At least I used to love it.
I used to spend hours a day here. If I was working, I looked forward to the end of the day when I could sit down for a while and catch up with the rec list and the front page. When my mother was ill I and I was sitting up nights with her I knew there would always be something to read here and someone awake to discuss it with. If I had a day off, I reveled in the luxury of spending all day here, bouncing in and out between other netsurfing, having the chance to read and comment on everything I wanted. I was an IGTNT author and a major contributor to The Grieving Room. I was here for Dean vs. Clark. I was here for the original pie fight. I knew all the dK insider jargon and even enjoyed the thankless job of tag maintenance. Daily Kos kept me company when I was caring for my mother during her prolonged illness and kept me sane after her death when I thought grief was going to shatter me into a thousand pieces.
Now I am joining the boycott.
It's been a long time coming.
I've been feeling less and less attached to Big Orange and it makes me sad.
I was so thrilled the night Obama won the election, and I was so excited about what it was going to be like at Daily Kos to have a Democratic president to support and a re-election campaign to strategize about together.
Looking back, I was naive. Even before the inauguration lines were being drawn, and I found myself on the wrong side of rox/sux even before rox/sux was officially born (unless you count the primary wars).
Repsonses here to the Henry Louis Gates episode and the President's comments about it were like a slap in the face.
Put rox/sux together with a willful blindness about racism and it was a short roll downhill from there to the President being told to get angry and grow a pair and fight and stop being a spineless wimp. It was a short trip from there to people defending the president's supporters being called the dumbest motherfuckers in the world. It was a short step from there to 70 people reccing a comment that Obama did not deserve to be mentioned in the same breath with Martin Luther King Jr.
Wow.
I have never called anyone racist for policy disagreements with the President. I do not believe that all people who dislike the president are racist. I knew there were people here waaay further to the left than I, and that no President who was able to get elected would ever please them.
Then I saw people here spewing the same RW talking points against Obama that I could see on Fakes News or hear on hate radio or read on Hillaryis44. When you lie down with dogs you wake up with fleas and you cannot use the same talking points that avowed racists use without opening yourself to a charge that you are more allied with the racists than with the First Black President and the people supporting him. Then when POC objected to this kind of language, the in-crowd was quick to assert that black kogs have no right to define our own experience or claim our own history or be offended when people of privilege try to redefine our experience and history by their standards.
Black Kos was a haven where trolls were dealt with. I lurked mostly, but I loved the writing and the comments and the sense of community and shared reality.
When I first heard about the purge there were a lot of names I was glad to see gone. But when I realized that some of the strongest voices at Black Kos had also been banned, I got angry. Markos had decided to punish the people who challenged the racially insensitive/clueless/tone-deaf remarks equally with the people who defended the racially insensitive/clueless/tone-deaf remarks.
I feel like I lost my best friend. My haven where I used to come and connect with other political junkies and learn about candidates and get involved with community support projects. Came for the politics, stayed for the community.
One last point: When I first became active on dK, Sunday nights were always a special time. After working a 10 hour day, I'd come home and make dinner for mom, get her cleaned up, have a home worship service sitting next to her hospital bed, give her her pills and shots and say goodnight, and at midnight or 1 in the morning after she fell asleep I would have my late Sunday night/early Monday morning "me time". On Daily Kos. I looked forward to those solitary hours. They didn't feel solitary, actually.
This Sunday night is different. I still worked a 10 hour day. It took me over three hours to get home because of weird Sunday bus schedules. I was looking forward to staying up late and catching up on what I missed on the blog. But when I came home I saw the SistahSpeak diary suggesting the boycott. Others were writing diaries about why they were joining the boycott. At first I wasn't going to write a diary about why I was participating but after I wrote a long comment in Robinswing's diary I thought I would expand on it. Just for the record. Google cache is forever. Came for the politics, stayed for the community, offended by racially insensitive remarks about the President and his supporters, boycotting in solidarity with others who want to make a statement about racism in Left Blogistan. If we all get banned, maybe it's a signal that the real world is calling. Or at least some other places on the internet. :-D
I love this place. For seven years I have practically lived here. But I'll be finding someplace else to crash for the next week. It's a symbolic gesture but the only one I can think of. People on this blog whom I think of as friends got smacked down for vigorously defending themselves, and I need to stand with them.
I need a new home page and someplace else to get my political news--any suggestions?