(⊙_⊙✿)

yes absolutely

What is happening in Mexico? 

How it began

On September 26, students our age (~19-22) were attacked by the local police and gangs in Iguala, Guerrero in Mexico. They were studying to become teachers at Escuela Normal Rural de Ayotzinapa. I have read many articles about how the students were in the town to ask for money to help pay tuition, to protest discrimination of rural school teachers, to travel to commemorate another student massacre of 1968, etc., so I am unsure of what is what here. But the students were on the buses and police blocked their way to get the students out. When they did, they opened fire on the students at once. Some students threw rocks back in self-defense, but the students were unarmed. Six people died and 17 were injured. Three students died, a taxi driver, a woman in a taxi, and a football player that was just 15 years old (x). The injured were taken away by an ambulance, local journalists came, etc but it was not over as more men came in plain clothes and rifles (x). These men are apart of Guerreros Unidos and work for the Beltran Leyva cartel. The students were forced into police vans and have since disappeared. 43 students are missing.

Some of the students escaped by hiding in nearby houses. One terrified student tried running away, but he was found later yet with his eyes gouged out and his face completely sliced away to the bone. A YOUNG MAN only 19 years old suffered through this. (As a warning, be aware that there are photos online and that while searching deep through articles and tags, they are present.) A survivor of the attack says this is “symbol of the cartel assassins” (x).

22 local policemen have been detained for suspicion of working with Guerreros Unidos. This is how authorities were then tipped on what has happened to some students. (x) (x)

The Mass Graves

~ More than a week later, on Saturday, authorities found mass graves nearby that has 28 burned remains with the tips (x). We fear that this may be some of the students. We won’t have DNA analysis to confirm anything for another two weeks, if not longer.

MORE mass graves were found yesterday, but it is still unknown about how many remains these graves have (x). 

UPDATE: Not all bodies in the graves belong to the students. (x) (x)

Keep in mind that the CITY MAYOR AND HIS WIFE are on the RUN. No one knows where they are. 

We still don’t understand the reason behind this violence. Why kidnap and kill these young men? There are several explanations online, but how do you explain something like this? One story is that the mayer’s wife was giving a speech that day and did not want to be disrupted by the students. Keep in mind that the wife is the head of the city’s family welfare department and also has family connections to cartels (x). There are other alternatives online, but I don’t know. I just don’t. 

You cannot be silent about what is happening in Mexico

You can’t. You just can’t. Social media has a big impact and this story has to spread. In the last 24 hours I have seen an incredible boost in coverage about Ayotzinapa.

On Wednesday, thousands protested the disappearance of the students in Mexico.

Amounting pressure is being put on the Mexican government to find the missing students. There is also added outrage and demand ‘to punish politicians linked to organized crime’. It is no shock when considering the police corruption and brutality in Mexico. As Mexico bleeds, we all bleed. 

Americans cannot ignore the violence of drug cartels and place it as just a problem in Mexico. There is too much innocent bloodshed. And because BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars are collected in the United States by Mexican drug cartels, it is a shared responsibility (x). CHILDREN ARE DYING. Do not skim over these articles, do not just read them and do nothing, you have to act and spread the information. Do not be silent. Please, please, please help and pay attention. 

ARTICLES

Mexico missing students: Nationwide protests held | BBC

Mexico relatives search for students in Guerrero | BBC

Mexico missing students: New mass graves found in Iguala | BBC

There’s little mystery to this mass grave: Mexico’s drug war is killing children | The Guardian

Are missing students in mass graves found near Iguala, Mexico? | CNN

Mexico Drug War Fast Facts | CNN

Iguala, Guerrero, tiene un viernes violento con ataques y muertes | CNN (Español)

Survivor of Mexico Student Massacre: ‘It Was Terrifying’ | NBC

Anatomy of a Mexican Student Massacre | The Daily Beast

The Apparent Massacre of Dozens of Students Exposes the Corruption at the Heart of Mexico | TIME

43 Missing Students, 1 Missing Mayor: Of Crime And Collusion In Mexico | NPR

TUMBLR TEXT POSTS (these have better information than I can explain)

free-clementine | Nobody even cares what’s happening in Mexico.

thinkmexican | Mexico Takes to the Streets for Students of Ayotzinapa

animalsandtrees | In Mexico

riseandshinecourage | Please, stop to read this.

there are more and more if you just search

So, I woke up this morning to see my sister’s facebook status talking about how she wasn’t going to be seeing Paper Towns because she really didn’t like one of the actresses included. I was confused, because my little sister has been excited for this movie for a long time, and it’s one of her favorite books. The comments about people asking who the actress was and why confused me even more, and I ended up popping over to the IMDb page to see what she was talking about.

As it turns out, they cast a girl named Caitlin Carver as Becca, who apparently has the glorious role of being the girl Margo’s boyfriend was cheating on her with. It’s a pretty minor role, and one that you’d probably be able to get over seeing if she was just an actress you didn’t like. 

But my sister hates this girl because she watched me grow up in the shadow of what this girl did to me in middle school. She watched her older sister suffer through mental illness, anxiety, panic attacks, and severe depression because of the way this girl treated her.

I moved to Alabama when I was eleven years old, and I was already struggling with starting at a new school, going through puberty, the onset of my depression, and some very severe family issues. I was chubby, I didn’t know how to dress, I had frizzy hair, and I found every ounce of friendship and comfort that I had through books like Harry Potter and Artemis Fowl. I kept a blog on xanga starting in around November of my seventh grade year, and kept in touch with my friends from Missouri through there. (spookyaspapertostart is one of those friends, and has remained a close friend since.) 

I noticed quickly that there was a pecking order at my middle school that I hadn’t seen in my elementary school at Missouri. The girls on the dance team liked to pick on the other kids—usually in that Regina George fashion that middle-school girls have. It hurt, and a lot of the reason it hurt was because school was supposed to be my escape from the awful things that were happening to me at home, and now there wasn’t escape. There was me being bullied and harassed at school, and there was me being laughed at for crying about it when I went home.

The bullying got worse, and started to fixate on me and my close friends specifically as opposed to ~loser girls~ in general, when some of my friends from Missouri stood up for me and reached out to her via xanga to tell her to leave me the hell alone because they were sick of seeing me in so much pain. From then on, everyone in that group seemed to know my name, my xanga handle, and everything that my heartbroken, lonely, depressed eleven-year-old self had posted online.

This is not an exhaustive list of what happened, but these are the events that stand out the most to me:

While walking around the track in gym, her and her friends (male and female) would trail behind me and my friend. They’d throw rocks at us when the teachers weren’t looking. They’d call us dykes. They frequently called my friend racial slurs (mostly related to her being Mexican, though she was from South Korea). 

They referred to me as a freak behind my back and to my face. I remember distinctly being ushered by a friend from one side of the courtyard to the other while a boy went “That’s her? That’s the freak?”

Her and her friends tried to hand hairbrushes to me on more than one occasion because I was obviously too white trash to afford one. (Because my hair was frizzy. Haha. Get it?)

Her friends made direct references to my xanga entries (again, ones that I wrote because I was lonely, and scared, and going through too much for an eleven year old to handle), and at one point read or quoted bits of them out loud in front of people. The same was true for my friends’ journals.

I know that this doesn’t seem like Hardcore Harassment, and I know for a fact that there were kids in my school who were bullied far more severely by this girl and her friends than I was. But this girl and her friends took away my self-confidence. They took away my ability to look people in the eye without flinching. They took away the time where I didn’t have panic attacks before having to go up in front of people. They took away my voice, they snuffed out my enthusiasm in the things that I loved at the time. They made me feel disgusting and like I was giving in to their expectations when I eventually did struggle through figuring out my sexuality.

I ended up sticking a finger down my throat before school for months in the hopes that I’d get sick enough that my mom wouldn’t make me go to school and deal with the teasing. My mom had to go to the school and have it put in my file that they weren’t allowed to put us in the same classes anymore because I was such a wreck after that year.

Caitlin Carver was racist, homophobic, classist, and frankly just cruel to so many people. And yet, she’s gotten her first role on a show about an interracial lesbian couple. She’s getting her first sizable film role in a movie written by a man who spearheads the Nerdfighter movement. It isn’t fair. It is not fair that someone who has been this terrible, and who has hurt this many people, can be cast in a movie whose fanbase is largely populated by the sort of people she would have harassed relentlessly. 

I honestly can’t sit back and not say anything about this, not when fishingboatproceeds was heavily involved in the casting process and has an online presence where he could hear me out. (There is obviously no way that he would’ve known this while casting. This isn’t a blame thing; this is a “you should know this” thing.) 

Please stay safe, you’re worth so much, you deserve so much more

Please don’t give up

Ten black mothers sat on the stage in an auditorium and looked into a diverse crowd of women in the audience. They were about to share something personal and hurtful with this room full of mostly s…

Ten black mothers sat on the stage in an auditorium and looked into a diverse crowd of women in the audience. They were about to share something personal and hurtful with this room full of mostly strangers.

They were going to talk about something they didn’t normally share with their white friends or colleagues.

It was about to get real in that room.

In the aftermath of the killing of Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager fatally shot by a white Ferguson, Missouri police officer, conversations about race in the St. Louis area have been loaded.

Christi Griffin, the president of The Ethics Project, wanted this to be different. She wanted to invite mothers of other races to hear directly from black mothers the reality of raising a black son in America. She wanted them to hear the words they each had said to their own sons, in different variations over the years, but all with the same message: Stay alive. Come home alive.

She wanted mothers who had never felt the fear, every single time their son walked outside or drove a car, that he could possibly be killed to hear what that felt like.

Griffin’s son, now grown, had never gotten in trouble nor given her any trouble growing up. But when her son was 14 years old, the family moved into an all-white neighborhood. She took him to the police department to introduce him to the staff. She wanted the officers to know that he belonged there, that he lived there.

When he turned 16, it was time for another talk. Every single time he got into his car to drive, she made him take his license out of his wallet and his insurance card out of the glove compartment.

"I did not want him reaching for anything in the car."

He graduated from college with a degree in physics.

Marlowe Thomas-Tulloch said that when she noticed her grandson was getting bigger and taller, she laid bare a truth to him: Son, if the police stop you, I need for you to be humble. But I need more than that. I need for you to be prepared to be humiliated.

If they tell you take your hands out of your pockets, take your hands out. Be ready to turn your pockets out. If they tell you to sit down, be prepared to lie down.

You only walk in the street with one boy at a time, she told him.

"What?" her grandson said. In his 17-year-old mind, he hadn’t done anything wrong and nothing was going to happen to him.

"If it’s three or more, you’re a mob," she said. "That’s how they will see you."

She started to cry.

"Listen to me," she begged. "Hear me."

Finally, she felt him feel her fear.

If they ask you who you are, name your family.

Yes, sir and no, sir. If they are in your face, even if they are wrong, humble yourself and submit yourself to the moment.

"I’m serious," she said. "Because I love you."

She told him she would rather pick him up from the police station than identify his body at a morgue.

When her grandson left to go home, she called her daughter to tell her about the conversation. Her daughter asked her what she had said, because her son came home upset, with tears in his eyes.

"I hope I said enough to save his life," Thomas-Tulloch said. "I’d rather go down giving him everything I got."

The mothers talked about the times their sons had been stopped in their own neighborhoods because “they fit the description.” They shared the times their sons had come home full of rage and hurt for being stopped and questioned for no reason. And they told the other mothers how often they told their sons to simply swallow the injustice of the moment. Because they wanted them alive, above all.

Amy Hunter, director of racial justice at the YWCA in metro St. Louis, said it’s taken her 10 years to be able to share this story about her son without crying. She didn’t want her white friends to see her cry when she told it. She didn’t want to look weak.

Her four children are now older, but when one of her sons was 12, he decided to walk home from the Delmar Loop in University City where he had met some friends.

He saw a police officer circling him, and he knew. He was wearing Sperrys, a tucked-in polo shirt, a belt. He was 12, and he knew, but he was scared.

He lived five houses away, and he hadn’t done anything wrong.

"I knew you were home," he said to his mom when he finally made it home after being frisked. "I knew I was about to get stopped, and I thought about running home to you."

His mother froze.

"I forgot to tell him," she said. "I forgot to tell him: Don’t run. Don’t run or they’ll shoot you."

Her 12-year-old cried when he told her what had happened and asked if he was stopped because he was black.

"Probably, yeah," she said.

"I just want to know, how long will this last?" he asked her.

That’s when she started to cry.

"For the rest of your life," she said.

It doesn’t matter about your college degree, the car you drive, the street you live on, she told the moms in the audience. It’s not going to shield your child like a Superman cape. She admitted that it was difficult to share these painful moments.

Just one of the mothers on the stage asked a single question of the audience. Assata Henderson, who has raised three children, all college graduates, said she called her sons to ask them what they remembered about “the talk” she had given them about how to survive as a black man.

"Mama, you talked all the time," they said to her.

It made her wonder, she said. She said she wasn’t pointing any fingers, but it made her wonder about the conversations the other mothers were having with their sons, who grow up to be police officers, judges and CEOs.

*leaves no space for non-binary ace/aros*

A thing I may or may not participate in, but definitely want as many people to try as possible. A big problem for asexual geeks (and grey-a’s, demisexuals, and other people on the spectrum) is the lack of representation we get in the fandoms that we spend most of our time participating in. To this, I say let’s take our favorite characters and mold them to reflect us. 

Participate in this challenge in any way you want on Asexual Awareness Week (Oct 26 - Nov 1). Edits, gifs, fanart, fanfiction, fanmixes, just copy-pasting this and listing them out one by one, literally in any way you contribute to the fandom on a day to day basis. 

Day 1: A male character you see as asexual.  Day 2: A female character you see as asexual.  Day 3: A character you see as grey-a or demisexual.  Day 4: A ship you would like to see as an asexual one.  Day 5: A male character you see as aromantic.  Day 6: A female character you see as aromantic.  Day 7: A ship you would like to see as a platonic one. 

On Friday, YA author Kathleen Hale published an article via The Guardian, entitled Am I Being Catfished (spoiler alert: no). Here is the article via a channel that won’t provide hits to the article itself: http://www.donotlink.com/framed?565129

In the article, Kathleen opens by saying that she received a negative review from a goodreads blogger. In case you’re pretty committed to life under that rock, negative reviews are pretty standard in an author’s career. Think of it as the first time a toddler faceplants. It sucks, we cringe, the kid gets back up and still has a reasonably good life. The review was really more of a series of status updates as the reviewer read and reacted in real time. What was said in those updates is of little importance. All you really need to know is that the review was completely about the work itself, was presented as 100% opinion, and did not make comment about the author or the author’s life in any way. In other words, a standard 1-star review.

The book community is a social one. When we love books, when we dislike books, when we cannot finish books, we talk about them. Readers, writers, and reviewers exist in a self-contained bubble of like-mindedness, and strive to create a safe place to share what we all have in common: books. So naturally, this goodreads reviewer shared her 1-star opinion with her friends. Let me emphasize again that the opinion was strictly about the book and had nothing to do with the author on a personal level.

Except Kathleen Hale did take it personally. So personally, in fact, that she spent months analyzing the situation. She closely monitored this reviewer’s instagram, facebook, and twitter, in addition to her other reviews. While this reviewer had presumably put this book out of her mind and gone on with her life, Kathleen google image searched her photos, and perused her facebook friends, and analyzed the photos of this blogger’s house.

When an opportunity to provide review books arose, Kathleen Hale found a way to acquire the reviewer’s address under the false pretense of sending signed books for reviews and giveaways. What she really did was rented a car and drove to the reviewer’s house. After that, she calls the reviewer at work, pretending to be taking a census type survey, in another attempt to gain information about this reviewer’s private life.

In her very lengthy Guardian article, Kathleen Hale justifies her behavior by insisting that the reviewer blogged under a pseudonym. In the online community, this is pretty standard, and it’s because of people like Kathleen Hale that many people lie about their real identities. Nonetheless, for whatever reason, much of the reviewer’s online persona appeared to be false, and so Kathleen used this as a platform to justify her obsession, putting on a sleuth hat when in fact all of this was a simple case of an author driving to a reviewer’s house for no reason at all other than that she didn’t like the review left for her.

She drove to her house. She called her at work. Multiple times. And then, at the end of all this, she posted a very detailed account of this horror show for The Guardian, with a cute title image and many giggles and winks to her neurotic quirks.

The reviewer, for her part, had merely posted a review of a book.

In the days that followed the article, I have seen plenty of people hoisting Kathleen Hale on their shoulders as a sort of vigilante against cyber bullying. All of these people are presumably pasting their own personal bullies’ faces over the blogger’s, and seem to have lost focus of reality, which is that the blogger merely expressed an opinion. The blogger was one person, on the internet, reviewing a book she did not like.

In an earlier post by Kathleen Hale, she blogs about her own mother allegedly molesting a child. Kathleen’s reaction was to follow that child into a movie theater, call her fat, dump peroxide on her head, and run away laughing. Her mother, over several glasses of wine, thanked her for this. Kathleen then spent several years stalking this child online. But I really can’t do the article justice. You can read Kathleen’s own blog about the event here: http://thoughtcatalog.com/kathleen-hale/2013/02/169836/ She seems proud of this action to this day, calling it revenge.

This is the person you’re enabling with your praise. This is the person you’re hailing as a hero.

And whether you review books or not, you have undoubtedly, at one point or another, shared an opinion on the internet. Maybe you don’t review books. Maybe you talk politics. Maybe you hate Taylor’s newest song. Maybe you’re just really fricking sick of Someone Like You. And for every one thing you dislike, there are thousands, if not millions, of people on that same social media outlet who like it. This blogger disliked a review and said as much in a benign way to her friends on a site designed for sharing opinions about books. The author showed up to her house. People clapped. Tomorrow, you’ll dislike a song, or the finale of a TV show, and you’ll say as much. What will happen to you then? Kathleen Hale is not the only Kathleen Hale out there. There are thousands of them. Millions. Unstable, predatory people who take it just too far, who spend months fixated on a stranger who exists to them only in photos or status updates. It cannot be predicted what will set these types of people off, but if we expect to be safe ourselves, we need to stand up for the opinions of others as if they are our own. Because if one opinion is unsafe, if one person “deserved it” then we all do, because we have more in common with that reviewer than we do with the person who showed up at her house.