Me, a known Disabled: uh, yeah, but it is very hard.
Person: okay, great!
Me: wait wait wait. I feel like you think I said, “Sure, no problem,” but what I meant was that while I can do the thing, it comes with the risk of harm to myself and/or my personal belongings. If there is any alternative to the thing, please let me do that instead.
So they go around the world bombing and killing people and then expect us to feel sorry for them?? Nah son, you deserve it.
me if i ever find out any of my neighbors are veterans
Hmmm. I mean, just because the army as an institution is flawed and damaging doesn’t mean everyone in it is a terrible person. To paint every single veteran with the same brush is reductive and to make light of the debilitating mental disorders many have just seems wrong. Like yes, fuck the military as an institution completely 100%, but blaming disabled ex-front-line infantry maybe isn’t the best direction for our anger, perhaps.
A lot of veterans are poor people who were intentionally targeted by scouting programs coming to their schools starting at age 13, and most of them are worse off coming back than they were to start with… let’s be courteous to folks with PTSD
Don’t be an ableist fuckface. Intentionally triggering someone is disgusting.
I thought people on this godforsaken website at least understood this one basic principal, but apparently not, so let me make it crystal clear:
IT IS NOT POSSIBLE TO BE SELECTIVELY PROGRESSIVE
You can hate Ann Coulter. But if you suggest that she deserves to be raped, you are a misogynist.
You can hate Woody Allen. But if you say he’s part of a Jewish conspiracy or joke about putting him in an oven, you are an antisemite.
You can hate Michael Vick. But you call for him to be lynched or call him the N-word, you are an anti-black racist.
You can hate Caitlyn Jenner. But if you misgender her, or make comments about her genitalia, you are a transphobe.
And you can hate the military. But if you deliberately try to trigger veterans with PTSD, you are an ableist piece of shit.
You do no get to pick and choose which people to treat fairly when it comes to acknowledging and combatting prejudice.
Not liking a person is not a free pass to disregard anti-prejudicial words and actions. Either you respect marginalized peoples as a whole (even if you don’t like an individual), or you don’t respect them at all. There is no middle ground.
If anyone really like, agrees with harassing veterans with PTSD or anything similar, unfollow me right the fuck now. I don’t want you following me.
You don’t have to like the military, it’s massively fucked up but y’all needs understand that most people in the military are victims of propaganda and are usually poor or part of a minority who are taken advantage of in order to join.
^^^ All of these comments tbh
Mhmm
They offered the ASVAB at my HIGH SCHOOL. They CAME INTO MY SCHOOL and said “If you guys take the military aptitude test, you get free donuts and you miss the first half of the day.” They brought in hot dogs.
They brought food to a place where half of us were in poverty if not more, and they said, all you have to do is take a little test and you’ll get a snack, you don’t have to come in to school on time (an extra full hour of sleep that morning!). So we did. By the hundreds.
My younger brother, a year behind me in school, scored “the highest we’ve ever seen in the whole damn state, son,” and for the next. Three. Fucking. Years. They harassed him. He got phone calls from every goddamn branch of the military. People would show up at our house at random, trying to recruit him. They’d tell him horror stories about how much better it is to enlist than be drafted (as if there’d been a draft in our lifetime!). They called our Mom at work. They sent recruiters to talk to our stepfather, who’d been in the Army, to try to get a handle on my brother’s weak points.
THREE FUCKING YEARS OF THIS.
My brother is the second child of six. My brother was thirteen by the time he had his own pillow for the first time. My brother was hungry all the time, dizzy from hunger some days–and oh, sidenote, my mother, stepfather and father are all abusive assholes who’d as soon hit you as look at you.
Guess what year my brother graduated?
If you guessed “May, 2002,” or “almost immediately after 9/11,” ding ding ding ding!
The ONLY REASON my brother didn’t join the military, in the end, is that his girlfriend at the time said “If you enlist, I will never speak to you again.” Her dad was a military man, and he was also an abusive shithead, so in her head the two were inextricable. But if she’d said “go for it?” Or if she hadn’t said anything at all?
Something like half of the males in my fucking graduating class enlisted.
It was better than starving.
And a great number of those are dead now.
I hate the US military industry. I’m disgusted by the things our military does. But by god I don’t blame our veterans for what was done to them.
Rich people don’t enlist.
The ones who join the military are the ones who are hopeful that for once they’ll know that they’re getting a meal, not just today but tomorrow too.
Every damn point of the thread.
I grew up in rural poverty. Out of 140 kids in my graduating class, 5 went on to university. 25, myself included, joined the military, because that was the only chance at upward
mobility for most of us.
Have you noticed that a lot of homeless people are veterans? That’s because THEY WERE POOR TO BEGIN WITH and now they’re poor with PTSD, missing limbs, and other trauma.
Saying that you have no sympathy for people chewed up and spit out by the military industrial complex is like saying you have no sympathy for inmates caught in the prison industrial complex.
AO3 updated their filters and I’m so shook???
I love this so fucking much, you have no idea. Thank you, AO3. This made my day way better, and my life so much easier.
I just stumbled upon this awesome post showing a way to keep pinback buttons from falling off of your backpack/purse/etc. using safety pins.
However, it reminded me of another method that I’ve used since high school, and continue to use to this day: Rubber earring backs.
You know…these things:
I had originally bought a package of them to keep my nose stud from falling out while I slept (it was the “screw” type), but then after losing a button off of my high school backpack, I stumbled upon an even better use for them.
If you place them on the pinback of the button, just ahead of where it closes, the pins can’t slip off.
It doesn’t matter what size or shape the button is. Also, I happened to find one that wasn’t closed when I went to take pictures:
The earring back basically acts as a rubber stopper. They’re made specifically to NOT slide off in order to keep earrings in place, so they work just as well keeping buttons in place, even if the buttons aren’t closed.
Considering the backpack that I had in high school…
…I can tell you with complete certainty that rubber earring backs are, bar none, THE best method of making sure you never lose another button ever again. Also, they’re cheaper than safety pins (which can also pop open, thus allowing the button to slide off) and you won’t have to poke extra holes in whatever you’re putting buttons on.
Or hell, combine the rubber earring backs WITH the safety pins! Your buttons will be COMPLETELY UNLOSE-ABLE!
