you can reserve a space on the train for your bicycle in the default online booking form.
to get a wheelchair space, i have to book the ticket then exchange several emails with the railway company, as if the concept of wheelchairs is entirely new to them. sometimes there’s no email address and they try to insist i call them, which is inaccessible to so many people. then they demand i show up half an hour early, at which point they typically act as if they’ve never heard of you or they have a wheelchair ready because no one told them i have my own. when i arrive at my destination, i cross my fingers that anyone has bothered to call ahead for someone to get the ramp out, and usually have to resort to asking another passenger to flag down a member of staff. i leave long after all the other passengers and crew. and don’t even get me started on airplanes.
now apply this principle to literally everything.
oh and the only reason i have to do any of this is because they didn’t build the trains to be level with the platforms. i only need their “assistance” (literally just a ramp) because they didn’t factor me in in the first place. all that effort, MY effort, for “help” i shouldn’t need.
being disabled is so much WORK. contacting everywhere you might go in advance to find out if it’s accessible, then you get there and “oh there’s just a few steps” or you have to call them on some number so they can get the one guy who has the key to the rickety elevator but oh wait he’s on vacation, or they’re using the disabled toilet as a storage closet. everything i do comes with layers of effort that abled people can’t even imagine (i know, i used to be one).
now bear in mind that on a good day i have like 25% of the energy of an average person my age. i need most of that to, you know, eat and so forth. so having to spend half my energy dealing with this type of bullshit renders so much of the world inaccessible to me, because i often physically cannot jump through all these fucking hoops to like… enter a building or get on a train.
“I came to this march for the message that white European culture has a right to be here just like every other culture,” Cvjetanovic opined. “It is not perfect; there are flaws to it, of course. However I do believe that the replacement of the statue will be the slow replacement of white heritage within the United States and the people who fought and defended and built their homeland. Robert E Lee is a great example of that. He wasn’t a perfect man, but I want to honor and respect what he stood for during his time.”
Let me pause to stretch my eyeballs since I just rolled them so hard I think they’re sprained.
Okay. So.
UNFORTUNATELY……white nationalists haven’t figured out a way to define their culture outside of how it relates to oppressing everyone else. I’m not even joking or throwing shade or making light. I can go on Twitter right now and make a culturally specific hashtag that other Black people will relate to, and it has nothing to do with hate or oppression. We’ll be celebrating a shared kinship and experience in this country, and of course white people will chime in with how excluded they feel, but that’s their problem not mine. Every culture in the US can do that.
Until white people can all come together and find some way to express the good things about being white that aren’t somehow related to the bad things that happen to everyone else, you don’t really get to celebrate just simply being white. I’m sorry if that sounds unfair to you, that Black people can celebrate being Black but white people can’t celebrate being white, but to me it seems a very small price to pay for all the benefits of being white at the expense of everyone else.
We celebrate being Black because y’all’s grandpas did this, brought us here, and separated us from our heritage and culture. So we had to BUILD one and the only thing we had in common were the chains (and religion) forced on us by white people and how we’re treated by this country because of our skin color. We built a culture because we had no access to our heritage. Our culture is on our skin because that’s the way y’all set it up. If you want to celebrate your heritage, trace it back to wherever you came from and put on some lederhosen or a kilt or a beret or some wooden shoes, because you can actually trace where you came from. You don’t get to just celebrate simply being white and the *only* reason you even want to is because you feel threatened by everyone else who isn’t.
there’s a tongue in cheek way jews summarize a lot of our holiday celebrations: ‘they tried to kill us, they failed, let’s eat!’. when you have that kind of heritage, you don’t feel all that sympathetic when one of the guys that’s trying to kill you whines about how he just doesn’t feel special enough. like rafi-dangelo says, figure out what part of your heritage to celebrate that isn’t about wearing the jackboot pressed down on the rest of our necks. we’ll be more than happy to celebrate it with you.
there is no such thing as ‘white culture’, that’s why.
i can go to the czech heritage festival in new prague every year and eat kolaches until i burst, and it doesn’t hurt anyone. no one is trying to stop me, either. i am pretty sure y’all don’t even slightly have a problem with that.
i’m also pretty sure mister tiki party up there would not enjoy it, because it doesn’t involve asserting his dominance over people, and that’s what he’s really about. his excuses are bullshit. he’s just a failure at life and wants to take it out on anyone but himself.
you can celebrate celtic cultures, norse ancestors, russian music and food, you can hoist a glass at oktoberfest, there are gatherings and museums and allsorts. any european culture you name. but not ‘white culture’ because THAT ISN’T A THING YOU RACIST BLOWHARD.
anyone else remember when there was a report that right-wing conservative terrorists were a greater threat than muslim extremists and the republicans pitched such a fit they buried the report, defunded the department that made the report and then basically made that department cease to exist
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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