I work in a decent sized, local, indie bookstore. It’s a great job 99% of the time and a lot of our customers are pretty neat people. Any who, middle of the day this little old lady comes up. She’s lovably kooky. She effuses how much she loves the store and how she wishes she could spend more time in it but her husband is waiting in the car (OH! I BETTER BUY HIM SOME CHOCOLATE!), she piles a bunch of art supplies on the counter and then stops and tells me how my bangs are beautiful and remind her of the ocean (“Wooooosh” she says, making a wave gesture with her hand)
Ok. I think to myself. Awesomely happy, weird little old ladies are my favorite kind of customer. They’re thrilled about everything and they’re comfortably bananas. I can have a good time with this one. So we chat and it’s nice.
Then this kid, who’s been up my counter a few times to gather his school textbooks, comes up in line behind her (we’re connected to a major university in the city so we have a lot of harried students pass through). She turns around to him and, out of nowhere, demands that he put his textbooks on the counter. He’s confused but she explains that she’s going to buy his textbooks.
He goes sheetrock white. He refuses and adamantly insists that she can’t do that. It’s like, $400 worth of textbooks. She, this tiny old woman, bodily takes them out of her hands, throws them on the counter and turns to me with a intense stare and tells me to put them on her bill. The kid at this point is practically in tears. He’s confused and shocked and grateful. Then she turns to him and says “you need chocolate.” She starts grabbing handfuls of chocolates and putting them in her pile.
He keeps asking her “why are you doing this?” She responds “Do you like Harry Potter?“ and throws a copy of the new Cursed Child on the pile too.
Finally she’s done and I ring her up for a crazy amount of money. She pays and asks me to please give the kid a few bags for his stuff. While I’m bagging up her merchandise the kid hugs her. We’re both telling her how amazing she is and what an awesome thing she’s done. She turns to both of us and says probably one of the most profound, unscripted things I’ve ever had someone say:
“It’s important to be kind. You can’t know all the times that you’ve hurt people in tiny, significant ways. It’s easy to be cruel without meaning to be. There’s nothing you can do about that. But you can choose to be kind. Be kind.”
The kid thanks her again and leaves. I tell her again how awesome she is. She’s staring out the door after him and says to me: “My son is a homeless meth addict. I don’t know what I did. I see that boy and I see the man my son could have been if someone had chosen to be kind to him at just the right time.”
I’ve bagged up all her stuff and at this point am super awkward and feel like I should say something but I don’t know what. Then she turns to me and says: I wish I could have bangs like that but my darn hair is just too curly.“ And leaves.
And that is the story of the best customer I’ve ever had. Be kind to somebody today.
Remember,
for those of you gushing over the “tiny house” trend… that’s all fine
and good, but NEVER… EVER… shit all over people who can’t live in
one of those for “wasting environmental resources” and “being what’s
wrong with the world”.
You know who can’t live in tiny houses?
Families. The elderly. Disabled people.
We CANNOT survive in tiny houses. Like, literally cannot. A lot of them
have lofts where you sleep, a lot of them are too small if you have
kids or pets or even just a partner you don’t want to be crammed into a
tiny space with all the time.
If you can and want to jump in on
the whole “tiny houses” thing, go for it. But stop saying people who
aren’t interested just “don’t care about the environment”. Fuck you, yes
we do. You’re just forgetting that not everyone is young and
able-bodied and capable of surviving in a space that small with stairs
and whatnot.
So fuck off with that nonsense. Those of us who are
too crippled or old or busy with families are STILL able and wanting to
do OTHER things to help the environment. Your latest trendy
environmental fad is not the only option and acting superior for jumping
on this bandwagon just makes you a dick.
They’re “frankenfood” or “dangerous” or “playing God.”
Legitimate problems with GMOs:
Artificially sterile seeds which force farmers to buy new seeds from with every crop from corporations which have a monopoly on said seeds. Especially harmful for smallholdings farms.
Like pesticides, pest-resistant GMOs become less effective at deterring pests over time due to natural selection.
licensing seeds which are then given away as a trial, then requiring farmers to either purchase the license again or destroy their entire crops. This is what at least one GMO corporation did in the wake of Haiti’s natural disaster.
We need to reframe the issue. Pretty much every “legitimate problem with GMOs” that one can think of is a problem with the corporations that create them and the cultural and legal environment those companies operate in. Patented gene sequences, artificially sterile seeds, GMO crops that take over other strains…those are all problems with the corporations that create them and the idea that doing those things is acceptable, not a problem with the GMOs themselves. We need to stop looking at this as a “GMO problem” and start looking at is as a systemic problem.
Why do witches like always wanna fatten kids up before they eat them?? fat is like the grossest part of meat
“Why hello there, little children~. Please follow me to my magical… FITNESS ROOM. NO P A N S I E S ALLOWED BEYOND THIS POINT. LEAVE YOUR WHINING AT THE DOOR BECAUSE IT’S LEG DAY AND WE’RE ABOUT TO GET R-R-R-RIPPE D.”
Because they’re always cooking said kids in cauldrons and ovens - aka long cooking times at lowish heat. If you do that to fatty meat, the fat melts completely and the meat gets tear-it-apart-with-a-fork soft. If you do it to lean meat, you get tiny little sad meat bits that bring no joy to anyone.
well you did ask
Also there’s wisdom in fattening them up on sweets and other carbs. A meatless, carb-rich diet makes for more tender and flavourful meat.
you are arguing over the semantics of EATING CHILDREN
Well yeah, you gotta get this shit right or it’s a waste of 40-80 lbs of meat.
plus if you feed them a high fat, low nutrition diet, they’re easier to subdue and less likely to run away, which would be a concern for an elderly crone.
Thank you, Old Witch With Candy House side of tumblr.
“Just how many times did you tell yourself “it’s okay, I can take it” while being aware that the same thing done to anyone else would be cruel and hurtful, but it was different for you, because you were used to it, and that made it okay?”
- And then they call you “too sensitive”. (via faulfelidae)
DID YOU KNOW: when someone tells you a thing is their favorite thing out of a given set of things, avoid responding with an argument about why a different thing from the set is objectively better or best.
not being a ruiner is both free and easy, and studies have shown that it can lead to long-term positive effects, like not having everyone you know wishing you’d get punched in the tit.
2015: Man-on-man marriage
2017: Man-on-child marriage
2019: Man-on-dog marriage
2021: Man-on-car marriage
2023: Hopefully the world ends by then tbh
Two consenting adults, be they man and woman, man and man, woman and woman, or any other combination not specified by the above, are now granted the right (as they always should have had) to enter a legally binding contract and obtain all its attached benefits.
Children cannot give consent. Children cannot legally sign contracts. Children cannot get married.
Animals cannot give consent. Animals cannot legally sign contracts. Animals cannot get married.
Optimus Prime is a sentient being and leader of the entire Autobot race and I don’t think you have any place telling him who his people can and cannot marry. If he is okay with Rewind and Chromedome or Astoria and Powerglide then you need to step off.
WELL SAID
It’s very easy to make Gracie’s mistake here if you persist in thinking of marriage as “a man and his chosen marriage object” rather than, you know, “two people choosing to marry each other.”
Says something about how some people view heterosexual marriage.
DING DING DING DING DING we have a winner.
None of these people have ever expressed a worry that dogs will start wanting to marry men, or that houseplants will start wanting to marry cars.
This way of thinking only makes sense if your view of straight marriage depends on “man actively choosing, woman passively chosen” and gay marriage only fits into your worldview as the distortion “man actively choosing wrong thing,” as though it’s a Sesame Street comedy sketch with Mr. Noodle trying to marry a pocket watch by mistake, presumably with his pants on his head.
Interestingly enough, I’ve never heard someone warn us about women wanting to marry anything, either.
thank you for that mental image. and yes, this is exactly right. i’ve never seen any anti-marriage assholes talk about what they’re afraid WOMEN will do.
It’s very easy to make Gracie’s mistake here if you persist in thinking of marriage as “a man and his chosen marriage object” rather than, you know, “two people choosing to marry each other.”
This, holy shit, yes. Literally until now I never understood how people couldn’t understand “can’t enter into a legally binding contract” when it came to children, animals, whatever. And now it’s clear as fucking day. And even grosser than I realized.
do men have resting bitch faces as well or do they not have negative characteristics ascribed to them for putting on a neutral rather than a deliriously happy facial expression
Yes, Black men in majority white spaces do. If I don’t smile every single second of the day my coworkers become in intimidated and start asking me what’s wrong, telling me to smile, make jokes about how I’m trying to be a thug/act hard, why am I angry, etc. And it’s not just white men at my job God FORBID I my large Black ass makes a white girl feel threaten because I’m sitting down with a neutral expression.
I’m not trying to take this post away from women and make it about Black men but I want to point out that wether it’s patriarchy or white supremacy; those who feel as if they have power over you HATE to see you not smile. They are so used to people like you smiling to gain their approval that when you don’t there’s a cognitive dissonance that makes them extremely uncomfortable.
That’s why “angry Black women” is a thing. They have to put on a smile for everyone (yes even feminist white women) or we all get uncomfortable.
You’re not good enough. You’re a bad friend. You’re not good at your job. You’re wasting time. You’re a waste of time. Your boyfriend doesn’t love you. You’re so needy. What are you doing with yourself? Why would you say that? What if they hate it? Why can’t you have your shit together? You’re going to get anxious and because you’re going to get anxious, you’re going to mess everything up. You’re a fraud. Just good at faking it. You’re letting everybody down. No one here likes you.
All the while, it appears perfectly calm.
It’s always looking for the next outlet, something to channel the never-ending energy. Writing. Running. List-making. Mindless tasks (whatever keeps you busy). Doing jumping jacks in the kitchen. Dancing in the living room, pretending it’s for fun, when really it’s a choreographed routine of desperation, trying to tire out the thoughts stuck in your head.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen it written out as if it were describing me exactly.
So far for Senior Week, we’ve already well established that I’m a freak. Cold Han Solo, waiting in lines for hours, but this is where I go over the edge. The fact that, as a compulsive poster collector, I have more posters in my flat file than I have on my walls. So I figured it was time to give some of those posters some love.
Honestly, the pushback against right what you know is mostly due to the fact that it produces a lot of writers who seem to conclude that they shouldn't learn anything new in order to write a book.
there’s a lot of people pushing back against “write what you know” as advice for aspiring authors and i would like to speak up in its defence for a moment because i just finished reading a mystery book where the murder weapon was a vicious fighting dog, and in the scene where it was finally revealed we found out that a) the person who had stolen it and was using it to kill people it had been keeping it secret from the police by locking it in his car boot, b) it was an irish wolfhound, c) once freed, it attacked the hardboiled detective across the yard instead of the gormless idiot who had been repeatedly stuffing it in a car boot, and d) its way of attacking the detective in this very dramatic finale was via mighty swipes of its sharp claws, which slashed through his skin like knives
i don’t think this author has seen a dog in his life. i think he might have confused them with lions? write what you know: if you’re writing an animal, be fairly confident that you could point to one in a small child’s pop-up book
When you have trouble making a decision because there are many factors at play that are hard to prioritise and require cautious weighing because different options eat different amounts of spoons, time and money and someone says “Just throw a coin/a dice” as if it was that simple
On Monday, a writer under the pseudonym “Hillary Clinton” published a now-viral parody article on Medium, entitled “Let Me Remind You Fuckers Who I Am,” hoping to remind voters of HRC’s core beliefs, values and credentials.
But writer shitHRCcantsay didn’t expect readers to be merely convinced with their, ahem, rather direct message. They came with the receipts.
woman: i miss you like the deserts miss the rain
man: oh that's so sweet, i--
woman: i've adapted to existence without you, buried everything we made together, and prolonged exposure to you would be disastrous.
Welcome news from Planned Parenthood here. Laura Bassett reports:
Planned Parenthood announced Friday that it will start registering voters at its clinics, on college campuses, online and at other locations, “regardless of their background, beliefs, or political ideology,” in an effort to get disenfranchised populations more involved in the political process.
The non-partisan campaign, called “My Vote, My Voice,” has the potential to reach a lot of people who don’t normally vote in presidential campaigns. Volunteers across 45 states will set up “action” tables outside of Planned Parenthood health centers and other locations in the community to sign people up to vote, educate them about voter ID laws in their states, and then remind them two weeks before the November election to vote.
Planned Parenthood serves 2.5 million patients a year, and many of those patients are young, low-income, and people of color― the demographics that are disproportionately affected by voter suppression laws.
Emily Vancamp as Sharon Carter in “Captain America: The Winter Soldier”
Here’s an example of what we call a “soft no”. Sharon turns down Steve’s offer in a way that’s meant not to insult him but never actually uses the word “no”.
Steve clearly gets the message, though, and importantly offers to leave her alone. Sharon’s comment afterwards gives him an opportunity to try again later, but he doesn’t press and respects her rejection of his company even though it’s probably hurt his feelings a bit.
Just in case you ever wonder “What would Captain America do?”; there you go.
never do something steve rogers wouldn’t do.
Unless it’s jumping out of a plane without a parachute, you probably shouldn’t do that
I just have to add - I’ve seen interviews with Marvel people where they say that this scene demonstrates that Cap’s awkward with women and doesn’t know how to ask women out on a date. And it drives me crazy, because - as the OP says - Steve behaved perfectly here. It was a very charming, nonthreatening offer, and he accepted her rejection with good grace. You can’t help but feel that to Hollywood, the fact that she said no means he asked badly - which is exactly how I’d expect Hollywood to think, namely, the idea that men should keep pressing and pushing women until they say yes
The man holding this #BlackLivesMatter sign is Richmond (CA) police chief Chris Magnus, whose department has not lost an officer or killed a citizen since 2007, the year after he took over. This is not an accident, this peacefulness is the direct result of his leadership. Police departments across the country should be looking to his department as an example to be followed.
‘Chief Magnus changed the department from one that focused on “impact teams” of officers who roamed rough neighborhoods looking to make arrests to one that required all officers to adopt a “community policing” model, which emphasizes relationship building.
“We had generations of families raised to hate and fear the Richmond police, and a lot of that was the result of our style of policing in the past. It took us a long time to turn that around, and we’re seeing the fruits of that now. There is a mutual respect now, and some mutual compassion.”’
I write funny things professionally, and have done for years. I’ve made a fair amount of money and even won some awards for funny things I’ve written. So as a professional writer of funny things I have thoughts on Donald Trump’s oblique joke yesterday about how great it would be if a gun nut assassinated Hillary Clinton and/or some of the judges she might appoint. As with many examinations of humor, this will not be particularly funny. You have been warned.
1. Of course Trump’s comment was a joke, and as someone who has told more than his share of inappropriate jokes to his later regret, I’m pretty sure I can model Trump’s brain process to getting there. He’s up on stage, he’s pissed off that he’s losing, he’s with a sympathetic crowd that wants him to say something punchy, and he has no goddamn filter at all, because why would he, his brand is “I say what I think” and his brand has gotten him this far. So out of the woodwork of his brain comes the clever observation that well, actually, some jackass with a gun could offer up a lead veto to Clinton and/or her judges, and out it went through his teeth. Trump didn’t give it any more thought than that: pop! into his head, push! out of his mouth. Maybe three tenths of a second from conception to utterance, if that. This is was not a statement he’d been consciously planning months to say.
Was it a joke? Sure. Was it funny? Like most jokes, it depends on whether you’re the audience for it. It didn’t work for me. Should Trump have said it? Immaterial, since it was said.
Should it be excused as “just a joke”?
Well, but, see. Here’s the thing about that: There’s no such thing as “just a joke,” and Trump of all people knows that.
2. The first problem with saying “it’s just a joke” is that people very often use that phrase to mean “I get to say/enjoy a horrible thing without penalty.” Well, as a professional writer of funny things, I feel perfectly within my rights to call bullshit on that. Jokes don’t come out of nowhere. They are the product of a presumably thinking brain just like any other speech, and like any other speech they are susceptible to the same scrutiny and criticism. Just like any other speech the context of the joke is useful, too.
So here’s the context of that joke: Donald Trump is a man who has pursued the presidency through racism and white nationalism and by insinuating criminal activity on the part of his opponents (or their families), who has encouraged foreign agents to subvert the US election process (another “joke”) and who is actively training his base of support — angry and scared white people, many of whom have a nearly-fanatical attachment to their firearms — to consider the election process rigged if it does not produce the result they want. Then, at a political rally, as the GOP candidate for president, while speaking about the 2nd Amendment and arguing how his opponent Hillary Clinton wants to get rid of it — to get rid of his angry white supporter’s firearms! — he drops a little joke about how, well, actually, they could oppose her, nod nod, wink wink.
Trump wasn’t making a private joke with friends in the comfort of his own ridiculously baroque home. He wasn’t writing satire (which is often not funny) or black humor in the pages of, say, the New Yorker. He wasn’t on the stage of a comedy club trying out five minutes of edgy new material in front of a half-drunk midnight crowd who are there to see someone else anyway. He wasn’t putting it in the comments of his liberal friend’s Facebook post about gun control. He wasn’t doing any of those things — although even if he were, he could still be held accountable for his words. Rather, he was, as the GOP candidate for president, at a rally of his supporters, in a race he is currently far behind in, joking about someone killing off Hillary Clinton, or whomever she appoints as a judge. He wasn’t there to make comedy. He was there, quite literally, as a political statement. That’s the context.
3.What, politicians can’t make jokes? Well, speaking professionally, it’s usually better when they don’t. They can’t all be Ann Richards. Every time Hillary Clinton attempts humor my desire to vote for her goes down a tenth of a percent. I don’t want or need my politicians to be funny. I need them to wonk out on unsexy topics like water rights and trade deals, and represent the interests of their constituencies. That’s the gig, not killing it for ten minutes at The Comedy Store.
That said, sure, if politicians can make jokes, why not? Yuk away. But again, jokes aren’t Get Out of Jail Free cards for saying horrible things. And when the jokes are, in fact, saying horrible things, like when the GOP candidate for president pops one off about maybe someone assassinating the Democratic candidate for president because of her alleged position on the 2nd Amendment, it’s all right to haul the joke out into the light and begin the utterly unfunny process of picking it apart to see what’s really going on there.
Why can’t you just let a joke be a joke? Because, to repeat, and as others have noted, it’s never just a joke. Jokes mean things, just like any other kind of speech. In fact, jokes often have greater impact, because jokes aim for the pleasure centers of our brain, not the analytical centers. The information of a joke hits in a place where you have fewer defenses against it, and fewer walls barring it from sinking into your overall worldview. This is why, among other things, you probably laugh at things you know you shouldn’t laugh at. It’s also why you’re probably quicker to excuse the content of a joke — it’s just a joke! — or to minimize the importance of what’s being said within one. How bad can it be if it made me laugh? And also, if the joke is saying something horrible, what does it say about me? You have a vested interest either way in explaining away your reaction.
Trump is not a great politician — indeed, if this election cycle has done anything, it has reminded us that the oft-derided skills of being a great politician are in fact useful and needed — but he is a marvelous bully, and like any gifted bully, he’s aware of how to use humor for its manipulative qualities. This is why he mocks his opponents and gives them silly names, why he says outrageous things, planned or unprompted and then immediately wraps them in the rhetoric of humor, and why all his defenders are instructed and prompted to explain away the jokes. He’s not the problem, you’re the problem if you can’t take a joke. No one wants to be accused of not being able to take a joke.
4. This is where once again I put on my hat as a writer of funny things to tell you the following:
It’s okay not to be able to take a joke.
It’s okay to think a joke is not funny.
It’s okay to focus more on the content of a joke than the delivery.
It’s okay to hold a joke to the same standard as any other speech, and to pay attention to the context in which it is delivered.
It’s okay to be scared of a joke and the joke-teller. Sometimes that’s the right thing to be.
Finally and perhaps most importantly:
Always question the motives of the person who is telling you “it’s just a joke.”
Why? Because, well, why are they saying that? Sometimes it’s because the person is a comedian, trying to convince you they’re funny (pro tip: if you have to convince someone you’re funny, you’re probably not funny to them). Sometimes the person who told the joke realizes they just stepped in it, and is trying to backtrack without making themselves look too much like an asshole. Sometimes the person is gaslighting you, trying to make you doubt yourself, for their own purposes. And sometimes that person is trying to normalize hateful rhetoric — or keep hateful rhetoric normalized — and is trying to make you defensive about seeing it clearly as what it is: hateful.
A person saying “it’s just a joke” isn’t always an asshole. But assholes are almost always happy to say “it’s just a joke” to make it look like the problem here is you. So when someone says “it’s just a joke” to you, that’s your cue for skepticism. Jokes mean things. Anyone who tells you otherwise either doesn’t understand the uses of humor, or is hoping that you don’t.
5. You are not automatically a bad person if you laugh at horrible things or find funny a joke whose content, on reflection, is not funny at all. You are a human being, and a skilled communicator — and Trump, for one, is a very skilled communicator — is going to play the changes on you. You might laugh because of the delivery. You might laugh because as a human you like the pleasure of laughing. You might laugh because of the context of the joke, or because it’s subversive, or because the butt of the joke is someone you dislike. You might laugh because the person telling you the joke is someone you admire. You might laugh because it’s expected. You might laugh because not laughing might be noticed. You might laugh because honestly you don’t know what else to do. You might laugh because it’s not safe to do anything else.
Laughing at a horrible joke is not the problem. Excusing that hateful and horrible joke as “just a joke” is the problem. The pleasure of humor don’t mitigate the damage it can do when the hate it offers slips into someone’s worldview, or simply reconfirms the hate they already hold. You’re not automatically a bad person if you laugh along with hate. You’re a bad person if you walk along with it. Humor makes it easy to take that walk. It’s up to you to resist moving your feet. The more you resist, the more you’ll recognize that hate actually isn’t all that funny.
6. Trump made a joke about someone assassinating his political opponent, or the judges she might appoint. Trump’s minions and enablers have been scurrying around trying to spin it, or mitigate it, or accuse people of misunderstanding it and anyway it was just a throwaway line, it was just a joke. But context matters and who is making the joke matters. Trump is a bigot and he’s ignorant and he is a buffoon and he has no filter but he is not stupid. He knows when he puts things out into the air that they are heard and that they are taken seriously. Even the jokes. Especially the jokes.
Trump wished out loud that someone would assassinate Hillary Clinton because inside, the screaming tantrum-throwing infant that Trump is wants her out of the way, and so does the slightly more grown-up version of him whose business model includes cheating contractors and workers out of their contractually-obliged fees and wages, and so does the 70-year-old version who has spent decades getting his way, who wiped the floor with the laughable opposition he had in the GOP primaries and sees no reason why he should do anything different than before, and is possibly confused as to why it’s not working any more, so just try harder. Does Trump actively want Clinton dead? No. But out of the way covers a whole lot of ground. Trump is a bully and he knows how to phrase a wish. So when that wish came howling out of his id up there on stage yesterday, he wrapped it into a joke and sent it on its way.
Trump made the joke because he knows, better than almost anyone, that there is no such thing as “just a joke.” He knows it, and the fact he knows it, and made the joke anyway, should scare the shit out of you.
As should this: When Donald Trump is president, he won’t have to make jokes anymore.
Powerful FB post by the author James Grissom on how Senator Hillary Clinton once advocated for him - and saved his life. “Some people speak well and inspire, and others actually show up and get things done.”
—
And as follow-up to the obvious question, he had this to say:
There are a zillion of these Hillary testimonials floating around now and the striking thing is the similar theme: In a situation where there was no political upside at all, Hillary went out of her way to help/learn/make someone feel important. Over and over again.
Charles Kinsey, a 47-year-old behavioral therapist who was trying to help a patient with autism who ran away from a group home where Charles works and got shot three times in the leg by the police, is filing a lawsuit against North Miami SWAT officer Jonathan Aledda.
When the shooting happened, Kinsey asked Aledda why he had done that and the answer was “I don’t know”.
However, now Aledda tells a different story. He says:
“I took this job to save lives and help people. I did what I had to do in a split second to accomplish that and hate to hear others paint me as something I’m not.”
Hope everyone remembers that Kinsey said multiple times that his patient was holding a toy truck in his hands, not a gun like the police mistakenly assumed. So there was no reason whatsoever for Aledda to shoot either Kinsey or Rinaldo Rios (the patient). The fact that Aledda is trying to justify his actions shows that he is EXACTLY what others paint him to be.
This is pure evil. @feelingwomanish i don’t even know what to say.
Anyone who sees this PLEASE READ and fill out the petition!!!!!
While the Children in Flint Were Given Poisoned Water to Drink, General Motors Was Given a Special Hookup to the Clean Water. A few months after Governor Snyder removed Flint from the clean fresh water we had been drinking for decades, the brass from General Motors went to him and complained that the Flint River water was causing their car parts to corrode when being washed on the assembly line. The Governor was appalled to hear that GM property was being damaged, so he jumped through a number of hoops and quietly spent $440,000 to hook GM back up to the Lake Huron water, while keeping the rest of Flint on the Flint River water. Which means that while the children in Flint were drinking lead-filled water, there was one — and only one — address in Flint that got clean water: the GM factory.
For Just $100 a Day, This Crisis Could’ve Been Prevented. Federal law requires that water systems which are sent through lead pipes must contain an additive that seals the lead into the pipe and prevents it from leaching into the water. Someone at the beginning suggested to the Governor that they add this anti-corrosive element to the water coming out of the Flint River. “How much would that cost?” came the question. “$100 a day for three months,” was the answer. I guess that was too much, so, in order to save $9,000, the state government said f*** it — and as a result the State may now end up having to pay upwards of $1.5 billion to fix the mess.
There’s More Than the Lead in Flint’s Water. In addition to exposing every child in the city of Flint to lead poisoning on a daily basis, there appears to be a number of other diseases we may be hearing about in the months ahead. The number of cases in Flint of Legionnaires Disease has increased tenfold since the switch to the river water. Eighty-seven people have come down with it, and at least ten have died. In the five years before the river water, not a single person in Flint had died of Legionnaires Disease. Doctors are now discovering that another half-dozen toxins are being found in the blood of Flint’s citizens, causing concern that there are other health catastrophes which may soon come to light.
People’s Homes in Flint Are Now Worth Nothing Because They Cant Be Sold. Would you buy a house in Flint right now? Who would? So every homeowner in Flint is stuck with a house that’s now worth nothing. That’s a total home value of $2.4 billion down the economic drain. People in Flint, one of the poorest cities in the U.S., don’t have much to their name, and for many their only asset is their home. So, in addition to being poisoned, they have now a net worth of zero. (And as for employment, who is going to move jobs or start a company in Flint under these conditions? No one.) Has Flint’s future just been flushed down that river?
While They Were Being Poisoned, They Were Also Being Bombed. Here’s a story which has received little or no coverage outside of Flint. During these two years of water contamination, residents in Flint have had to contend with a decision made by the Pentagon to use Flint for target practice. Literally. Actual unannounced military exercises – complete with live ammo and explosives – were conducted last year inside the city of Flint. The army decided to practice urban warfare on Flint, making use of the thousands of abandoned homes which they could drop bombs on. Streets with dilapidated homes had rocket-propelled grenades fired upon them. For weeks, an undisclosed number of army troops pretended Flint was Baghdad or Damascus and basically had at it. It sounded as if the city was under attack from an invading army or from terrorists. People were shocked this could be going on in their neighborhoods. Wait – did I say “people?” I meant, Flint people. As with the Governor, it was OK to abuse a community that held no political power or money to fight back. BOOM!
The Wife of the Governor’s Chief of Staff Is a Spokeswoman for Nestle, Michigan’s Largest Owner of Private Water Reserves. As Deep Throat told Woodward and Bernstein: “Follow the money.” Snyder’s chief of staff throughout the two years of Flint’s poisoning, Dennis Muchmore, was intimately involved in all the decisions regarding Flint. His wife is Deb Muchmore, who just happens to be the spokesperson in Michigan for the Nestle Company – the largest owner of private water sources in the State of Michigan. Nestle has been repeatedly sued in northern Michigan for the 200 gallons of fresh water per minute it sucks from out of the ground and bottles for sale as their Ice Mountain brand of bottled spring water. The Muchmores have a personal interest in seeing to it that Nestles grabs as much of Michigan’s clean water was possible – especially when cities like Flint in the future are going to need that Ice Mountain.
In Michigan, from Flint water, to Crime and Murder, to GM Ignition Switches, It’s a Culture of Death. It’s not just the water that was recklessly used to put people’s lives in jeopardy. There are many things that happen in Flint that would give one the impression that there is a low value placed on human life. Flint has one of the worst murder and crime rates in the country. Just for context, if New York City had the same murder rate as Flint, Michigan, the number of people murdered last year in New York would have been almost 4,000 people – instead of the actual 340 who were killed in NYC in 2015. But it’s not just street crime that makes one wonder about what is going on in Michigan. Last year, it was revealed that, once again, one of Detroit’s automakers had put profit ahead of people’s lives. General Motors learned that it had installed faulty ignition switches in many of its cars. Instead of simply fixing the problem, mid-management staff covered it up from the public. The auto industry has a history of weighing the costs of whether it’s cheaper to spend the money to fix the defect in millions of cars or to simply pay off a bunch of lawsuits filed by the victims surviving family members. Does a cynical, arrogant culture like this make it easy for a former corporate CEO, now Governor, turn a blind eye to the lead that is discovered in a municipality’s drinking water?
Don’t Call It “Detroit Water” — It’s the Largest Source of Fresh Drinking Water in the World. The media keeps saying Flint was using “Detroit’s water.” It is only filtered and treated at the Detroit Water Plant. The water itself comes from Lake Huron, the third largest body of fresh water in the world. It is a glacial lake formed over 10,000 years ago during the last Ice Age and it is still fed by pure underground springs. Flint is geographically the last place on Earth where one should be drinking poisoned water.
ALL the Children Have Been Exposed, As Have All the Adults, Including Me. That’s just a fact. If you have been in Flint anytime from April 2014 to today, and you’ve drank the water, eaten food cooked with it, washed your clothes in it, taken a shower, brushed your teeth or eaten vegetables from someone’s garden, you’ve been exposed to and ingested its toxins. When the media says “9,000 children under 6 have been exposed,” that means ALL the children have been exposed because the total number of people under the age of 6 in Flint is… 9,000! The media should just say, “all.” When they say “47 children have tested positive”, that’s just those who’ve drank the water in the last week or so. Lead enters the body and does it’s damage to the brain immediately. It doesn’t stay in the blood stream for longer than a few days and you can’t detect it after a month. So when you hear “47 children”, that’s just those with an exposure in the last 48 hours. It’s really everyone.
This Was Done, Like So Many Things These Days, So the Rich Could Get a Big Tax Break. When Governor Snyder took office in 2011, one of the first things he did was to get a multi-billion dollar tax break passed by the Republican legislature for the wealthy and for corporations. But with less tax revenues, that meant he had to start cutting costs. So, many things – schools, pensions, welfare, safe drinking water – were slashed. Then he invoked an executive privilege to take over cities (all of them majority black) by firing the mayors and city councils whom the local people had elected, and installing his cronies to act as “dictators” over these cities. Their mission? Cut services to save money so he could give the rich even more breaks. That’s where the idea of switching Flint to river water came from. To save $15 million! It was easy. Suspend democracy. Cut taxes for the rich. Make the poor drink toxic river water. And everybody’s happy.
Doing harassment prevention training for work and saw this. Since I often see people demanding a citation for “intent doesn’t matter” here’s one straight from the Eastern Michigan University harassment training manual.
Her hair is done. Her makeup is flawless; her coat, luxurious. She’s single. She’s thin or she’s fat or she’s muscular or she’s old or she’s young but she’s never ever cute or soft or scared of you.
She’s hungry. She wants money, and she wants more luxurious coats, and she wants power. She wants to sit in the chair that is currently occupied by whoever’s in charge, and she doesn’t want to wait for the world to give her that throne. She doesn’t have time for that. She’s not going to wait. She’s going to take it.
She wants a voice. She wants your voice. She’ll use it to yell when she’s angry and to cry when she’s frustrated and to murmur poison into the ears of some nearsighted boy-king who doesn’t see what she sees. He can’t even begin to see the web she’s weaving, so she’ll wrap him up in a little cocoon of silk and she’ll set him aside, where he can’t ruin any of her plans.
Cruella de Vil (101 Dalmatians, 1961)
She runs a business. She makes a thousand decisions every day and she never feels the need to justify any of them with a shrug or an “I don’t know, I just thought maybe we could…?” Woe betide the man who speaks over her in a meeting.
We love her and we hate her in equal measure. We feel that way because she revels in being all the things that we are told we aren’t allowed to be. She is confident, and she has wrinkles, and her nose isn’t a formless nonthreatening comma in the middle of an ill-defined wide-eyed face—it’s a knife, or an arrow, or a scythe. She frowns. Everyone in the audience and on the internet wants to talk about whether or not she’s sexy but they’re asking the wrong questions and she’s laughing at them for it. She wears bright colors, nonprimary colors that coordinate with her green skin or her purple eyeshadow. She’s too good for this game, too smart for her boss, tired of getting stepped on. She gets mad and she gets even.
Ursula (The Little Mermaid, 1989)
Her lipstick is flawless and her eyebrows are the boss of you.
Why is it that female cartoon villains get to be all of these things, to have all of these things? Why do they get to have hairstyles—no, Hairstyles, with a capital Hair—while their protagonist counterparts are drawn small and soft and childlike? Why does Ursula get to have a beauty mark and the most impeccably waterproof makeup a sea witch could hope for, while Ariel gets the same wide-eyed small-jawed face as every other white Disney princess? Why does Maleficent get a headpiece that defines menacing elegance and dark grandeur, while Aurora gets generic late-fifties bangs? Why does Shego get to mouth off to Drakken and read magazines by the pool and decide what is and isn’t her job, while Kim Possible has to leap into action regardless of whether she’s tired or sad or sick or, heaven forbid, too busy?
Shego (Kim Possible, 2002-2007)
Why is it that I can easily remember the faces and voices of female cartoon villains, but if asked about female cartoon heroes, all I can remember is the clothes?
Female cartoon villains define transgression. We look at thin-wristed shy-smiling nice-haired female protagonists and we see what’s expected of us: wait. Be patient. Be nice. Be happy with your lot, enjoy what you’re given, and don’t look for more. Make wishes, not plans. Have animal friends, never henchmen. No one should work for you, but everyone must love you. Look soft and small and breakable, and cry with your head flung into your arms so no one has to see your puffy eyes. Be afraid that no one will ever rescue you. Be afraid that you’ll have to live your whole life without adventure ever finding you.
Demona (Gargoyles, 1994-1997)
We look at female cartoon villains and we see what’s forbidden: ferocity. Never laugh with your head thrown back. Never apply your eyeshadow as a cut-crease. Never draw in your brows or dye your hair. Don’t wear nice clothes (unless they’ve been sewn for you by people or animals who love you, or delivered to you by magic). Don’t look in mirrors. Don’t want things. Don’t get old or fat or tall. Don’t make demands. Hope, maybe, but never expect. No, not even if you’ve dedicated your life to a goal—even then, don’t you dare expect. Work hard, but don’t grind for years and years building an empire because if you do, then you’ll get taken down and the audience will cheer at your suffering. Don’t carve your face into a mountainside, because that territory is reserved and your name is not on the list.
Yzma (The Emperor’s New Groove, 2000)
We’re sold on the female protagonists, and I do mean sold. We admire their spunk and their tenacity, because it’s accessible—it’s rebellion in the form of wanting. It’s gazing at the stars at night after spending all day scrubbing the floors, and believing that wishing will be enough. But once they graduate to getting what they want? Once they’ve made real sacrifices in pursuit of their dreams? Once they’ve made it, or even once they’re almost there?
Poison Ivy (Batman: The Animated Series, 1992-1995)
That’s when they become dangerous. That’s when they become the villainess. Somewhere in there, they stop caring about what other people think, and they get what they want, and they turn into cautionary tales: something bad is waiting for the woman who goes that way. We believe it. We repeat it. We look at women who are running things and we’re suspicious, because we’ve spent our whole lives looking at women with ambition and knowing that they can’t possibly be allowed to grasp whatever it is they’re reaching for.
Oh, sure. They do bad things. They’re petty and jealous and rude and they grab and they take and they hurt people. They’re not nice. They’re not role models.
Witch of the Waste (Howl’s Moving Castle, 2004)
But, then again, what if they were role models? Aren’t they the versions of ourselves that we wish we were bold enough to be? We fear them and we hate them and we envy them and we want to be them. What could we become, if we threw our heads back when we laughed? What could we become if we were willing to push aside everyone who stands in our way? What could we accomplish? What would happen to us, if we decided that we didn’t want to scrub floors during the day and wish on stars at night and wonder when the adventure is going to come find us?
How might you laugh if you’d burned every bridge that needed burning, and there was nothing standing in the way of your ambition? How might you look, if the only person you needed to please with your fashion choices was you? It’s delicious and frightening to think about becoming the type of woman that a Disney illustrator would light from below, surrounded by billowing smoke, with your henchmen cowering in the background and every opportunity spread before you. It’s thrilling to imagine a life where your only fear is mortality, and even that can be negotiated out of the way if you know the right people or brew the right potions. It’s wonderful and terrible to think about having that much power, because as we all know, that much power makes you a villainess.
Maleficent (Sleeping Beauty, 1959)
And that’s a bad thing.
Right?
Sarah Gailey’s fiction has appeared in Mothership Zeta and Fireside Fiction; her nonfiction has been published by Mashable and Fantasy Literature Magazine. You can see pictures of her puppy and get updates on her work by clicking here. She tweets @gaileyfrey. Watch for her debut novella, River of Teeth, from Tor.com in 2017.
1. Of course Trump’s comment was a joke, and as someone who has told more than his share of inappropriate jokes to his later regret, I’m pretty sure I can model Trump’s brain process to getting there. He’s up on stage, he’s pissed off that he’s losing, he’s with a sympathetic crowd that wants him to say something punchy, and he has no goddamn filter at all, because why would he, his brand is “I say what I think” and his brand has gotten him this far. So out of the woodwork of his brain comes the clever observation that well, actually, some jackass with a gun could offer up a lead veto to Clinton and/or her judges, and out it went through his teeth. Trump didn’t give it any more thought than that: pop! into his head, push! out of his mouth. Maybe three tenths of a second from conception to utterance, if that. This is was not a statement he’d been consciously planning months to say.
