I wish I could find one thing I read a while back, with someone talking about the actual history around the Civil War in the North Georgia mountains compared to the number of assholes currently flying the stars and bars under the carefully pushed impression that it really is their “heritage”.
Depressingly similar pattern in my part of Virginia, yeah. The bit that only didn’t get split off to make WV because it already had enough rail infrastructure that Virginia wanted to hold onto.
@illuminatiswag – Yeah, I’m in the UK now, and I thought I was going to have a stroke the first time I saw something like this:
Outside the soccer stadium, European extremist political groups have been known to fly the Confederate flag, too. European skinheads and neo-Nazis have sometimes adopted the Confederate flag, especially in Germany, where the swastika and other symbols of Nazi Germany are officially banned by law. Many Europeans see the flag as a de facto sign of far-right political leanings: A Confederate flag that was spotted in a photograph of a French police station last year caused a minor scandal.
Bizarrely, American Civil War reenactions have become popular in Germany, with significant numbers of Germans preferring to fight on the Confederate side. “I think some of the Confederate reenactors in Germany are acting out Nazi fantasies of racial superiority,” Wolfgang Hochbruck, a professor of American Studies at the University of Freiburg, once told American journalist Tony Horwitz. “They are obsessed with your war because they cannot celebrate their own vanquished racists.”
It’s disconcerting enough elsewhere in the US. Where it’s a lot harder to claim ignorance of some of these connotations, even with some of the rest of the weird resurgence that apparently started in the ‘40s. It’s a mess.
Reminded again by this post, as an adult I am impressed in some different ways by the fact that when I had some horrific GI symptoms as a kid? The go-to explanation was always “stress from school”.
(It really was a pretty stressful experience, what with the bullying and all. The main thing causing those problems was unrecognized celiac, however.)
I mean, doctors were taking it as a given that the educational system is regularly stressful enough for kids that they will develop things like frequent otherwise unexplained vomiting and explosive cases of the runs in response. (Plus migraines, and you name it.) Whether it’s “just” from the direct physical effects of stress, or some weird psychosomatic ploy to try to avoid a stressful environment, and/or best attributed to mental health problems brought on/aggravated by school stress.
This evidently seemed totally reasonable, to the point of being the default assumption whenever they encountered a school-aged kid dealing with health problems which they couldn’t immediately figure out. (Then no further investigation required…)
This seems disturbing enough, on its own.
What really gets me, though, as an adult? The answer to this was never once “Gee, if this stressful environment is making children sick, maybe we should figure out how to change the situation to be less stressful!” Or even trying to make some changes to take pressure off the individual kid who is barfing in their office here and now. No, they apparently need to just get over it, if they are not actively milking it to avoid going to school like they should be doing.
Of course, I understand a lot more about institutions now. It’s still seriously messed up, how accepted and enabled some of the harm coming out of bad ones can be.
When she was in college, one friend of hers got the wrong race marker put on his driver’s license, by a DMV clerk eyeballing him and making their own judgments.
He was a very dark South Indian, going to school in a US state which used “White” and “Colored” as the only categories. People from the Indian subcontinent were considered legally white within that bizarre binary framework, but apparently that DMV clerk had other ideas from looking at him.
He had at least as much hassle trying to get that race marker changed as a gender marker now. He apparently did eventually get it changed, but it took months and they didn’t much like whatever foreign documents he could get hold of. What a surprise 🙄
And, it mattered.
The kicker? That was in the late ‘60s, after official desegregation. They were still insisting on official race markers on documents, and yes it still mattered which side of the binary you ended up on.
(Along with things not matching up, which was a longer term problem in our family.)
Some tag commentary I ended up adding on the last reblog:
#people do get impatient and actively shitty with me #a lot #stupid foreigner bonus #since i moved here #i just don’t do voice calls if there’s literally any other choice
Some of that is down to significant further hearing loss (which also gives less info for the screwy auditory processing to work with!)–but not all of it.
I also refuse to call the anxiety component “phone phobia”, precisely because it is a secondary thing. The anxiety has gotten worse in direct response to actual shitty behavior trying to deal with people on the phone. Not every time, of course, but people do turn just plain rude and insulting frequently enough that it really is a problem.
Another thing where it’s often kinda hard to sort out the ableism from the xenophobia, tbqh. I mean, I did already run into the “stupid hillbilly” reactions before. If anything, that makes me more frustrated just trying to go about my business. Not much win possible.
This post I reblogged earlier is well worth a read anyway. But, I was interested to see someone do such a good job of wrapping words around some observations:
I don’t mean stay closeted — I didn’t manage that for very long, I’m a terrible liar, and this was the early 90s and my college hosted Queer Nation rallies — I mean don’t get caught…
At some point the world changed. Part of that change is that the people who believe gay to be the literal worst and most disgusting thing a person can be or do, worse than murder, they feel outnumbered and threatened now. And now that they feel threatened, outnumbered, small and powerless, they enact their insecurity and fear in great grand gestures.
Yeah. It’s all very disturbing. In some ways, the social and political atmosphere around a number of things has turned so much more polarized and frankly scarier–when it was far from great before. As she points out. And with not much obvious to be done besides just keep trying to ride it out.
I have had to think about some of this stuff a lot, too. And it gets overwhelming sometimes.
Ran across this, from a couple of years ago, when I was (unsuccessfully) looking for something else. Seemed worth bringing back.
It also struck me as crap funny in a way, that I ended up with the opposite go-to strategy as a kid in the ‘80s: perm the hell out of it, to at least make it look more uniform and less chaotic, when you have no idea how to deal with naturally curly hair 🙄 Besides just keeping it chopped off.
That only started after I was in school, though, and old enough to somewhat safely get my head slathered in chemicals without immediate meltdowns. And it wasn’t all the time.
(Just as glad it was totally socially acceptable to just keep it chopped off when I was little, though. Because I still hate anyone messing with my hair, and it was Meltdown City any time somebody tried then…)
Glancing through the notes on this, I can’t help but be kind of glad again that I do seem to have missed out on most of the more recent hair straightening pressure in the US.
A while back, I watched one video that showed up recommended on YouTube out of curiosity, with a younger black American guy talking about some of the things he noticed while visiting the UK. (Don’t have the spoons to try to find that now, and most of it isn’t relevant anyway.)
One thing that did unexpectedly jump out at him, though? Seeing a lot more variety of hair textures on women. Not just a decent bit of natural hair on black women, but also much more curly/wavy hair in general that other women were not routinely wearing straightened.
I mean, I don’t know much about that guy’s frame of reference at home, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he had a point there. Some people do straighten their hair here, but it really doesn’t seem to be a base expectation to look even vaguely put-together in anything like the same way.
(And I am suspicious of some of the racial not even undertones with it sometimes. Non-straight hair just doesn’t seem to be racialized in the same ways here, longer term. Coming from a pretty mixed background, I may have noticed even more.)
From what I’ve kept gathering from some discussions, that pressure really seems to have picked up over the past 10 years or so, since I last spent any time back in the US. And it does keep surprising me.
This time, I was particularly struck by more than one person in notes mentioning unsolicited advice to straighten toddler girls’ hair so it would look neater 😵 I mean, I grew up with a (very badly managed out of ignorance) snarly mop of hair that stuck out all over the place, and some adults got just plain abusive about it. But, some expectations seem to have gotten more rigid since then, and applied much earlier.
(Toddlers? Really?! Their hair is just starting to really grow in, and basically never looks neat. Beyond the issue of treating curly/wavy as inherently messy. Why anyone would expect it to be Under Control, I have no idea. Much less think it’s reasonable to use hot appliances and/or chemicals on a squirmy toddler head. Talk about some messed up priorities.)
Unfortunately reminded again of when my grandmother couldn’t keep it in her head that my mom had terminal cancer–and kept complimenting her on the weight loss. 😨
No matter how terrible she was looking in reality, because extremely ill and weak enough to barely stay on her feet. As you can maybe imagine.
I knew the lady was pretty screwed up in that department, but it still startled me. I mean, she managed to land herself in the hospital with I think kidney failure among other consequences of starvation when my mom was a kid–and never really acknowledged that she had any problems there, even after that. Her take? “I looked the best I ever have in my life, but I felt terrible!” Nah… 😑
That reaction to the results of her daughter’s Cancer Diet still startled me, though, after listening to her usual for 30+ years. Besides the basic short term memory problems aggravating that particular example, I guess it was another example of dementia disinhibition helping bring out the worst. I still have some hard feelings, though.
It couldn’t be easy, living your own life like that. (95 years of it, next month.) That sounds terrible. But, also laying it on the people close to you at every opportunity? There’s really not much excuse for that. At all.
At any rate, no damned wonder I was the fourth generation that I know of on that side of the family to end up with the Family OCD partly coming out through a pretty serious ED.
My Mamaw got it from her mother at least as bad as what she’s handed out herself, but there’s still no excuse. I know how hard that shit can be to deal with, and refuse to pass it on. But, I am also the only one so far to acknowledge the problem and try to stop hurting myself with it 😩 Overwhelming to think about.
ETA: Not to mention the number of people who wouldn’t have any issue with most of it, as long as nobody outright said “eating disorder”.
Just reminded again, I’m still appalled that I couldn’t find a rescue/rehab organization anywhere in Greater London willing to take on pigeons at all, when our half-grown cats proudly carried in an injured one almost as big as he was then. There was a roost nearby, but it hadn’t occurred to me that a kitten might go after a full-grown pigeon. Surprise! 😕
(That was also over 10 years ago, and I don’t know about now. Hopefully there is at least one rescue taking them. May have missed something then, but you can bet I did some motivated looking.)
So, I needed to do some other research, starting from a point where I’d never taken care of birds at all, and set up my own makeshift pigeon infirmary–with those cats carefully shut out of the room 😨
Thankfully, that bird wasn’t badly injured, and mostly needed a few days to recuperate in a safer place before it seemed ready for release.
Clatterbane’s Flying Rat Hospital ended up with several other patients over the years, including one I saw struggling with an obviously hurt leg and birdnapped off the street. Luckily, all the others were also either just shook or not badly enough hurt to need veterinary attention, and recovered with a some TLC and a couple of weeks at most. (If any had been in worse shape, I would have hauled them to our vets’, who do also treat birds, and tried to get them more help. No worries there.)
But, they deserved better than “Geez, I have no idea what I’m doing, but at least I do care enough to try to find out how to help to the best of my ability.” I don’t care if they’re not usually considered Proper Wild Animals Deserving Of Help. That’s just mean.
Much of the fruit on trees in a relatively sunny position at Kew after a relatively warm summer in 1996 was still not fully ripe, though it was very nearly so and ripened well off the tree
And that was a noteworthy performance 😅
It’s also very unlikely to get frosted at the appropriate time. Which, in my estimation, makes parsnips and rutabagas/swedes just about edible without the weird sweet tones (though a lot of people do want that)–but is kinda the opposite of what you need to get persimmons worth eating.
Even if we had the space, that would have to be a nope. Pretty as the trees are.
(You can find Asian persimmons here, but the flavor/texture are very different. The North American kind don’t ship worth a damn either, like pawpaws, which is why they’re not really grown commercially.)
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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