the “poor person who refuses handouts” is a classist microaggression, it tells poor kids that the worst possible thing they could do is accept help and that poor people who do get help are “lesser” (because anyone who does get help is always portrayed as screwing the system somehow, ie. “welfare queen”), as well as emphasizing to people that your pride is more important than your continued survival or general well-being.
I think I’ve finally figured out why Christianity and in particular overseas Christian missionary work creeps me out so much.
Watching yesterday’s MHP Show segment where they’re discussing the documentary God Loves Uganda, and there’s a bit with a well-fed, healthy, white, privileged American young woman telling a Ugandan woman who appears emaciated and extremely poor by our culture’s standards that she’s come all the way across the sea to bring them the “good news” of Christianity. Ms. Harris-Perry very rightly commented that maybe that young, healthy, white, privileged American woman should stop and take a moment to listen to what the Ugandan woman has to tell her for a change, which obviously never happens. It’s an unbelievably common thread in white American Christian missionary work: they come as benevolent emancipators to educate the local people and raise them up out of the squalor they’re only living in because they haven’t found Jesus yet.
And that’s when it hit me: the underlying belief, the reason that white American Christians never seem interested in hearing what these local people think and feel and know about life, is because there is a perceived causality between 1. Not being Christian, and 2. Not being rich and privileged.
It is the belief that poverty is due to a defect of character, rather than to oppressive circumstances.
This is the exact same belief that underlies the disgusting statements from the wealthy conservative white Christian rightwing in the US when they talk about how poor people wouldn’t be poor if they’d just let the privileged wealthy white Christians teach them about the dignity of an honest day’s work – because they actually think that people are poor because they just don’t like working. They brush aside the facts of jobs being scarce, of even if you can find a job it won’t pay anything even resembling a living wage, of black market industries and gangs that have taken hold in communities because there are no other options to support and protect your family, of entire generations being mowed down by violence and drugs, and, in many developing nations, of the fact that sometimes the ground just won’t grow anything, and even when it does it gets stolen or destroyed or extorted from you by roving extremist armies or by the very government that’s supposed to be protecting you and the rest of the people of your nation, and you’re lucky if they just take your food and money instead of raping and slaughtering you and your whole family—
And then some rich healthy white Christian American, who has never gone to bed starving, has never buried a child for a disease that can be cured but just not where you live and not for people like you, who thinks studying at a university is a BURDEN rather than a PRIVILEGE, is going to show up and tell you that if you just tried harder and learned the dignity of “real work” and learned to be a good Christian then you’d finally stop being poor and hungry and sick, because obviously that is all entirely your own fault and the people taking everything from you and trying to kill you and your family are meaningless because those things don’t exist in a rich white Christian American’s world so they’re not real because their world view is the only one that matters.
So yeah. Christianity, missionary work, efforts to spread democracy and “American values.”
Creep.
Me.
The fuck.
Out.
And on top of all of it: they walk around with that sense of serenity like they are literally god’s gift to these poor people who just don’t know what they’re missing if only they’d try harder.
Just disgusting.
Woof, this is a relic! As evidenced by the fact I had to make it an image post, because at the time of originally posting this, tumblr was doing that thing where text posts were getting automatically shortened into links. Fuck, I feel old.
It's interesting to me to see this first sort of awakening on this particular topic in my past. I was already an ex-mormon & ex-christian by this point, but I hadn't yet been able to articulate a lot of my problems with the belief system I had been raised in. Even here, what was such a moment of clarity for me at the time, now feels I was barely grasping around the edges of an idea.
It's what the Puritans believed, that good things happen to good people, and bad things happen to bad people. So if bad things happen to you, even just freak accidents, well you must have deserved it for some secret sin.
Ever heard some rich asshole talk about 'pulling themself up their bootstraps'? And it's almost always someone who inherited family money, or had good luck, or were privileged & given more chances to succeed because they were white or male or abled or beautiful or skinny etc? (And/or cheated & abused everyone who worked under them in order to amass their wealth.) That's called The Bootstrap Myth (or sometimes The Bootstrap Fallacy). It's a form of Prosperity Doctrine wherein being a "good" person is specifically defined as working hard and having good business sense (or in other words, not paying taxes and abusing your employees! Soooo sensible!!! /sarcasm)
The thing with Property Doctrine is that uses a very common but also very tricksy logical fallacy. See, they go from a) good person, so therefore b) good things happen to you, and then flip it all around to be: b) good things don't happen to you, so therefore a) you must not be a good person
When people say, 'A therefore B does not equal B therefore A,' this is what they're talking about. It's a fallacy, meaning it's false, it's not true, it doesn't work like that. A causes B, but that doesn't mean that B always happens only because of A.
My car's battery died (A) so therefore my car won't start (B)
Does not mean
Every time my car won't start (B) it must be because the battery is dead (A)
Your mechanic will tell you there are lots of reasons for a car not to start. No gas, a faulty ignition, etc. See what I mean? A may cause B, but other things can cause B too. So B happening doesn't mean A is necessarily the cause.
But in Prosperity Doctrine, they don't understand this (or they ignore it, because it benefits them). If someone is poor (B), it must be because (A) they made bad choices or they sinned or they didn't work hard or they didn't have good business sense or they didn't pray enough or WHATEVER
And then the really sinister part of this whole belief system: if this person sinned, or didn't work hard, or "God" just doesn't like them for whatever reason, then it would be against "God's" will (or the natural order or social Darwinism or whatever justification they come up with) for the Good Person to help them. Which is why you have conservative religious people defunding food stamps and medicaid and disability benefits and public libraries and public schools and literally any form of social safety net that might help those Bad People. Because they only need that help because they're poor (in money or health or any other dimension) and they're only poor because they're Bad and because "God" willed for them to be punished for their badness. If "God" wanted you to have money for food, he'd have already given it to you, so the Good People can't possibly go against "God" and let you have food stamps!
The thing about missionary work, though, to bring it back to my original rant all those years ago, is that it's an attempt to tell poor, starving, oppressed, traumatized people that they can become one of the Good People and stop being one of the Bad People if they accept Jesus into their life. Because, like I originally ranted about, Christians don't believe that there's any justifiable reason to be poor or sick or disabled or oppressed, those things are all just caused by "God's" will to punish you for being a Bad Person.
It's the same logic as the fuckwad who told me in Sunday school when I was still LDS that I wouldn't be depressed if I read my scriptures and prayed enough.
Idk, I'm not really coming to any big conclusion here. Prosperity Doctrine is the big conclusion, really. And it's not just limited to Christians. It's an extremely pervasive form of magical thinking. It's in everything from 'you must have sinned to bring this disaster on you and your loved ones' to 'you just didn't manifest hard enough so you're not beautiful/rich/famous/happy yet' and 'if you just sell enough in this multilevel marketing scheme or take on yet another side hustle you'll definitely get rich any day now!'
It's victim blaming and just about any form of oppression or "-ism" type bigotry, rolled up together and justified in this magical system where random chance doesn't exist and bigotry doesn't exist and privilege doesn't exist. It's a mystical justification for all these forms of bigotry, and for maintaining oppressive systems, and it's still just as magical & ludicrous when the person benefitting from it is trying to sound down to earth and talk about pulling themself up with hard work alone and absolutely never ever ever any help from anyone else never
And the thing is, again to go back to the missionary stuff that started all this for me, is that this system of magical thinking doesn't only justify an individual person's bigotry. It doesn't only excuse one person from refusing to give spare change to someone begging on the street. It also, necessarily, by definition, excuses the action of the violent, oppressive dictator who has their goons steal all the food and money and technology and medicine and clean water. Because that still counts as a Bad Thing happening to you, you poor malnourished people in various war-torn countries. And that wouldn't happen to you if you weren't one of the Bad People. And rather than take any kind of action to either treat the symptoms of your problems, like using their wealth & resources to provide housing or food or medicine, or treating the root of your problems, like helping you overthrow that dictator, instead Christian missionaries say that the real problem, the real reason for these Bad Things happening to you, is that you're not one of the Good People.
You haven't manifested hard enough.
You haven't hustled fast enough.
You haven't read a specific book often enough.
You haven't talked to some old man in the sky enough.
So, see, it's your fault.
even if the fraud was like 5% it wouldn’t compare to rich people cheating the system by trillions lmao
Also, SNAP “fraud” is like exchanging some of your stamps for cash to buy necessities you can’t buy with stamps, like soap or deodorant or tampons
TBH even if one hundred percent of people on food stamps were committing food stamp fraud I’d still be in favor of keeping the program around
Hey I wanna talk about this.
I work at a drug addiction counseling center. A ton of my clients have, at one time or another, sold their food stamps. This is basically exactly what the GOP is afraid of, right? Drug addicts selling their food stamps.
I have learned, now, to ask them WHY they sold their food stamps. Here is an incomplete list of the answers:
- I need tampons, and you can’t buy them with foodstamps
- See above RE: toilet paper
- I was living in a hotel with no kitchen then. I had to buy pre-prepared food
- The homeless shelter won’t let me keep food in my locker or room, so I have to buy pre-prepared food (Yes, really)
- I had to make rent
- My sister had to make rent
- My son had to make rent
- I needed co-pays to get my medication or I’ll die
- I needed co-pays to get my medication or I’ll loose control of my mental health
But the absolute most common form of food stamp fraud I see? Giving away food stamps to other family members who get no food stamps or insufficient food stamps to feed their families. I see that every month. People glassy eyed and hungry because they gave away their food to their adult kids, their grand kids, cousins, siblings etc.
So, is food stamp fraud rampant? In some places, yes. And I’m not about to chastise people for it.
reblogging because it’s still true and important
People that are like “climate change is worsening and all of humanity is going to deserve it” should realize how kind of evil and insane of a thing that is to say Like, no actually, the masses of people in the world that are impoverished, homeless, poor and working paycheck to paycheck to survive, plus the masses of indigenous folks, POC, queer and religious minorities trying to survive the trauma of generations of industrialization & colonization DON’T deserve to go extinct over the actions of a few dozen oil executives and an economic system we have no control over, especially when we’re doing all that we can for a safer healthier planet wtf
The lives of 7 billion humans do not deserve extinction over the actions of very few oil companies destroying the planet, don’t say shit like that.
THANK YOU
And that should be immediately reported to HR. (And hopefully they do something)
[Image description: A tweet by Sean T. Collins (@theseancollins) written in black text on a white background, that reads:
“fuck anyone, ever, who sits on a pile of money and tells you you’re poor because you drink, go out to eat, watch TV, go to the movies, smoke whatever, play video games, have a fucking phone, or anything else that makes the nightmare world they’ve made for us slightly bearable”
End ID.]
#WhyIDidntReport is trending.
[Image description: A tweet by Barb McQuade / @BarbMcQuade written in white text on a dark navy blue background. The tweet reads:
“Teachable moment: sexual assault is a highly under-reported crime because survivors fear being shamed, threatened and disbelieved. Delay in reporting does not mean a survivor is lying.”
End ID.]
[Image description: black text on a white background that reads:
'Those who fail to exhibit positive attitudes, no matter the external reality, are seen as maladjusted and in need of assistance. Their attitudes need correction. Once we adopt an upbeat vision of reality, positive things will happen. This belief encourages is to flee from reality when reality does not elicit positive feelings.
These specialists in "happiness" have formulated something they call the "Law of Attraction." It argues that we attract those things in life, whether it is money, relationships or employment, which we focus on. Suddenly, abused and battered wives or children, the unemployed, the depressed and mentally ill, the illiterate, the lonely, those grieving for lost loved ones, those crushed by poverty, the terminally ill, those fighting with addictions, those suffering from trauma, those trapped in menial and poorly paid jobs, those whose homes are in foreclosure or who are filing for bankruptcy because they cannot pay their medical bills, are to blame for their negativity.
The ideology justifies the cruelty of unfettered capitalism, shifting the blame from the power elite to those they oppress. And many of us have internalized this pernicious message, which in times of difficulty leads to personal despair, passivity and disillusionment.
Chris Hedges'
End ID.]
when a crime is committed, it is not the victim’s fault
[Image description: A tweet by BIG DEATH ENERGY / @Punongbayan_ written in black text on a white background. The tweet reads:
“Rape was already a thing back in the 1950s when women wore pleated, below-the-knee skirts. Rape was already a thing in the 1800s when women wore frocks and several layers of clothing underneath. Rape has nothing to do with fashion and everything to do with rapists.”
End ID.]
“Time heals all wounds.” Me, a person with PTSD from child abuse:
“People only have power over you if you give them power.”
“People treat you the way you allow yourself to be treated.”
“Holding onto hate is like swallowing poison and expecting the other person to die.”
You can really tell who’s never experienced poverty and food insecurity when it comes to discussions around food costs and how unhealthy food is cheaper. Some fucker always comes in with the price of like… lettuce or… apples. And it’s like yeah bitch but can you work an 11 hour shift after eating some salad and an apple!?! Find me something cheaper, and more filling than the broke ass staples of boxed mac and cheese, hot dogs, noodles, bread, beans, and rice. I’ll wait.
It also ignores the mental toll that poverty takes like maybe your home made veggie filled recipe isn’t crazy expensive but it also involves prep time and cooking time and organization in terms of fresh food that a lotta poor people can’t manage.
Not to mention if you can only afford to get to the store once every couple weeks via bus or cab then you can’t keep fresh veg on deck.
But ya know.. poor people are just dumb and lazy.
People reblogging this with “actually you can do this super labour intensive prep and only buy bulk which means more money on grocery day and all this storage space you defs have when you’re poor” and it’s like……… did you read this at all
And all the “well actually” replies on this post operate from the assumption poor people haven’t thought of these things…. or don’t know any of these things or are too lazy which I mean was my original point and people just continue to prove it …..
^This is from a discussion about Kylo Ren. NGL, as a survivor of religious abuse, this triggered me.
Look. If we accept the premise that the Jedi are a religious order… Ben Solo was and is, by the standards of his family’s religion, unclean. He is impure. He is tainted. “There is a darkness in him.” According to the Novel Of The Film, from the time Leia was pregnant with him, she sensed that darkness.
…And this is not to say that Han and Leia were abusive parents, or that Luke was an abusive teacher. But the principles of a religion can themselves be abusive, and kids aren’t stupid.
If your religion says that People With Dark In Them are Bad and Dangerous… and you’re a kid who’s heard your parents mention in whispers that you’ve got dark in you… and you see them worry when you get angry over something little, in ways that other kids’ parents don’t… you are eventually going to put the pieces together. The pieces that say that you are Bad and Dangerous.
The Organa-Solos sent Ben to Luke partly so that he could learn to control the darkness. And like, we all saw how that turned out, but put yourself in Ben’s horrible gothy shoes for a sec.
You were sent to go study with your uncle, because you are Bad and Dangerous and you need to stop being Bad and Dangerous. There is a little voice in the back of your head telling you that you’re not Bad and that people say you’re just Dangerous because they’re afraid, but listening to that voice is Bad and makes you Bad. You go study with your uncle. It’s your last ditch hope, your last chance to have the people around you stop treating you like a total monster.
…and then you wake up in the middle of the night to find the guy who’s supposed to fix you standing over your bed, for all intents and purposes looking like he’s about to kill you.
This isn’t just a ‘my uncle tried to kill me’ thing. It isn’t just a ‘my master tried to kill me’ thing. This is a ‘the person who was supposed to make me Not Bad anymore has decided that I am too Bad to be allowed to exist; I have no hope left’ thing.
…If you really think you’re Bad- or impure, or sinful, or touched-by-the-Dark-Side, whatever you want to call it- you will lose your goddamn mind. You cannot live your entire life without thinking that there is something good about you. The best case scenario is crippling anxiety and/or depression. And if someone comes to you when you’re in that place and says “no, you’re not really Bad- the thing that makes you Bad is really a gift, and as long as you do what I say, you’ll be worth something”… that kind of thing is a lifeline.
You are hurting; if someone says they can make it stop, you’ll listen. And if that someone happens to be an unscrupulous sack of shit, and they can manage to convince you that they are the only person that you should trust, and they can make you feel ‘good’ enough that you want to stay with them but keep you vulnerable and hurt enough that you won’t think about leaving… yeah you can see where I’m going with this.
…And no, that doesn’t mean that Ben Solo Is A Cinnamon Roll Who Did Nothing Wrong UwU, and no, I’m not triggered because someone insulted my problematic fave. I’m triggered because this is the same kind of thought process that goes into “well, why didn’t you just call the cops if he was hitting you?” or “well, if the pastor was touching you, why didn’t you just tell your parents?”
IRL trauma survivors do not always do things the way they “should” or “ought” to. Trauma survivors can get pretty fucked in the head. And sometimes in the process of trying to get out of that bad situation, whatever it is- you fuck up. You hurt yourself; you hurt other people. You make really, really bad decisions and you know they’re bad but you don’t see any other choice. Obvious, ‘safe’ choices seem dangerous. ‘Normal’ seems scary and confusing. That’s one of the many, many fun ways in which trauma fucks up your head.
Hurting other people is wrong, and being a survivor does not give you an excuse to hurt people. But at the same time, one of our society’s favourite ways to blame trauma survivors for their trauma is to go ‘well, you didn’t react in the Correct, socially acceptable way, therefore you must have really wanted it/you must have done something to deserve it/you must be Tainted and Bad’. And the thing is, no matter what your trauma was and no matter what you did, you will never be able to react in the Correct way. Sometimes something as simple as ‘being male’ or ‘not crying’ can mean that what you did is Incorrect, and therefore you’re not really traumatized or you’re some kind of monster.
… It bothers me a lot that people are willing to do this kind of victim blamey bullshit in the name of fandom-SJ. Applied to a fictional character? Yeah, it’s pretty harmless. And I know OP is very much against victim blaming when applied to real people, so I’m trying not to assume the worst of them. It’s just a show, I should really just relax.
But … gotta say, it doesn’t make me feel like your corner of fandom is a safe space for trauma survivors when I hear you throw around this kind of crap. :I
☝️
So I’m gonna reblog again with commentary because this post expresses exactly what disturbs me about the conversation around Kylo Ren, The Fictional Character: a dismissal of his relatability for people who have been psychologically manipulated and abused as children, especially, but not uniquely. It’s not really about denying his guilt so much as about understanding that his environment was complicit and that this is absolutely what happens in real life to real people. Yes, most people will not go as far as Ben did, but he’s fictional. He’s the extreme. What makes him relatable is what he feels just before he crosses that line. Luke stopped right before doing a horrible thing like that- killing Ben. But, you know, Luke also wasn’t a child anymore, and had had decades of experience dealing with Jedi ideals and the Force. People come to the edge and turn back. Whatever that edge is, and for some it’s as ‘harmless’ as an evil thought. The point is they do very much come to that edge, and the anti-kylo wave on tumblr is really insistent that this, already, not the act, but the approach to the act, is evil, irredeemable, abnormal. Well.. see above for Luke. Kylo Ren’s murder spree is a fictional extreme. A person who relates to his failure to turn around before it was too late may not be a mass murderer, you know. Their personal edge, the absolute line they should not cross, it will be something more mundane. You know where my line was? Where I crossed it? I punched my mother in the arm, hard, in church, because I couldn’t take her comments anymore. I never want to cross that line again. No, I didn’t murder a bunch of people but I’m not a fictional magic space kid, either. How many of you relate to an extreme fictional experience you’ve never actually had in real life?
Thin people actually think they’ve ‘earned’ their bodies. They honestly believe their thinness is a product of their own hard work, restriction of food and exercise. People who were just born thin, eat a normal diet and go to yoga twice a week think that that’s what it takes, and cannot fathom that there are fat people out there doing the same amount of exercise or more, eating the same or (in a lot of cases) a more restrictive diet and yet remain fat.
When offered a brownie thin person would joke “oh you want me to get fat” (let’s not even touch on how they think it’s somehow bad), but they honestly think eating a brownie or liking sweets and having them every day would actually make them fat.
Like, honey, you’re a size two. You can live off brownies for a month and not move and you’ll gain at best a couple of pounds. That’s how your body works. Some bodies work like that. Others don’t.
There’s a scientific study out there that found that thin people on average eat more than fat people. Yet they remain thin. They work office jobs, and go to yoga twice a week, or they’ve romanticized going to gym for a booty blasting workout and they think that this is the hard work they’re puttig in, and that if they stop, they will pretty much overnight, automatically rocket into size 20.
Even though there are plenty examples of thin people not liking exercise while being foodies and remaining thin, they will still claim that ‘it all burns off in the hard work of taking pictures for Instagram’. Or some shit. They continue to eat fast food on the same exact rate as fat people, and they drink alcohol, which is extremely high in calories, yet they think that yoga and kale salad and a smoothie the next day solve all their problems, and fat people are just too unintelligent and lazy to do exactly that.
There are thin people being foodies and hating exercise and drinking and temaining thin, and there are thin people being gymrats and counting calories and being vegan and remaining thin and thin people an mass still don’t see anything contradictory to their gospel in those kinds of thin people coexisting, while completely disproving everything we are told about diets. It’s not about a diet, diets don’t work.
Models will claim in interviews that they have to restrict themselves severely and workout dawn till dusk just to keep up the rare body type the lottery of genes has granted them and has no intention of taking away, workout or no workout. And then they die of malnourisment.
Thin people turn to fat people and tell them to follow the diet and workout for years, because they believe, ultimately, that all the body types stem from one thin one, or a couple of types of a thin one, so there must be a way to reach it. If they have that body type naturally, they feel entitled, they feel like they tried hard enough to reach it, even if by doing virtually nothing, and other fat people are not trying hard enough.
It’s akin to a person born rich telling a poor person to try harder to win the lottery of capitalism. I’m not even talking about billionaires, it’s the same mindset in upper middle class, who believe that by being born, stepping into all the doors that are open to them and literally not bankrupting themselves in a system built to prevent that, they’ve done some hard labour and deserve that pat on the back, and a brownie, that’s their guilty pleasure, alongside cocaine or some shit.
It’s an untrue, entitled mindset that’s harmful for everyone involved, including models and thin people who feel guilty for eating, and to fat people who often themselves think the same way, that if they work hard enough, they can win the lottery of genetics.
And it takes so much hard work to break free from that mindset.
Petition to fucking salt and burn the concept of “attention-seeking behaviour” as something intrinsically bad in children
To elaborate: If a child especially* is seeking attention, it’s because they fucking need some attention. “Attention and interaction from adults” is a non-negotiable neurological need. It is as important as food and water and clothing and a place to pee.
There will be times when a child seeks attention that are Unfortunate, either because now is not a good time for attention, or because the manner in which they are trying to get the attention is Unfortunate. See also “TALK TO ME WHEN YOU ARE ON AN IMPORTANT PHONE-CALL” and “I WILL GET YOUR ATTENTION BY SCREAMING AND BREAKING YOUR STUFF.”
But here’s the trick: if they are seeking attention then, and in that way, that means that they are not getting attention they need otherwise. And not reinforcing the bad behaviour is only half the solution. The other half is giving them attention in other ways and responses to other things.
If the only way that a child gets attention is by acting out? They will act out. Their all-powerful lizard-brains (which are absolutely, in children, VERY POWERFUL) will eventually literally just see the negative consequences of the behaviour as the price to pay for getting the attention their brains absolutely need as much as their bodies need food and water and to take a piss.
You cannot get out of the absolute responsibility to give a child under your care regular positive attention and interaction. If the child under your care is starting to show bad attention-seeking behaviour? That is a fail-proof diagnostic that on some level that child is not getting the attention and validation they need.
This does not mean that you do things that will tell them “yes, behaving this way will get you good attention.” But it does mean that you need to start showing them how to get more good attention from you.
You have to start teaching, “No, you cannot crawl all over me when I’m on the phone - but when I hang up the phone you can come ask for a hug or for me to look at your drawing”. YOU HAVE TO DO BOTH PARTS OF THIS. If you need a child to stop doing things like Making Messes for Attention, you have to start GIVING THEM attention for good things (and you know you might have to start at the very very bottom of the rung with “thank you so much for not making a mess today! Let’s play hide and seek!” Or something similar, but TOUGH SHIT, YOU ARE THE GROWNUP, THEY ARE THE CHILD).
… and if the child in question is younger than 12 (well really 18 at least, but DEFINITELY 12) months just fucking pay attention to them, they don’t have the cognitive capacity to understand putting off fulfillment, ok?
You know what the WORST THING possible for a baby to start doing is? Not trying to get adult attention.
Because that means that their brains have decided that you have abandoned them in the grass for the hyenas to eat, so they’re just going to stop developing and start dissociating. And this ends up with attachment disorders that will actually cause the child great difficulties in later life.
If a baby is crying and honestly distressed, fucking soothe it already.
(nb: yes, to some extent babies do need to learn to self-soothe; this lady has an actually sane article about this process which is a miracle, which gets into more detail about the processes involved and how it is a PROCESS, not just leaving the baby there to cry itself into hysterical exhaustion and teaching it that you won’t respond to its needs. PROCESS.) (nb2: sometimes the sleep/soothe process also gets into genuinely Medically Complicated Territory at which point you should be working with an actual paediatrician with specific training/etc, and you STILL don’t just leave the fucking baby there to scream for hours, trust me).
This has been your swear-filled elaboration of a friend’s aggravation for the day. Tip your server.
*adults also need attention, but adults are, well, adults: it is in fact their own responsibility to figure out how to seek attention from people who have the capacity to give it to them, at times that are good for everyone involved, etc. Children, however, are damn well children and it is the responsibility of caregiver adults to fulfill their needs and TEACH THEM how to fulfill their needs as they grow.
*holds a lighter aloft*
That is such a good rant, I adore it and welcome it and validate it! raising a cub of my own, and caring a lot about attachment theory, has really put this into practice in concrete ways. You can actually OBSERVE the cub needing attention to make their brain grow. (sometimes, when I don’t have anything left to say/give, but the cub needs attention, I just smile and burble repeatedly, “Warm eye contact! Warm eye contact to make your brain grow!! Yeahh! Warm eye contact! Positive attention!” because I’ve run out of things to say, but the baby doesn’t know that yet, ho ho ho)
But Discoursing away from baby development, one thing I always question is the CONTEXT for which people dismiss behavior as attention-seeking. It’s always cast as this terribly bad thing, “attention-seeking,” as if people noticing you is this corrosive thing that damages you and everyone around you. This thing that should be punished, by denying attention, like:
You know how in Harry Potter, whatever Harry does, his bullies and abusers say that he’s doing it for attention, so they dismiss it and mock it? If he publicly has ANYTHING, from a mild compliment to a broken limb - “Weren’t you getting enough attention, Potter?”
“Look at you EXISTING, Potter. Were you hoping to form some kind of human connection? Did you think you could exist, and occasionally need things? Well, we’ve seen through THAT pathetic ploy. REQUEST DENIED.”
It’s pretty weird, is what I’m saying. It’s kind of a thing that shitty people say.
Anyway, I’ve found it pretty liberating in my life (and good for my mental health!) to question this. Why is attention-seeking positioned as bad? Why is asking for it a good reason to be denied it? Why are certain people denied attention, such that everything they do is cast as a desperate ploy to acquire the attention they are not entitled to? How exactly does the existence of crying baby, a woman’s pink hair, or a blue badge apparently manage to suck all of the air out of the room?
Given that we are social animals who require positive attention to grow, maintain relationships, keep our mental health and do our jobs well, what’s so bad about giving it to people?
Given that so many humans are raised in such a broken way that they seek negative attention - resulting in terrible things and a broken world - what is even so terrible about people explicitly asking for attention in a positive way, with something like brightly colored hair, or by creating a piece of art for others to see?
Why is attention-seeking intrinsically bad?
They don’t want people to feel sympathy for us.
Has anyone else noticed how, when you have a chronic condition of some kind, that there’s always the basic assumption from people around you that you’re not already doing everything you can?
It’s all about the illusion of control. People who are healthy like to believe they can always keep being healthy if they do the right things. They don’t want to think about how good people get struck with terrible circumstances for no reason. So they keep assuming that if they got sick, they could do something to make it better. And if you’re still sick, that must mean you’ve done something wrong or not done enough.
Nail. Head. The same attitude can be seen in how a lot of people talk about poverty.
And sexual assault. All they have to do is not go there not drink that not wear that not date them and they’ll be fine, right?
The Just World theory - that as long as I do everything right, I’m safe, and everybody who isn’t safe is at fault for not doing everything right - is perhaps the most harmful and widespread mindset today
if you ever see a conservative and wonder just how in the world they have so little compassion? they are genuinely convinced that most - not all, but most - bad things that happen are the fault of the person affected, because then they don’t have to feel bad
somebody explaining this to me as a young adult was, quite literally, the start of me seeing the world in a new way and moving considerably to the left politically. by letting go of the just world mindset my conception of reality shifted considerably
