I say, “I have no more love to give! I have only anger in my heart today, and I want you to be angry with me! That I am sick and I am tired, and I want you to be sick and tired with me! I-I-I am sick and tired of going to the funerals of black men who have been murdered by white men! And I am sick and tired of the people of this country who continue to allow these things to happen!”
—Euologist, Mississippi Burning, 1988
Unico. This movie gave me nightmares, and haunted my memories for decades. I think I saw it on HBO one afternoon when I was home, sick, from school. For some reason I thought it was a Rainbow Brite movie, so I could never find it when I searched for it. The image of people being transformed into those horrible dolls…it was too much for me. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, I’ve finally found it! And now that I’ve rewetted it…oh god, it’s even worse than I remembered. Thanks, Internet. Fuck you too.
I also concur with this. Fuck these Stone Age motherfuckers; organize and vote!
Forewarned is forearmed, people!
I cannot WAIT until this thing comes out…
Man, I support this wholeheartedly. There’s no way it would happen but by by-goddamn-well ought to. Fuck these swine.
Go sign it! Make your friends and family sign it!
Henry Rollins has some musings about the Steubenville verdict.
It’s a lot of musing and thinking-out-loud, and Rollins hits on a lot of interesting points while he works through his reactions to the case. There’s no one real answer to a lot of the questions he finds himself asking because, as he puts it, there’s failure on so many levels here it’s hard to know where to start. From my own perspective as an educator, though, I think there’s one really, really important lesson we can impart to kids at just about all levels, and it’s this:
YES MEANS YES.
I know, I know; no points for originality. Fuck originality. I was talking to some dude about the verdict yesterday and the kid started going on about how you can just never be sure when someone’s consenting when they’re intoxicated. I thought he was going to take it somewhere profound, but instead he wound up shrugging it all off by suggesting that, well, you just never know, so sometimes people are gonna get raped. He phrased it a little differently–“You just never know.” “It’s hard.” Dude, it ain’t that fuckin’ hard. Did she say yes? Awesome! Go for it! Did she say no? Hands the fuck off. Did she say maybe? Well, that’s not yes, no hands the fuck off. Did she hint yes? Be sure, and make sure it’s an unequivocal yes, or you’re an unequivocal shitbag.
If kids can internalize that, you’d reduce the chances of dudes making the terrible decision to rape another human being, and you’d reduce the shitshow of people making excusing for rapists.