Stuck at home with “nothing to do?” Don’t be a bored bastard. Here are some ideas:
- Send emails or make calls to various legislatures and committees with live OBC bills. Send the message that only non-restrictive and non-conditional access laws are acceptable. Restore rights for all; Don’t dole out favors for some. Go to BN’s Legislative Page for a list of current bills. (Warning: the way things are going you may have to just leave a message.)
- Read an adoption book, especially The Bastard Chronicles: 20 Years of Adoptee Equality Activism in the US and the Birth of Bastard Nation. Also, check out the Bastard Nation Reading Room for plenty of suggestions. Most are available on Kindle or other online sources so you don’t have to leave the house and get virused -up.
- Start an adoptee rights page for your state or city on Facebook.
- Visit Adoption Twitter. Get in a fight.
- Tell selected deformers to go fuck themselves.
- Binge on TV. There are plenty of adoption stories to trigger even the best of us. The Most Dangerous Animal of All, currently on Hulu, is a documentary about an adoptee who is convinced that his bio father is the Zodiac Killer, even when evidence rejects his theory. It is not sensational, but a thoughtful mediation on identity, memory, family, belonging, and adoption pain and loss. Adoptee Gary Stewart is not a con man. He is simply an adoptee looking for his truth.
- Likewise, catch up on soaps. There’s no place like Port Charles, Salem, or Genoa City for baby and DNA switching and stealing, SORASing, LDAing, and long- lost reunions. On General Hospital the Wiley saga continues. At this rate, he will be 37 before the case is settled by Port Chuck’s incompetent probate court that would take Charles Manson over Anne Frank in a custody battle. And watch the explosion on DOOL when Kristen learns her baby was switched with a dead newborn. at the hospital. WTF does that to a DiMera? A Kiarakis, of course.
- Investigate your state’s access laws.
- Support International Adoptees and Adoptee Citizenship. Stop adoptee deportations. Adoptee Rights Campaign and Adoptees for Justice need your help.
- Check out Safe Haven Baby Boxes and The Hope Box Facebook pages to learn how vulnerable women are encouraged and manipulated to drop the baby in the wall and walk away guilt- and name-free, and then be hailed a hero for not following their natural instinct to throttle it at birth.
- Roll a joint with your Amended Birth Certificate
- Fine-hone your hatred for your state legislature, selected politicians, deformers, your personal adoption agency, birth or adoptive parents.
- Create a meme that blames your stomach problems, failure to pass algebra, dislike of ants, and spread of COVID-19 on your adoption. Expand your meme to a blog. Expand your blog to a book.
- Make a YouTube video about adoptee rights
- Send money to your favorite adoptee civil rights organization
Finally, read Camus’ The Plague. Think of it as a metaphor for AdoptionLand.
“how hard it must be to live only with what one knows and what one remembers, cut off from what one hopes for!”
New York Adoptee Rights Coalition
