#or lack thereof
Me when I watch yet another m/f relationship turn romantic on TV: ughh seriously why? They were better as friends smh
Me when I watch an obviously queer couple be labeled as ‘just friends’: nO THEY FCKN AIN’T, THEY’RE GAY FOR EACH OTHER OMG STOP DOING LOVE SO DIRTY
innocence
Regular reminder that there’s literally nothing stopping white people from enjoying their own heritages and that all that bonehead noise about how “the SJWs” are gonna come after you because you wanna learn Irish or you think Vikings are cool is just straight-up a lie.
Y’know what robs white people of culture? White supremacy does. And you can take that to the fuckin bank.
This is actually something I’ve felt for a long time but was afraid of talking about because I wasn’t sure if anyone else felt the same way. We’re losing any and all important ways of positively and benevolently performing, expressing, sharing, and celebrating our cultures because they keep getting invaded and corrupted by white supremacists.
It’s the white supremacists we need to annihilate. Then we can have our celebrations.
Gatekeep white supremacists from white culture. Separate them from it, remove them from it.
They’re not white culture, they’re hate culture.
When Urgroßvater fled the Rhineland way back in the day, he wound up in Mississippi. All the kids grew up as monolingual Anglophones, because the last thing you want to be in a place like that is different; better to identify with the dominant group, if you’re lucky enough that that’s an option. Any meaningful sense of heritage was gone by the time the next generation learned to talk. Now it’s 2018 and all the German I have is Berliner Hochdeutsch from school and Duolingo. Whatever songs and stories and traditions I could’ve had are just gone, like a fart in the wind.
Deep down in my bones, I feel like I was cheated out of something. And it was the pressure and desire to assimilate into whiteness that did the cheating.
The same thing happened to me with Italian on both sides, children raised to fit in without any real heritage or traditions passed on.
My grandfather told his Prussian parents, “We’re in America. Speak English.” He spoke Polish, Russian, German, and English. My grandmother spoke German, Norwegian, and English. My parents used to have arguments in German but refused to teach us. I’m a monolingual Anglophone. I’m still upset about it.
My grandmother’s family assimilated so hard because they were Russian Jews. I am continually working my way back to my ancestress’ list of languages and crafts skills.
(There is probably an argument that I’m carrying a lot of Nanna around here, but hey.) (She spoke English, French, German, Russian, and probably some Latin. I’ve swapped Latin for Spanish and am kinda crappy at German. She also could look at a piece of finished clothing and go home and put together a replica; I’m working towards it with knitting instead.)
And yes: I was named for her.One of the truths about European colonization of the world was that most of those who were most emphatic about assimilating or eradicating non-European cultures were usually those who’d already had the same thing done to them. Which can go all the way back to distinctions of rank and station in what we think of as “the same” society - some of the areas of the USA and Canada that were/are the worst in terms of anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism were those colonized by the Welsh, Scottish, Irish and even English farmers and peasants who’d had their entire generations and centuries of culture, ancestry and livelihood ripped up and thrown out by Enclosure or forced relocation or the Famine or what have you.
They came to the Americas and thought now we can be on the top and acted out the worst parts of their own (often intergenerational) trauma on everyone vulnerable to them. It’s a very very common human pattern and all over the world it continues today.
I’m relatively connected to Scottish culture for a western Canadian—my mother and uncle did Highland dance when young, my brother was in pipe bands, I’ve been to a lot of Highland games, my grandmother took me to Scotland when I was young.
And it’s basically all because my Orkney ancestors REMEMBER and are still VERY PEEVED about being invaded by the English, having their language, culture, and traditional forms of dress outlawed and stolen, and losing political autonomy.
So even though they were still kinda racist, when my grandparents went up to the Arctic to exploit the environment and learned about how Canada’s Indigenous people had been colonized and had their language, culture, and traditional forms of dress outlawed and stolen… even then they were like, “Hey, that sounds shittily familiar” and worked in small ways (in between drilling oil wells) to help preserve Inuit culture and help individual Indigenous people.
Imagine what might happen if white people remembered what it was like for their families to be fed into the meatgrinder that took in their heritage and spat out mayonnaise, and decided that maybe it wasn’t so great after all.
I was always very, very pissed off that my grandparents steadfastly refused to teach me Greek.
If it weren’t for “We’re in America, speak English,” I might have grown up speaking Norwegian, German, Dutch, and maybe some Gaelic.
“We’re in America, speak English” is also “We’re in America, speak only English,” and that is loss beyond measure.
Sometimes I want to cry because I want want want the Czech culture that my great-great-grandparents were raised in… but when they came over, they renounced it all. They were Czech, but their children (my great-grandparents) were American. Their children’s children (my grandparents) were American. They spoke English and they participated in American culture; even their last name had to be pronounced the American way. They might speak Czech to their friends when they went to Mass at St. Wenceslaus, but at home, they worked hard to learn English and practice American traditions.
My grandfather knew a little Czech, and remembered some of the traditions his grandparents had brought over. But when he died in… 2013, 2014? we lost anything he didn’t pass on, because he was the last child of that line.
I once had someone at a pagan gathering say to me “oh, you’re Czech? that means you can worship the Slavic gods!” But even if I could trace my family back to pre-Christianity Prague and Bohemia, would those gods even recognize me? Through Americanization, my family’s Czechness was reduced to a fun fact and a way of excusing our weird last name.
And sometimes that really just boils my blood.
There is no “white” culture, the traditions of my Welsh ancestors do not look like the traditions of my German ancestors or French ancestors beyond a certain few surface similarities. The languages and religions, traditional metalwork and buildings, the musical styles, they are not the same. They are even less like Russian or Slavic culture. Reducing everything to a bland, homogenous “whiteness” is assimilationist bullshit.
I was lucky in my family’s retention of at least some traditions. My great grandmother came over in 1915 from Ireland. The Garlic language schools were a little too new for her to have learned the language, but songs and stories were preserved, and passed to her children, and then to my father, who spent nearly all of his life so far in preserving and sharing as much as he can of traditional culture as a musician. It’s not much, not in the face of what’s been lost and how much is being taken and sat upon by boneheads and nationalists. But it’s something, at least.
May Brighid and her forge and hammers do to them as they have earned.
omg, I had a huge conversation with one of my Pakistani friends about this recently.
We were talking about “American” culture = “white” culture and then what is that?
What is “traditional” (not-native) American food? Hot dogs? Apple pie?
What about clothes? The Pilgrims, the way so many public schools try to dress up our little ones every Thanksgiving? Revolutionary War garb? Civil War? Victorian? How old are we talking?
When a white American that’s been completely white-washed of their specific European heritages wants to honor their ancestors, what the eff do they do?
But I can go to the Highland Games and find the exact effing tartan pattern Mr. B’s ancestors wore 500 years ago.
White Americans are desperate for culture. I think that’s one of the big factors behind cultural appropriation (ranking behind imperialism and racism, of course). There’s the “American” culture is “white” culture, yeah, totally, but it’s also a whole lot of nothing. What’s our heritage? 250 years of the current government? There’s not much sense of connection, of being part of a culture deeper and more meaningful than just ourselves which I think is also where a huge part of our toxic patriotism comes in. We’re just so effing desperate to belong.
What’s our mythology? Where are our legends? Effing Paul Bunyan and his origins in ad campaign?
My family lists about 8 different European countries as our background but on both sides everyone’s been in the U.S. for over 100 years (150 for most of my dad’s side) and there is just nothing left of any ethnic pride, culture, identity, sense of a homeland, nothing. Just “American.” And we’re not too thrilled about this country right now but the culture is the country is the identity is….. I’m too tired to parse this well.
My partner’s family still talks about being forced to cut ties with the German cousins that remained in the homeland nearly 100 years ago now, so as not to arouse suspicion or cause anyone to doubt their patriotism. That’s when they deliberately stopped teaching their kids German, stopped making their favorite dishes, started making differently styled clothes, etc. They wondered what happened to their relatives during WWII, if they resisted, if they joined, if they survived, what happened to them. But never tried to resume contact.
The melting pot idea is real, y’all. And some of our ancestors took it too darn seriously. What happens when all the European immigrants are stewed up together and melted down and have no connections to who and what they were before and there’s poison in the pot? We get some seriously sick culture.
This forever: “They came to the Americas and thought now we can be on the top and acted out the worst parts of their own (often intergenerational) trauma on everyone vulnerable to them. “
no offense but fuck adults who are like ‘you kids never just go outside and play anymore’ where the hell in my schedule of going to school for 7 hours, coming home and doing 3ish hours of homework, going to extracurriculars, and finding time to sleep do i have time to go outside and fucking frolick in the streets
Not to mention that teens who do spend time outside are seen as trouble-making or deviant for doing something as simple as using the fucking swings at a park.
Adults: Teens never go outside anymore.
Teens: *go outside*
Adults: ITS A GROUP OF TEENAGERS THEY MUST BE OUT CAUSING TROUBLE
Six hours of homework a night the entire time I was in school and three separate occasions I’ve gotten questioned by the police just for walking home but yeah it’s those damn lazy millennials
This is a fucking mood.
And the reason that when I have kids, if the teacher overloads them with homework I will be having a very firm, stern meeting with them asking them exactly how they can fail so terrifically at teaching my child in the time they are given, and continuing by asking them if they assume any profession on the entire damn planet consumes 8+ hours of time in-office combined with 6+ hours of time out of office doing paperwork at home.
This is especially true since, if my future kids have ANY of my predispositions, they’ll have too many hobbies and vocations to deal with even on a normal schedule.
With that in mind, if a teacher wants to be willing to work with said kid (”Look, I want to build a catapult. If I show my work, will you count it as a homework grade for this unit?” etc etc) then I have no problem; the issue I have is forcing some kid to repeat the same set of the same problems in an attempt to force rote memorization in the direct face of the fact that such measures are less than effective compared to other means of education.
Fucking THIS.
For those who feel strongly about the way education goes these days (and you should) – check out all your local and national candidates’ positions on education. Don’t blame the teachers; they do what they can in a fucked up system. “Teaching to the test” is the reality now – prepping students for standardized tests (mostly via rote memorization), not encouraging independent thinking and exploration. Most of the teachers I know quit within five years due to the pressure, long hours (they have huge amounts of paperwork too!), and ridiculously low pay.
I was gonna draw 420 zukka fanart… but then I got high. I was gonna portray two joint-toking sweethearts… but then I got high. My art is still half-baked (ha) and I know why! (hey, heeey) Because I got high, because I got high, because I got hiiigh.
My only criticism about about Ms. Marvel is that nobody has a thick jersey accent.
love to figure out trans male health stuff by searching through Reddit threads because there are so few sources of information and the doctor only had vague guesses. it’d be great if we could actually have, like, detailed medical guides for doctors and trans patients–with visuals of actual trans bodies and not ones labeled or depicted as female! with references to (recent) medical studies! and not just ones that stop at going on T/having surgery. we keep having medical needs after we “complete” transitioning (and some trans guys don’t take hormones or get any surgery! or take T and later stop!).
Whumptober Day 17!
Link to the Ao3: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34210837/chapters/86042734
Title: Infection - Mister Wilson
Prompt: No. 17 ‘Field Care 101’ - “Please don’t move!”, hemorrhage, dread
Trigger Warnings: blood
Word Count: 834
That was the one issue with an abnormally high level of enhanced healing - his body had close to no idea what to do with a simple infection.
It was partly his own fault - he hadn’t bothered to bind the wound up until an hour after he had received it, opting instead to separate himself from the site of the kill and leave both the car and its thoroughly-dead occupant abandoned on the side of the highway. He was paid to terminate targets, not clean up the mess.
Wait till the target was alone and vulnerable, slit their throat, and get back to the pick-up location in time to catch a flight back to the nearest form of civilization - quick and simple, basically a day trip compared to most of the contracts Slade took on. Or at least it should have been if not for two determining factors: he had admittedly underestimated the target’s unnatural speed indicating that they were likely metahuman, and he hadn’t noticed the dirty knife.
A mistake had been made. Slade had believed that the target was armed only with the hunting rifle slung across the backseat, and had been sure to act quickly enough that they were not able to use it, but he hadn’t counted on the target going for their knife instead. Slade’s blade at their throat, their blade in his thigh - one left dead on the side of the road, the other left with what should have been a minor wound quickly revealing itself to be more serious than originally anticipated. Well, shit.
He left the car where it was (things like vehicles were far too easily traced) and opted to walk instead to the pick-up location, leaving the injury he had gotten in the however-brief fight to fix itself up while he walked. Slade knew his body, and he knew that a knife wound of that depth could easily repair itself within six-to-eight hours even without treatment - best not to waste time or his sparse medical supplies on something not worth worrying about.
It was the fever that forced him to reconsider. While a normal human would take close to a day to start revealing serious symptoms of infection, his unnatural metabolism cut that time down to sixty minutes - sixty minutes before he noticed he was panting a bit too hard, sixty minutes before he realized he was limping too much, and sixty minutes before he realized that infection had already set in.
Nothing too bad, he told himself, as he continued his march roughly southwest across the tundra, mentally calculating the hours and miles left until he reached his destination. An infection would slow down his healing factor and ensure that he recovered from the wound later than expected, but that wasn’t a big deal. Whatever parasite or pathogen or, god forbid, poison had gotten into his system from that dirty knife, his body was sure to finish it off quickly. So Slade paid the pain in his thigh no mind, and kept on moving.
He stumbled once, then a second time, and after the third unprompted trip to the cold ground, he decided that it was allowable to take a short break and check on the leg. First glance indicated that pathogen was most likely - the area around the wound was red and swollen while the injury itself was seeping both pus and blood into the leg of his pants. Nothing too bad, he told himself, nothing he couldn’t take care of.
Slade decided to allow himself ten minutes to clean it out with fresh snow and tie it up with a few strips of gauze to slow the seeping. Closer inspection revealed that oddly enough, his healing factor had patched up most of the torn muscle beneath the injury already and despite the obvious infection, he was healing faster than usual. Healing, but not recovering all because some idiot couldn’t keep their knife clean.
He knew from experience that antibiotics wouldn’t do much to help - his metabolism processed them too quickly and it would require a dangerous overdose to achieve the desired effect. Rigorous cleaning with alcohol or wound spray would be a bit more effective, though likely a bit too harsh on the slowly-closing wound and tender muscle beneath. Slade knew that there was nothing for it - he would just have to let his body run its course and get rid of the infection in due time.
The wound throbbed continually and he was starting to develop a serious limp as the muscles locked up in response to the stress, but Slade had never let it stop him before and he wasn’t about to let it stop him now. He ignored the pain as best he could and kept moving, marching steadily towards the pick-up location where he would maybe - maybe - let someone a bit more knowledgeable than him in medical issues take a look at the infection festering just beneath his skin. Then again, it wasn’t too bad, he told himself.
