#naptogether
Lee Carroll Brooker, a 75-year-old disabled veteran suffering from chronic pain, was arrested in July 2011 for growing three dozen marijuana plants for his own medicinal use behind his son’s house in Dothan, Ala., where he lived. For this crime, Mr. Brooker was given a life sentence with no possibility of release.
See also (these two stories just happen to be about veterans, but the policies need to be better for everyone):
Retired Master Cpl. Paul Franklin lost both of his legs from just above knee when a bomb hit the vehicle he was driving during a Canadian Forces tour in Afghanistan in January 2006.
Ten years later, he is getting ready to fill out yet another set of forms to tell the Canadian government that, in fact, his legs are still missing.
“It’s insane,” Franklin said. “My problem with all this is if you have someone who has post-traumatic stress disorder or some sort of brain injury, or you have a combination of the two and they’re on street drugs or alcohol or whatever, the chance of them filling out the forms correctly is minimal at best.”
When a veteran wants to fill out disability and pension forms, it can sometimes involve multiple applications to several bodies, including insurance companies, even for permanent injuries like Franklin’s.
He said veterans should deal only with Veterans Affairs and the process should be far more simple. If medical status has changed, he said, a doctor’s note should suffice. If it hasn’t, no forms should be needed, he said.
hey here’s a wild idea, let’s not allow teachers and administrators to hit students, it’s fucked up, and it is also disproportionately used against black kids, and this is 2016 and go fuck yourself if you think this is acceptable, honestly, go fuck yourself, thanks, also there is some asshole with Slate Plus making about a thousand comments about how great corporal punishment in schools is, as though we cannot all tell that he is furiously jacking it at home while he types
I’m animated when retelling the story. If I become Lucille Ball on a bad date, I can dissociate. This is the approach when I type it out for the online magazine xoJane. It will soon become the bad-date story that upends my life, but I don’t know this as it spews out of me like stomach bile. I don’t care that the writing’s not good; I just want other women to stay away from him.
Hours after it’s posted, the article goes viral, and the faithful rush to Ghomeshi’s defence.
As I watch the vitriolic comments pile up, my editor checks in. I beg her to change the title they gave it, which is an extraordinary 23 words long. (“IT HAPPENED TO ME: I Accidentally Went On A Date With A Presumed-Gay Canadian C-List Celebrity Who Creepily Proved He Isn’t Gay.”) I didn’t write those words. They make me sound like a homophobic asshole. The editor says she’ll see what she can do and advises me to “ignore the haters.” She doesn’t change the title.
I regret writing that I stupidly thought Ghomeshi was gay before meeting him. I had let that assumption conjure a false sense of safety. I’m a naive fool. The Internet notices. I get upset messages from the LGBT community. My heart breaks. I absorb their pain and field their comments. I’m sorry.
OKAY LET US PIVOT TO SOMETHING FUN! AAM is collecting ridiculous emails people have gotten at work:
The best email I have seen was sent to several hundred people in response to reply all being misused and contained the line
“If you are looking for sympathy, you’ll find it dictionary somewhere between shit and syphilis …….”
Many, many pictures of Titanic survivors and the families waiting to hear about them!
What avoiding eye contact DOESN’T mean:
When I was growing up, eye contact was mentioned during confrontations at home where my truth was demanded. “Can you look me in the eye and tell me that?” I was asked. But I can’t recall either of my parents ever saying outright that I should look people in the eyes more, or that it was an expected part of communicating with others. Problems didn’t really occur until my early school days, when teachers insisted that I should look the person I speak to in the eye. During these exchanges, I learned for the first time the pain and trauma that could come from meeting eyes across space.
Yes, I do mean pain, and yes, I do mean trauma.
Eye contact actually hurts me. If I meet the eyes of another and hold their gaze for more than a microsecond, I experience sharp discomfort throughout my entire body. When making eye contact, I also feel that my very soul has been laid bare—that my every inner thought is on display, and that my mind can be read and my secrets made public. The best I way can explain it is that it’s like being opened up totally from the inside out for all to see.
Kate Aurthur is one of my favourite pop culture writers, and her INCREDIBLE look at how Nina became a disaster is so so so good:
In 2005, when Mort began writing Nina, authorship was less contested. The two perceived favorites for Best Picture at the Academy Awards for that year were Brokeback Mountain, a tragic gay love story directed by Ang Lee, a straight man, and the winner, Crash, which directly engaged with racial antagonism in Los Angeles — and was directed, produced, and co-written by Paul Haggis, a white man. That the politics of popular culture and racial appropriation are more scrutinized now is a good thing, said Coates — it means democracy can be a factor. “I think the social media piece is big,” he said. In 2005, “not only is there no Twitter, there’s no black Twitter.”
“Personally, I feel for all of them involved. I really, really do,” Coates said about Nina’s filmmakers and cast. “It’s not a matter of them being bad people. It’s not about them being personally racist. It’s not a matter of Zoe Saldana not being a good enough actor. It’s about a bigger systemic thing. And in a world in which someone who looks like Viola Davis is restricted from the stories she can be a part of, we say that burden should be shared equally. It’s not going to be shared equally. But we say it should.”
the dreaded “people not saying racist things at casual dinner parties” end game:
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