I KNOW WHAT I SAID YESTERDAY, but i need you all to educate yourselves on something that is going on at the moment.
if you’re in the uk, i am sure you have heard of what is called the WINDRUSH GENERATION, but for those abroad essentially it is this: a group of people from the british commonwealth who moved here legally have had their records lost / destroyed (to be determined) and a number of those people have been detained / not been able to be let back into the country after being abroad. there are threats of deportation flying, a man has his access to vital medicine on the NHS removed. like i said, these people are people who moved here when free immigration was legal, prior to 1971, and a lot of them LEGALLY on their parent’s passports (as was the system here) meaning a lot of them have no papers in their name. primarily, the people are black caribbean.
here’s the scary part, and why i am posting, my family are a part of this generation. my papi has lived her since he was 7 months old. while my mammy is jamaican born and bred, my papi never lived in his homeland, and he could lose his right to work, his right to the NHS, his right to live here, all because the home office lost papers, and his were in his parents name. now, yes, there have been A LOT of promises made in parliament, and i know theresa may is saying nothing will happen to these people and cases of discrimination against rightful british citizens will be negated by the government but 1) MAY HAS A TRACK RECORD OF BEING ANTI-IMMIGRATION and 2) because the government lost the only things proving when people like my papi moved here, we can’t prove they are rightful british citizens.
so what am i asking????
first, educate yourselves, please. you can read some more in depth pieces about this through these links: X, X, X, X– mentions of death in this one, VIDEO HERE.
second, if you are in the UK, please please please please LOBBY YOUR MP’S. you have a voice, we have a voice. send letters, call them, email them, tweet them, facebook them. create a stir. we are the people and we will not stand for some britons being treated better than others.
third, if you are not from the UK —– share our voices. seek us out, we are speaking, use your power to make us louder.
forth, PLEASE, if you read nothing else i link, read this. please, i beg you. listen to the stories of people like my father. listen to the windrush generation. hear their voices.
i know tumblr is america centric and i get it, honestly, i do. but i am british-carribean before i am here for any of you and i am begging you, don’t let us be silenced.
It’s set to be debated on the 30th of April, so this is the perfect time to lobby MPs.
There’s a lot to read on twitter under the tag #windrushjustice, and anyone anywhere can use that hashtag; if you’re overseas, the best person to tweet might be Theresa May – @theresa_may
We fucking invited them.
The Windrush generation came in response to the British government *asking* for immigrants from the Commonwealth because they wanted cheap labour.
Now they don’t want to hold up their end of the bargain, so they’ve decided to turn the people who answered their appeal, came and built lives here, contributed to our economy and culture, into criminals.
Fuck that. If you insist on pretending living here is some kind of privilege to be earned, these people deserve to be here more than most.
“Man, I’d kill myself if I had to live the way you do”.
…thank you, for completely devaluing my life. Oh you didn’t mean it that way, I see. I’m sorry. What exactly did you mean when you told the chronically ill person you’d rather be dead than be like them? Oh, that you admire them. Right, right. That’s an odd way of phrasing it then. Isn’t it.
This is your reminder that it’s actually not a compliment to tell a sick or disabled person that you’d kill yourself if you had to live like them. It is not a nice or supportive thing to say and can actually be very dangerously triggering for someone.
If you feel compelled to say something, empathy is a good thing to try. So instead of making it about you and how you could not cope with being us, say something like “that sounds like it’d be hard, I’m sorry you’re dealing with that” or “Wow that sounds sucky, can I help in anyway?”
It’s true my life is not the same as your life, and that’s okay. But don’t go making assumptions that yours is more worth living just cause all your parts work. And I know a lot of you who say that don’t mean it unkindly, I know it’s said unthinkingly and I’m not trying to make you feel like a horrible person. But I am asking you to think.
A bus driver literally blamed me for him not letting me off the bus because I hit the button but wasn’t at the door by the time we got to the stop last week. Because everyone stranding in their own two feet who doesn’t have a cane or crutches can keep their balance on a moving bus and has no problem hanging their body weight off an arm.
Me hanging my weight off my dominant arm hasn’t been reliably safe since Thanksgiving before last. (Bad lifting decision at the grocery, turkey was not involved.)
Lately they’ve started pulling off before the last person on reached the first seats even when that person had gray hair and looked slightly frail, so apparently they’re operating on the ‘mobility aids only’ definition of who gets to make it to the priority seats. I need to start reporting the ones that break the federal regulation about the white line – I nearly face-planted this winter thanks to one who pulled out before I could even tap my pass and then seemed offended that I death-gripped every vertical piece of metal to a seat the next time we stopped.
But I don’t have a visible sign of a physical problem because even right after I got hurt using a sling to reduce joint mobility was the worst thing I could have done. People my age decide to race me to open subway seats and flash me smug ‘I won’ looks while I death grip hug a pole – no documentation means I’ve got zero chance of ousting them. I get looks for trying to get on buses before little old ladies because I can use any open seat if I have the time to get there but they can kick people out of priority without having to ask.
I’d like to try riding standing again where there’s a chance to give up and sit if things go wrong, since it’s been long enough for me to mostly heal, but all it might take is one person seeing me ride standing to mark me as a liar even if I ended up in pain for a week afterward and learned I should never do that again. And this is the kind of thing that is lifetime vulnerable to reinjury.
This was 1976. Big Bird understood and was wholly accepting and empathetic toward Buffy breastfeeding in public, and Big Bird is meant to be the equivalent of a preschool aged child, but every single day on social media, adults exclaim disgust toward breastfeeding in public and misogyny at the parents who do so. People, you’re less evolved than
Big Bird was 38 years ago. Grow the hell up.
holy shit. I had NO idea Sesame Street covered this topic.
And Buffy was Native American. And she breastfed. In front of muppets and children. No one died.
There are a lot of people, asexual and not asexual, who do not enjoy public displays of affection. I’m not comfortable with it being directed at me, and I feel awkward sometimes when I’m around it. I know plenty of people who are not asexual who have very different preferences and comfort levels re: public displays of affection. Nothing wrong with that.
I have issues with doing a lot of things normally classed as PDA in public even when I’m fine with the same things in private, and I think part of it is the ‘is there something reserved for when it’s just us alone’ effect regarding intimacy. I’m sex-repulsed, so I hit my ‘never will I ever’ limit well before society thinks I should be allowed to.
The one that really gets me is the ‘perform for the camera’ couple photo phenomenon. There exist photos from before my spouse and I figured out we are both asexual where my dad did the couple photo thing (it was about a year after we started dating and we dated a decade before becoming engaged, for reference) and I visibly become less and less comfortable as the sequence progresses. At some point I just cross my arms over my chest and stay like that until it’s over.
This pair of aces were barely more frisky by societal standards in private on their wedding night than in those photos taken outside with witnesses, thanks to the ‘but you have to be okay with this, you’re dating’ expectations. And those photos are tame. We’re talking ‘Christian Side Hug’ levels of tame. My high school would have considered that perfectly reasonable locker break PDA even when the powers that be were still enforcing the rules against any PDA.
A significant part of our wedding planning was making sure we could weasel out of Now Kiss and have backup if anyone objected to us just hugging.
No one of any orientation should be expected to put the most intimate things that they do or are willing to do with a romantic or sexual partner on public display.
The ‘uncomfortable observing other people’s PDA’ issue is a different problem, but I think in some cases it may be related and there needs to be an understanding that looking away (‘I am uncomfortable being a bystander to this’) is different from telling people they have to stop (‘I don’t want you doing this anywhere that there are any bystanders’). I’ve seen the two conflated far too often.
I think a lot of people’s opinions about the incel community (as opposed to shy and romantically lonely men or shy and romantically lonely people in general) are looking way too hard for an explanation for something that’s kind of obvious. if you are the sort of person who responds to loneliness by posting sentences like “[SuicideFuel] daily reminder, every female you see has had a dick in her mouth,” you don’t have to be fucking Einstein to figure out why you can’t get laid
daily reminder, every female you see has had a dick in her mouth
This is actually weirdly inspirational. Like, at the end of the day we’re all humans doing human things, and we can be vulnerable. This is something I occasionally do think about: public personae people project are very devoid of vulnerability, and thinking that it’s pretty wild to imagine that the same people I talk to every day can be snuggling someone or having sex in a different context.
I think a lot of people’s opinions about the incel community (as opposed to shy and romantically lonely men or shy and romantically lonely people in general) are looking way too hard for an explanation for something that’s kind of obvious. if you are the sort of person who responds to loneliness by posting sentences like “[SuicideFuel] daily reminder, every female you see has had a dick in her mouth,” you don’t have to be fucking Einstein to figure out why you can’t get laid
Did they all start out that way, or are you falling victim to the just world fallacy?
I feel like at this point I have a reasonable sample of men who are decent people and who are romantically lonely, and literally none of them do this. I am actually sort of insulted on behalf of the lonely and formerly lonely men I know that you think they would!
I mean, at some point (assuming free will exists etc) they did, in fact, make the free choice to be terrible people when they had the option to not be terrible people. I don’t think this is, like, a defense.
re: tags, no the point is more ‘they started out fairly normal, had problems with loneliness and got super sad then eventually super resentful then eventually turned into assholes (which may contribute to them continuing to be lonely now)’ rather than ‘they started out as assholes and that’s why they’re lonely’.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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