I really want to do a small project this summer. I would use a nifty website (courtesy of one of my Education professors) which allows people to post sticky notes on a virtual wall.
About what, you may ask?
Messages from people with disabilities to parents of people with disabilities. Because I know from personal experience that there is a huge disconnect there. And the optimist in me is saying that if we can bring light to some of these problems, maybe future parents can be a bit better.
I want to call it ‘This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You’ which admittedly is a mouthful but I think it establishes the theme of the project. Most parents say this to their disabled children, not realizing how wrong and harmful it is.
What would this project look like?
If all goes well, it will look like an online corkboard filled with dozens of ‘sticky notes’. Each sticky note would be posted by us, people with disabilities, who want parents of children with disabilities to know something. I’m looking into making it anonymous. Each sticky note should only be a sentence or two. It should just present the basis of what you want to say. Some examples that I’ve thought of include:
It does not hurt you more than it hurts me
Your children are going to know that they’re different.
You are not a hero for having a disabled child.
It’s not your child’s fault.
For the love of everything that is good and holy, do not ever use the word ‘differently-abled’.
Seriously your child is going to figure out very quickly that they’re different, don’t try to pretend otherwise.
Don’t be your child’s bullly.
Don’t bully people on behalf of your child.
Listen to your child.
They can be vague advice, they can be something that you want to say to your own parent (and can do so anonymously), they can be positive, they can be negative, they must be clean, I will be monitoring them.
Again, this would be from people with disabilities to parents of people with disabilities.
My abled followers can participate by signal boosting the website and posting pictures of the sticky notes.
This is supposed to be a month of Pride. a month where the LGBTQIAP+ community stands up collectively to celebrate our identities, our worth, and our communities bravery as a whole. It’s a month to remember LGBTQ history, the things they don’t tell you in the history books: the Stonewall Riots of 1969, the assassination of Harvey Milk, the AIDS Crisis, the legalization of same sex marriage in various countries, people killed for loving someone, and most importantly: the worth of each queer individual and the validation of their identity. Instead I have kids on the internet and in real life (who barely understand who they are, who were just coming to terms with their identities) scared that they will be the next victim of hate. I have mainstream media ignoring the fact that this mass shooting, one of the deadliest in US history, took place at an LGBTQ nightclub on Latinx night. Instead they focus on the shooters ties to “extremist Islam”. They ignore the bravery that the victims held in choosing to go out and celebrate their truth, despite hatred still very real within the USA; the bravery the rest of the community has in still finding something to celebrate this Pride month. I have friends and strangers around the world banding together to spit in the face of this hate. So much love has gone around, but we are all so tired. Now people have to once again decide if their identity is worth dying for. Is it worth going to a Pride Parade if there’s a chance you could die?
Next time someone asks why there isn’t a Straight Pride, why “the gays” still need pride “they can get married now, what more do they need?” I want them to be gently reminded of this day where over 50 people lost their lives, and even more were injured physically and psychologically due to one man’s hatred of people he didn’t understand and did not want to understand. I want them to be reminded of the decades of persecution: from Oscar Wilde, Roger Casement, the LGBTQ victims of the Holocaust, the Lavender Scare, and now Pulse in Orlando (and this is just in Western culture, just a brush with the suffering those in the LGBTQ community have faced). To any of you still reading who are LGBTQIAP+, I applaud your bravery of living your truth, even if it is only with yourself. Stay brave, keep loving the world and especially yourself, and know that it has to get better because you and I and individuals like us are the future.
My deepest condolences to the victims and their friends and families, rest in peace and know that you are loved by many.
y’all think this is cute and fun looking but as a bamf that drove 3,000+ miles across the country I can tell you that its not. When you get on I90 and your GPS tells you to go straight for the next 450miles and you realize you could watch the entire Braveheart movie twice before you see anything other than cow pastures or corn fields you beg for death. I saw so much weird ass shit from towns with horses that wander like stray dogs and places where people say weird shit like “Sure dont!”. America is fucking bizzaro and a trip like this is only for the most Mad Max-iest of mother fuckers.
Listen, I help run a blog about antisemitism and Jewishness. It’s mildly popular; 3,500+ followers, but not up to the tens of thousands of followers other blogs this subject area get. The reblogs we’ve gotten concerning Steve Rogers being Hydra outrank posts about actual living Jews being attacked, spit at, and harassed. They outrank posts about the Holocaust, survivors, historical antisemitism, stories about Jewish people’s preserved bodies being discovered in a Nazi scientist’s lab. The only conclusion I keep coming to is that people care more about two dead Jewish men and the character they created than they care about Jewish people in general.
When someone tells me it’s because antisemitism doesn’t exist in the US, that you can care about both, that they just don’t see posts about antisemitism on their dash, when I see news articles where people on the right are ~so surprised~ that there’s antisemitism in their ranks because it’s a leftist problem, that conservatives can’t be antisemitic because they support Israel (not true), when I see news articles where people on the left are surprised that there’s antisemitism in their ranks because it’s a right problem, that antisemitism isn’t a problem anymore because Israel exists (not true), claim that all Jews are white so they can’t be oppressed or victimized (not true), or claim that all Jews received reparations for the Holocaust (incredibly not true), both the beginning and the end of antisemitism? It makes me want to scream.
Antisemitism exists. We post about. People report about. I can only continue to believe the “we just didn’t know” excuse for so long. We are ignored, we are mocked, we are used as rhetorical devices for other oppressed people.
[SPOILERS FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA: STEVE ROGERS #1 BELOW]
Yesterday, Marvel released the first issue of Captain America: Steve Rogers by Nick Spencer, Jesus Saiz, and Joe Caramagna. It’s a pretty boilerplate (albeit beautifully depicted) story of a rejuvenated Steve Rogers back in the field…right up until he tosses an ally to his death and declares “Hail Hydra” in a final page splash. The whole thing is intercut with flashbacks to his childhood of a neighbor inviting Steve’s mother to a Hydra meeting, thus implying that Steve was indoctrinated as a child and has been a sleeper agent of Hydra all along.
This is comics, right? Unleash a shocking twist to get readers to pick up the next issue! Make everything All-New All-Different for a few months until things settle back into the status quo! Have a character behave so incongruously that fans just have to know why!
Except.
Except this is different than having Superman be a jackass to Lois and Jimmy on the cover of some Silver Age issue of Action. This is different than a kiss or a death or a resurrection. This is even different than the usual “wildly out of character” stunts that would normally have readers up in arms, like Batman using a gun.
Quick comics history lesson: Captain America was created in 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby as a superpowered, super-patriotic soldier fighting the Axis forces. He was famously depicted punching out Adolf Hitler on the cover of his first appearance, inCaptain America Comics #1—which hit stands in December 1940, a full year before Pearl Harbor and before the United States joined World War II, making that cover a bold political statement.
You probably already knew that, but I’d invite you to think about it for a minute. In early 1941, a significant percentage of the American population was still staunchly isolationist. Yet more Americans were pro-Axis. The Nazi Party was not the unquestionably evil cartoon villains we’re familiar with today; coming out in strong opposition to them was not a given. It was a risky choice.
And Simon and Kirby—born Hymie Simon and Jacob Kurtzberg—were not making it lightly. Like most of the biggest names in the Golden Age of comics, they were Jewish. They had family and friends back in Europe who were losing their homes, their freedom, and eventually their lives to the Holocaust. The creation of Captain America was deeply personal and deeply political.
Ever since, Steve Rogers has stood in opposition to tyranny, prejudice, and genocide. While other characters have their backstories rolled up behind them as the decades march on to keep them young and relevant, Cap is never removed from his original context. He can’t be. To do so would empty the character of all meaning.
But yesterday, that’s what Marvel did.
Look, this isn’t my first rodeo. I know how comics work. He’s a Skrull, or a triple agent, or these are implanted memories, or it’s a time travel switcheroo, or, or, or. There’s a thousand ways Marvel can undo this reveal—and they will, of course, because they’re not about to just throw away a multi-billion dollar piece of IP. Steve Rogers is not going to stay Hydra any more than Superman stayed dead.
But Nazis (yes, yes, I know 616 Hydra doesn’t have the same 1:1 relationship with Nazism that MCU Hydra does) are not a wacky pretend bad guy, something I think geek media and pop culture too often forgets. They were a very real threat that existed in living memory. They are the reason I can’t go back to the villages my great-grandparents are from, because those communities were murdered. They are the reason I find my family name on Holocaust memorials. They are the perpetrators of unspeakable, uncountable, very real atrocities.
But writer Nick Spencer and editor Tom Brevoort are more concerned with making this “something new and unexpected”; with having “fun” and getting readers “invested in Hydra characters.” Because what’s more fun than downplaying genocide?
I’m not going to pretend to be cool here. I’m emotional. This is emotional. Captain America isn’t even my usual guy to get incandescently angry over the erasure of his coded Jewish history— that’s Kal-El, the Moses of Krypton—but reading this comic made me feel sick to my stomach. Reading the flippant responses of many non-Jewish readers—including friends—has brought me to tears. Somehow a community that gets up in arms about whether or not Batman has a yellow circle behind his logo seems to think that being angry about this is stupid, or indicative of a lack of experience with comics.
So let me be very clear: I don’t care if this gets undone next year, next month, next week. I know it’s clickbait disguised as storytelling. I am not angry because omg how dare you ruin Steve Rogers forever.
I am angry because how dare you use eleven million deaths as clickbait.
I am angry because Steve Rogers’s Jewish creators literally fought in a war against the organization Marvel has made him a part of to grab headlines.
I am angry because the very real pain of the Jewish community has been dismissed since this news leaked on Tuesday night as “Twitter outrage.”
If this story doesn’t hurt you? Good. I’m genuinely glad. I don’t want anyone else to have the gorge rise in their throat when they read the entertainment news. I love comics. I don’t want them to make people feel angry and betrayed. But understand that not feeling that way comes from a place of privilege, and don’t dismiss the concerns of those of us who are upset just because you have the luxury not to be.
I’ve been trying to think of how to finish this post, but I don’t think I can say it better than my friend and fellow Panelteer Sigrid Ellis did here:
And knowing that this wound is temporary, that it’s for the sake of sales and money and a story beat, that just makes it hurt more, not less. How little we must matter, the people who needed Steve to be the defender of the underdog and the weak, how little we must matter if betraying us for a story beat is so easy.
How little must we matter. The people who created Captain America, and Superman, and countless other heroes like them. The people who need him. The people whose history and suffering and hope, as we stood on the brink of annihilation, gave you your weekly entertainment and your fun thought experiment, 75 years later.
I'd Much Rather Have a Dragon 