[Content Note: Disablism; self-harm.]
One of the things I've been seeing a lot in the wake of Robin Williams' death is the thought that perhaps discussion around his taking his own life after living with depression will encourage other people to seek help.
And that is a true thing.
For people who need help, and have access to mental healthcare, being motivated to seek out help will be a very good thing.
Of course, not all people have access to mental healthcare. And not all people who need help, in the throes of depression and/or related anxiety disorders, have the capacity to seek out that help for themselves.
So another thing I've been seeing a lot is reminders to reach out to people who may need and want assistance accessing mental healthcare.
And that is also a true thing.
It can be invaluable to people whose mental illness makes it nigh impossible to even contemplate the task of navigating insurance networks and finding covered providers who specialize in their needs and making an appointment and getting to that appointment and filling prescriptions and all the other bits and pieces of the process of participating in their own care.
It can be helpful to have a friend who offers to walk through that process with you.
So another thing I've been seeing is the suggestion to be present for people who have mental illness, to ask them what they need and offer what help you can, whether that's researching options or driving someone to an appointment or picking up groceries or doing laundry for them.
I don't want to diminish any of this—the need for accessible comprehensive mental healthcare; the importance of having the support of friends (or family members, or whomever) to help begin (or restart) that journey; the meaningful difference it can make to have someone who's willing to just do the chores one doesn't have the energy to do oneself.
These are all good things.
But I also want to say this: There is a strong narrative around "fixing" people with mental illness. And I don't mean just helping someone with a mental illness be as functional and healthy as they can be. I mean the idea that someone can "get over" being chronically mentally ill, and how offering "help," or advising them to "get help," often acts in service to that narrative.
Partly this narrative exists because some people do experience temporary, or situational, depression and/or anxiety, and so there exist a lot of bad assumptions about how everyone is capable of "getting over" depression and/or anxiety. Individual people experience mental illness in individual ways, and chronic mental illness is not indicative of "weakness," of a person's inability to bootstrap themselves out of their disorder.
(Which is why, for the love of Maude, if you have an anecdote about a person who jogged their way or meditated their way or special dieted their way out of depression and/or anxiety, keep it to your fucking self, unless and until someone with mental illness solicits your advice.)
And partly this narrative exists because most of us don't have good practice at allowing people to be in pain. We want to be able to fix people we love who are hurting.
Sometimes to the point where we ignore all evidence that trying to "fix" someone is only hurting them even more.
One of the things we all have to get okay with is the reality that even people with chronic mental illness who seek help, all the help available to them, are still going to hurt, sometimes or all the time.
That "help" often means getting the tools to navigate mental illness, not to "fix" it.
One of the best things anyone can do for someone with chronic depression and/or anxiety is simply let us be ill.
I don't mean abandon us. I don't mean accept all manner of behavior with mental illness invoked as an excuse for harm, of self or others. What I mean is: Don't oblige us to mask our illness for your comfort, because you can't sit with the fact that we've got an illness that makes us hurt, sometimes or all the time.
Let us be fully present, even when we feel bad.
This is a cultural thing. There are, for example, way more people who want to read me write about my resiliency in the face of fat hatred than write about how it hurts. There are way more people who will show up for a party than for a support session. There are people who love to laugh with you, who would recoil to see you cry.
And that's because crying needs "fixed." Instead of being viewed as just another expression of emotion. Which some people may need to express more than others.
Some people with mental illness need interventions, not a space to cry without judgment. Some people need both. Some neither. And crying is just shorthand for any number of possible manifestations (short of harming others) of depression and/or anxiety that someone might show, which could make someone else uncomfortable when there's no easy "fix," that don't necessarily need fixing.
The point is that it has to be okay to be a person with mental illness. Before anything else—before "help," before supportive offers, before listening—it just has to be okay to be who we are.
It is tough to be expected to be someone other than yourself, at the same time you're clawing your way out of an abyss. Or clinging to the edge of one, trying to avoid falling in.
I am not suggesting indulgence; I am suggesting validation.
There are people who resist this approach to people with mental illness about whom they care. They mistakenly believe that accepting us as who we are is accepting, and thus giving power to, the very darkest parts of our disease.
That is exactly wrong. Being allowed to acknowledge those dark places is our only chance to successfully navigate them.
And, besides, they are not outside of us. They are inside of us.
To ask us to abandon these parts of ourselves at the door is to ask us to tear our very selves in two, as if that could ever make us whole.
Let us be unbroken, and then you will see that we don't need to be fixed.
That is certainly the help I need myself, and the help I endeavor to offer to my loved ones with diseases like mine.
On Help, Getting and Giving
Daily Dose of Cute
Zelda the beach bum. At the Indiana Dunes this past weekend.
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today...
[Content Note: Militarism; police brutality; racism] Here is some more important reading related to the killing of Michael Brown, subsequent, protests, and police response in Ferguson:
* Michael Brown Remembered as a Gentle Giant.
* Eyewitness to Michael Brown Shooting Recounts His Friend's Death.
* Dozens Arrested During Protests over Ferguson Police Shooting.
* #IfTheyGunnedMeDown Shows How Black People Are Portrayed in Mainstream Media.
* National Moment of Silence Will Remember Victims of Police Brutality.
[CN: War] In Israel and Gaza: "Talks to end a month-long war between Israel and Gaza militants are 'difficult,' Palestinian delegates said on Tuesday, while an Israeli official said no progress had been made so far. As a 72-hour cease-fire held for a second day on Tuesday, Palestinian negotiators began talks with Egyptian intelligence after a meeting on Monday that lasted nine hours and the Israeli delegation returned to Cairo." At least the cease-fire is holding in the meantime.
[CN: War] In Iraq: "US combat forces will not re-enter Iraq, John Kerry insists, but the US says it will explore more 'political, economic and security options' as the country transitions out of political deadlock with a new prime minister. During a visit to Australia for the annual Ausmin talks, the Secretary of State told reporters the US government congratulated Haider al-Abadi on his nomination, and he urged the incoming prime minister to form a new, inclusive and functional cabinet 'as swiftly as possible.' ...Kerry made it clear [the offer of US support] did not mean a return of US combat troops. 'There will be no reintroduction of American combat forces into Iraq,' he said. 'Nobody, I think, is looking forwards to a return to the road that we've traveled.'" Good call.
[CN: Rape culture] You know how I keep saying that one of the most pernicious lies people tell in asserting there is no such thing as "rape culture" is that everyone agrees rape is terrible? Yeah. My point, here it is again: Teen Convicted in Steubenville Rape Back on Football Roster. "Ma'Lik Richmond, one of two teens convicted in the rape of a 16-year-old girl in Steubenville, is back on the roster of the Steubenville Big Red football team. Richmond was found delinquent of raping a 16-year-old girl in March 2013, and must register as a Tier II sex offender every 180 days for 20 years. ...Interim Superintendent Melinda Young says part of the current athletic policy states that any student convicted of a felony will be suspended for one calendar year." I bet he's really learned his lesson! Jess has a typically thoughtful piece here.
[CN: Homophobia; reproductive policing; gender essentialism] Fucking hell: "For the first time in nearly fourteen months, a state's ban on same-sex marriage has withstood a constitutional challenge in court. A state judge in Tennessee ruled last week that 'neither the Federal Government nor another state should be allowed to dictate to Tennessee what has traditionally been a state’s responsibility.'" Roane County Circuit Judge Russell E. Simmons, Jr.'s decision is viewable here (pdf), and on pages 5-6 there's some TERRIFIC stuff about how marriage is for procreation. (It is not terrific.)
And finally! A mama panda has given birth to triplets in a Chinese zoo. "An official from Sichuan Wolong national nature reserve, considered the foremost authority on pandas, said the trio were too young [at 15 days old] to be officially recognised as surviving, but that they were the only known panda triplets alive. 'We can only say they are surviving once they reach six months. For now they are indeed the only surviving triplets,' said an official from the centre." Good luck, little pandas!
Ferguson
[Content Note: Militarism; police brutality; racism.]
This is a scene from Ferguson, Missouri, last night, where residents were protesting the police killing of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown:
There were lots of images like this one coming out of Ferguson last night, as police marched down the streets dressed in riot gear, throwing tear gas and shooting rubber bullets to disperse protesters, and announcing over a loudspeaker, "Return to your home."
The press was told that their presence was endangering police officers. But the press was probably keeping residents safe, given what the police were doing in full view of their cameras.
If it looks like the police turned Ferguson into a war zone, well, that's probably the result of the increasing militarization of police forces across the country.
And, as Brian Stuart points out here, there is a very cynical reason for police showing up to a protest in riot gear with tanks and tear gas: It is to control the narrative, to convey to people outside looking in that such force was warranted by the "rioting" residents of Ferguson.
And it works. Protestors are called rioters. The "rioters" and their "rioting" become the story, instead of a police officer killing an unarmed young man by shooting him eight times or more. The police officer's actions become retroactively justified, because here is "proof" of what sort of community Ferguson is, what kind of people its residents are.
Of course the officer had to shoot that boy. Look at the people in that town. They're animals.
That's the narrative being established. The gross, ugly, racist narrative.
Inviting white people to publicly weigh in, to repeat the word "riot" over and over until it becomes truth.
Across this culture of abuse we are entrained to always empathize with abusers and audit victims, and we fall into these roles so easily, as the public responses to Ferguson underline, again. We retell the story in ways so that we can find excuses for a murderous cop, and find blame for the young man he killed, and for his community.
If this were happening in my community, I'd be yelling in the streets, too.
I don't have any kind of tidy ending here, but I want to make a final observation: One of the biggest lies that is told in this country is how we want victims to use violence to defend themselves. ("Arm yourselves!") We don't mean it. The people who say that don't mean it.
Whether it's Marissa Alexander defending herself, or the residents of Ferguson pushing back against state-sanctioned harm, we don't fucking mean it. It is a lie told specifically to defend the rights of abusers to retain and expand their right to arm themselves, and to be violent with impunity.
When victims actually push back, even in nonviolent ways, that lie is exposed for the rank bullshit it is.
Ferguson has the tank tracks in its streets to prove it.
RIP Robin Williams
[Content Note: Death; self-harm.]
Yesterday, actor Robin Williams was found dead and is suspected of taking his own life. An investigation is currently underway.
He was 63. His New York Times obituary is here.
Williams had a long history of depression and addiction, both of which he'd spoken about in interviews. After his death was announced, many people quite understandably expressed surprise at the manner of his death. Even when a person you know only from afar speaks openly about their inner emotional life, and the mental illnesses that profoundly affect it, it can be difficult to reconcile that with what we see, either because of what they let us see or because of what we choose to see.
Williams was primarily known as a comedic actor, although he was a great dramatic actor, too, and all his best roles were melancholy characters. Dead Poets Society. The Fisher King. Awakenings. Good Will Hunting. He always seemed to me like the consummate sad clown.
I am so sad for his family, friends, and colleagues. My condolences to them, and to everyone to whom his work and life meant something profound.
* * *
This thread is to discuss his life and work. There are many amazing stories about Robin Williams as a person, as an actor, as a passionate video gamer, which you are welcome to recount. You are welcome to share what films, or TV shows, of his you loved.
And, because no person gets to be a multimillionaire making American comedy films without making a lot of bigoted garbage, you are allowed to talk about his work that you didn't love, if you need to do that.
Some of his work really causes strong reactions in one way or another. I know, for example, some gay men who love The Birdcage with one million hearts, and some who loathe it with the power of ten thousand suns. I can't stand Mrs. Doubtfire, but many people love it like a loved thing made out of loved bits.
It's okay to talk about all of it. My friend T, who, like me, had a Mork from Ork talking doll when he was a kid, said last night he couldn't even remember a life without Robin Williams in it. We're 40. Williams had a humongous body of work over a long career.
* * *
I've mentioned before that The Fisher King is one of my favorite movies. It is the only film that I watched, walked out of, purchased a ticket for the next showing, and saw again immediately. The black leather jacket I wore in high school had the chalice that was the film's emblem painted on one shoulder. T and I watched a VHS copy of that film over and over and over, tucked under blankets on a shitty couch in my parents' basement.
That, too, is a film that elicits mixed reactions. It is a film about survival and mental illness and accountability, and the symbolic delusion (or magical realism, depending on your perspective) that represents mental illness is something to which some people with mental illness object, and, with others, myself included, it strongly resonates.
Williams certainly brought something very personal to the role. Which, if one didn't know before, one knows now.
* * *
This is probably my favorite Robin Williams scene of all time. From The Fisher King.
Parry (Robin Williams) and Lydia (Amanda Plummer) and Jack (Jeff Bridges) and Anne (Mercedes Ruehl) are on a double-date at a Chinese restaurant. Anne and Jack are an established couple; it is Parry and Lydia's first date. Lydia is extremely socially awkward; she spills things and takes too many noodles and is just generally weird. Parry affectionate mimics her awkwardness, in order to make her feel comfortable. They laugh and play hockey with a dumpling. Anne and Jack look on with wonder and amusement; Anne comments that they were made for each other.RIP Robin Williams.
As everyone is laughing, for different reasons, Parry breaks into song: "Lydia the Tattooed Lady." Everyone slowly goes quiet. Anne noticed her bra strap has fallen down and pulls it back up. Jack pulls it back down with a finger and kisses her shoulder. Lydia is, for the first time, calm and still, listening to Parry sing. He's done something magical. The camera pulls back, and everything feels like love.
Question of the Day
When was the first time you recall having accomplished something, or reached a milestone, that made you feel like a grown-up? Even if it turns out you still had a lot of growing up to do; this is just about the first time you had that thought or feeling.
Quote of the Day
[Content Note: Violence; guns; racism.]
"I don't care if Mike Brown was going to college soon. This should not matter. We should not have to prove Mike Brown was worthy of living. We should not have to account for the ways in which he is suitably respectable. We should not have to prove that his body did not deserve to be riddled with bullets. His community should not have to silence their anger so they won't be accused of rioting, so they won't become targets too."—Roxane Gay, in "Silence Is Not an Option."
Your 3 Day Song
In a similar vein as Your 50x Film: What song would you listen to 1,000 times in a row for $100,000?
This one, I definitely chose based on the shortest song of which I could think. And I'm sure there are shorter songs (don't The Beatles have some 20-second track somewhere?), but the first one that came to mind was Queen's "Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon," which is just over a minute long.
Even listening to that for 17 hours seems pretty damn unpleasant, though, lol.
Fat Fashion
This is your semi-regular thread in which fat women can share pix, make recommendations for clothes they love, ask questions of other fat women about where to locate certain plus-size items, share info about sales, talk about what jeans cut at what retailer best fits their body shapes, discuss how to accessorize neutral colored suits, share stories of going bare-armed for the first time, brag about a cool fashion moment, whatever.
Top by ModCloth; vintage purse purchased from Etsy.
This is one of my favorite combinations: A polka dot top in a vintage-ish style and a vintage bag I picked up a few years ago for a couple of bucks. I feel happy in this outfit.
One of the things about the material from which this top is made is that it clings. You can definitely see my round belly in this one. A few years ago, there's no way I would've worn it, because I would have been far too self-conscious.
Not because I imagined that anyone couldn't tell I was fat if I buried myself beneath baggy, shapeless frocks (and there's nothing wrong with wearing baggy, shapeless frocks if that's the way you're most comfortable!), but because I have been entrained to believe that I should conceal evidence of my fatness as best as possible out of courtesy for other people who don't like looking at fat bodies.
Yeah. Fuck that.
The thing about that expectation is that it was always a no-win proposition, anyway. If I wore ill-fitting, figure-disguising clothes, then I was criticized for being unfashionable. (Which, when I worked in an office, went hand-in-hand with "looking unprofessional.") If I wear fitted, figure-revealing clothes, then I am criticized for "showing off" my fatness.
So there's no sense dressing to avoid the inevitable criticism of my fat body. Instead, I dress in a way that at least makes me feel good.
[Content Note: Fat shaming.]
On a related note, yesterday, Dear Abby answered a letter from a fat woman being fat shamed and body policed by her mother, under the auspices of making other people "uncomfortable," and the answer was absolutely heinous: "You are not wrong for wanting to be comfortable. But please remember that when you visit someone else's home, that person's wishes take precedence—even if it used to be your childhood home. While you say you are comfortable in your own skin, it would be interesting to know what your physician thinks about your obesity. I suspect that your mother would be prouder of you if you were less complacent and more willing to do something about your weight problem."
HOLY SHIT.
(Via Shaker M, there is a blog seeking better responses to Abby's correspondent here.)
This is the exact entrainment to which I was referring: This idea that fat people are meant to dress in a way that shields and protects thin people from their discomfort with our bodies.
Instead of, you know, advising thin people to get the fuck over it.
Anyway. That socialization can be incredibly difficult to overcome. Here I am, at 40, just shaking off the vestiges of a lifetime of expectations that I engage in self-hatred for the comfort of others.
How about you?
As always, all subjects related to fat fashion are on topic. You don't need to stick to this one!
Have at it in comments! Please remember to make fat women of all sizes, especially women who find themselves regularly sizing out of standard plus-size lines, welcome in this conversation, and pass no judgment on fat women who want to and/or feel obliged, for any reason, to conform to beauty standards. And please make sure if you're soliciting advice, you make it clear you're seeking suggestions—and please be considerate not to offer unsolicited advice. Sometimes people just need to complain and want solidarity, not solutions.
TV Corner: Better Call Saul
The first teaser trailer for Better Call Saul, which is a prequel series about secondary but hugely popular Breaking Bad character Saul Goodman, played by Bob Odenkirk, has been released:
Saul sits at a table in what looks to be a cafe with some people; they are not visible; the camera is in close-up on Saul. He says, "Lawyers. We're like health insurance—ya hope ya never need it, but, man oh man, not having it? No." He shakes his head and chuckles. Text onscreen: "Better Call Saul. February. AMC."GIVE IT TO ME!
If you've never seen Breaking Bad, and you're thinking: "That's a pretty shitty thing to say, since not everyone has access to health insurance," YOU ARE CORRECT. That is shitty. And it's exactly the sort of thing that Saul Goodman would say.
[H/T to Deeks.]
Daily Dose of Cute
Just a totally normal position for grooming oneself. He is made of rubberbands.
As always, please feel welcome and encouraged to share pix of the fuzzy, feathered, or scaled members of your family in comments.
Two-Minute Nostalgia Sublime
[Content Note: There is a strobe-light effect in this video.]
Earth, Wind, & Fire: "Boogie Wonderland"
In the News
Here is some stuff in the news today...
[Content Note: War] In Iraq: "The Obama administration has begun directly providing weapons to Kurdish forces, who have started to make gains against Islamic State fighters in northern Iraq, senior U.S. officials said Monday. The United States previously had insisted on only selling arms to the Iraqi government in Baghdad, but the Kurdish peshmerga fighters had been losing ground to Islamic State in recent weeks. ...U.S. officials would not say which agency is providing the arms or what weapons are being sent in its ramped-up military support role, but one official said it is not the Pentagon. The CIA has historically done similar arming operations. A senior State Department official would only say that the Kurds are 'getting arms from various sources. They are being rearmed.'"
[CN: Sexual violence] I don't even know what the fuck the Wendy Davis campaign is thinking with this move: The campaign has made an advert which highlights a case in which Greg Abbott, her Republican opponent for the Texas governorship, did not support allowing a survivor of rape to sue the company whose door-to-door salesman raped her, as they failed to do a routine background check, which would have revealed a history of sex abuse. The woman won, but Abbott, then a justice on the Texas Supreme Court, dissented. The ad (viewable at the link) asserts that Abbott doesn't care about survivors, but it was made without the woman's consent, and it further depicts a recreation of the assault. Wendy Davis: You don't get to claim that you care about survivors when you borrow their stories for campaign adverts without their consent and run ads with imagery that stands to trigger survivors. This is some real bullshit.
[CN: Anti-immgrationism] Welp: "President Barack Obama's pledge to fast-track the deportation of migrant children from Central America is out of step with the opinion of a majority of Americans, who say the children should be allowed to stay in the United States, at least for a while. ...The [Reuters/Ipsos] poll, conducted on July 31-Aug. 5, found that 51 percent of Americans believe the unaccompanied children being detained at the U.S.-Mexico border should be allowed to remain in the country for some length of time. ...[Only] 32 percent said the children should be immediately deported." Which is pretty much the exact percentage of diehard rightwingers who will never vote Democrat, so maybe rethink this policy, Mr. President.
[CN: Racism; misogyny; objectification] I'm sure we're all definitely shocked to hear that a new report has found that music videos are rife with racism and misogyny, and that "especially black women were routinely portrayed in a hyper-sexualised fashion." The report says, in part: "We believe in women's right to self-expression and freedom of movement. Our concern is how the music industry uses music videos as yet another vehicle to colonise and commodify black women's bodies. We urge the music industry to consider what young women and the evidence are telling them." Right on.
Today in Awesome Kids: "Mo'Ne Davis led her team into the Little League World Series, throwing a three-hitter Sunday to lead Taney Youth Baseball Association Little League of Philadelphia to an 8-0 victory over a squad from Delaware. Mo'Ne struck out six in the six-inning game in the Mid-Atlantic Regional championship game. The 13-year-old will become only the 17th girl to play in the Little League World Series in 68 years." Wow.
Here are some terrific photos of the supermoon, if you want to look at them!
And finally! This is a good story about a neat lady who is helping save harder-to-place shelter pets by serving as a temporary home until those pets can find a place with a rescue organization equipped to help them. Amazing. ♥
Film Corner: Boyhood
[Content Note: Kyriarchy; minor spoilers for the film Boyhood.]
[Static image created using stills from this promotional gif.]
This weekend, I saw Boyhood, the new film by Richard Linklater which he made by shooting a few days a year over 12 years, thus showing all the characters naturally aging over the course of the film.
I am generally a fan of Linklater's work—I really love his "Before" series with Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke—and I was very excited to see this film, which has met with ridiculously high praise from critics. (It currently has a perfect score of 100 on Metacritic.) I was also approaching it with a bit of dubiousness, given the title, which felt a little too universal to me.
And my expectations were met, on both counts.
The film is genuinely extraordinary. I am in awe of the ambition and patience that went into its making.
Even more so because it's not gimmicky. The aging of the primary characters—Mason, the boy of the title, played by Ellar Coltrane; Samantha, his sister, played by Linklater's daughter Lorelei Linklater; their mother, played by Patricia Arquette; and their father, played by Ethan Hawke—is evident but not the central focus, and the story moves along in a natural way.
One of the things I loved best about the film is that there is no contrived tension, no invented dramatics to manipulate the audience. There are, for example, scenes of Mason fucking around with his friends, doing vaguely dangerous unsupervised things, and a million lesser coming of age stories have primed us to expect disaster, but, more like real life, it's just one of those times that kids do stupid shit and survive unscathed.
It's a very compelling film, which captures the feeling of what being young is like for a whole lot of people. But not everyone, of course. Not even all boys. Which is my one complaint about the film: That title is awful.
Originally, the title was 12 Years, which is so much better, but 12 Years a Slave caused a title change:
The name frames the film as the boy's story, though in execution, every character owns a piece. "To me, Boyhood was a limited title," admits Linklater, who had wanted to call it 12 Years, until that other film won three Oscars. "It's very much his point of view, but it could be Girlhood or Motherhood or Familyhood."Except it couldn't—because it's no more a universal story about girlhood or parenthood or familyhood than it is about boyhood. Mason is a straight, white, thin, able-bodied boy, who moves between classes throughout his childhood in the US, and his boyhood looks fundamentally different from other boyhoods.
Which is okay. Very few stories are truly universal. But that's why 12 Years would have been so much better a title than anything which suggests universality.
It is, however, a very good film, irrespective of the problems with its title.
Mason's sister and divorced parents feature prominently in every part of the film, too, and I wish Linklater would have done a film from each of their perspectives, seeing those 12 years through four different sets of eyes. Which is an unequivocally unfair ask, I know! It's just that I want to see the same 12 years from Patricia Arquette's eyes so badly.
Arquette gives an amazing performance as Mason's mother, a woman who became a parent to two children at a young age, who becomes a single mother after their father, her first husband, takes off to Alaska, and who then goes back to school to become a (beloved) professor—navigating along the way two more marriages, one of them profoundly abusive. Hers is a story of survival and resiliency and strength, and her children's lives are shaped important ways by her choices, or her lack of choices. Her life is not background to theirs; it is definitional.
The thing is, I'm not certain that Mom's, or any of the other possible versions, would have been so well received—which is not Linklater's fault. Judy Berman wrote an interesting piece wondering what might have been different if it had been Girlhood rather than Boyhood. And she's right that it would have been gendered, and genre-ed, in a way that Boyhood hasn't been.
Which is ultimately, in addition to the radical filmmaking process itself, what makes Boyhood certainly one of the most interesting films I've seen in a long time: It's a story about a boy, telling one of the most complex stories about a woman that's been onscreen in years.
Again and Again and Again
[Content Note: Police brutality; guns; death; racism.]
In Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis, 18-year-old Michael Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed by a police officer. Preliminary reports are that the officer shot Brown eight times.
And, as in every other case we've discussed that has similarities to this one, the police's account of the shooting looks very different from witness accounts. The police account asserts Brown assaulted the officer and reached into his car and tried to take the officer's gun; witness accounts say the officer grabbed Brown, and that Brown was running away with his hands up showing he had no weapon when he was shot.
The confrontation began when the officer told Brown and his friend to stop walking in the street and walk on the sidewalk. There is no reason that should have turned deadly.
And, as in several other cases we've discussed, there was a protest which turned violent, which has subsequently been reported as a riot, though some of what's been reported is not in evidence based on social media coverage of the protest. For example:
Whether residents were indeed chanting "Kill the police," however, has been called into question; video from a demonstration outside the Ferguson Police Department shows residents chanting "Killer cops have got to go."What we know for certain is that an unarmed black teenager was shot multiple times by a police officer, after an interaction that began because that teen and his friend were walking on the road instead of the sidewalk.
That doesn't seem like it could have a reasonable explanation.
And what we know for certain is that the media coverage of the protests, at which most of the protesters were black people, are highlighting incidents of looting and possibly misrepresenting chants calling for justice as calls to violence.
We're meant to pretend that it doesn't matter when black communities are demonized as inherently violent and lawbreaking, that this isn't connected to young black people being killed by police or fearful white gun owners or stalking vigilantes.
It matters.
Necessary
[Content Note: Poverty.]
Raymond Burse, interim president of Kentucky State University, has returned more than $90,000 of his $349,869 annual salary so that minimum wage workers at the university could all make $10.25 an hour. The change is immediate and "will stay in place even after a new president is selected, he said. It will be the rate for all new hires as well."
I've seen this described as a nice gesture, or a generous move, or variations on that theme, and, in the sense that Burse had absolutely no legal obligation to do give back part of his salary, I suppose it is, but, in the sense that his drawing slightly less excellent of an excellent salary to give lower-wage workers an increase to a still-not-livable wage, it sort of seems to me less like generosity and more like necessity.
Which is not a criticism of Burse at all. He seems to agree that it something he needed to do. "This is not a publicity stunt. You don't give up $90,000 for publicity. I did this for the people. This is something I've been thinking about from the very beginning." And he notes that not all university presidents are in the position to do the same.
This is the reality of increasing income inequality, now that wealth and income are so concentrated, if we're ever going to try to find any kind of reasonable balance: The haves are going to have to do with a little less so that the have-nots can have a little more.
But people waiting to be paid a liveable wage for a days' work shouldn't be dependent on the largesse of their employers voluntarily giving back some of their income. Because a lot of them will be waiting forever.
We need laws that guarantee a realistic livable wage and limiting executive income to a reasonable multiplier of that wage, so that if executives want to make more, they need to give their employees more, too.
Because what Burse did was necessary, and it was also incredibly rare all the same.
Open Thread
Hosted by Perth.
(Scotland, not Australia.)
This week's Open Threads have been brought to you by the letter P.
