#and I really feel like that disproportionate view of her own emotions / interactions with others is what triggers her the most

[queencvbra]

One thing I need to bring up about Tory and her ADHD is that one of the biggest symptoms she has (outside of the "basic" symptoms like hyperactivity, attention issues, etc.) is Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria. I feel like it plays into her Intermittent Explosive Disorder getting triggered because a lot of the explosive episodes she has stem from feelings of rejection, whether that's on a personal or societal level. It's why she's so sensitive to what people say to her and tends to take things the wrong way, she just preemptively expects the worst from most people and expects people to dislike her even if they don't necessarily have a reason to.

Her default state is so combative and overly sensitive because it's a defense mechanism. No one can shock you with rejection or disappointment if you stay ready for it, or if you treat people like they've already done something to wrong you. And those times when she is caught off guard and genuinely gets her feelings hurt, even if it's over something stupid or her misinterpreting something? That's usually what triggers her. That's what leads to her overreacting. She's been through a lot over the years that's hurt her in ways she can't explain, and yet she still can't process it. For so long her only ways to cope were to either shut down or blow up. She's getting better about it, she has new ways to deal with things and a support system now, but it's all still new to her and she's not perfect about how she deals with those feelings.

[michelleelizabethtanner]

Belated welcome to the fandom, I am making my way through Rough Night and I am obsessed. Was curious: how would you rank the gg seasons and why? Fave character and the one you hate the most? Thoughts on 2.13 - a terrible narrative decision or a way to jump start many more episodes of delicious angst?

Aw, hi anon! Thank you for the welcome. I’m excited to be here. 😁 And thank you for your kind words about Rough Night! That’s so sweet. 🥹

I really love all the seasons in their own ways. There’s something so special about each one. Ranking them is hard for me. If I HAD to, I’d say 2,1, 4, 3 – strictly for quantity and quality of Brio interactions.

Season 1 is just so full of moxy. It’s endearing and why I kept watching the show. Everyone looks so cute in it and their excitement to be working on this set really came through. I love their wigs and I love their outfits and I love their conspiratorial energy about this naughty thing they’re doing. I even love dumb Dean and his ridiculous schemes to keep his unhappy wife.

Season 2 deepened every character. It gave us glimpses into just how unhappy Beth and Dean’s marriage had been and for how long. She never looked at him the way Ruby looks at Stan. It gave us a better view into the disproportionate friendship Beth and Ruby have had for years. How Beth would choose her above everyone else every time, and how she expected Ruby to do the same. Foreshadowing for season 4. Of course, the ✨Brio energy✨ in this season is unmatched. It’s magic. The way they were so many things to each other here and how poorly they handled it all. 2.13, in my opinion, was an excellent narrative decision. Everything Brio had been to each other in this season led up to it and made perfect sense. It showed Rio for who he is – deeply emotional, imperfect, lonely, easily hurt and petty when he is. It was our first glimpse into his humanization. He wasn’t a smirky, all-knowing, impervious figure anymore. He was made into a man who feels compassion and confusion and attraction and wants validation just like the rest of us. Season two showed us just how much he NEEDS validation and how hurt he gets when he doesn’t receive it.

Idk why people don’t like season 3. Everyone loves angst in fic and this whole season was Brio angst. The way this man suffered feeds my soul. This is a much more emotionally complicated season and I love that for all of us. 😆 The indecision, the duality, the denial, the deep deep hurt. The way he made her watch while he killed someone. “My girl.” He said it to Beth, not Lucy. He held her eyes and brought a lamb to slaughter to show Beth she wasn’t above causing someone’s death. She wasn’t better than he is. And in turn, the way we got small glimpses into how Beth thinks about him when he isn’t there. Her scene teaching Lucy’s bf to shoot and what her holding that knowledge implied. How closely she was coached and guided. She was remembering as she took her aim and fired. Remembering all he’s taught her and remembering the last time she fired a weapon. The depth of her denial is so frustrating to watch because we see the care and nostalgia there for her. She just refuses to acknowledge it.

Season 4 was unmatched Rio personal development. If anything, I think THAT was probably the most out of character and out of previous scope thing to happen. The catalyst of Nick made sense but also was kind of barely believable as a plot line. It recast Rio as much less in control than we all assumed him to be, and made him much more subservient to his lonely predicament. Ultimately though, I buy it because it’s what leads Brio back to each other. And that’s all we’ve ever wanted. Rio, who’s held on to so much anger to try and maintain control, just gave it all up. Let it drift and wash away. “We can do whatever we want.” Sir! Pleeeaaaseeee! 😭😭😭 The way he did all the gestures. The way he self-sacrificed for her. Set aside all shreds of ego for her. I will tolerate all the trash boyfriends and all the bicycle bullies for the way Rio showed Beth all his softness. I wiiiiish we would have gotten to see her soften to him too. Our white whale.

[alastanor]

To start, I would like to thank @cis-het-angel-kinnie for bringing this video to my attention, even if it was to praise the video rather than to point out it's flawed arguments against Charlie for main character.

If you have not seen the video yet, I recommend giving it a watch prior to reading this or you may be confused.

Click to read more...

What Is A Protagonist?

I am not bringing up this question because I think the source used was incorrect. However, the statement that "protagonists ask questions and antagonists make arguments" is an oversimplification of both roles. And I am going to explain why.

The trope of protagonist vs antagonist is an age old theme which has been used countless times throughout storytelling's history in books, plays, films, and story-driven video games. As such, the definition of both roles has continued to flourish and evolve over time. It is no longer good vs evil.

While @diregentleman used books written by, I assume, published writers for his argument, I am going to use Creative Writing and Literary Experts from a Masterclass article.

In the article, a protagonist is described as this:

"In storytelling, a protagonist is the main character or principal character or group of characters in a story."

More than one character is capable of being an antagonist in this story. Given that demons are meant to be redeemed, fitting the theme of the story, it is fair to surmise that all (or the majority of) the demons surrounding Charlie are protagonists in some form.

The article goes on to state that the protagonist's goals reflect the overall story goals and the plot moves forward based on their decisions.

This being said, Charlie's overall goal reflects the premise of the story, that being that Hazbin Hotel is a story about redemption. This is a goal that Angel Dust does not have.

In DireGentleman's video, he claims Angel Dust joined the Happy Hotel with the intention of being redeemed, albeit skeptical whether it could actually be done. This is actually inaccurate, and we see this in both the pilot and the comic.

Angel does display skepticism straight from the gate, but when they explain their reason for approaching him (that no one else has agreed), he makes this face:

Does that really look like someone who believes redemption may be possible? But for further establishment of just how little Angel believes redemption is possible, Angel also laughs them off and calls their goal "lame."

The only reason Angel agrees to Charlie and Vaggie's proposition is because it is a rent free place to stay. He admits as much just a bit further into the comic. By the end, Angel says "Redemption, it's silly. Huh, Nuggs."

The tone we are led to believe he uses is one of contemplation and relief. Relief due likely to the fact that there is some light at the end of the tunnel to the shit situation he was in.

This is just comic evidence, of course. If we go to the pilot, when Angel is engaging in the turf war with Cherri Bomb, he explains that he is using Charlie and Vaggie for free rent. Further exemplified when he later asks if participating in the turf war meant he didn't have a free room anymore. But also in his conversation with Cherri, he also admits that he is still taking some drugs behind Charlie and Vaggie's back. Something that we see immediately toward the opening of the pilot when Angel buys a bag of Angel Dust.

Character Dynamic

I cannot emphasize this enough, the Hunicast is NOT a good exemplifier for character dynamics. Every single "character interaction" is based on fanon, not canon, and they are prompted by the fans themselves. Only Viv really knows exactly how Angel and Alastor would canonically interact. It is no better a source for character dynamic than the wiki is for accurate information. IE, some things may hold true, but the majority of it is not and it is better just to wait until it is confirmed canon.

Moving on...

There is a lot of focus on Valentino as a main antagonist, based entirely too much on the hope that Angel will be the main protagonist. And this is really just disingenuous when you consider there are two other implied Overlords, as well as several other sources of strife within the world of Hazbin Hotel.

An Antagonist is someone working against the protagonist to prevent them from achieving their goal. Alastor would not meet this criteria, as he is a self-professed observer and conflict creator. But he is not a main antagonist. Someone working against the goal of redemption could be anyone from the Overlords (which, far as we know, would include Valentino), Lucifer, or even Heaven itself.

Where antagonists come into play, quoting Masterlist once again, I think these two types of antagonists were overlooked:

A conflict-creator. An antagonist doesn’t have to be a “bad guy.” Sometimes, they’re just a character whose goals are in direct conflict with the protagonist’s, like Mr. Darcy in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice or Javert working to arrest Valjean in Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables.

The protagonist themselves. The main source of conflict in a story can be from within the protagonist themselves—their shortcomings or insecurities are keeping them from reaching their goal. A prime example of this is Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. While Holden comes into conflict with many characters in the novel, the ever-present antagonizing conflict comes from his own obsessions and insecurities.

Now, why did I bring up these two types? Well! I'm glad you asked! You see, where conflict-creator comes into play would line up more with Alastor. He isn't really the bad guy, but he does create some friction where his goals meet with Charlie's. He is a professed observer, but it is strongly believed that there is something else, another goal, that he has omitted.

As for the Protagonist themselves, this lines up pretty strongly where Charlie is concerned. You could argue that it does for Angel too, but Angel's goal, as mentioned before, is not Redemption. That goal is Charlie's, and hers alone. Yet it is her naivety, inexperience, and insecurities surrounding her failures as a princess that are holding her back from achieving her goal. Going by this, not only do we have multiple protagonists, but we also have multiple antagonists.

"So far, no one else's past is wrought with tension like Angel Dust's."

Even if this wasn't a sweeping, dismissive statement made with limited information, it would still be incorrect. Why? Because each and every character in Hazbin Hotel is going to have their own story to tell. Stories that will each be as relatable and wrought with tension, the only reason we know Angel so extensively is because Viv put the most work into him. She has admitted that Alastor and Angel were characters she wrote based on past dealings and experiences she had. Let those implications sink in a bit.

Now, to further this, people don't need to empathize with a character to like them. They can sympathize as well, even if they personally cannot relate to the emotions the character is feeling.

And where Angel is concerned, he is not addicted to drugs. Angel has used drugs to escape the pain of his trauma. His response in the pilot to having his drugs stolen from him is not one of a typical addict. Which leads us to believe the drugs are simply a coping mechanism more than they are an addiction.

Real Audience for Hazbin is 12 to 16

I would really fucking hope you are joking. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and guess that this was said by someone who isn't a parent. While yes, kids will be sneaky and watch or play things they're not supposed to, a show with drug use/abuse, rape, sex, physical/mental/emotional abuse, and suicide is as much for them as Rick and Morty.

Further, it is not just these themes that make the show for adults. It is the format of the storytelling. Yes, you can complain about what you consider issues with the pilot. But at the end of the day, it did it's job. It established the story premise, introduced important characters (Fat Nuggets does not fall in that category, calm down), gave a basic understanding of their relationships to each other, and get the audience interested in continuing the series. Considering the views for the pilot and the resulting disproportionate growth of the fandom, I would say it did that in spades.

Hazbin Hotel is not Steven Universe. I cannot say this enough times, and the reason I cannot is because I cannot tell you how many times I have come into contact with the underage side of the fandom griping about lack of lore, griping about lack of production information, and overall being exceedingly impatient. At the risk of sounding like an old miser, the underage side of the fandom has never had to wait for additions to a series. Like waiting for Homestuck updates, or the new release of a Harry Potter novel. They have had a steady schedule of content, along with shows that give exposition dumps "in the first 3 minutes."

So don't look at Hazbin Hotel through the lens of kids' show fandoms. It has so much more to offer than that.

Alastor vs Valentino

No, this is not about whether Alastor could beat up Valentino. In the video, DireGentleman pulled a huge pet peeve of mine and lumped Valentino and Alastor together, labeling them both "monsters." Which is opening a huge can of worms for me. So, I will give a brief summary of why that is wrong, and provide a link to one of my other posts for deeper diving.

So, there is a reason why Valentino is more hated than Alastor is. Lumping them together is a mistake.

Valentino is a pimp that abuses and manipulates his victims through intimidation and (implied through) some kind of addiction to the red smoke (whether that is real or symbolism is yet unknown). He takes who and what he wants, be damned the consequences or who gets hurt. He is incredibly self-serving, with no consideration for anyone else. He uses people like pawns, and when those pawns refuse to do what he wants, what does he do? He forces them to do it anyway.

By comparison, while Alastor may use his people like pawns, he also has more consideration for them and doesn't abuse them (far as we can tell). The evidence to support this is the attitude of those serving under Valentino vs those under Alastor. Niffty and Husk both seem to not have a problem with Alastor, and where Husk is concerned it seems that his attitude toward Alastor is their typical banter. But definitely nothing that displays abuse. In fact, when Husker is hesitant or even refusing to do as Alastor asks, Alastor doesn't force Husker. He offers payment in the form of something Husker genuinely likes.

Now, while some might argue this is also manipulating through addiction, one could look at it this way. However, Alastor didn't make Husker an alcoholic. That was Husker's vice to begin with, Alastor simply has no intention of fixing it. After all, Alastor has said he doesn't think anything can change a sinner.

For further explanation and delving into Alastor, click here.

Parents don't 'get' Charlie = Disney Princess

Once again, we fall upon the slippery slope of disinformed statements. While the joke was made that the princess of hell expresses herself best through song, parent issues do not equate to being something that is relatable primarily or only to kids and teens. It's kind of offensive that there is a sort or implication in this statement that adults don't have issues like insecurities surrounding their own failures, or parent issues like what Charlie has or worse. And once again, we fall into the empathize vs sympathize realm and I once again will say that the audience does not need to empathize with the protagonist to make them a good protagonist.

Charlie is a failed princess, her people don't respect her and didn't even prior to her hotel announcement. Yes, she is sheltered and naive. Likely due to how little she was able or allowed to interact with sinners. After all, her ex-boyfriend was from another hellborn family. One that, from what we can surmise, interacts rather frequently with the Magne family.

And it is because of this naivety and inexperience that her method to redeem sinners will not work.

In the video, DireGentleman states that we can pretty much assume that Charlie's redemption methods will work. But her methods, as we see in her song, is to inject demons with meds and take away/burn their vices. She is seeking immediate resolutions to problems that require therapy and a long process that should be making sinners want to change. All Charlie is currently accomplishing is earning the ire and scrutiny of her people. This is why I previously mentioned that Charlie is both protagonist and antagonist, as she is getting in her own way to accomplishing the goal of redemption. And this is where we find that Charlie meets the "starts out being wrong" requirement mentioned in the video as well as "admiring a character for trying."

Charlie is also in a perfect position to be the tour guide for us, the audience, as we observe the metamorphosis of every demon who needs to be redeemed. She is, once again, surrounded by those who need to be redeemed which means we will witness every character arc. This includes Angel, who does not need to be the central focus for us to witness his story.

Finally...

It was stated, or at least implied, that Hazbin Hotel's pilot is no longer relevant. This is a statement that pretty much leaves me puzzled. The only way it would be irrelevant is if Hazbin went in a completely different direction, and we have no reason to believe it will. Vivziepop is still creative director for Hazbin Hotel, and A24 is notorious for giving creators their creative freedom. What A24 is doing is animating, making VA regulations, and ensuring there is an air tight lid kept on the project. Especially given it's popularity in such a short amount of time.

Contrary to what DireGentleman said, Hazbin Hotel will definitely live up to it's hype. Being picked up by A24 will not compromise the show simply because it's not in the same realm of indie production that Helluva Boss is. And it's a bit unfair to Vivziepop to imply as much.

In Conclusion...

Please do a bit more digging in regards to not only the show, but everything surrounding it. Don't lump fanon and canon together and expect them to be equal sources, and please do not claim an obviously adult-audience show is more fit for children and teens.

And lastly, please do more digging to better understand media and storytelling. Reading books is great, but what you were using as the foundation for your arguments were far too simplified and vague,, given the complexity of the protagonist and antagonist roles. Overall, the video just came across as one huge helping of Angel Dust bias with a side of strong dislike for Charlie.

[missmentelle]

What is BPD and how does it manifest? What are your personal experiences with it and what are the misconceptions?

Borderline Personality Disorder is a mental health condition that severely disrupts your ability to form stable and healthy attachments to others, and to form a stable and healthy sense of yourself. It usually develops for the first time in your late teens or early 20s, and it can last for the rest of your life, although many people with BPD are able to successfully control their symptoms or even achieve full remission if they seek mental health treatment. BPD can be a brutal disorder to live with, and the symptoms can seriously impact your day-to-day functioning. People with BPD may find it incredibly difficult to achieve their goals or lead a “normal” life. Unlike people with other personality disorders that affect relationships, people with BPD desperately want to have healthy relationships with other people, but their symptoms make this incredibly difficult to achieve, which is a constant source of frustration and shame for many people who have this disorder. Symptoms of BPD include:

Intense and near-irrational fear of abandonment. They live with constant fear that the people in their lives will abandon them, even if there are absolutely no signs that this is the case. They will go to extreme lengths to avoid being abandoned, even if the risk of abandonment is entirely imaginary. 

Relationships that are very intense, and very unstable. They tend to engage in a pattern called “splitting”, where they see someone as wonderful and flawless and perfect in one moment, and then see them as worthless, unreliable and untrustworthy the next. They either have you on a pedestal or they are convinced that you hate them, with very little time spent between those two extremes. 

Frequent mood swings. This is more than just the usual “up and down” of something like bipolar disorder - they swing between a wide range of emotions like shame, disgust, euphoria, despair, rage and everything in between. 

Disproportionate emotional reactions. People with BPD have more or less the “correct” emotional reaction to events in their lives, but the intensity of their emotional reaction is completely blown out of proportion. A neurotypical person might be mildly annoyed if their partner forgot to text them when they promised to. A person with BPD may lapse into full-blown rage and despair, and these intense feelings could last for hours or days. Anger is the most common emotion that they experience with added intensity, and it can even cause harmless interactions to quickly escalate. 

Reckless behaviour. People with BPD often partake in high-risk behaviour, like drug use, unprotected sex, gambling, spending sprees, or unsafe and reckless driving. They also have a tendency to self-sabotage - sometimes when things are going well in their lives, they will suddenly quit their jobs, drop out of school and break up with their partners with absolutely no warning. 

An unstable sense of their own identity. This is hard to explain to someone who doesn’t experience it, but most people have a pretty stable sense of who they are, what they value, what they want, what their goals are, etc. People who BPD do not have any stable answers for any of those things. Their sense of “self” shifts rapidly and often. They may completely change their entire image of themselves from day to day, or go through periods where they even doubt if they exist. 

Self-harm and suicidal behaviour. People with BPD frequently self-harm, and they have one of the highest suicide rates of any disorder. Their self-harm is usually triggered by a real or imagined abandonment or rejection, and it can be extremely difficult to manage. 

A general sense of emptiness. People with BPD often feel that their lives are meaningless, or that they will never be happy. They might feel like nothing matters, or that they are bad, worthless people who do not deserve to be happy. 

BPD is a very tricky disorder to cope with, especially when it comes to relationships. It is important to remember that people with BPD are not bad people, and it is not their fault that they have this disorder. Many of the behaviours they exhibit are the result of all the pain and distress that they are feeling, not because they have any malicious intent. Many of them are simply desperate to be loved, and their extreme emotions are what prevent them from achieving this in a healthy way. At the same time, though, it’s important to acknowledge that people with BPD can cause serious harm to people they form relationships with, and the pain that their friends, family members and partners feel is just as real and just as valid. People with BPD are sometimes the perpetrators of abuse (as well as the victims), and it’s naive to think that a potential partner can overcome these issues through love and patience alone. The symptoms are aggravating to deal with as a person with BPD actually experiencing them, and they can be exhausting or terrifying to deal with as the partner of a person who has BPD. A diagnosis of BPD is not an excuse to treat others badly, and people with this disorder are still responsible for recognizing when they need to seek help, or when they might need to take a break from relationships as a whole. 

I’ve had numerous experiences with BPD in my lifetime. I’ve worked with it as a mental health professional; many of the homeless kids I worked with met the criteria for BPD, and for many of them, BPD was at least contributing to their ongoing homelessness. Some had burned bridges with family members or professional organizations that could help them, due to their erratic or intense behaviour. Many had experimented broadly with drug use, reckless behaviour or casual sex, and had faced life-altering consequences - like drug dependency, criminal records or unwanted pregnancies - as a result. Many of them were caught up in very intense and very unhealthy romantic relationships, and they were unable to work on other aspects of their life (finishing school, finding housing, finding employment, etc) because all of their time and energy was devoted to their high-needs relationships. It’s hard to get someone to sit down and work on their math homework when they feel an intense need to comb through their partner’s instagram for any signs of cheating. It can be a very tricky disorder to deal with as a professional, because you are no exception to the person’s fear of abandonment or their intense relationship style - it can be more difficult to form consistent trust and rapport with BPD clients than it is with other clients, which makes treatment difficult. 

I also have a lot of hands-on experience with BPD in my personal life. I lived with a partner who had BPD for two years, although he only received his official diagnosis after we had already ceased living together. We got together as teenagers, and as far as I can tell, he developed BPD in his early 20s, around two years after we met. My ex refused all forms of mental health treatment, and living with a person who had untreated Borderline Personality Disorder was one of the most exhausting and difficult experiences of my life. He had the classic “splitting” pattern; much of the time, he had me up on a pedestal, and he would boldly tell me and other people that I was the most perfect person who ever lived, that I was the answer to all of his problems, and that he never needed anything or anyone else in the world as long as he had me. Other days, he would tell me that I never cared about him, that he would never be good enough for me, and that I secretly wanted to leave him. We had some happy days, hanging out and just being best friends who were madly in love with each other, but as his disorder really took hold, the extremes became much more common. His behaviour became reckless and erratic, and he started leaving our apartment at night to break into nearby abandoned buildings and construction site. He never developed any anger problems, but he became despondent, and started spending entire days sobbing on the couch and contemplating suicide. His goals and view of himself changed weekly - some weeks he saw himself as smart and studious, and some weeks he saw himself as being doomed to homelessness. I cared about him very, very much, but I could not live like that anymore. He was not a bad person and his situation was not his fault - although it was his responsibility to accept help, which he failed to do - but he was not good for my own mental health. No one is obligated to stay in such a tumultuous and unstable relationship, and unfortunately it reached a point where I could not do it anymore. 

Unfortunately, my current partner and I are also dealing with a situation with BPD at the moment. In this case, however, he has an ex-partner with BPD who cannot accept that their relationship is over. Every couple of weeks she calls him in the middle of the night, sometimes to declare that he is the most wonderful person she ever met and insist that they were meant to be together. Other times, she calls to tell him that he is a terrible person who never cared about her or respected her, and she informs him that she is in the middle of self-harming because of him. We both acknowledge that she is a deeply troubled individual, and neither of us have any ill will toward her. He informs her family every time she calls, and I have no issues with him picking up the phone to talk to her in the middle of the night if it means that someone can be made aware of her in-progress self-harm. Again, she is not a bad person and her issues are not of her own making. Her case happens to be particularly extreme - most people with BPD do not even approach this level of inappropriate behaviour - but I cannot deny that it is a source of distress in my life. 

There are two big misconceptions about BPD that I think should be dispelled. The first is the notion that BPD is a “female” problem. While it is true that female diagnoses of BPD outnumber male diagnoses considerably, there are probably a lot of social biases at play. A man who has intense relationships in his early 20s and copes by doing drugs, sleeping around and driving fast is seen as “normal”, or “just blowing off steam”. A woman who behaves the same way is considered mentally ill. Men who present with characteristic symptoms of BPD may instead receive a diagnosis of Bipolar Disorder, depression or anxiety, due to the notion that BPD is only a female problem. Women who have symptoms of Bipolar Disorder, depression or anxiety may be diagnosed with BPD. People tend to see what they expect to see, and many clinicians expect to see lots of women with BPD. 

The other misconception I want to dispel is that idea that BPD never gets better. It is the most treatable of the personality disorders, and most people with the condition see at least some improvement after their mid- to late twenties. Therapy and medication can help treat the symptoms to make life and relationships more manageable, and people with BPD who receive proper treatment can even achieve full remission of their disorder. This is a difficult disorder, but it is not a life sentence, and it should never be assumed that people who have this disorder are going to be this way forever. Hope and treatment are out there. 

Hope this answers your question! 

[knightofbalance-13]

Why I think Darling In The Franxx is better than Evangelion.

...

Look, I won’t insult you by saying that this is a purely objective post nor am I going to say that Darling In The Franxx is gonna always be this good. However, considering my unbashed loathing of Evangelion and my very high adoration of Darling In The Franxx combined with the latter taking so much from the former I feel as though I need to explain why I prefer Franxx over Evangelion, both from a subjective and (as much as I can) objective point of view.

First off, the characters. My issue with Evangelion’s character was that I either loathed the characters when I was suppose to like them or even loath them for different reasons. My examples for this include Misato who I loath for being an adult who could have stopped so much pain and suffering if she talked to Shinji for more than five minutes or at least stopped hitting on him and SEELE who I hated for being boring and pretentious, essentially wasting my time.  Or I feel wholly unattached to them, the examples being the Brudge Bunnies for having little to no personality between them, Dr. Akagi because I have no idea who you really are and Rei, who resets partway but even then I found her so boring I never cared.  Or I do like them...and I’m punished for it by the show, prime example being Shinji Ikari getting fucked over by forces out of his control. Simply put: Everything about the characters in Evangelion prevent me from getting invested in them thus I cannot care about them (Hell, I laughed when Mistao got shot.)

But with Darling In The Franxx, that isn't the case. I can care about Hiro trying to keep up his relationship with Zero Two without worrying too much about it going to shit. I can care about Ichigo trying to help Hiro be happy as well as being the squad leader without worrying about her dying or something. I can care about Zero Two trying to fight against the Klauxosaurs and becoming human. I can also enjoy them just for who they are with how they act and how they interact. The children all have distinct and virbrant personalities that make them a treat to watch on their own. Even Hiro is enjpyable to watch because he can act as the straight man to anyone in the show and thus give the audience someone to relate to, especially with Zero Two. And even with characters I’m suppose to hate, I hate in an enjoyable sense. I hate Dr. Franxx for fucking with Zero two at such a young age but I know I’m suppose to hate him and his actions bring Hiro and Zero Two together. I can care about these characters and the others because they were built better: They have better personalities, better interactions, better places in the story and more emotional connections with me

Speaking of interactions, one of my BIGGEST compliants with Evangelion was that it was full on willing to show how terrible human relationships are...but when it came to actually showing the GOOD, it apparently suffers from short term memory loss. Shinji and Asuka, Shinji and Rei. Asuka and Kanji, Mistao and SHinji, Misato and Kanji, Gendo and Yui, Gendo and Akagi- NONE of the relationships in Evangelion should EVER have happened, both romantic and platonic. This is because the show displays these relationships as fundamentally toxic and hurts EVERYONE involved. Why should I care about humanity when it shows humanity itself is basically self destructive? Just as well, relationships with other people is a key part of being human and character relationships are a key part of writing. SO when I see nothing but toxic relationships, I end up being numb towards the whole show and  thus I don't care about anything.

On the opposite end, Darling in The Franxx shows the characters in HEALTHY relationships. The pistils and stamen, in all but one case, actually function properly. I can see these characters getting along and being happy with one another and get invested in them. When they get in danger, I not only worry for that character but for the others as well because of how that one person’s death could affect them. And when things are slow, I can enjoy the hijinks and the emotional moments between the parastites. The best example of this is the main couple of Hiro and Zero Two. Yeah, they both have issues and the relationship can be shaky at times but overall the two really feed into one another: Hiro helps Zero Two be grounded and relate to the audience as well as be held back when needed and Zero Two makes Hiro more emotional and less of a blank slate. Essentially: they are Shinji and Asuka done right.

Moving away from characters, both series drop the mecha aspect of their show latter on in their life spans but Darling In The Franxx drop it a LOT sooner so the show can focus more on the characters. This gives the show time to set up the world more, give the side characters some focus in order to endear them to us and foreshadow events to come whereas Evangelion dropped it suddenly, left many of it’s side characters in need of development to have any sort of impact but there was no time and a lot of stuff just seems to come out of nowhere.

The pacing of Darling in the Franxx is better as well. Evangelion spent a great chunk of it’s runtime pulling a “monster of the week” mecha show which makes the sudden change to the more psychological aspects of latter run more jarring as well as certain plot points to either be forgotten or rushed. WIth Darling in the Franxx, the show stops the whole Monster Of The Week shtick at episode 6 and uses this time to slow down and take it’s time developing it’s characters before paying off latter down the line, thus making the show more easy to digest than before.

The monsters themselves are a bit of a weird case. While the Angels in EVangelion are more unique and stylized in design, which makes thigs more fun to watch as they are battled against...considering we’re not suppose to be cheering for the Angels, that ends up biting the show in the ass. I like the Angels more than the Klauxsaurs...but that makes them dying less heroic and more tragic, especially with the implication there is only one like them. And considering how horrible most  of the humans are, I was more likely to cheer for the Angels (AKA the VILLAINS) than the heroes whereas in Darling In The franxx, I see the Klauxsaurs as animals that need to be put down before they can hurt the heroes or cause destruction, thus THEIR defeat feels more heroic and satisfying.

The mechas are pretty cut and dry for me. Yeah, the Eva units are neat and all...but they’re too flesh-like to marvel at the ingenuity of humanity and too machine like for me to be interested in them. Not only that, despite actually being cyborgs, the Eva Units don’t really have their own identities aside from Eva Uni 01 and I fucking hate that waste of flesh and metal. But with the Franxx, they have enough human attributes and distinct looks to feel invested in them and their humanoid faces serve to express what the characters are feeling without being taken out of the action. But they do look mechanical enough that you can watch in awe at a man-made machine doing such complex movements and manuvers as well as triumphing over impossible odds that makes you feel awesome for just being human.

The story sure as hell is a lot more enjoyable in Darling In The Franxx. Evangelion not only dropped the ball taking soo much time with the Monster of The Week set up that the actual story is too compacted to be engaging as well as the fact that it went off into pseudo-existential crisis so much that it became dull and pretentious. Darling In The Franxx gives it’s true story time to breath and settle in, especially since it has been established and shown since episode 1. I can enjoy and digest and comprehend Darling In The Franxx more easily, allowing me to search for more nuances and little aspects more whereas with Evangelion, I’m too busy trying to figure out what the fuck is going and what message I’m suppose to get to see anything little and rewarding.

And finally, the tone of both series or rather, how Darling in the Franxx did it better. Evangelion up to the very end went with a very bleak, very dark, very hopeless tone. Now the tone itself is not a problem, you can do this kind of tine very well, the best example being Berserk and the way it used the inner darkness and hopelessness of the world to paint an almost oppressive, gripping tale. However, that was because Berserk fully embraced that and choose a story that worked with it. Evangelion however decided thatit could still be hopeful and choose a story that simply didn’t mesh well with it, meaning it tried to tell a story of a boy finally opening up to the world while conditioning the audience to believe he’ll get punished unfair and disproportionately for it. The show tries having hopeful moments but the audience is conditioned to know it won’t last. The show tries to end happy but the tone says otherwise. WIth Darling in The Franxx, the tone is still dark but not COMPLETELY. There can be hope in the show because it has worked in the past. There can be a chance for a better time because it worked in the past. There is more investment and hope and love for the story because the tone conditioned the audience right. This being especially prevelant in Episode 13 where in the previous episode there was hope that things would work out alright and in that very same episode, that idea was fed and nutured until it blossomed at the end.

And I could go on and on and on but I’ll stop here for now. Why Darling In The Franxx works better is a bit complicated but still easy to understand. Evangelion didn’t have very many positive sources to draw from because it was among the first shows to do this breed of show. Thus it screwed up due to there being no chance for positivity in the show, However, Gainax’s NEXT anime actually serves as the best show to taken inspiration from WITH Evangelion: FLCL. FLCL managed to cover up a lot of the flaws with Evangelion form having a lighter tone, wackier moments, better relationships and more positive payoff. FLCL itself has a number issues with not taking itself seriously, being a bit too happy, glossing over the bad aspects of relationships as so on. Which is why shows that borrow from both tend to work the best. Prime example being Gurren Lagann with a middle of the road tone that allowed for any number of messages as well as striking close to home with characters that worked both positively and negatively with a story that struck the right balance between the two.

Essentailly, Darling In The Franxx took the best of both shows and thus had a lot more potential in the beginning than the others. Gurren Lagann did the same and it became the Magnum Opus of Studio Gainax, becoming the true successor to their first work. And I believe Franxx is on the road to being a true successor to Evangelion.

[myfriendpokey]

zine thoughts pt 2

where do you sell videogames? zine fairs, children's book stores, used record marts, from the trunk of a car like rudy ray moore, on etsy or on craiglist, with flyers on the wall of the local chip shop or library. through awkwardly hammered-together handmade electronic systems or the reverse, turning your game into a jumbled set of paper text and graphical fragments which can be sold in boardgame stores as some kind of reconstruct-the-narrative puzzle. you could make one-off bespoke games or game simulacra for movies that want to depict some kind of videogame being played onscreen without having to go through the licensing rights. you could ghost-develop games for wealthy people to put their names on ("american mcgee presents my life with princess diana by donald duck"). you could develop training games for the military-industrial complex, ha ha ha ha. you could get funded by the CIA to ensure the medium of videogames remains sufficiently arty and rehabilitated to function as propaganda for capitalism... i mean we already know they were involved with the paris review and iowa writer's workshop and all that jazz so they gotta have least a couple people on the payroll already, right, and we will all be treated to some very entertaining revelations following the inevitable freedom of information act request 15 years down the line. you could try connecting with the little self-contained fan communities for things like touhou, fnaf, undertale, m-minecraft, like those renaissance artists who had to drop their patron's face in the background of some religious scene except in this case it would be one of the homestuck guys. you could make "trainers" for more popular games, or demos that could show how they "feel" without a $60 investment. you could sell small games as assets for larger ones that want to have some kind of in-universe  playable arcade system without having to invent a whole new game from scratch. you could just make extremely specific forms of pornography, maybe not the worst option even, just make sure the very artistic sequences of the protagonist remembering his dead wife are broken up every now and then with scenes of him unhinging his jaw to swallow and slowly digest another, smaller sad games protagonist whole (with rumble function for controllers!!!). you could make games for all the people who are still on windows xp or earlier or have some kind of arcane video card setup that prevents them playing anything other than that one preinstalled pinball game. you could try selling them at street vendors. you could try learning another language and making games for non-anglophones that don't sound like an english-written game that was localised without much thought after the fact.   you could make games for kids in the hopes that they sexually imprint on them enough to support your erotic oil paintings of the characters 10 years later, just like nintendo. you could make an extremely interesting and thoughtful videogame and then offer not to release it if the donation threshold is met, thus sparing people the emotional obligation of having yet another thing on their should-play-this-eventually list. you could develop games with some bewildering system of in-game and real-world currency interactions and then sell it to the mob as a way to launder money. you could make videogames that robots record themselves playing to upload en masse which are then watched by other robots as part of some weird, ungraspably abstract SEO economy, or better yet make robots to make the videogames as well. you could make virtual cemetary plots either private (downloadable exe) or public (hosted on the server) with their own customisable mood-themes and weather settings (dark, stormy, remember-you-will-die; sunny, quiet, circle-of-life etc). you could make prosperity orbs. you could make games for office workers or call center staff which resemble excel documents or phone system frontends from a distance. you could make games which really ARE excel files, some dense collection of interlocking hidden formulas that change to display text and ascii characters as you tab your way through. you could probably talk your way into "adapting" any of those old IPs that still float around long after anyone stopped having any particular thought or feeling about them at all, like the flintstones or ziggy or something, maybe do like those 1960s superhero cartoons where they just filmed panels from the comics - just break a 2d flintstones cartoon into constituent elements and have them hover around in a little cutout diorama that you fly thru, possibly explained in-universe as representing the 4-d vision of the great gazoo. you could make games that play themselves, for the depressed. you could become a ghastly serial m**derer where after each crime you upload a new game to itchio which will reveal the  name of your next victim, and costs only $9.99, and of course everyone buys and plays it because the police have put up a reward for solving the crime because they can't get past the dinosaur on level three, and all seems lost until some plucky young computer student who found the game on a friend's hard drive manages to solve the riddle hidden within the game's structure, following the clues, to an old castle, she knocks on the door, it's opened by, yes, it's will wright, wearing a wizard outfit, who tells her that by dint of solving all the puzzles she is now invited to join that mysterious organization known as "The Elect" which is assembled from the finest minds in all game design with a view to secretly controlling the world economy (via "werewolf blood", somehow), that she need only complete the ceremony by sacrificing one untutored soul, he holds out an ornate knife, she hesitates........

the question is where to sell videogames rather than how because for the most part we already know how - there are a million more or less instructive articles out there about hitting up conventions or talking to the press, and it's not that they're wrong, exactly, more that they expect to be applied in an environment that no longer exists. but what should preface and qualify the idea of sheer volume swamping the indie games market is that, outside of a few small pockets, there never really was an "indie games market" to begin with - indie games drew and mostly still draw on the existing videogames market, rather than constituting a new one. it's telling that the glory days of indie games were just the ones where they were able to draw upon some of the same privileges larger titles already had in the ability to access that same audience - being frontpaged by steam, say, or making it onto a comparatively closed console platform, or generating earnest thinkpieces... you could say that they were tapping into structures the industry had already built but had not yet occupied to full capacity.

of course there are exceptions and various efforts to set up new economies for small weird interactive things (like patreon, or game bundles), and some efforts to reach outside the existing games audience likely were successful - but when we think of indie games "functioning" economically, whether that means supporting a small team, a single person, or just hitting minimum wage per hours spent, i believe we're mostly still talking about ones which are built around the existing games economy. which is fine, but i think it's also intrinsically precarious in ways which maybe get glossed over in discussions of the "indiepocalypse" - are all those new steam releases really causing a problem or are they just exacerbating a structural limitation which was already always there, a reliance within the indie game economy on a certain lucky-few-ism which just became grossly more noticeable the more disproportionate it got?

of course it's easier to be dismissive after the fact, and my fantasy about "where" to sell videogames is partly a fantasy of them having a location to begin with - of attaining something of the grounded and immutable appearance of the non-digital, as though brick and mortar stores  don't have a relationship to the likes of amazon as basically precarious as any online storefront. and there are also real and obvious reasons why the various videogame audiences all tend to clump together - similarities in terms of the hardware required, the inputs allowed, of visual and cultural reference points, to say nothing of the personal / professional histories of the people involved in each. we are all contained within "the medium"...

so maybe it's also a fantasy of starting to pick apart that conception of the medium. i think small game developers already have more in common with artists or musicians working on the fringes of their respective industries than they do with even moderately successful teams within the same format, and use similar language, engage in similar forms of practice - particularly as near everything  comes increasingly mediated by the digital these days. i think they already ARE working in similar spaces to some extent, whether it's social media sites or digital storefronts or meatspace stores pushed by necessity not to specialise. and without wanting to be paranoid (or moreso than the CIA thing, at least) i think we should be cautious of the way a certain focus on mediumicity can obscure these overlaps.  a "new medium" is one which inherently pushes against the image of one as grouded ahistorically in some eternal human verity or other (where each medium supposedly embodies some different mode of perception / medieval humour / ninja turtle etc) - it is to see firsthand the way in which supposedly eternal, neutral qualities are materially constructed, which includes seeing forms of social organisation and usage become mystified into extrahuman conditions.  and given their basis in technology that includes drawing from wider trends in the use of that technology as a whole - which specifically, in tech circles, can mean more and more tightly interlocking systems of proprietary knowledge and speculative capital, as well as "new mediums" constructed so as to be inseperable from some storefront, website or monitoring technology. i don't think anybody will necessarily break even taking their games to a zine fair (not that they're breaking even now). but i do feel like trying to build networks across those medium boundaries could be more valuable in the effort to build some sustainable environment for these things than any amount of reform within the house that tech built.

[PS: it occurs to me that you could plausibly argue that the very bagginess of medium-centric formulations is what makes them valuable, in forcing many different groups to butt against each other on one platform rather than just disperse into echo chambers. but i think exactly the reverse is the case: nobody really engages with each other's work in artgames because the stakes are simultaneously too small and too large. they're too small in that however much i might be picky about another person's work - and i think it's this vague pickiness or sense of not-quite-right-ness that drives the most searching critiques - it still feels pointless to pursue that instead of the glaring, omnipresent faults of the big AAA players, which means more complaining about far cry for all eternity. and they're too large in that most small game development is so precarious that it's not really worth the risk of knocking someone out of the circle over penny-ante shit. only with both economic security and broad similarity of outlook can a truly vital,  human culture of spiteful cattiness begin... our day will come]

(image credits: Eco Fighter, World Heroes 2 ,The Space Adventure, Nancy)

[blueraith]

Some folks still need to learn how to constructively comment

Wish I could say that I’ve been writing Chapter... 12(? Legit, I don’t often remember the chapter numbers outside of the Google doc) since posting Chapter 11 (we’re just gonna assume I know where the fuck I’m at in my own story, okay? Give me this).

But that would be a bald faced lie.

(Mostly because of my sister’s graduation and all the family visiting and the concurrent back injury I was suffering. Really kills the writing mood when you can’t sit up properly to type.)

This is going under a read more, because this incident Vexed Me To The Max(TM) and triggered a Rant of Epic Proportions(TM).

But graduation has been over, and my back has been feeling great. What really kept me a bit down since all that was over and done with is that very morning I’m feeling better, I see that I have two comments on the 100 fic I’ve put on indefinite hiatus. Yeah, it’s not an active story, but I still care about it, and I’ve been thinking about it recently. So, in short. I still care about it a hell of a lot. Hell, I care about everything that I write. I’ve written fanfiction at what’s nearing 10 years now, but nothing has erased the fact that putting yourself out there in the public eye takes a hell of a lot of effort and, sure, a smidgen of courage and confidence.

Well, this lovely commenter told me that my word count was way too high, that I was slowing my story down, and that they skipped to the last chapter (from Chapter 2, they skipped 6 chapters of ongoing character development, an ensemble cast, Ark politics, and canon fix-its) “40k words and [Clarke’s] still not on the ground yet??”

This is me paraphrasing both comments. I deleted them with extreme prejudice from the fic because I wasn’t leaving that kind of useless bullshit on my work after it effectively ruined my mood for, like, four days.

Why was it bullshit? Well, for one thing taking the average word count per chapter, it’s only a little over 5k words per chapter. Look. I balance out my word counts very carefully for each story that I write. This fic has a longer than average word count compared to my more recent stuff (which is around 4k per chapter) because of all the fuckin shit I was pulling off in this particular fic. Reworking canon to better explain why the Arkers were resistent to the radiation on the ground while having the superior blood that the Mountain Men wanted without putting them up in their shitty space station for thousand of years that evolution would have actually required them to have gone through to be remotely realistic.

Jake’s alive in this fic because I don’t like dead characters shaping character development on a pre-canon basis. Personally, I dislike orphan/parental loss storylines before the specific original work has even started. I get that orphans exist in real life. But YA media has a disproportionate amount of dead parents. Eh. I wanted to do something different. So, this means there’s an entire extra character in the story that I have to write and develop.

Diana Allers actually matters in day to day Ark life instead of just showing up and nearly murdering everyone because she’s a selfish bitch for little to no reason other than to make Abby’s already pretty damn full storyline even more packed than it already was. (Seriously, why didn’t they develop Allers more? She’s lazily implemented in canon, and I hate it. Lord only knows I enjoyed Abby and Raven’s plotlines far more in several places of Season 1 rather than Bellamy’s Manpain Adventures Lite Before He Turns Into A Complete And Utter Psychopath Later On In The Series).

Jaha is far more competent and slimey than he is in the show, rather than being a foolish man who is barely toddering along in the plot towards something useful.

Abby and Jake are at odds because Jake technically betrays Clarke and allows her to get arrested in the beginning of the story. They adopt Raven in the interim and they’re all awkwardly trying to free Clarke while pretending that Jake and Abby aren’t having marital problems. Well, Jake and Abby are pretending, Raven is as blunt as she usually is and just calls shit like she sees it.

Ensemble cast. There’s literally a tag on this story that tells you all that “This Story Is Literally About Everyone.”

So.

Yeah.

Clarke’s not on the fucking ground yet. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Having skipped past 6 chapters.

Is 5k really that long? I wouldn’t know, personally when I read a longfic, I go into it knowing that the chapters might be long as fuck because I know that I’m reading a fic that could literally take me through several days and I read pretty damn fast. Not that 40k words is really all that much when you’re rewriting a TV show using all the characters who already exist in canon and then getting into their thoughts and motivations because that is literally what books do, this isn’t a screenplay, I wouldn’t be caught dead writing one because I despise them. Sorry, but you’re getting the full range of thoughts and emotions of everyone involved. I know, that’s just awful, getting hours and hours of content for free, but god forbid the plot doesn’t run on your timetable.

But that’s really the crux of this rant, isn’t it? NEVER complain about word counts, people. Too short? Who the fuck cares? The author could be just beginning their writing careers, so to speak. Word counts of any significance takes practice, first of all. So, not only could they might or might not have the required experience to write longer chapters, they may not even want to. And that’s fine. Because they do this FOR FREE.

Same thing with longer chapters. Are you really going to come at me, nearly a year after I’ve written and posted this work, complaining about word count, as though there’s even a remote chance that I’m going to go back and edit down all of that time and effort I put into that work to satisfy your fragile reading stamina?

Pfffffffffft.

I mean, this is funny to me in some regard because I’m over here wondering just what would be a good length for this person. Part of the reason my chapters tend to be at least 4k words long is because that’s generally where I can get a comfortable amount of character interaction, introspective thought, and plot moving forward. All three of those things matter to me when writing chapters. I hate reading too short works (and no, I don’t tell these authors this. I read what they give me and just deal with it because they’re entertaining me for free) and it’s little more than characters just trading dialogue with each other. I want to know what they are thinking about as well. I want a bit of narration. I’m reading something from a specific character’s point of view, and I want that chapter to ooze the personality of that character.

These are all the things I keep in mind when I write to my word count goals, personally. Doing it in less than 3k words might be possible, but it would sure as hell be annoying.

But most of all, it just irritated the fuck out of me. Like I’ve said multiple times in this rant. I do this for free. I don’t expect you guys to know this, but in order to get these substantial updates when I can manage to actually feel well enough to write and get them published, it takes me EIGHT TO TWELVE HOURS of sitting in front of a computer screen to have a chapter finished. On a good day. Yes. Most of the chapters I put out are done in one day, in one block, and I’m often up until 5 AM finishing something up. I have severe ADHD. Sometimes it is a chore to get shit put on a page because I can’t sit down and focus my thoughts enough to sound even coherent. Sometimes I have issues keeping up with what the beginning of a long sentence was about and I have to constantly keep up with what the fuck I’m even talking about in any given thought.

So, you have an author with a severe executive function disorder attempting to concentrate hard enough to get her own thoughts in character for each and every character that is featured in any given story while attempting to resist even the most mundane distractions while desperately hoping she’s going to hit a period of hyperfocus long enough to get substantial work down, but if that happens she’ll probably forget to eat because she’s on a writing binge that goes on with actual significant work for a period of several hours.

I love writing, despite the challenges I have to deal with in order just to get it done. I love most of the comments that I receive. I’m coming off a period of extreme depression from some family issues I was dealing with. My skin is rather thin at the moment and that irritated the fuck out of me, but those two comments knocked more wind out of my sails that I really wanted them to, and that bugs me even more.

But I am more experienced in fic writing than probably your average person. This commenter pissed me the fuck off, but I’ve moved past this, it’s hardly shattered my motivation to write forever.

But a careless commenter could easily do that to someone just getting into fanfiction. And it makes me wonder just how often this happens everyday, every hour, when entitled, spoiled people who think their needs are more important than the author doing this FOR FREE decide to voice their terrible opinions on their works. I love my readers, I don’t hold myself beholden to them, but they are extraordinarily important to me. Plot, pacing, and character development are all my own when I write because first and foremost, I write for myself. It’s a hobby that I clearly have to work very hard at to even be remotely successful at, and taking anyone else’s standards into account is never going to happen when I have to live up to my own already very high expectations. But I do keep y’all in mind when I’m devoting my time, energy, and effort in. The chapter lengths I have partly exist to make up for the wait times I inevitably have between each release. I very much know that I am sporadic and inconsistent when updating. So, when I do, I want to have something that isn’t just a whisper in the wind when it finally cycles to the top of the AO3 listing.

I know there are inevitably readers who didn’t like my content, or do think my stuff is too long. That’s fine. But don’t come into my space and give me two comments that were effectively “TL;DR” and expect that not to be a slap in the face. Because it is. I have wonder if the fandom kids today even know the kind of slap backs this sort of thing would have gotten in LiveJournal.

But, never mind that. I’m a big girl, I took some petty revenge in deleting that bullshit from my boards and then setting the fic to moderated mode, but what I would like anyone who decides to read through what is actually a long winded post (all my rants are, admittedly) to learn is that you are not reading professional work. You are not reading work that has been paid for. You are not reading work that has been professionally edited. I’m not saying that you can’t have standards for fic, lord knows I have many, but I don’t go into an author’s work and leave shitty comments. Never. Constructive criticism on fanfiction keeps the author’s time in mind, their skill level over what they’re actually capable of, and whether or not they’re even open to criticism. Some authors don’t even want your advice. They just want to know that you liked it. And if you don’t, just don’t say anything. I’m not quite that fragile personally, when someone is giving me useful criticism that can be used to actually improve my quality of writing, but I will freely admit that clearly I have a sore spot about comments addressing word counts.

Get out of here with that shit.

In short. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

[lodelss]

Three Missouri Voters Explain Why Everyone Should be Able to Vote by Mail in 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way the world operates, but as the presidential election approaches, many states have failed to respond when it comes to voting. The safest way to vote during the pandemic is to vote by mail, but state restrictions block many voters from doing so. The ACLU has sued 10 states for restricting access, including Missouri, where the state legislature just voted to expand access in 2020. While the Missouri legislature win was a major step toward progress, the state is still restricting access by requiring most voters to notarize their mail-in ballots — which means they have to violate social distancing recommendations to vote by mail.  The ACLU is fighting the notarization requirement on behalf of voters like Cecil Wattree and Javier Del Villar — two Missourians who joined the original lawsuit because they wanted to exercise their right to vote by mail. Cecil, Javier, and fellow Missouri voter Kamisha Webb shared their stories with the ACLU to show why voting by mail should be accessible — and safe  — for all. 

Vote by mail to protect Kamisha

For Kansas City resident Kamisha Webb, going to the polls could put her life in jeopardy. Kamisha has asthma and a condition called hereditary angioedema, which requires her to use a nebulizer machine, various medications, and biweekly injections to manage her health. A cold or flu could land her in the ICU. Contracting COVID-19 could be fatal. Kamisha is doing everything she can to be safe. She stays at home on paid leave from her job because teleworking isn’t an option. She talks to her grandmother virtually, despite wanting to see her in person. But she’s worried she may not be able to take similar safety precautions when it comes to voting. 

“I feel like I have to choose whether to exercise my right to vote, or risk putting my life on the line,” she tells the ACLU. “And no one should have to mix the two, ever.”

Kamisha first learned about absentee voting when she overheard people signing up at a polling place during the 2018 midterm election. She learned that it was an option for people who are sick, for example, or have a disability that hinders their ability to vote in person. 

“I just thought, wow, that’s so cool to have a process in place for individuals to still vote if they’re not able to physically go to the polls,” Kamisha tells the ACLU. “It would be wonderful if we could take that same idea and make an exception due to COVID-19. Whether or not someone has a health condition, we have a deadly virus on the loose. We should all have the right to not only vote, but to be safe in doing that.”

People of color will likely be harmed most by restricting access to voting by mail. Voter suppression efforts already target people of color nationwide, and COVID-19 disproportionately affects people of color, particularly the Black community, to which Kamisha belongs. She attributes this to the prevalence of underlying health conditions, lack of access to health care and insurance, and discrimination in medical care. On the higher death rates in the Black community, Kamisha is “saddened, but not surprised.” Kamisha joined the Missouri lawsuit not only because she is at risk, but because she believes everybody should be able to vote by mail during the pandemic. If the court rules in her favor, she says she will be overcome with joy: “I’m kind of filled with emotion just thinking about it.”

Vote by mail to protect Cecil’s daughter

By the time she turned eight, Cecil Wattree’s daughter, Allyn, had gone through open heart surgery, multiple strokes, was placed on a ventilator, and was on a waiting list for a heart transplant — among other ailments and surgeries resulting from her being born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome.  “It’s a gift of God that she recovered to the point where she is able to function,” says Cecil. “But it still leaves her immunocompromised when it comes to her lungs and her heart.” That makes Allyn high risk to COVID-19. When the ACLU sued Missouri, he joined the lawsuit, explaining, “I’m in a unique position to be able to advocate for my daughter.” Cecil constantly worries about exposing his daughter to the virus, especially because he still has to go to work at a primary care clinic. The clinic has taken precautionary measures, and Cecil is being “super hyper vigilant” at home because of his daughter.  “When I come home, I have to pretty much take all my clothes off in the garage or the cellar and then run into the bathroom and take a shower before I even see Allyn,” says Cecil. “Even after that, it’s a struggle to be safe when you have a highly affectionate eight year old who wants to be in your arms. I always worry that I might have encountered the virus in some way.”

It doesn’t help that as a Black man, Cecil has to navigate a world where his race directly impacts his ability to stay safe. He thinks twice about visiting a store wearing a mask in a white neighborhood. And he’s seen discrimination in medical care firsthand with his own daughter: “When Allyn had a stroke, the doctors didn’t believe she had one, even though she showed symptoms. I had to advocate so hard just to get them to look at her and give her a CT scan.”  He worries about what this means when it comes to COVID-19, which has symptoms similar to the flu or cold: “How am I going to get them to take it seriously?”

Cecil wants to be as safe as possible and vote absentee in November — but having a vulnerable daughter, being Black, and being an essential worker doesn’t make you eligible in Missouri.  “A lot of people have fought and died for my ability to vote,” says Cecil on why voting is so important to him. “Being able to vote by mail would give me a sense of protection while also ensuring that I can exercise my right to have a say in the direction this country’s going.” No matter the outcome of the lawsuit, however, Cecil knows he’s privileged to have the option to vote in person when it comes down to the wire. “There are people who have no availability, no transportation, whose health is already compromised. To tell them to social distance while not allowing their voices to be heard is to take advantage of the current situation to suppress voters.”

Vote by mail to protect Javier’s community

As a 29 year old without pre-existing medical conditions, Javier is not considered by the CDC to be high risk to COVID-19. But Javier works for the national delivery service, making him an essential worker who comes into contact with the whole community on a daily basis.  “In delivery, I feel like I’m helping people get what they need, because we do a lot of medical supply deliveries,” says Javier. “So it feels good. At the same time, it feels uncomfortable just knowing that the people receiving those deliveries are often out of work, while I am working.” While millions of people have lost their jobs in the past few months, Javier’s work has gotten even busier, with longer hours and more packages delivered each day. He calls it “Christmas volume.” Due to stay-at-home orders in the community, he’s also encountering more people when he delivers packages to their homes. Often, they want to come out and talk to him. “You really get the vibe that people just want to talk and see someone and interact,” he says.  He’s noticed a range in responses to COVID-19 safety measures in the people he encounters. “Some customers wave through their window and then will come out with a bleach bottle and spray down the package I just left at their door. Parents will yell at their kids to not touch the package if they come running out. And then there are some people who will just pick up the package and take it inside like it’s any other day. Everyone’s handling it differently.”

Javier can’t control what others do, but he takes his own precautions like wearing latex gloves while working, even though it’s not required by his job. When a customer wants to chat, he tries to keep his distance. If he comes down with symptoms similar to COVID-19, like he did in March, he stays home. Javier does what he can to stay safe in all areas of his life, so he wants to do the same when it’s time to vote in November. 

He knew voting by mail would be the safest way to vote during the pandemic, but he was surprised to find out how restrictive Missouri’s absentee voting criteria are. He says it’s a concern for the people he encounters on his delivery route, too.  “I’ve talked to a good amount of people about it within the last two weeks,” he explains. He thinks that people will be more likely to vote if they can do it from home with an absentee ballot — especially considering the pandemic.  “Voting is a basic, fundamental part of a democracy and it needs to be viewed more as a celebration and an essential part of every American’s duty if you will, to vote or not vote, but it still should be looked at as like a national holiday.”   “I picture Missouri at the forefront of changing ideology in the United States,” says Javier. “If we’re able to do something progressive in Missouri, I think the rest of the country would be able to see that as a positive thing.”

The stories of Kamisha, Cecil, and Javier show why voting by mail is a necessary option for everyone, regardless of their circumstances. There have been bipartisan efforts to expand access to vote by mail in states including Alabama, Indiana, New Hampshire, New York, and West Virginia. States should take additional measures, such as expanding early vote periods, preparing for a surge in absentee ballots, and doing away with unnecessary requirements like getting a witness signature or having to pay for postage. At the same time, states must ensure safety for those who choose to vote in person as well as poll workers. Nobody should have to risk their health to vote. 

For information on how to vote by mail, see the absentee voting guide. 

Published June 8, 2020 at 10:12PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3f5BUi6

[nancydhooper]

Three Missouri Voters Explain Why Everyone Should be Able to Vote by Mail in 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way the world operates, but as the presidential election approaches, many states have failed to respond when it comes to voting. The safest way to vote during the pandemic is to vote by mail, but state restrictions block many voters from doing so. The ACLU has sued 10 states for restricting access, including Missouri, where the state legislature just voted to expand access in 2020. While the Missouri legislature win was a major step toward progress, the state is still restricting access by requiring most voters to notarize their mail-in ballots — which means they have to violate social distancing recommendations to vote by mail.  The ACLU is fighting the notarization requirement on behalf of voters like Cecil Wattree and Javier Del Villar — two Missourians who joined the original lawsuit because they wanted to exercise their right to vote by mail. Cecil, Javier, and fellow Missouri voter Kamisha Webb shared their stories with the ACLU to show why voting by mail should be accessible — and safe  — for all. 

Vote by mail to protect Kamisha

For Kansas City resident Kamisha Webb, going to the polls could put her life in jeopardy. Kamisha has asthma and a condition called hereditary angioedema, which requires her to use a nebulizer machine, various medications, and biweekly injections to manage her health. A cold or flu could land her in the ICU. Contracting COVID-19 could be fatal. Kamisha is doing everything she can to be safe. She stays at home on paid leave from her job because teleworking isn’t an option. She talks to her grandmother virtually, despite wanting to see her in person. But she’s worried she may not be able to take similar safety precautions when it comes to voting. 

“I feel like I have to choose whether to exercise my right to vote, or risk putting my life on the line,” she tells the ACLU. “And no one should have to mix the two, ever.”

Kamisha first learned about absentee voting when she overheard people signing up at a polling place during the 2018 midterm election. She learned that it was an option for people who are sick, for example, or have a disability that hinders their ability to vote in person. 

“I just thought, wow, that’s so cool to have a process in place for individuals to still vote if they’re not able to physically go to the polls,” Kamisha tells the ACLU. “It would be wonderful if we could take that same idea and make an exception due to COVID-19. Whether or not someone has a health condition, we have a deadly virus on the loose. We should all have the right to not only vote, but to be safe in doing that.”

People of color will likely be harmed most by restricting access to voting by mail. Voter suppression efforts already target people of color nationwide, and COVID-19 disproportionately affects people of color, particularly the Black community, to which Kamisha belongs. She attributes this to the prevalence of underlying health conditions, lack of access to health care and insurance, and discrimination in medical care. On the higher death rates in the Black community, Kamisha is “saddened, but not surprised.” Kamisha joined the Missouri lawsuit not only because she is at risk, but because she believes everybody should be able to vote by mail during the pandemic. If the court rules in her favor, she says she will be overcome with joy: “I’m kind of filled with emotion just thinking about it.”

Vote by mail to protect Cecil’s daughter

By the time she turned eight, Cecil Wattree’s daughter, Allyn, had gone through open heart surgery, multiple strokes, was placed on a ventilator, and was on a waiting list for a heart transplant — among other ailments and surgeries resulting from her being born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome.  “It’s a gift of God that she recovered to the point where she is able to function,” says Cecil. “But it still leaves her immunocompromised when it comes to her lungs and her heart.” That makes Allyn high risk to COVID-19. When the ACLU sued Missouri, he joined the lawsuit, explaining, “I’m in a unique position to be able to advocate for my daughter.” Cecil constantly worries about exposing his daughter to the virus, especially because he still has to go to work at a primary care clinic. The clinic has taken precautionary measures, and Cecil is being “super hyper vigilant” at home because of his daughter.  “When I come home, I have to pretty much take all my clothes off in the garage or the cellar and then run into the bathroom and take a shower before I even see Allyn,” says Cecil. “Even after that, it’s a struggle to be safe when you have a highly affectionate eight year old who wants to be in your arms. I always worry that I might have encountered the virus in some way.”

It doesn’t help that as a Black man, Cecil has to navigate a world where his race directly impacts his ability to stay safe. He thinks twice about visiting a store wearing a mask in a white neighborhood. And he’s seen discrimination in medical care firsthand with his own daughter: “When Allyn had a stroke, the doctors didn’t believe she had one, even though she showed symptoms. I had to advocate so hard just to get them to look at her and give her a CT scan.”  He worries about what this means when it comes to COVID-19, which has symptoms similar to the flu or cold: “How am I going to get them to take it seriously?”

Cecil wants to be as safe as possible and vote absentee in November — but having a vulnerable daughter, being Black, and being an essential worker doesn’t make you eligible in Missouri.  “A lot of people have fought and died for my ability to vote,” says Cecil on why voting is so important to him. “Being able to vote by mail would give me a sense of protection while also ensuring that I can exercise my right to have a say in the direction this country’s going.” No matter the outcome of the lawsuit, however, Cecil knows he’s privileged to have the option to vote in person when it comes down to the wire. “There are people who have no availability, no transportation, whose health is already compromised. To tell them to social distance while not allowing their voices to be heard is to take advantage of the current situation to suppress voters.”

Vote by mail to protect Javier’s community

As a 29 year old without pre-existing medical conditions, Javier is not considered by the CDC to be high risk to COVID-19. But Javier works for the national delivery service, making him an essential worker who comes into contact with the whole community on a daily basis.  “In delivery, I feel like I’m helping people get what they need, because we do a lot of medical supply deliveries,” says Javier. “So it feels good. At the same time, it feels uncomfortable just knowing that the people receiving those deliveries are often out of work, while I am working.” While millions of people have lost their jobs in the past few months, Javier’s work has gotten even busier, with longer hours and more packages delivered each day. He calls it “Christmas volume.” Due to stay-at-home orders in the community, he’s also encountering more people when he delivers packages to their homes. Often, they want to come out and talk to him. “You really get the vibe that people just want to talk and see someone and interact,” he says.  He’s noticed a range in responses to COVID-19 safety measures in the people he encounters. “Some customers wave through their window and then will come out with a bleach bottle and spray down the package I just left at their door. Parents will yell at their kids to not touch the package if they come running out. And then there are some people who will just pick up the package and take it inside like it’s any other day. Everyone’s handling it differently.”

Javier can’t control what others do, but he takes his own precautions like wearing latex gloves while working, even though it’s not required by his job. When a customer wants to chat, he tries to keep his distance. If he comes down with symptoms similar to COVID-19, like he did in March, he stays home. Javier does what he can to stay safe in all areas of his life, so he wants to do the same when it’s time to vote in November. 

He knew voting by mail would be the safest way to vote during the pandemic, but he was surprised to find out how restrictive Missouri’s absentee voting criteria are. He says it’s a concern for the people he encounters on his delivery route, too.  “I’ve talked to a good amount of people about it within the last two weeks,” he explains. He thinks that people will be more likely to vote if they can do it from home with an absentee ballot — especially considering the pandemic.  “Voting is a basic, fundamental part of a democracy and it needs to be viewed more as a celebration and an essential part of every American’s duty if you will, to vote or not vote, but it still should be looked at as like a national holiday.”   “I picture Missouri at the forefront of changing ideology in the United States,” says Javier. “If we’re able to do something progressive in Missouri, I think the rest of the country would be able to see that as a positive thing.”

The stories of Kamisha, Cecil, and Javier show why voting by mail is a necessary option for everyone, regardless of their circumstances. There have been bipartisan efforts to expand access to vote by mail in states including Alabama, Indiana, New Hampshire, New York, and West Virginia. States should take additional measures, such as expanding early vote periods, preparing for a surge in absentee ballots, and doing away with unnecessary requirements like getting a witness signature or having to pay for postage. At the same time, states must ensure safety for those who choose to vote in person as well as poll workers. Nobody should have to risk their health to vote. 

For information on how to vote by mail, see the absentee voting guide. 

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/news/voting-rights/three-missouri-voters-explain-why-everyone-should-be-able-to-vote-by-mail-in-2020 via http://www.rssmix.com/

[brajeshupadhyay]

The nexus between coronavirus and protests: ?The virus was the kindling. Police brutality lit the fire.?

At 2:15 a.m., Walt went downtown to see, to make a statement. The Smiths had talked and talked about the virus; they knew joining the protests against police brutality meant a higher risk of being infected. They took the risk to give their 10-year-old son a chance at a future in which he is not “walking around with the spirit of fear,” Shae said. They took the risk because after dealing with the pandemic “we still have to do whatever it takes.”

The protests mean exposure to the virus and potentially accelerating its spread. The virus has killed more than 109,000 Americans, including a disproportionate number of blacks. Yet the Smiths and tens of thousands of others have chosen to take the risk.

Far from being separate crises, the deadly epidemic of covid-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, and the sudden explosion of street protests against police violence are intimately connected, according to protesters and public and mental health professionals.

“People are so pent-up with frustration from being inside for so long,” said Patricia Newton, chief executive and medical director of the Black Psychiatrists of America, which has about 2,000 members. “That was the kindling, and the police brutality lit the fire. People tell me, ‘I need to get out of the house,’ and ‘I’m having cabin fever.’ When people feel hopeless, they feel they have nothing to lose and caution goes to the wind.”

For Shae and Walt Smith, the decision to leave home and walk among strangers for the first time in months was calculated, the result of a thorough discussion about what lay ahead for their two young sons as black men in America.

In Columbia, Md., Jada Smith made the pivot more impulsively. On the day a Minneapolis police officer drove his knee into George Floyd’s neck until he died, Smith had barely left her house in three months.

Smith, 23, broke her self-isolation, joining teeming, screaming, shoulder-to-shoulder protesters who packed streets north of the White House.

“F— coronavirus. Who cares about coronavirus?” she said. “You can’t even walk out the door without being afraid for your skin color. This is more serious than what the coronavirus was. This is our lives out here. This is our children’s lives.”

For medical professionals, the nightly images of huge crowds walking city streets, shouting and chanting, sometimes wearing masks but with hardly any possibility of social distancing, is frightening, even if it’s also understandable.

Newton and others who have counseled protesters describe the connection between the two crises as complex — very different for different people. Some protesters consciously weigh the risks of catching the virus against a moral calling to voice their anger about racial bias. Others simply follow their passion to meet the moment on the nation’s streets. What both groups have in common is a web of emotions stemming from the pandemic: anger, isolation, loneliness, frustration, powerlessness, hopelessness.

“There are a lot of factors weighing on people,” said Reed V. Tuckson, chairman of the Black Coalition Against Covid-19 and a former D.C. health commissioner. “It would be the height of hypocrisy for people protesting on behalf of those who cannot breathe to then bring home a virus that will prevent the people you live with from breathing. At the same time, a major appeal of protests like these is that they are exciting, engaging and morally compelling, and even more appealing when people have been quarantined for so long.”

Newton has counseled protesters to consider the health impact of large gatherings. “I keep telling people, ‘You can’t protest if you’re dead and you can’t protest if you’re on a ventilator,’ ” she said. “If the people in your home and your community get the virus because of your unwillingness to take precautions, who are you helping? But when people get angry, they stop thinking.”

The clash between the need to take precautions against the virus and the desire to take part in the protests came home to Kitaw Demassie when his 13-year-old daughter asked if they could join a demonstration.

Demassie, a physician who is dean of the School of Public Health at the State University of New York Downstate, said his daughter understood the risk of infection, “but the anger and the isolation from the stay-at-home order combined to make her and other young people feel the need to go out. The isolation of the past three months increases anxiety, depression and also symptoms of indignation. Demonstrating peacefully helps people do something with their anger.”

Father and daughter decided to join a group of physicians protesting in their white coats in Manhattan — “using protection and social distancing,” Demassie was quick to add.

For many years, protests against racial bias have erupted anew after each incident of police brutality that gains national attention. But this time, Demassie said, the explosion of outrage is louder in part because “the interaction with the virus shutdown is fueling these protests.”

Demassie understands why people feel compelled to protest — after all, he’s joining a crowd himself — but he remains “very sure that this will have a big impact on the number of virus cases. There really is no social distancing in these demonstrations.”

It’s a tricky moment, he said: “We have two epidemics — racial disparities in health care, as we see in the death rate from covid-19, and racial injustice as exemplified in the death of George Floyd. In both cases, we need to flatten the curve.”

It’s not that protesters don’t know that gathering in large crowds is likely to further spread the virus. Rather, they often view that reality through a blend of fatalism and idealism.

Shae Smith, a 34-year-old manager at a Gap store, sometimes sounds fatalistic. The virus, police brutality and the way she and other black Americans lived before this year’s events all added up to a deadened life, she said: “We’re already in survival mode. The unemployment that people are facing. . . . How much more can we take? We’re already at our wit’s end. It’s like, we’re walking around, in a sense, feeling defeated.”

Yet she also sounds idealistic. The protests are a chance “to see to it that people are going to be held accountable,” she said. “We got our mask on, and I made a sign and we went out.”

The fatalism is sometimes literal.

Kelly Rudin, of Bethesda, Md., had lived in terror of the virus. Kelly, 63, would send her 62-year-old husband Tom out to do the grocery shopping. But the couple, longtime activists who protested President Trump’s inauguration and the police choking death of Eric Garner in New York, knew immediately what they would do after Floyd’s death.

“This,” Kelly said, “is worth dying for.”

“If white people don’t come out, our society — ” she hesitated, then finished: “Our society is basically done anyway.”

Until recently, the Rudins had taken all precautions they could. Now, they donned cloth masks and promised each other they would stay six feet from everyone else.

But marching amid the crowds, Kelly didn’t feel worried anymore. Watching a group try to breach a police barricade on Pennsylvania Avenue, Tom lamented that because of the virus, they could not go closer.

“Ordinarily,” Kelly said, “I’d be in the middle of that.”

They leaned against a fire hydrant for a few minutes. The shouting rose. People ran back and forth. Tom and Kelly looked at each other. In tandem, they waded into the crowd.

Such stories are both inspiring and worrisome, Newton said.

“I never thought I’d see Americans so fatalistic and idealistic at the same time,” she said. “The fatalism is very scary. I’ve heard repeatedly people saying to me, ‘If I’m going to get killed, I want it to be for a reason.’ At the same time, there’s this idealism — they feel it’s their civic duty to go out on the streets.”

Chante Burg, who recently left her job as a special-education teacher in Louisville to become a disabilities consultant, had plenty of cause to fear the virus. Recently recovered from Lyme disease, she takes 26 pills a day to boost her immune system. She had spent the past two months at home with her boyfriend, a former teacher.

But then, after Breonna Taylor, a 26-year-old black emergency medical technician, was shot and killed by Louisville police in her own home, Burg heard a call to action through her network of teachers.

“I was livid,” she said. “Just livid. I was furious, I was devastated. I felt like, this is the end. This is the end. It can’t go on.”

Burg, 34, felt compelled to act. “The virus didn’t concern me at all,” she said. “My immune system, I’ve built it up, and I have faith, I have faith in God, I have faith in my immune system.”

She did worry that some people carrying the virus might be among the protesters, that some people may have gotten cabin fever and were “using these protests to get out of the house,” she said. “But I don’t dwell on that.”

She feels in the dark about the virus. She mistrusts the White House, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, basically all of the often-conflicting guidance she hears on the news.

“We don’t know what to believe or who to trust, so we need to take care of ourselves,” Burg said.

In contrast, she’s confident that protesting is the right choice: “It’s important to me to be able to speak out and not live in fear, and it’s important for me to exercise my right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I’m not doing that when I’m sitting at home. Today, I feel empowered, I feel strong. I feel that we’re making progress, and we are going to win.”

In the sea of young faces massed in front of the White House during the past week, Louis and Merianne de Merode stood out. He is 71 and she is 64. The Georgetown couple both have compromised immune systems from battles with cancer; they had strictly quarantined themselves, living on delivered groceries, venturing out only for bike rides on lonely stretches of the C & O Canal.

Fearful of joining the protests because of the risk of infection, they changed their minds when they read their neighbors’ comments on a listserv where affluent Georgetowners complained about the looting visited upon local shops without discussing the rioters’ motivations.

The de Merodes put on cloth masks and headed downtown.

“This is 1,000 times more people than we’ve been around,” Merianne said. “We’re walking with people who don’t all wear masks. So we’re scared.”

But just as they felt morally obliged to protest, they also felt compelled to put themselves in a 14-day quarantine after the demonstration.

Tuckson, the former D.C. health commissioner, said the same moral responsibility that brings protesters onto the streets should lead them to quarantine themselves afterward. “If you’re going to follow your idealism,” he said, “you’re going to have to also protect the people you live with.”

Some health advocates feel a tension between advising protesters to take precautions against the coronavirus, which has produced disproportionately high death rates among blacks, and endorsing action against another epidemic — racial disparities in everything from housing quality to police brutality.

But Newton said the two epidemics are more closely connected than many protesters realize.

“The virus exposed the underbelly of the problems we’ve had in health care for decades — a disparity in care that reveals some of the same bias we see in police brutality,” she said.

For more than two months this spring, Denelle Acosta locked herself indoors, leaving her San Antonio home only to buy groceries or ride her bike. As a cancer survivor who is also diabetic, Acosta said she had to remain hypervigilant as the coronavirus swept across Texas.

But when she watched the video of the last nine minutes of Floyd’s life, “I just started sobbing,” said Acosta, 36, who works as a sommelier and bartender at an upscale restaurant. “I have all these health issues, but I don’t care. I don’t want a virus to take me, but if I’m going to be fighting for what’s right, I’ll go out like that.”

Acosta saw the officer crushing Floyd as a metaphor for how the system weighs on vulnerable people. She decided to protest in San Antonio, then drove an hour north to Austin to join another crowd.

In front of Austin police headquarters, Acosta, who wore a black mask, pointed to a camp of tents and couches where homeless people find shelter beneath a busy highway and began listing reasons she believes “the system is broken. So many people have no health care, our education system is a joke, we’re not taking care of our veterans or the elderly.”

Police brutality is front of mind, but she thought also about Trump’s aggressive tweets, the plight of vulnerable communities and the pandemic, which she said has exposed inequity in American society.

“Laying my life on this line for this movement is more important to me than dying because of a virus,” she said. “I can’t take it anymore.”

Fisher and Jamison reported from Washington. Wallace reported from Louisville. Holly Bailey in Minneapolis, Peter Holley in Austin and Hannah Natanson in Washington contributed to this report.

The post The nexus between coronavirus and protests: ?The virus was the kindling. Police brutality lit the fire.? appeared first on Sansaar Times.

via Blogger https://ift.tt/3dKBSft

[davisboy1]

Some Thoughts on the Ethics of Sexuality

Disclaimer: My intention here is to think through these issues, not to declare with certainty what my personal views on sexual ethics are. I will be making some observations and opening a window into my own thought-process here, but again, my emphasis is that this is a thought-process and not a dogmatic assertion of principles/beliefs/views. If I'm wrong or you disagree, please let me know, this is an important conversation.

Human sexuality is admittedly a touchy subject to discuss - partially, in my opinion, because of how visceral sex actually is and how viscerally we respond to it. I'm using the Bible for most of my source material because I grew up totally immersed in Christian culture, so my main frame of reference for any ethical issue has always been the Bible, and for better or worse, that has not changed. For the sake of this discussion, however, I am not using the Bible as an "authority" but as a guide, a frame of reference.

From my perspective, it seems as if the Biblical teaching regarding sex really boils down to one or two issues. First, the clear Biblical desire is for sexual interaction among people to happen within a marriage. Second, the Bible seems to teach that when a male and a female come together sexually, this is somehow a mystical (spiritual?) unification of those two separate people into one person or being. 

What are we to make of those two things as we discuss sexual ethics?

First, I like to nuance what is meant by "marriage." The Bible's definition of a marriage seems to be one man, leaving his parental family unit, and joining together with his wife into "one body." It really seems as if the base Biblical definition of marriage is two people coming together as their own new "family unit," so to speak. Two different people becoming one body, one family. This is quite different from, but not wholly incompatible with, the State's view of marriage as the "legal union" between two people, which is made, enforced, and can be voided by a contract. With these distinctions, I hold that a couple may be "Biblically married" even if they are not legally married by the State, but a legal marriage by the State would of course constitute a Biblical marriage inasmuch as the two people are joining their lives together into "one unit."

Why does the Bible want to restrict human sexuality to two people who have joined together as one unit? Or, to ask a different question, does the Bible view the sex act as two people coming together into one unit, and thus becoming married? I'm not sure I can answer these questions, but I do think one could make a case that it is the sex act that creates a "Biblical marriage," given that one of the dictionary definitions for marriage is "a combination or mixture of two or more elements." Sex is certainly the "combination of two or more." As regards Biblical marriage, I think cases can be made for either view, either that the sex act is what creates the marriage, or that the sex act should only happen after a marriage has been established. Either way, the Bible prefers sex to happen within the unity of a marriage, however it is that may be. 

So again, why does the Bible want to restrict human sexual expression to such a degree? Why is monogamy such a big deal? And why would the Bible reject the second half of monogamy's definition - "at a time"? I don't know the answer to these questions, but I do have some ideas, especially given our current cultural moment. 

In the #MeToo era wherein sexual misconduct (specifically against women) is being exposed, decried, and fought against, it's more important than ever to collectively try and discuss the ethics of sexuality. As far as I can tell, modern society has a fairly strict ethic regarding human sexuality that is not wholly incompatible with Biblical teaching, even if it is "less strict" than Biblical teaching.

It seems as if the most important sexual ethic in modern society is consent, the age of consent, and what constitutes consent. This is 100% compatible with Biblical teaching inasmuch as marriage is portrayed as two people coming "together" "as one" into "one body." In order for two people to come together "as one," there has to be mutual consent between both of those parties. Biblical sexuality is not meant to be a sexuality of dominance but of mutual self-giving. "1 Corinthians 7:4 (NCV) The wife does not have full rights over her own body; her husband shares them. And the husband does not have full rights over his own body; his wife shares them." 

Now of course, that is one of the many verses that has been misused to further a sexuality of dominance wherein men are "owed" sex by their wives. That's not what the Bible is trying to teach right here. The Bible here is teaching that sexuality is the *sharing* of bodies. This verse does not allow either the husband or the wife to "take" or "demand" the other person's body in a sexual way. Within the context of the preceding verses, and operating under his assumptive framework that marriage is the only proper expression for sexuality, Paul is warning people that sexual sin is a danger, and that to avoid the dangers of sexual sin married couples should be *freely sharing* their bodies with each other. 

As I mentioned above, a sexuality of dominance is incompatible with a Biblical sexual ethic. This would mean not only that sex requires mutual consent and self-giving, but also that neither party should feel like they have no choice BUT to consent. To use the example of Louis C.K., I would contend that while he did try to gain consent from the women he interacted with (and should be commended for at least that), his position of dominance as a famous, well-known, white male certainly seemed to give those women the impression that they had no choice but to consent. When one person holds a disproportionate amount of power in the sexual relationship, it is very difficult for there to be a truly mutually self-giving interaction. 

Why is sexual sin or sexual misconduct viewed in such a negative light? In my opinion, this has something to do with what I mentioned above about the sexual act being a mystical or spiritual union between two people. According to the Bible (and if we're being honest, probably most people) sex is about more than just the physical interaction of genitalia. There is something more than merely physical going on in the act of sex. While I certainly can't define what the metaphysical aspects of sexuality, I am content to claim that there IS some metaphysics of sexuality that contributes to our understanding of sex. We consider sexual misconduct a violation not only of another person's body, but of their entire person. A raped woman has more to deal with than merely the physical trauma. There is mental, emotional, and spiritual trauma associated with being (violently) forced or coerced into an act that is meant to be unifying. Sex is nowhere near "unity" when it is being forced upon someone. 

I think that in some aspects, yes, sex is an animalistic, bodily urge that is meant for the continuation of the species. But humans have transcended the purely animal force of sexuality into something that unifies us, comforts us, and makes us feel whole. Dominating sexuality is not the way humans are meant to interact. 

Finally, I'd like to discuss some aspects of same-sex interaction as it relates to the Bible. As you may know, I no longer see good reason to prevent gay and lesbian people from enjoying the experience of mutual self-emptying sexuality. I view the Bible's commands against same-sex acts as products of a deeply, deeply patriarchal system that viewed men as effeminate and therefore worthless if they weren't the "dominating" partner in sexual activity. Patriarchy is STILL ingrained in almost every modern culture, which is why there's still a long way to go on our development of sexual ethics. A society that views sex through the lens of male dominance is absolutely going to be opposed to any sexuality where the male partner is not dominant - which also means opposition to the Biblical idea of mutual self-giving. In all honesty, other than what the Bible has had to say on the matter, what moral reasons are there for being opposed to same-sex sexual activity? A gay or lesbian couple is no less capable of mutual self-giving consent and unity than is a straight couple. 

This is of course, where I do want to voice what I see as one possible argument against same-sex sexual activity. The Biblical idea of unity seems to be that of unity in diversity, that is, a unity between the diversity of the male and the female bodies. One could therefore argue that the Biblical ideal of sexual unity has to be firmly situated in sexual diversity. 

However, I see this lacking merit for two reasons. One, God Himself is said to be love and unified in the Trinity - but the persons of the Trinity are of the same "essence" or divine nature, so to speak, so this would be a unity of same-ness, not necessarily a unity of diverse peoples. Two, in a society wherein heterosexuality is the norm, could it not be said that same-sex sexual interactions are an example of the diversity of sexual expressions? If all people are straight, would this not be a unity in same-ness, to some degree? A human society that accepts straight or gay expressions of sexuality could be said to be unified within that diversity. 

That concludes this particular discussion on sexual ethics. I do look forward to some interaction on this topic, because I think it's vitally important. I do also think it is important for us to work through these tough topics together, with charity and grace for those who disagree or hold alternate views. Human sexuality is messy but it is also beautiful and unifying. Let's work together as one to figure out how best to interact with each other at every level, sexuality included. 

[killingthebuddha]

“If you focus too much on only a personal relationship being the core tenet of your faith, then it means that you’re more easily able to marginalize topics like human suffering, which in some cases is spurred by climate change. We are embodied creatures in this planet, so let’s live like we are,” said Sean Lyon. Credit: Meera Subramanian

WHEATON, Illinois — Diego Hernandez wasn’t thinking much about climate change until last summer, when he was traveling with his family along the Gulf Coast in his home state of Texas, where his ancestors—cowboys and politicians, he said—reach back to the 1600s. His mother suggested they take the “scenic route” for that summer drive, Diego said, his fingers making air-quotes because there was nothing “scenic” about it. All he saw were oil refineries.

“At that moment,” said 19-year-old Diego, who considers himself a libertarian, “the switch kind of flipped for me.” Why are we putting refineries in this beautiful place? he thought. The impacts from Hurricane Harvey, which had hit Houston the previous August and had affected some of Diego’s relatives, were also still lingering in his mind.

“I used to be like, oh, there’s oil, go start drilling, you know, because of course it’s all about the money, right?” he said, his voice tinged with sarcasm. But after that family outing, he began to ask questions—”What is it doing to our environment? How is it going to affect us in the next 10 to 50 years?”—and since then he’s had climate change on his mind.

Diego is a clean-shaven, lifelong Christian wearing a cyan blue button-down and polished cowboy boots, and a sophomore at Wheaton College in Wheaton, Illinois, which has been called the Harvard of Christian schools. The entrance sign, framed by a glowing bed of zinnias in full bloom, pronounces the school’s motto: “For Christ and His Kingdom.” But while Diego has all the credentials of a true political conservative—president of Wheaton’s Young Americans for Freedom chapter, a cabinet member of the College Republicans—he also finds himself genuinely baffled by the right’s stance against acting on climate change.

While many evangelicals are preoccupied with the long-term state of human souls and the protection of the unborn, Diego and the other students I met at Wheaton are also considering other eternal implications and a broader definition of pro-life. They are concerned about the lifespan of climate pollutants that will last in the atmosphere for thousands of years, and about the lives of the poor and weak who are being disproportionately harmed by the effects of those greenhouse gases. While Diego was just shy of eligible voting age in the 2016 presidential election, he’s old enough to vote now. He and other young evangelicals thought hard this year about the politicians on offer, the issues they stand for, and who deserved their votes.

  What’s an Evangelical to Do?

Evangelical Protestants—one in four American adults—are a political powerhouse. They are the single largest religious group in the nation, and they are nearly twice as likely to be Republican as Democrat. And while Baby Boomers are currently the strongest political voting bloc, that’s only because the older you are, the more likely you are to vote.

The current crop of younger people—from Gen X to Millennials to the newly minted adults I met at Wheaton—are poised to dominate the eligible-voter body politic. They would definitively tip the voting scales—should they become engaged. There are signs they might be doing just that. From the Parkland school shooting victims to Millennial political candidates, the youth of America are speaking up.  And, significantly, they accept the scientific consensus on climate change at a much higher rate than their elders.

This is true even of young evangelicals, as the existence of the Young Evangelicals for Climate Action (YECA) attests.  YECA is a ministry of the Evangelical Environmental Network that aims to mobilize students, influence religious leaders and pressure lawmakers into passing legislation to address climate change. I met Diego at a climate change discussion event on campus that was organized by Chelsey Geisz, a Wheaton junior and a YECA climate leadership fellow.

From Colorado Springs, Colorado, Chelsey, 20, always loved nature, she told me as we sat together in a gazebo in Adams Park, near campus. She’d taken a few classes on sustainability at Wheaton, and last year spent time working at Eighth Day Farm in Holland, Michigan, where Christian volunteers have turned the dirt once trapped below strip mall pavement into garden plots to grow vegetables for the hungry. These experiences meant she was primed when she heard about YECA.

Though non-partisan, YECA is targeting conservatives, since that’s where the facts of climate change have failed to lead to action. According to the organization, they’ve engaged more than 10,000 young evangelicals so far. Along with Chelsey, there are another half-dozen fellows at other schools across the country, helping to build the grassroots movement. The fellowship includes a summer training session that covers the science of climate change, as well as the socio-cultural and religious aspects of the issue. As a YECA fellow, Chelsey organizes campus events such as the session I attended in September and she serves as Wheaton’s executive vice president of campus sustainability, a new position that YECA helped develop.

It can be tough to be an evangelical who cares about climate change, Chelsey said, “because the environmental activists don’t trust you and the evangelicals hate you.” Or they could hate you; she was quick to point out that the evangelicals she knows personally are generally tolerant of her views. “I’m not encountering anyone at Wheaton, even among my most conservative friends, who disagree with climate change,” she told me. She’s having some trouble with her father, though, who’s troubled by her YECA work. He holds a Harvard law degree, works at a company that invests in resource-rich properties, and associates Chelsey’s transformation into a “climate activist” with a liberal agenda he finds suspect. “For a man who has such well-reasoned opinions, I just feel like there’s so much emotion for him that it’s not about the science at all,” she said.

As for liberals themselves, Chelsey said, some of them do treat evangelicals like her with some suspicion. After all, aren’t evangelicals the ones who elected anti-environment Trump?

“I think there’s some misunderstanding about what our faith compels us to do,” she said as the sun set behind her, creating a halo around the edges of her auburn hair.

  Praising Natural Systems

Sean Lyon is a recent Wheaton graduate who was also a YECA fellow while he was in school. He feels that he was born to love the natural world; his first word as an infant was “bird,” after all, and flying creatures remain a passion he can’t quite explain. While in school, he created his own interdisciplinary major of biology and business and spent significant time in Tanzania working with ECHO East Africa, a faith-based sustainable agriculture organization. He still lives in the town of Wheaton, easy commuting distance to Chicago, where he’s volunteering at the Field Museum of Natural History.

Sean, 23, grew up in upstate New York, among “classic North American white evangelicals,” where climate was not a concern and politics were conservative. But his love of the natural world shifted his perspective. He saw heaven on earth, and something worth saving, in every wingbeat he witnessed.

“Every ecosystem carries His creativity in it,” Sean said, “and every species is a mark of His design.” He had a thick brass bangle encircling his wrist, and blue eyes behind clear Lucite-rimmed glasses. Sean drew an analogy to his sister and grandparents, who are all artists. “So how would I treat the art that they created? If I love them, then I’m going to treat their art well. I’m not going to deface it. I’m not going to ignore it. I’m going to really honor it. And so when I see my God as having created everything that I’m interacting with, I want to honor it because that’s a way that I can show my love for this Creator.”

But God didn’t just create singular works, Sean said; he created systems, natural systems that every living being relies on. He hoped that all Christians—no, he corrected himself, all faiths—would unite to protect those systems.

“That’s my current prayer.”

  ‘Structural Sin’

Climate science isn’t questioned at Wheaton College the way it often is in the wider evangelical community. The school is a brick-and-mortar rebuttal to the myth that science and religion must be at odds with each other. When Wheaton students step into their-state-of-the-art science building, for instance, they are greeted with signs stating that a “sound Biblical theology gives us a proper basis for scientific inquiry,” and a display featuring locally excavated Perry the Mastodon, which carbon dating shows to be more than 13,000 years old.

The school is not alone in intertwining commitments to love God and protect the earth, often referred to as “creation care.” The Cape Town Commitment, a global agreement between evangelical leaders from nearly 200 countries, includes acknowledgement of climate change and how it will hurt the world’s poor (and it is required reading for Wheaton freshmen). Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University and an evangelical, has been an outspoken advocate for climate action. And in addition to YECA, there are numerous groups active in this arena, including the Evangelical Climate Initiative, Climate Caretakers, Care of Creation and A Rocha.

In late 2015, the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE)—the biggest umbrella group of evangelicals in the country, representing 43 million Americans—issued a statement accepting climate change, acknowledging the human contribution to it and encouraging action. YECA’s advocacy helped bring that statement, called “Loving the Least of These,” into being. In it, NAE argues that Christians should be compelled to care about climate change as a matter of social justice, equating those without the resources to adapt to failed farming or dry wells or rising seas as the modern-day equivalents of the widows and orphans of Jesus’s day.

When Chelsey reads the Bible, she hears this gospel of social justice, too.

“Instead of talking about climate change,” she said of her work as a YECA fellow, “I talk about environmental justice. There’s definitely a guilty complex, especially among the white evangelical community, about how complicit we’ve been, and apathetic. People really want to redeem that.”

Chelsey’s framing reveals that she is steeped in a liberal arts ethos friendly to intersectionality, the idea that humanity’s ills, which disproportionately affect the most vulnerable, cannot be conquered until root causes are addressed. This perspective is shaping academic dialogue in both secular and faith-based schools.

But does fighting climate change detract from evangelism? Here there’s a rift within the evangelical community. Should the emphasis be on saving souls or saving God’s creation? And are the two really at odds?

“That’s the Billy Graham evangelicalism,” Chelsey said of the personal salvation perspective, referencing Wheaton’s most famous alumnus. “It’s your faith between you and Jesus.” But the problem with that approach, she said, is that it doesn’t force Christians to deal with larger systems of injustice. “The evangelical community is really limited when it comes to talking about systemic and structural sin rather than individual sin. Most of us have never heard about systemic racism and climate change in church,” she said. Even as evangelical organizations embrace the need for action, the message isn’t coming across from the pulpit. “These things never come up because they’re apparently not gospel issues,” Chelsey said, “But at Wheaton, we think they are.”

For Sean, there’s not one speck of conflict between his love of God and the gospel and his fierce desire to see action on climate change. They’re complementary, he said.

“If you focus too much on only a personal relationship being the core tenet of your faith, then it means that you’re more easily able to marginalize topics like human suffering, which in some cases is spurred by climate change,” he said. “We are embodied creatures in this planet, so let’s live like we are.”

Could his concern for the climate be a threat to his faith? I asked him.

“Actually, I see more of a threat in the idea that we can divorce our lives on this earth and the lives of other people and the lives of other creatures from our life of faith,” Sean said. Better to revel in God’s love. “How much deeper and how much more beautiful is a way of loving Him that involves my whole being and the whole world around me rather than just simply the status of my soul?”

  When Pro-Life Means Entire Lives

Abortion was the entry point into American politics for many evangelicals, after the Supreme Court affirmed abortion rights in Roe v. Wade in 1973. Before that, evangelicals were generally unconcerned about abortion rights, which had the uncontroversial support of Republicans; they were also generally disengaged from voting. Today, the single-issue anti-abortion preoccupation of many evangelicals, now considered a given by many political leaders, confounds some of the young evangelicals I met at Wheaton.

“If we say we’re pro-life, we have to care for people who are experiencing incredible environmental degradation and so directly affected by climate change,” Chelsey said. “If we’re pro-life, that’s a bigger issue to me than abortion.”

Sean agreed. “So many people are now saying, okay, if you’re going to be pro-life you have to be pro all-of-life, lifelong pro-life, which has primarily come up in the immigration debate. If you’re pro-life, how can you be separating children from their parents?”

Diego sees it a little differently. “Abortion is definitely a deal-breaker for me,” he said, even though he said he’s not generally a one-issue voter. He echoed Sean and Chelsey to some degree, agreeing that “being pro-life doesn’t just mean being pro-life to the baby at birth. It also means the life of the mother and the life of the baby after birth.” But when he watched the 2016 presidential debates, he found himself agreeing with some of Hillary Clinton’s points … until he was appalled by what he saw as her “gung-ho” support of abortion rights. He decided he could just not get behind someone with those views.

Young evangelicals wrestle with these difficult choices in the voting booth, confronted with either/or candidates, unsure who will best represent their hopes for life on earth, all life, all of God’s creation. Right now, anti-abortion rights Christians typically have only one party to get behind. And it’s that party, represented in the White House, that is aggressively rolling back climate protections, from pulling out of the Paris climate accord to promoting coal.

  Future Powerhouse at the Polls?

Diego, Chelsey and Sean are the future. This younger generation has grown up with the realities of climate change and political polarization since they were swinging on monkey bars, and they aren’t hesitating to break rank with evangelical Baby Boomers on the issue. They remain faithful and politically conservative for the most part, but they are more concerned about a climate that they will have to live with much longer than those boomers heading into retirement. The shift aligns with a recent Pew poll that found that among Republicans, young adults were far less likely than their elders to support reliance on fossil fuels.

“Every one of the people who I’ve talked to who’s come to my events and engaged in climate issues from a Christian perspective said, ‘My parents don’t agree with me,'” Sean told me.

But even with this clear shift toward accepting climate science among young Americans, the quandary for young evangelicals in the voting booth remains.

Sean, who said he couldn’t in good conscience vote for either party, opted for Jill Stein in 2016.

Chelsey, as a busy freshman in 2016, followed in her father’s footsteps and voted for Trump.  Her father had been singularly focused on getting a Republican on the Supreme Court. Now, she hangs her head about the decision.

Diego, about to vote in his first election, grew up in a struggling, hard-working family in San Antonio. His father showed him how to mow lawns when he was six, he said.  His mother would pick up her raggedy old Bible and tell Diego, “This is what you should base all of your beliefs and all your values on. It shouldn’t be what you hear from someone on TV or C-SPAN or NPR.”

Surveys show that the way people view climate change is determined more by political affiliation, along with race and ethnicity, than by religious affiliation. So while 81 percent of white evangelicals voted for Donald Trump, it’s important to remember that about a quarter of the country’s evangelicals are not white, and it is among minority groups that the evangelical community is growing. And on the issue of climate change, Diego’s Latino background makes him part of the American demographic that is most concerned about climate change. He wonders whether his mother deliberately pushed for that “scenic route” to wake him up a little.

What are the choices for these faithful young? With church membership in decline and the Republican party in flux, how vocal these young people are could shape the future of the climate debate. If the Christian right wants to hold onto the next generation, getting right with the planet might prove as important as getting right with God.

Many concerned about the environment rally for more evangelicals to understand climate change and embrace leadership positions on the issue. “It would be a milestone if you managed to take influential evangelists—preachers—to adopt the idea of global warming, and to preach it,” Nobel Prize-winning economist Daniel Kahneman told the host of Hidden Brain, an NPR science show. “That would change things. It’s not going to happen by presenting more evidence, that is clear.”

And in the book The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth, renowned biologist E.O. Wilson wrote a long letter with the salutation, “Dear Pastor.” It is an urgent, heartfelt plea. “We need your help. The Creation—living Nature—is in deep trouble. Scientists estimate that … half the species of plants and animals on Earth could be either gone or at least fated for early extinction by the end of the century. A full quarter will drop to this level during the next half century as a result of climate change alone.”

These new sermons and stories are unlikely to come from older pastors and preachers, most of whom have become representatives of the Republican Party platform that doesn’t want to even acknowledge that climate change is an issue to discuss, let alone embark on the massive undertaking necessary to begin to solve it. But for the young, who will live with the catastrophic predictions that worsen with each new iteration of the UN climate report, there are new stories emerging. They are conversion stories of a new sort, springing from dirt once buried under Midwestern parking lots and held aloft on the wings of Sean’s beloved birds. Preachers and politicians seeking to keep the young religious right in their midst may need to leap past the quagmire of a questionable climate change debate and get right to the root of finding solutions for the generations that will be living into the long tomorrow of a warming planet.

  This story was originally published on InsideClimate News. 

[themomsandthecity]

Why Kids Prefer Family Dogs to Family

This article by Patrick A. Coleman was originally published on one of our favorite sites, Fatherly. The Air Bud franchise proves that "kids love dogs" is a powerful meme in Western culture, but scientists have long been working to sniff out the real-world origins of that cliche. Why do children love dogs? It's a big question requiring a massive amount of delicate social research. That work has now uncovered both evidence of how bonds are forged and unexpected data on the surprising strength of those relationships. Academics are demonstrating that children may forge stronger bonds with family dogs than with family, specifically siblings. If pop culture hypothesizes that there is something distinct and durable about puppy love, scholars may be on the verge of finding proof. A 2017 study by Cambridge researchers looked at the interactions of 12-year-olds and their pets in 77 British households. The children were asked about the quality of relationships with the members of their families, including pets. That quality was measured in four different dimensions: satisfaction with the relationship, feelings of companionship, communication, and conflict. Of those parameters, the kids reported less conflict with pets than with their siblings, but also, surprisingly, more satisfaction. That's an academic way of saying they felt a stronger bond with their pets than with their brothers or sisters. Importantly, researchers noted that in the hierarchy of pets, kids were most bonded with dogs, followed by cats. "The most fascinating finding was particularly around disclosure," says study author Matt Cassells. "That element is about how much you talk to your pet or your sibling about your problems. It was really striking to find equivalent ratings between pets and siblings." Related To All the Moms Who Hate When I Call My Dog My "Baby" Cassells notes disclosure is already known to be a good thing for psychological well-being in humans. In fact, simply putting thoughts and feelings into a journal can be therapeutic. Cassells posits that compared to a diary, or even a sibling, a dog offers a better sounding board. He theorizes that's because dogs can make eye contact, offer expressions, and show empathy (or appear to show empathy), they are generally viewed as sympathetic. Maybe they are. More likely, they are engaged in an entirely different sort of emotional exchange. But the lack of true understanding doesn't diminish the power of the interaction on both sides. "Another advantage that pets have over siblings is that they don't respond. They don't judge, and they don't talk back," says Cassells. "A sibling will communicate their actual feelings, and those will sometimes be hostile." What makes the emergence of the specific behavior - kids disclosing to canines - particularly remarkable is that most children are not instructed to open up to spaniels. The behavior that leads to strong bonds doesn't need to be taught. Dr. Gail Melson, Professor Emerita in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at Purdue University, has been studying the interaction of animals and kids for much of her career. She writes about those relationships in her "Why the Wild Things Are" column in Psychology Today. Melson points to several factors that have caused children to be so bonded with dogs, beginning with the concept of biophilia. When he published Biophilia in 1984, Harvard professor E.O. Wilson was claiming that he'd discovered a concept core to the continuation of life on Earth. "If you just look at the word, it looks like, 'a love of biological things,' but it doesn't mean that," Melson says. "Built into our brains is an attentiveness to other forms of life. . . . There's a study of babies under the first year of life, who are presented with a living animal and a wind-up toy. The attention and interest go to the living animal." But that's just one link in the leash. It explains why the kid wants to be with the dog, but not how that relationship is reinforced and strengthened. Melson says that western culture, not evolution, deserves credit for furry cosleeping. "For hundreds of years, we've accepted a kind of link between children and animals," she says. "We've tended to see them as similar. Part of raising a child is taking something that is wild and making them part of civilized society." Both babies and animals are considered "imperfectly socialized" creatures we have to train to be part of our families. Melson explains that the parallel developmental path between animals and children has caused Western society to see them as interchangeable analogs. Hear the words "fur baby" just once, and this point is forever seared into the brain. Related Saying Your Dog Is Your "Baby" Is an Insult to Moms Everywhere Because of this, we reflexively push kids and animals together, both physically and symbolically. This results in baby-meets-puppy media and pajamas lousy with cartoon zoo animals. Melson is also mindful of the fact that dogs' minds work differently. She notes that the evolution of prehistoric wolves into modern pets was mutually beneficial for both human and animal. As Canis lupus familiaris emerged, they became valuable tools. What was a professional relationship - wolves learned to coordinate hunts with humans - warmed into something friendly. Dogs came closer to the fire. "Dogs evolved to be part of the human family," Melson explains. "The evolution of the wolf into the dog took place beside human evolution. So the natural environment of the dog is with human beings." Once the symbiotic relationship was formed, dogs took on more specific working roles. But dogs in postindustrial Western society live in a largely postwork world. They've been able to adjust largely because the qualities that once made them valuable to their owners - attentiveness, ability to follow direction - make them adept at emotional labor. "When a dog comes into a family now, they're coming into a role already set up for them as a companion," says Melson. And they are thriving in that role. So, instead of retrieving game for hunting ancestors, they now fetch sticks and balls to the delight of kids everywhere. And instead of paying attention to subtle cues from a shepherd, they watch and listen attentively as a child tells them their secrets. And it appears that the relationship between dogs and families is primarily here - here being disproportionately the western hemisphere, but increasingly the world. The American Pet Products Association estimates that some 60 million American households own dogs. And they note that as baby boomers have aged, millennials have joined the pack. Younger adults now make up the bulk of dog owners. Dog culture will continue from there. The Air Bud movies? Maybe not. http://bit.ly/2p2EK0F

[lodelss]

Three Missouri Voters Explain Why Everyone Should be Able to Vote by Mail in 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way the world operates, but as the presidential election approaches, many states have failed to respond when it comes to voting. The safest way to vote during the pandemic is to vote by mail, but state restrictions block many voters from doing so. The ACLU has sued 10 states for restricting access, including Missouri, where the state legislature just voted to expand access in 2020. While the Missouri legislature win was a major step toward progress, the state is still restricting access by requiring most voters to notarize their mail-in ballots — which means they have to violate social distancing recommendations to vote by mail.  The ACLU is fighting the notarization requirement on behalf of voters like Cecil Wattree and Javier Del Villar — two Missourians who joined the original lawsuit because they wanted to exercise their right to vote by mail. Cecil, Javier, and fellow Missouri voter Kamisha Webb shared their stories with the ACLU to show why voting by mail should be accessible — and safe  — for all. 

Vote by mail to protect Kamisha

For Kansas City resident Kamisha Webb, going to the polls could put her life in jeopardy. Kamisha has asthma and a condition called hereditary angioedema, which requires her to use a nebulizer machine, various medications, and biweekly injections to manage her health. A cold or flu could land her in the ICU. Contracting COVID-19 could be fatal. Kamisha is doing everything she can to be safe. She stays at home on paid leave from her job because teleworking isn’t an option. She talks to her grandmother virtually, despite wanting to see her in person. But she’s worried she may not be able to take similar safety precautions when it comes to voting. 

“I feel like I have to choose whether to exercise my right to vote, or risk putting my life on the line,” she tells the ACLU. “And no one should have to mix the two, ever.”

Kamisha first learned about absentee voting when she overheard people signing up at a polling place during the 2018 midterm election. She learned that it was an option for people who are sick, for example, or have a disability that hinders their ability to vote in person. 

“I just thought, wow, that’s so cool to have a process in place for individuals to still vote if they’re not able to physically go to the polls,” Kamisha tells the ACLU. “It would be wonderful if we could take that same idea and make an exception due to COVID-19. Whether or not someone has a health condition, we have a deadly virus on the loose. We should all have the right to not only vote, but to be safe in doing that.”

People of color will likely be harmed most by restricting access to voting by mail. Voter suppression efforts already target people of color nationwide, and COVID-19 disproportionately affects people of color, particularly the Black community, to which Kamisha belongs. She attributes this to the prevalence of underlying health conditions, lack of access to health care and insurance, and discrimination in medical care. On the higher death rates in the Black community, Kamisha is “saddened, but not surprised.” Kamisha joined the Missouri lawsuit not only because she is at risk, but because she believes everybody should be able to vote by mail during the pandemic. If the court rules in her favor, she says she will be overcome with joy: “I’m kind of filled with emotion just thinking about it.”

Vote by mail to protect Cecil’s daughter

By the time she turned eight, Cecil Wattree’s daughter, Allyn, had gone through open heart surgery, multiple strokes, was placed on a ventilator, and was on a waiting list for a heart transplant — among other ailments and surgeries resulting from her being born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome.  “It’s a gift of God that she recovered to the point where she is able to function,” says Cecil. “But it still leaves her immunocompromised when it comes to her lungs and her heart.” That makes Allyn high risk to COVID-19. When the ACLU sued Missouri, he joined the lawsuit, explaining, “I’m in a unique position to be able to advocate for my daughter.” Cecil constantly worries about exposing his daughter to the virus, especially because he still has to go to work at a primary care clinic. The clinic has taken precautionary measures, and Cecil is being “super hyper vigilant” at home because of his daughter.  “When I come home, I have to pretty much take all my clothes off in the garage or the cellar and then run into the bathroom and take a shower before I even see Allyn,” says Cecil. “Even after that, it’s a struggle to be safe when you have a highly affectionate eight year old who wants to be in your arms. I always worry that I might have encountered the virus in some way.”

It doesn’t help that as a Black man, Cecil has to navigate a world where his race directly impacts his ability to stay safe. He thinks twice about visiting a store wearing a mask in a white neighborhood. And he’s seen discrimination in medical care firsthand with his own daughter: “When Allyn had a stroke, the doctors didn’t believe she had one, even though she showed symptoms. I had to advocate so hard just to get them to look at her and give her a CT scan.”  He worries about what this means when it comes to COVID-19, which has symptoms similar to the flu or cold: “How am I going to get them to take it seriously?”

Cecil wants to be as safe as possible and vote absentee in November — but having a vulnerable daughter, being Black, and being an essential worker doesn’t make you eligible in Missouri.  “A lot of people have fought and died for my ability to vote,” says Cecil on why voting is so important to him. “Being able to vote by mail would give me a sense of protection while also ensuring that I can exercise my right to have a say in the direction this country’s going.” No matter the outcome of the lawsuit, however, Cecil knows he’s privileged to have the option to vote in person when it comes down to the wire. “There are people who have no availability, no transportation, whose health is already compromised. To tell them to social distance while not allowing their voices to be heard is to take advantage of the current situation to suppress voters.”

Vote by mail to protect Javier’s community

As a 29 year old without pre-existing medical conditions, Javier is not considered by the CDC to be high risk to COVID-19. But Javier works for the national delivery service, making him an essential worker who comes into contact with the whole community on a daily basis.  “In delivery, I feel like I’m helping people get what they need, because we do a lot of medical supply deliveries,” says Javier. “So it feels good. At the same time, it feels uncomfortable just knowing that the people receiving those deliveries are often out of work, while I am working.” While millions of people have lost their jobs in the past few months, Javier’s work has gotten even busier, with longer hours and more packages delivered each day. He calls it “Christmas volume.” Due to stay-at-home orders in the community, he’s also encountering more people when he delivers packages to their homes. Often, they want to come out and talk to him. “You really get the vibe that people just want to talk and see someone and interact,” he says.  He’s noticed a range in responses to COVID-19 safety measures in the people he encounters. “Some customers wave through their window and then will come out with a bleach bottle and spray down the package I just left at their door. Parents will yell at their kids to not touch the package if they come running out. And then there are some people who will just pick up the package and take it inside like it’s any other day. Everyone’s handling it differently.”

Javier can’t control what others do, but he takes his own precautions like wearing latex gloves while working, even though it’s not required by his job. When a customer wants to chat, he tries to keep his distance. If he comes down with symptoms similar to COVID-19, like he did in March, he stays home. Javier does what he can to stay safe in all areas of his life, so he wants to do the same when it’s time to vote in November. 

He knew voting by mail would be the safest way to vote during the pandemic, but he was surprised to find out how restrictive Missouri’s absentee voting criteria are. He says it’s a concern for the people he encounters on his delivery route, too.  “I’ve talked to a good amount of people about it within the last two weeks,” he explains. He thinks that people will be more likely to vote if they can do it from home with an absentee ballot — especially considering the pandemic.  “Voting is a basic, fundamental part of a democracy and it needs to be viewed more as a celebration and an essential part of every American’s duty if you will, to vote or not vote, but it still should be looked at as like a national holiday.”   “I picture Missouri at the forefront of changing ideology in the United States,” says Javier. “If we’re able to do something progressive in Missouri, I think the rest of the country would be able to see that as a positive thing.”

The stories of Kamisha, Cecil, and Javier show why voting by mail is a necessary option for everyone, regardless of their circumstances. There have been bipartisan efforts to expand access to vote by mail in states including Alabama, Indiana, New Hampshire, New York, and West Virginia. States should take additional measures, such as expanding early vote periods, preparing for a surge in absentee ballots, and doing away with unnecessary requirements like getting a witness signature or having to pay for postage. At the same time, states must ensure safety for those who choose to vote in person as well as poll workers. Nobody should have to risk their health to vote. 

For information on how to vote by mail, see the absentee voting guide. 

Published June 8, 2020 at 05:42PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3f5BUi6

[lodelss]

ACLU: Three Missouri Voters Explain Why Everyone Should be Able to Vote by Mail in 2020

Three Missouri Voters Explain Why Everyone Should be Able to Vote by Mail in 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way the world operates, but as the presidential election approaches, many states have failed to respond when it comes to voting. The safest way to vote during the pandemic is to vote by mail, but state restrictions block many voters from doing so. The ACLU has sued 10 states for restricting access, including Missouri, where the state legislature just voted to expand access in 2020. While the Missouri legislature win was a major step toward progress, the state is still restricting access by requiring most voters to notarize their mail-in ballots — which means they have to violate social distancing recommendations to vote by mail.  The ACLU is fighting the notarization requirement on behalf of voters like Cecil Wattree and Javier Del Villar — two Missourians who joined the original lawsuit because they wanted to exercise their right to vote by mail. Cecil, Javier, and fellow Missouri voter Kamisha Webb shared their stories with the ACLU to show why voting by mail should be accessible — and safe  — for all. 

Vote by mail to protect Kamisha

For Kansas City resident Kamisha Webb, going to the polls could put her life in jeopardy. Kamisha has asthma and a condition called hereditary angioedema, which requires her to use a nebulizer machine, various medications, and biweekly injections to manage her health. A cold or flu could land her in the ICU. Contracting COVID-19 could be fatal. Kamisha is doing everything she can to be safe. She stays at home on paid leave from her job because teleworking isn’t an option. She talks to her grandmother virtually, despite wanting to see her in person. But she’s worried she may not be able to take similar safety precautions when it comes to voting. 

“I feel like I have to choose whether to exercise my right to vote, or risk putting my life on the line,” she tells the ACLU. “And no one should have to mix the two, ever.”

Kamisha first learned about absentee voting when she overheard people signing up at a polling place during the 2018 midterm election. She learned that it was an option for people who are sick, for example, or have a disability that hinders their ability to vote in person. 

“I just thought, wow, that’s so cool to have a process in place for individuals to still vote if they’re not able to physically go to the polls,” Kamisha tells the ACLU. “It would be wonderful if we could take that same idea and make an exception due to COVID-19. Whether or not someone has a health condition, we have a deadly virus on the loose. We should all have the right to not only vote, but to be safe in doing that.”

People of color will likely be harmed most by restricting access to voting by mail. Voter suppression efforts already target people of color nationwide, and COVID-19 disproportionately affects people of color, particularly the Black community, to which Kamisha belongs. She attributes this to the prevalence of underlying health conditions, lack of access to health care and insurance, and discrimination in medical care. On the higher death rates in the Black community, Kamisha is “saddened, but not surprised.” Kamisha joined the Missouri lawsuit not only because she is at risk, but because she believes everybody should be able to vote by mail during the pandemic. If the court rules in her favor, she says she will be overcome with joy: “I’m kind of filled with emotion just thinking about it.”

Vote by mail to protect Cecil’s daughter

By the time she turned eight, Cecil Wattree’s daughter, Allyn, had gone through open heart surgery, multiple strokes, was placed on a ventilator, and was on a waiting list for a heart transplant — among other ailments and surgeries resulting from her being born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome.  “It’s a gift of God that she recovered to the point where she is able to function,” says Cecil. “But it still leaves her immunocompromised when it comes to her lungs and her heart.” That makes Allyn high risk to COVID-19. When the ACLU sued Missouri, he joined the lawsuit, explaining, “I’m in a unique position to be able to advocate for my daughter.” Cecil constantly worries about exposing his daughter to the virus, especially because he still has to go to work at a primary care clinic. The clinic has taken precautionary measures, and Cecil is being “super hyper vigilant” at home because of his daughter.  “When I come home, I have to pretty much take all my clothes off in the garage or the cellar and then run into the bathroom and take a shower before I even see Allyn,” says Cecil. “Even after that, it’s a struggle to be safe when you have a highly affectionate eight year old who wants to be in your arms. I always worry that I might have encountered the virus in some way.”

It doesn’t help that as a Black man, Cecil has to navigate a world where his race directly impacts his ability to stay safe. He thinks twice about visiting a store wearing a mask in a white neighborhood. And he’s seen discrimination in medical care firsthand with his own daughter: “When Allyn had a stroke, the doctors didn’t believe she had one, even though she showed symptoms. I had to advocate so hard just to get them to look at her and give her a CT scan.”  He worries about what this means when it comes to COVID-19, which has symptoms similar to the flu or cold: “How am I going to get them to take it seriously?”

Cecil wants to be as safe as possible and vote absentee in November — but having a vulnerable daughter, being Black, and being an essential worker doesn’t make you eligible in Missouri.  “A lot of people have fought and died for my ability to vote,” says Cecil on why voting is so important to him. “Being able to vote by mail would give me a sense of protection while also ensuring that I can exercise my right to have a say in the direction this country’s going.” No matter the outcome of the lawsuit, however, Cecil knows he’s privileged to have the option to vote in person when it comes down to the wire. “There are people who have no availability, no transportation, whose health is already compromised. To tell them to social distance while not allowing their voices to be heard is to take advantage of the current situation to suppress voters.”

Vote by mail to protect Javier’s community

As a 29 year old without pre-existing medical conditions, Javier is not considered by the CDC to be high risk to COVID-19. But Javier works for the national delivery service, making him an essential worker who comes into contact with the whole community on a daily basis.  “In delivery, I feel like I’m helping people get what they need, because we do a lot of medical supply deliveries,” says Javier. “So it feels good. At the same time, it feels uncomfortable just knowing that the people receiving those deliveries are often out of work, while I am working.” While millions of people have lost their jobs in the past few months, Javier’s work has gotten even busier, with longer hours and more packages delivered each day. He calls it “Christmas volume.” Due to stay-at-home orders in the community, he’s also encountering more people when he delivers packages to their homes. Often, they want to come out and talk to him. “You really get the vibe that people just want to talk and see someone and interact,” he says.  He’s noticed a range in responses to COVID-19 safety measures in the people he encounters. “Some customers wave through their window and then will come out with a bleach bottle and spray down the package I just left at their door. Parents will yell at their kids to not touch the package if they come running out. And then there are some people who will just pick up the package and take it inside like it’s any other day. Everyone’s handling it differently.”

Javier can’t control what others do, but he takes his own precautions like wearing latex gloves while working, even though it’s not required by his job. When a customer wants to chat, he tries to keep his distance. If he comes down with symptoms similar to COVID-19, like he did in March, he stays home. Javier does what he can to stay safe in all areas of his life, so he wants to do the same when it’s time to vote in November. 

He knew voting by mail would be the safest way to vote during the pandemic, but he was surprised to find out how restrictive Missouri’s absentee voting criteria are. He says it’s a concern for the people he encounters on his delivery route, too.  “I’ve talked to a good amount of people about it within the last two weeks,” he explains. He thinks that people will be more likely to vote if they can do it from home with an absentee ballot — especially considering the pandemic.  “Voting is a basic, fundamental part of a democracy and it needs to be viewed more as a celebration and an essential part of every American’s duty if you will, to vote or not vote, but it still should be looked at as like a national holiday.”   “I picture Missouri at the forefront of changing ideology in the United States,” says Javier. “If we’re able to do something progressive in Missouri, I think the rest of the country would be able to see that as a positive thing.”

The stories of Kamisha, Cecil, and Javier show why voting by mail is a necessary option for everyone, regardless of their circumstances. There have been bipartisan efforts to expand access to vote by mail in states including Alabama, Indiana, New Hampshire, New York, and West Virginia. States should take additional measures, such as expanding early vote periods, preparing for a surge in absentee ballots, and doing away with unnecessary requirements like getting a witness signature or having to pay for postage. At the same time, states must ensure safety for those who choose to vote in person as well as poll workers. Nobody should have to risk their health to vote. 

For information on how to vote by mail, see the absentee voting guide. 

Published June 8, 2020 at 10:12PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3f5BUi6 from Blogger https://ift.tt/3hgWbn4 via IFTTT

[lodelss]

ACLU: Three Missouri Voters Explain Why Everyone Should be Able to Vote by Mail in 2020

Three Missouri Voters Explain Why Everyone Should be Able to Vote by Mail in 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way the world operates, but as the presidential election approaches, many states have failed to respond when it comes to voting. The safest way to vote during the pandemic is to vote by mail, but state restrictions block many voters from doing so. The ACLU has sued 10 states for restricting access, including Missouri, where the state legislature just voted to expand access in 2020. While the Missouri legislature win was a major step toward progress, the state is still restricting access by requiring most voters to notarize their mail-in ballots — which means they have to violate social distancing recommendations to vote by mail.  The ACLU is fighting the notarization requirement on behalf of voters like Cecil Wattree and Javier Del Villar — two Missourians who joined the original lawsuit because they wanted to exercise their right to vote by mail. Cecil, Javier, and fellow Missouri voter Kamisha Webb shared their stories with the ACLU to show why voting by mail should be accessible — and safe  — for all. 

Vote by mail to protect Kamisha

For Kansas City resident Kamisha Webb, going to the polls could put her life in jeopardy. Kamisha has asthma and a condition called hereditary angioedema, which requires her to use a nebulizer machine, various medications, and biweekly injections to manage her health. A cold or flu could land her in the ICU. Contracting COVID-19 could be fatal. Kamisha is doing everything she can to be safe. She stays at home on paid leave from her job because teleworking isn’t an option. She talks to her grandmother virtually, despite wanting to see her in person. But she’s worried she may not be able to take similar safety precautions when it comes to voting. 

“I feel like I have to choose whether to exercise my right to vote, or risk putting my life on the line,” she tells the ACLU. “And no one should have to mix the two, ever.”

Kamisha first learned about absentee voting when she overheard people signing up at a polling place during the 2018 midterm election. She learned that it was an option for people who are sick, for example, or have a disability that hinders their ability to vote in person. 

“I just thought, wow, that’s so cool to have a process in place for individuals to still vote if they’re not able to physically go to the polls,” Kamisha tells the ACLU. “It would be wonderful if we could take that same idea and make an exception due to COVID-19. Whether or not someone has a health condition, we have a deadly virus on the loose. We should all have the right to not only vote, but to be safe in doing that.”

People of color will likely be harmed most by restricting access to voting by mail. Voter suppression efforts already target people of color nationwide, and COVID-19 disproportionately affects people of color, particularly the Black community, to which Kamisha belongs. She attributes this to the prevalence of underlying health conditions, lack of access to health care and insurance, and discrimination in medical care. On the higher death rates in the Black community, Kamisha is “saddened, but not surprised.” Kamisha joined the Missouri lawsuit not only because she is at risk, but because she believes everybody should be able to vote by mail during the pandemic. If the court rules in her favor, she says she will be overcome with joy: “I’m kind of filled with emotion just thinking about it.”

Vote by mail to protect Cecil’s daughter

By the time she turned eight, Cecil Wattree’s daughter, Allyn, had gone through open heart surgery, multiple strokes, was placed on a ventilator, and was on a waiting list for a heart transplant — among other ailments and surgeries resulting from her being born with hypoplastic left heart syndrome.  “It’s a gift of God that she recovered to the point where she is able to function,” says Cecil. “But it still leaves her immunocompromised when it comes to her lungs and her heart.” That makes Allyn high risk to COVID-19. When the ACLU sued Missouri, he joined the lawsuit, explaining, “I’m in a unique position to be able to advocate for my daughter.” Cecil constantly worries about exposing his daughter to the virus, especially because he still has to go to work at a primary care clinic. The clinic has taken precautionary measures, and Cecil is being “super hyper vigilant” at home because of his daughter.  “When I come home, I have to pretty much take all my clothes off in the garage or the cellar and then run into the bathroom and take a shower before I even see Allyn,” says Cecil. “Even after that, it’s a struggle to be safe when you have a highly affectionate eight year old who wants to be in your arms. I always worry that I might have encountered the virus in some way.”

It doesn’t help that as a Black man, Cecil has to navigate a world where his race directly impacts his ability to stay safe. He thinks twice about visiting a store wearing a mask in a white neighborhood. And he’s seen discrimination in medical care firsthand with his own daughter: “When Allyn had a stroke, the doctors didn’t believe she had one, even though she showed symptoms. I had to advocate so hard just to get them to look at her and give her a CT scan.”  He worries about what this means when it comes to COVID-19, which has symptoms similar to the flu or cold: “How am I going to get them to take it seriously?”

Cecil wants to be as safe as possible and vote absentee in November — but having a vulnerable daughter, being Black, and being an essential worker doesn’t make you eligible in Missouri.  “A lot of people have fought and died for my ability to vote,” says Cecil on why voting is so important to him. “Being able to vote by mail would give me a sense of protection while also ensuring that I can exercise my right to have a say in the direction this country’s going.” No matter the outcome of the lawsuit, however, Cecil knows he’s privileged to have the option to vote in person when it comes down to the wire. “There are people who have no availability, no transportation, whose health is already compromised. To tell them to social distance while not allowing their voices to be heard is to take advantage of the current situation to suppress voters.”

Vote by mail to protect Javier’s community

As a 29 year old without pre-existing medical conditions, Javier is not considered by the CDC to be high risk to COVID-19. But Javier works for the national delivery service, making him an essential worker who comes into contact with the whole community on a daily basis.  “In delivery, I feel like I’m helping people get what they need, because we do a lot of medical supply deliveries,” says Javier. “So it feels good. At the same time, it feels uncomfortable just knowing that the people receiving those deliveries are often out of work, while I am working.” While millions of people have lost their jobs in the past few months, Javier’s work has gotten even busier, with longer hours and more packages delivered each day. He calls it “Christmas volume.” Due to stay-at-home orders in the community, he’s also encountering more people when he delivers packages to their homes. Often, they want to come out and talk to him. “You really get the vibe that people just want to talk and see someone and interact,” he says.  He’s noticed a range in responses to COVID-19 safety measures in the people he encounters. “Some customers wave through their window and then will come out with a bleach bottle and spray down the package I just left at their door. Parents will yell at their kids to not touch the package if they come running out. And then there are some people who will just pick up the package and take it inside like it’s any other day. Everyone’s handling it differently.”

Javier can’t control what others do, but he takes his own precautions like wearing latex gloves while working, even though it’s not required by his job. When a customer wants to chat, he tries to keep his distance. If he comes down with symptoms similar to COVID-19, like he did in March, he stays home. Javier does what he can to stay safe in all areas of his life, so he wants to do the same when it’s time to vote in November. 

He knew voting by mail would be the safest way to vote during the pandemic, but he was surprised to find out how restrictive Missouri’s absentee voting criteria are. He says it’s a concern for the people he encounters on his delivery route, too.  “I’ve talked to a good amount of people about it within the last two weeks,” he explains. He thinks that people will be more likely to vote if they can do it from home with an absentee ballot — especially considering the pandemic.  “Voting is a basic, fundamental part of a democracy and it needs to be viewed more as a celebration and an essential part of every American’s duty if you will, to vote or not vote, but it still should be looked at as like a national holiday.”   “I picture Missouri at the forefront of changing ideology in the United States,” says Javier. “If we’re able to do something progressive in Missouri, I think the rest of the country would be able to see that as a positive thing.”

The stories of Kamisha, Cecil, and Javier show why voting by mail is a necessary option for everyone, regardless of their circumstances. There have been bipartisan efforts to expand access to vote by mail in states including Alabama, Indiana, New Hampshire, New York, and West Virginia. States should take additional measures, such as expanding early vote periods, preparing for a surge in absentee ballots, and doing away with unnecessary requirements like getting a witness signature or having to pay for postage. At the same time, states must ensure safety for those who choose to vote in person as well as poll workers. Nobody should have to risk their health to vote. 

For information on how to vote by mail, see the absentee voting guide. 

Published June 8, 2020 at 05:42PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3f5BUi6 from Blogger https://ift.tt/2YdKYuH via IFTTT