People on such short trips usually don’t stick around long enough to realize how ineffective they are being. In Uganda, I got used to seeing groups of young people come for week-long visits at the orphanage where taught English. They would play with the kids, give them a bracelet or something, and then leave all-smiles, thinking they just saved Africa. I was surprised when the day after the first group left, exactly zero of the kids were wearing the bracelet they had received the day prior. The voluntourists left thinking they gave the kids something they didn’t have before (and with bragging rights for life). But the kids didn’t care, because what they really wanted was school uniforms, their school fees to be paid, guaranteed meals, basic healthcare, and the like — the basics.
Worse, they can even be harmful to children who struggle with abandonment issues. This should not be understated; have you ever considered the negative impact it routinely has on kids after they bond with someone for a week, and then that person disappears from their life? If your justification for going on these trips is “seeing the smiles on the kids’ faces”, then you’re part of the problem.
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peace and health to you and yours
i’ve been whining about how my holiday time will just be stuck at home. no travel, no adventure, nothing. i thought for a minute that C and i were going to get each other a roomba as our joint holiday gift and it made me so sad that i cried in a target. (and flipped off the teens who were looking at me. teens, some day you will know adult exhaustion!)
then, this weekend, we had a series of catastrophes - i fell in a parking lot and bruised a nerve in my arm (is that even a thing? who knew that was a thing!!) and am now not supposed to lift anything with my arm, including the baby. THEN, both C and i got the stomach flu, like bad bad very bad, like 101 fever for 2 days, had to send the baby to my parents because we could not care for her at all, couldn’t even try to eat for days.
if this was all a grand lesson to teach me to treasure quiet time with family and friends and to be grateful for the love i have in my life and not long for adventure - it worked. but i could use a less thorough lesson next time, universe.
(i’m sure the 35 christmas-themed hallmark movies i’ve watched from my sickbed have influenced my increased holiday spirit as well.)
uber, but for someone to come to where you are so you can punch them in the face
this song is still super sick and amanda blank’s verse is pure fire.
not a great day
definitely getting a cold
car battery died at the gas station on the way to work this morning
nobody’s at work so why’d i drive down here anyway
people are bringing adoption into discussions of TERFs in a way that assumes that adoptive parents are treated exactly the same as birth parents and nobody ever questions the mother-ness of adoptive moms
men are trash
SOLUTION: listen to amanda blank album “i love you” as loud as possible and rap along to the best of my remembrance!
State laws that prohibit persons subject to IPV-related restraining orders from possessing firearms and also require them to relinquish firearms in their possession were associated with 9.7% lower total IPH rates (95% CI, 3.4% to 15.5% reduction) and 14.0% lower firearm-related IPH rates (CI, 5.1% to 22.0% reduction) than in states without these laws. Laws that did not explicitly require relinquishment of firearms were associated with a non–statistically significant 6.6% reduction in IPH rates.
there’s no information in the article about how these laws affected other crime rates - such as mass shootings - but that’d be interesting to see also. (although they’re such rare events there’s probably not the statistical power to pick it up.) anyway, relinquishment enforcement feels important right now.
The gunman behind a rampage in Northern California was out on bail charged with stabbing a neighbor, others had complained about him firing hundreds of rounds from his house, and he had been the subject of a domestic violence call the day before the attack.
Yet Kevin Neal was free and able to use a semi-automatic rifle and two handguns Tuesday to shoot 14 people, killing four, in seven different locations across his rural community, including an elementary school, before he died in a shootout with police.
Yet you can feel the backlash brewing. All it will take is one particularly lame allegation — and given the increasing depravity of the charges, the milder stuff looks lamer and lamer, no matter how awful the experience — to turn the tide from deep umbrage on behalf of women to pity for the poor, bullied men. Or one false accusation could do it. One man unfairly fired over a misinterpreted bump in the elevator could transform all of us women into the marauding aggressors, the men our hapless victims.
MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle, himself once having been returned to power after a plagiarism scandal, has mourned publicly for the injury done to his friend and former colleague Mark Halperin, who got canned after being accused of pushing his penis against younger female subordinates: “He deserves to have what he did deplored,” Barnicle declared. “But does he deserve to die? How many times can you kill a guy?”
A powerful white man losing a job is a death, and don’t be surprised if women wind up punished for the spate of killings.
Many men will absorb the lessons of late 2017 to be not about the threat they’ve posed to women but about the threat that women pose to them. So there will be more — perhaps unconscious — hesitancy about hiring women, less eagerness to invite them to lunch, or send them on work trips with men; men will be warier of mentoring women.
whistle-notes