The NYC AIDS Memorial Website Says That By The End Of 2000, 448,060 People Had Died In The US Of AIDS.

The NYC AIDS Memorial website says that by the end of 2000, 448,060 people had died in the US of AIDS. Not in New York City. Not only gay men. Not during the 1980s. More context on the original post here.

I get the sentiment. It’s important to remember those who died due to national inaction. But comparing numbers of deaths in tragedies isn’t the only way to show respect for the dead or outrage for their mistreatment, and we can still be careful to share true things in service of justice goals.

Getting this right matters because the gay men and other people who died of AIDS matter, and their deaths deserve to be contextualized correctly as we remember the atrocious tragedy of the AIDS crisis. It matters because I’m seeing people reblog these numbers as a way of shutting out trans and bi people from the LGBTQIA community, as if those people did not also die of AIDS. It matters because opponents of gay rights can jump on things like this to undermine the entire argument. It matters because truth matters--more than winning a point.

During the 1980s, more gay men died in New York City during the AIDS crisis than all recorded deaths of American soldiers in Vietnam. You need to know that.

Holy fucking shit, Bad Bob too.

If ur feeling it .... I don’t believe each person has just one true love, but sometimes we don’t have enough time to find another. (That’s the way it crumbles. Cookie-wise.)

Oh buddy, am I ever feeling it :^)Warnings: Unhelpful advice from grownups, bitter hyperbolic, fatalistic feelings about love and death, the fucking canon overdose fuck this fandom

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Head’s up that you don’t necessarily have to go through the earlier numbers before you arrive at that higher number. The way it’s written, number 5 in particular, it sounds like it’s a progression, getting worse. That’s not always how it works.

I was reading through these and not seeing myself in numbers 4, 5, 6. But boy is #7 recognizable. So if you’re thinking you’re not doing so great, but you you can’t remember when your mental health was just starting to impact your everyday life, keep reading. Still valid.

A simple mental health pain scale.

every second aziraphael goodomens is onscreen with the other angels he just radiates “uncomfortable gay cousin at the family reunion” vibes. like at no point during the show is he literally listening to his uncle talk about sports and trying not to give away that he doesn’t know either of the teams he’s talking about but spiritually, spiritually that’s exactly where he’s at. 

Oh my God, why have I never connected the Industrial Revolution’s terrible impact on farmers to settler colonialism?? Must investigate further, but seems fittingly full-circle...

As my Rainbow Fish post pushes towards 16K notes, the thing that always breaks my heart is the tag-cloud stories and sometimes replies. 

Some of them are clearly from childhoods that would have been abusive no matter what - the person’s giftedness happened to be one of the tools, one of the things about them that abusive parents or teachers or peers turned into a club to hit them with - and those are fucking tragic and I’m so sorry. And it’s not your fault: when all a parent can say they like about you is “you had so much potential” it is not your fault, that is them being horrible. Every fucking child is lovable, likeable. For a parent to say that says there’s something wrong with them, not you. 

And then the other ones that break my heart so bad are the ones where … the parent meant well. Or the teacher. Or whoever. Or where it was kids being horrible little shits but the actual problem was (and always is) the adults who didn’t intervene because seven year olds are always little shits, they’re seven, they literally did not come with kind generous ethical behaviour installed. We have to teach them that. We have to teach them what’s good and what’s bad and that means you don’t sit there and enable them harassing their classmate because a) it is hideously horrible for the poor target and you have a responsibility to protect them but also b) you are doing the bully NO DAMN FAVOURS. 

But also: do not tell your eight year old it’s up to them to save the world. Especially don’t tell your fucking hypersensitive hyper-intellectual eight year old it’s up to them. Do not tell a child who’s just been hit by the overwhelming weight of the chaotic difficulty that is decency and humanity in the world that it’s their job, their responsibility, to “use their talents” to fix things. 

They’re eight fucking years old. Their job is to learn how to be kind and learn how to tie their own shoes, to learn how to regulate their emotions and behaviours, to let their brains expand, to learn how to think, to do all the things eight year olds need to do in a safe space so they can be best prepared to join the huge overwhelming effort of making the world better, with the rest of us, when they’re grown up. 

Nobody can save the world by themselves. It’s possible we’re not even up to it en masse and there’s seven billion of us and counting and it’ll probably still take another hundred years or so before we get our shit together enough that we can save ourselves. One eight year old sure as fuck can’t, and the best that any one of us can really hope to do is figure out how not to make it worse. 

Which is a much harder proposition when you’re exhausted, anxious and miserable from the three mental health disorders that you developed because when you were eight and your ability to cognitively grasp the vastness of human suffering massively exceeded your emotional ability to process and deal with it AND your critical thinking skills to take that apart and grasp the impossibility of it, someone loaded you down like Atlas. 

Do not tell your eight year old that they owe their soul to the world. Or that they’re letting people down by not “living up to potential”. Your eight year old as a human owes other people basic decency and human consideration, and their best “potential” is a life wherein they have found themselves a space to be content and sturdy and solid in the world so that they can best act out that decency and human consideration. 

That is the only “potential” anyone needs to worry about. 

This has been your intermittent Feelings-Dump by Feather about Kids and that post and how she just wants to go back in time, find all of you when you were six, tell you you’re good enough, and take you to play in the playground. Or read a book. Or get ice-cream. Or whatever. 

@copperbadge this reporter agrees with your thesis on February.