Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. BlueSky: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
When I was 16 I was pro-life, I wanted kids and to get married, I had next to no inkling of what gay people went through and “disapproved of the lifestyle” because that’s what my parents told me to think, I didn’t even know asexuals existed and if I had I probably would have thought they just needed to get laid.
It’s 15 years later now and I’m pro-choice, I don’t want kids of my own, I’ve been married and divorced and am now engaged, the majority of my friends are some form of queer as well as myself, and I am on the ace spectrum.
We change as people as we grow up. It happens. We get exposed to new things, learn new ways of thinking, see other sides to things.
Which is one of the reasons Tumblr’s toxic black/white nonsense is very infuriating.
Because it’s a bunch of kids who haven’t learned yet that shit’s gonna change trying to make absolutes out of every situation. They’re always out to find the bad guy.
Like there’s a very reverse Scooby Doo kind of feeling like “Oh look, let’s take the mask off your fave artist/actor/etc and reveal that they are the monster. Look how problematic!!!” and for small infractions too.
I dunno man. Life’s going to change for you, people are going to change around you, and YOU are going to change as you grow. Who you are right now is not who you are going to be at 30.
I mean, lord, can you imaging parenting kids with the same attitude tumblr has? You kid screws up once and you’re flipping shit on them and kicking them out of the house?
It’s not good behavior, always looking for the bad in things, always looking for a monster. You can take a stand in other ways against bad shit in the world and it doesn’t have to mean harassing people. Give to charities, promote things like help hotlines, volunteer places, take classes on how to counsel people, there’s so many good ways to help. Badgering people, sending death threats, being a dick? Those aren’t helping.
Ya’ll will change as you grow and you gotta acknowledge that you change and so do others and that change isn’t instant and that some things never 100% change and that’s okay. The world is like that. There’s stuff we’ll never eradicate 100%. It sucks. I’d love to prevent some shit from ever happening ever but that’s not how life is. So instead we do what we can while we’re here to help others.
Be kind. Don’t be a dick. The world is nicer that way.
In my class we have a worm day. If they promise to be gentle and not tug, they can hold one of those beautiful squiggly caretakers of dirt. The wonder they have for it is so real - and I say, did you know they have 5 hearts and love you with all of them. Then I say, “are you holding a boy worm or a girl worm” and they guess. They are all right, and they are all wrong, because worms are both. And I say that. I say, “they are just like people; sometimes not a boy or a girl but something in between, or sometimes they’re both on different days. And they still love you with all 5 hearts.”
“Cool,” says one kid. “I don’t want to be a boy, I want to be a girl sometimes.” And I say okay.
Children are taught fear. They are taught that the worms are gross. It isn’t until they’re a few years older than my class - up in 3rd or 4th grade - that they start shrieking at my little worm friends. They won’t play the silly games or sing the silly songs or even promise not to tug. A fourth grader hears my lesson about gender and says, “That’s so weird,” and suddenly I hear from the mouths of these beautiful children, “Yeah,” “this is weird,” “No, mine is a girl.”
It is not the 4th grader I blame. It is the person in her life that saw something beautiful and ruined it for her. It is the “put that down, it’s gross,” “you don’t want to get dirty” “there’s us and there’s them.” I want to show her - without the humble little blind noses of worms, we are nothing. We need them. Did you know if they grow a belt they’re over a year old! Spent tunnelling through the secrets of roots. I want to show her: it’s okay if tomorrow you feel like a boy or maybe something neither, something different that is entirely you.
But fear, once discovered, is not an easy stain to get out. We say, “What will we tell the children” and forget - the children already heard. They heard you snickering about the person down the street. They saw you talking to your friend about “those people”. And they internalize it, burrow it into them. We don’t tell the children, we model hatred until the children can’t hear you, can’t hear you declare, “do as I say, not as I do.”
Later the 4th grader goes home. “Ugh,” her mother says with a shudder, seeing my box, “I hate worms.”
Robert E. Lee himself refused to wear his confederate uniform after the confederacy’s defeat in the American civil war. At his funeral he was not buried in it and no one in attendance was permitted to wear theirs either. He also declared that his confederate battle flag (what we now call “the confederate flag”) never be raised again and that it was a flag of treason.
When you think about kids in middle school who have attendance problems, it can be easy to blame the parents (or the kids themselves), shake your head, and throw up your hands at a problem that is too big to be fixable. But what if all some of these kids need are clean clothes to wear to school? Whirlpool has taken on what could be dismissed as a minor issue and seen tremendous results.
Last year Whirlpool created the Whirlpool Care Counts Program and donated seventeen pairs of washers and dryers to school districts in St. Louis and in Fairfield, California. The schools then invited kids with attendance problems to bring in their laundry to be cleaned while they were in class.
The results were astounding: over 90% of participating students increased their attendance that year, at-risk students attended almost two more weeks of school, and each student got approximately 50 loads of laundry done at school. This year, Whirlpool will expand the program to twenty more schools in five more districts.
On Thursday morning, the U.S. Justice Department issued a memo saying it would end the use of private prisons to hold federal inmates. The decision comes on the heels of a major internal report by the Justice Department showing that its private prison contractors weren’t running safe prisons. Similarly, scathing reports exposed the widespread abuse and neglect in private prisons. But this isn’t the end of private prisons.
The game’s creators have launched a fundraiser, America Votes With Cards Against Humanity, where they’re letting their customers decide which of the two campaigns should received the donations the company collects.
“Today, we’re letting America choose between two new expansion packs about either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump,” the project’s website reads. “At the end of this promotion, Cards Against Humanity will tally up the sales of both packs, and depending on which pack gets more support, we will donate all the money in support of Hillary Clinton’s campaign.”
incredible
holy shit
I know it’s not the same thing, but this Ryan Lochte (did I spell that right? do I give a shit?) reminds me of people trying to treat Kylo like he’s a misguided teenager. Asshole is thirty years old.
Like how old does a white man have to be before ‘boys will be boys’ stops working?
