#cw school shooting
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE GOVERNOR OF FLORIDA, REGARDING WHAT EXACTLY ABOUT MY CHILDHOOD WAS SO VERY INNOCENT AND NATURAL
was it protecting my innocence, governor, when we stood with our sweaty palms pressed together in a little circle, praying some adult step in and save the white rhino. when we huddled around a wood stove, sitting through yet-another worst-weather-on-record. running our hands over the dry dirt and learning monarch butterflies are going extinct in our lifetime.
was it protecting my innocence, governor, when we pressed our tender bodies like little shivering leaves closer to the back of the classroom, eyes closed, waiting for the shooting drill to end? i don’t know if you’ve been through one, governor, but it isn’t like a fire drill. nobody laughs. nobody talks. we all wait for the gray slip of death to pass us over; knowing - tomorrow might actually be the one.
was it protecting my innocence when our parents were suddenly all out of jobs. was it natural how many of us were living out of cars. how our school milk came soured, how we would skip eating rather than admit we didn’t have enough to pay off our “lunch debt,” how many of us were dropping out and working-for-a-bit.
was it natural and innocent when we were bullied within an inch of our life. how the school knew and did nothing. how people we trusted groomed us to be okay with men ogling. sex ed from the wrong kids, from the television, from pornography. shame pulsing through every inch of our bodies. believing that at 13 we could be something like tempting.
was it just the normal progression of things, i mean. was it god’s honest plan how many of us wound up sick in a gutter with something running through our systems. the designer drugs and the nicotine addictions. i broke my wrist, governor. i was 15, and they put me on opiates.
was it protecting my innocence, governor, and i don’t mean to be rude - but when my graduating class began to commit suicide, was that the innocence? is it an acceptable loss to you? that some of us will just not make it out of childhood alive - but then. for those like me, i guess, you don’t care if we do.
which part. i’m asking genuinely, now. my childhood never got to be the idyllic american dream. my childhood doesn’t look like yours. it looks like no generation before me. we watched the internet grow up with us, destroy us, destroy our self-esteem. those who came after you - we didn’t getto live in ignorance. it wasn’t an option, despite your priorities. it turns out what you don’t teach, children learn in their own way: and that learning is usually ugly.
i just want to know. i had an excellent education. i had it easy. and if innocence is what you are protecting, sir, as an educator, i’m happy to agree. but i’d love to know how being raised ashamed of being gay actually somehow protected me. how it made my life easier, smooth, free of cruelty.
when you’re ready, sir, i’d love to talk about public education policy. but in the meantime, if i may:
stop fucking talking.
hi all i learned about both these things today and figured i’d put them in one post so others can learn.
at some point (i don’t know when) in the first two eps of kenobi, there is a sequence where the younglings are murdered during order 66. any approximate timestamp, if people have one, would be appreciated.
also, the first scene of the first ep of stranger things s4 is a bunker full of children that have been killed.
in the wake of uvalde, i wanted to flag this. i certainly don’t have the heart to watch anything with dead children right now, and i’m sure others don’t either. if you do watch it, good for you, that’s fine. i just don’t have the spoons right now.
ETA: apparently the younglings don’t die or if they do it’s not on screen, but it’s still a scene that opens with children in school and stormtroopers slamming in guns blazing so i think the warning is accurate
updating to say it’s at 6:05 in the first ep for kenobi and the summary i got from a friend is “None of the bbs die, but it’s their teacher leading them through the halls of the temple while the clones are shooting everyone, and she does die” so as an fyi for folks.
also re: stranger things: the dead children are consistently flashed back to a lot especially in eps 6 and 7 apparently but pretty regularly throughout so that’s something to be aware of.
before anyone goes “don’t make it about terfs this is serious!!” idk maybe the fucking terfs shouldn’t make it about terfs
like idk don’t u think, me, an american, isn’t aggrieved and furious and ashamed every single fucking time this happens??? don’t you think I know how fucking serious this is????? why else would I be fucking seething at the people trying to take this latest in a never-ending string of horrific tragedies and make it a fucking vehicle to peddle their stupid batshit lies to everyone and their fucking mother still grieving this??? holy fucking shit dude!!!! have some fucking humanity!!! have some fucking shame!!!!!!!!! who raised you to think like this!!!!!!!!!
with all the news of the texas school shootings going around, I’d like to remind you notto pass around anything that says shit like “men are inherently violent” or talks about “male anger,”because I can almost guarantee it’s very thinly veiled terf rhetoric, and we do not fucking need problems from them stirring the fucking pot on top of everything else.
I am not asking you to sympathize with the shooter, I am not asking you to just brush aside the horrendous acts of death and violence, I am asking you to look at the larger picture.
In a lot of ways, I have a lot of the same experiences growing up as the shooter in question. I was bullied extensively throughout my growing up, and it’s left me warped and antisocial in ways I am still dealing with to this day. It’s left me with PTSD, it’s left me with a volatile temper, and it’s left me with a lifetime of unlearning all of these toxic behaviors and coping mechanisms. And me being DFAB doesn’t Magically diminish those issues. It doesn’t reduce a person’s capacity for anger, or violence, nor does being DMAB somehow inherently increase it. this is not a question of biological sex or whatever imperatives terfs claim they have. this is a question of means, privilege, and entitlement.
if I didn’t have the support system I did, if I didn’t have the privilege I did growing up, there is a very real chance that I, or anyone else in my position, could have gone down the same road.
these are societal problems born of societal flaws. reducing it to just “male anger/men are inherently violent” is an incomplete and honestly just inaccurate and incorrect framing of it. it takes the focus away from the decision to commit these violent acts, and the agency with which it was done. framing it like this, like they can’t help it, because men are angry and violent, it’s just their nature, takes away that agency, and ergo, the responsibility for their own actions.
this is not a question of biology. this is not an unsolvable problem born of some ““unchangeable”” law of nature. this a question of privilege and entitlement. this is a set of patterns of behaviors, born of our collective failures as a society. this, and every single instance of this before it, have all been preventable, were it not for those failures.
passing this shit around only further enforces those biases, beliefs, and expectations that led to it in the fucking first place, and pretending that it doesn’t is, at best, wildly irresponsible, and generally just spreads pointless hostility, enforces stereotypes, and just makes it all the harder to fucking fix it.
for fuck’s sake. think before you fucking speak.
death-2-colonialism-n-colonizers:
Is this the lesser of two evil everyone was talking about?
American political system is an anti-human system from it’s foundation.
