Confess My Secrets

Normally, it’s always been very young children and it’s only their parents that can speak about it. The narrative gets controlled, the conspiracy theorists talk about how it’s all an act, so much bullshit.

But these are kids who are active on social media, incredibly close to voting age, and they’re demanding their voices are heard. Every single thing that downplays, dismisses or conspiracies the shooting has been subverted by their efforts, and they’re not letting adults who’ve never lived what they lived through control the narrative.

“It was a conspiracy!” “No, we have video evidence of it happening.” “Shouldn’t you be calling 911 instead of making videos?” “We called 911 so many times they told us to stop.” “But he was a troubled child!” “We were ALL troubled, that’s no excuse.” And it just goes on like this.

The whole energy around it feels different. These kids are not having this bullshit, and while they should not have to stand their ground and fight this battle, goddamn it they are going to. If the adults won’t, then goddamn it these kids will draw a fucking line and say ‘no, no more, this is bullshit’. 

It is *absolutely* deliberate that this is attached to a bill about trans rights, because that gives them the maximum “oh well that doesn’t affect me” safety from progressive activists as well as the maximum “yeah fuck those tr*nnies back to hell” coverage from conservatives. Very few cis people give a shit about trans rights, and a LOT of cis people care a hell of a lot about hurting trans people.

we don’t give a shit about their ~beliefs~??? I dont care if mr dick is sittin in his house thinking jews are awful. I would LIKE for him to not think that but I ultimately do not care. I do not care about changing his thoughts. 

i care about preventing him from having enough of a public platform that he and people like him gain the power to ACT ON those beliefs.

so yes actually! punching nazis when they are trying to be suave on television, such that they are unwilling to try to go and appear suave on television again, does accomplish that. 

It’s why they can so easily play devil’s advocate, and why they think they’ve won an argument when their opponent becomes “emotional” or personally invested.

Americans aren’t told this shit. 

The only thing we’re taught about any Middle Eastern country in school is that 1) the region exists 2) it’s where The War is happening and 3) Muslim people live there. That’s it. Maybe if you’re lucky you’ll get into the Hammurabi Code and some early Babylonian stuff but American schools seem to think that if it happened outside Europe and before the colonial period, or makes America look bad and isn’t about A Very Watered Down Version of What Slavery Was, it’s not important.

Info on this is almost notoriously hard to find. It’s not in any texts on American and Russian involvement in the Middle East during the Cold War that I can find. You have to specifically look for a book about the Shah’s return to power, and even then you’d be hard pressed to find a book like that at your local bookstore. Once you get into some higher level college courses you might know about it, but the people who can afford those are more likely to already be indoctrinated into a certain Way of Thinking (read: they’re racist as shit) by the time they get there. And it’s almost like you have to know about it beforehand if you want to find information on it.

She’s 60. She never heard of this.

As I was explaining this and how, during the Regan years, we funded Osama Bin Laden to fight against Russia, leading to the destruction of much of the infrastructure in the region, one of the plant workers came in to get his badge fixed.

He works in the quality control lab. He served 15 years active duty in the Army. Super smart guy, has a masters in chemistry and another masters in biology, raises saltwater fish in his spare time for sale, has the saltwater aquarium setup of the gods.  Raises rare corals too, some of which he donates to be used in re-seeding reefs around the world, but that’s a side tangent.

And he listened for a minute, then nodded and said “Yeah. I was there during that. I helped train people to fight. They wanted us to help them build schools and hospitals, after, but we were only interested in them as cannon fodder. Left the whole area in ruins. I wasn’t surprised when they hated us for it later. Told people then it would happen. We let them know then that they were only valuable to America as expendable bodies. Why wouldn’t they resent us for that?”

And she just looked floored.

“So…” She started, after a few minutes. “What do you think of Trump?”

“I hate him. He’s a coward and he’s going to get good people killed.” He didn’t even blink. “

She looked back and forth between us for a second, and then asked how I knew all this.

“I research things.” I said. “Google is great.” He nodded enthusiastically.

And she just sat there for a second and then said, really quietly, “I didn’t know.”

She lived through it.

edit: oh, and the class was an elective, and only spring semester, because the same teacher did intro to law in fall semester. so basically only 24 kids a year in all of minneapolis, to the best of my knowlege, were informed of our deliberate destabilization of the middle east in the 80′s and 90′s.

it’s not like we could just spread the word on social media, either. there was no such thing.

it’s easy for millennials to look down on gen-x and boomers for being ignorant, but we just didn’t have the tools to acquire this information. we may not have believed everything we were told – hell, gen-x at least was famously cynical about the propaganda we were taught in school – but that didn’t mean we were able to find out the truth.

I am from the USA.

I have one of the most top-teir private insurance plans available.

I live in a city with four, count ‘em, FOUR hospitals.

I have been a patient of my pulmonologist for 2 years.

I scheduled my next appointment today. The first available appointment?

In three and a half months.

Please stop with this “you can see a specialist in a week!” Nonsense. No you can’t. Not with elite insurance and not as an existing patient. I’ve had to make specialist appointments as far as 8 months out.

Yesterday I made an appointment with my primary for a somewhat urgent matter. His next available? In 3 weeks.

I hate going to the emergency room because the average wait time is 4-10 hours. I ended up in a coma once because of complications caused by the wait time.

I am in the most medically privileged position a chronically ill person in the US can be, and the wait times to see my doctor are still very very long.

There are people in my country who can’t even afford to go to the doctor and people justify it by saying “but in Canada, they have to ~*wait*~.

We wait here too. We wait JUST AS LONG, and sometimes even LONGER.

But not everyone gets to wait, and they die because of it.

That disgusts me.

just at the age of 5, i had been told that boys made fun of me and teased me because they liked me, that one day i would grow up and marry a handsome husband, that i should go flirt with my mom’s friend’s son, and that i should happily let little boys that i do not know kiss me on the cheek because it’s considered cute and romantic

that, my friends, is assuming my straightness at the ripe old age of five. and straight people do this all the damn time. 

so don’t you fucking dare sit there and tell me that teenagers are too young to know if they’re gay, lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, trans, asexual, non-binary, what have you. because not only is that bullshit, that is suggesting that our identities are so inherently scandalous and sexual that they can only be claimed when we’re older. that it’s wrong to be a young kid and be gay. that it’s wrong to know at a young age that maybe you aren’t straight and you aren’t cis. you’ve over here got white suburban parents clutching their pearls because we dare teach kindergarteners about being gay and what that means

And it’s so ingrained in kids that you have to like a kid of the opposite gender. Like, I got shit from my classmates for not liking anyone. Because My asexual ass didn’t like any of the guys since they were mostly jerks to me. And like, yeah kids that age don’t have ‘sexual attraction’, but they can still have a crush on someone completely just because they’re ‘cute’. So whenever I was asked by my classmates about my ‘crushes’ and I said no one, they’d get on my case. Eventually they tricked me by asking which guy I liked best, so I said ‘well, I guess if I had to pick one guy it’d be this one because he’s nice to me?”, and they proceeded to totally ruin what little friendship I had with him by loudly ‘teasing’ us every time we interacted. Yeah, I’m totally blushing right now because I’m ‘talking to my crush’ and not because you fucks are purposely embarrassing me.

All because we’re told from day one that we have to like someone of the opposite gender. Because even small children who don’t know about sex at all have this knowledge of ‘you must like the opposite gender or you’re weird and must be shunned’. 

And you know what? I grew up knowing that ‘It’s Okay to be Gay!’. My mom is a major Ally, like the best Ally, and I’ve always known I could possibly be gay. Though, of course, I didn’t like any of my female classmates either because they were also jerks. And I didn’t know Asexuality was a thing until I was 17(not to mention nonbinary genders and all that) but before that I was like ‘okay, I guess I like both genders I guess? I’m not into the sex like my friends are, but romantically I could like a guy or girl ”. Like, hmm, I didn’t like any of my classmates, but what fictional crushes did I have back then? What year did Atlantis come out? 2001? Okay I was like five at the time and I had a crush on Kida(not that it ever went away). And there were probably earlier ones I’m forgetting because that was more than three quarters of my life ago.

But ‘minors are straight because other attractions are too sexual’ or whatever. Yeah, because y’all didn’t teach us ‘the birds and the bees’ from age nine? How we’ll totally want to do the do with the opposite gender? I was lucky to get one of those health teachers that was like ‘sex is okay to do’, but said absolutely fuck all about anything other than straight sex. 

As of end of day, June 1, the following states have joined:

Massachusetts

Oregon

Colorado

Hawaii

Connecticut

Virginia

Rhode Island

According to Wikipedia, these ten member states combined make up 30.1% of the US population, 35.3% of US GDP, and 17.8% of U.S. carbon dioxide emissions.

61 mayors and counting have also joined in (I told you voting for mayors is important). A few of the many highlights:

New York City

Los Angeles, CA

Chicago, IL

Boston, MA

Houston, TX

Philadelphia, PA

New Orleans, LA

Orlando, FL

Atlanta, GA

Washington DC

Elon Musk and Disney’s Bob Iger have quit Trump’s advisory council over it.

my favourite thing ever in the history of this universe is the misogyny speech. i love it. i love it so much. 

for those who don’t know what the misogyny speech is: australia’s PM julia gillard was our first female prime minister and was bullied relentlessly throughout her career by sexist politicians saying that as a woman she was unfit to lead. and then. then. one day, julia gillard snapped.

the resulting three-minute speech, known simply as the ‘misogyny speech’ in australia, was possibly the most epic smackdown seen in australian political history, surpassed only by “i wanna do you slowly”. it was incredible. students memorised it and marched through the streets yelling it. a national australian choir arranged it as a five-harmony piece. even hillary clinton went out of her way to meet julia gillard and tell her how fucking awesome the misogyny speech was.

i, personally, have the misogyny speech memorised. because i live in tony abbott’s electorate, and my dream of dreams is to see him at the shops one day and follow him while yelling it.

You can ask how long it will take for the pizza to get to you, and they will tell you how far away a dispatcher is.

My flat-mate’s date for the night was almost as drunk as her.  She had passed out in her room and locked the door.  He refused to leave because he wanted to have sex.  He also demanded food because he was dealing with “whiskey dick”.  He didn’t like the lack of food in the fridge.  I called 911, did the stuff stated above, and he was getting PISSED about how long the “order” was taking.  He took my phone, demanded they “hurry the fuck up”.  Police arrived two minutes later, arrested him, and helped me file a police report.  Pressing charges wasn’t necessary because he had warrants on him from THREE different states for the very thing he planned to do to me.  Several months after this happened one of the officers informed me he was charged with two felonies because he crossed stay lines, and will be serving no less than 35 years in prison.  The officer ripped into my flat-mate about her bringing home complete strangers, while drunk, knowing full well this shit could happen. 

This was 14 years ago.  

Do the pizza order, do it as calmly as you can.  The dispatcher I spoke to said things like this:

“If he’s drunk say you want mushrooms.”  I said I want extra mushrooms.

“If he’s threatening you with sexual assault say you want onions.”  I said I want onions.

She went like this with different toppings and sauces for a description of him, like pineapple if he’s blonde, black olives if he’s tall, extra large if he’s tall, etc.

Contributing to oppositional nominee funds for 24 vulnerable Republican representatives is a way to get them good and scared now, so they won’t try any more shenangians.

This is so incredibly important, because they’ll be looking at fundraising, and so will the Senate.

Under the Republican “Healthcare” plan, rape would be a pre-existing condition that insurers don’t have to cover

I’m reminded of the time Paul Ryan once casually implied that rape was little more than another form of conception…and how, under the guise of “family values, Republicans pushed laws that give convicted rapists visitation rights…

Republicans are evil. Period. You’re on the wrong side of literally everything if you support them, even conditionally.