you dismiss someone’s pain because their reaction is “too much,” that’s a deflection from accountability.

If you think a victim is being “too loud,”

you are not a safe person,

but a vehicle and enabler and funnel for abuse.

One of the most common things you’ll hear about a person who did terrible things is “They also did really good things!”

Please know that abusers and oppressors do good things sometimes because

1) it offsets their own guilt

2) it pads their reputation

3) they compartmentalize who and what they value.

In my opinion, no good deed can compensate for villainy. It only means that they knew the difference and largely chose evil anyway.

I watched a video about messages sent to space, and those by children were very moving (and funny). It reminds me how small we are and how much we need each other.

“Dear Aliens. Who knows, someday we won’t be aliens but will call each other Friend.”

“Please do not eat all of us. If you do, you won’t have anything to eat.”

“What would I do with an alien? I would do sign language with my hands. I would make sure that he has some food after his long trip and ask him to be my friend.”

“First, I am sorry to call you Aliens … I would like to tell you that our planet is so beautiful with blue oceans and blue sky … Some people think that we have destroyed it and others think that we have made it better. Both ideas might be right. I think we have destroyed it because we made a lot of wars. On the other hand, I think we have made it better because we made some forest preserves to protect it from any danger. Changing things for the better is a good idea. Don’t you think so?”

“Dear Aliens, Please help us save our world. Not, from you, from ourselves … Our planet is polluted, many nations are at war, there is civil unrest, and our economy is in turmoil. Perhaps you can save our world. We’re sure that you are friendly beings, as you have traveled so far to see us. Please come live among us and share your wisdom with us; we really need it.”

“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”

— Arundhati Roy

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.

“I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence.”

— Toni Morrison, The Nation, Mar. 23, 2015

In case you need to hear this:

Please know your value is

not contingent on your usefulness, productivity, outcome, contribution,

not on you being a pillar or example or model citizen,

not on you being polite or a team player or playing along,

not accorded by a grade or papers or status or perceptions of those committed to dehumanize you,

not on you being “excellent” or a “good one.”

Your value is permanent

and anything and anyone that denies your humanity has only denied their own.

“Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself. And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place. Cultural and political forces can sweep clean all but the ‘safe,’ all but state-approved art.”

— Toni Morrison, The Source of Self-Regard (2019)

I hate that one day I’ll have to explain to my children this entire era of American Christianity and its absolute absurdity and hypocrisy.

I hope I’ll get to explain it in past tense.

I saw this comment recently and it still rings true:

“First they came for the journalists

and I did not speak out

because no one knew what happened.”

“I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think l've come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.”

— Captain G. M. Gilbert, the Army psychologist assigned to watch the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials 1945-1949

I have been at hundreds of deathbeds and I have never once expected anyone to mourn their abuser. There may be rage, or relief, or a long exhale. But there is zero obligated sorrow for someone who embodied tyranny and suffocation over a family for years, for a lifetime. You’re not obligated to grieve an abuser, an oppressor, a monster. We can grieve they were a person and a bearer of life. We can grieve what they might have been and what they have taken. And that’s about all I can say on that.

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