also I think it’s important we realize that being nice to children needs to also apply into their teenage years.
when I was 17, five months after my dad had died in a house fire and I lost my home and we nearly ended up homeless, I was lucky enough to go on a school trip to the bahamas to study the reefs. This was my Ultimate Dream, as an aspiring marine biologist, and I couldn’t believe it was coming true. It was the only good thing to happen to me since the fire, the only thing I’d genuinely looked forward to.
But I had ADHD and could be too loud (by then I was good at not talking out in class so I was only loud when we were ALLOWED to be) and a little whacky. My humor was “weird,” I had asthma, and to top it off, I wasn’t pretty.
When we got there, the outpost where we were staying was run by college students, probably getting their graduate degrees, all aged about 22-26. And they saw us all as their age, even though some of them nearly had a decade on us.
And since they saw us as peers rather than children, they felt comfortable making judgements about us, and they decided I was weird and annoying.
And they were mean to me. They made fun of me, deliberately made me feel excluded and odd in front of each other and my own peers, and sometimes when I’d say something in class they’d make a face, say “Ohhhkaaaayyyy,” and look at each other knowingly while they pretended they were even trying to hold back laughing at me. They avoided calling on me during classes, didn’t want me participating, and generally made it obvious how annoying I was to them.
I even noticed that another person in my class was just as weird, if not more, than I was, but she was gorgeous. And to people looking at us as adults instead of children, that mattered.
And it ruined everything.
Another adult on the trip started paying attention and thinking perhaps there was a reason the people in charge didn’t like me. After all, what kind of adult is mean to a kid for no reason? So one night at a festival when she saw me take apart my inhaler, she misunderstood what it was and told the teacher in charge of our trip she’d seen me using drugs. I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere alone for the rest of the trip, not even the bathroom at the airport, despite my friends and a few other peers defending me.
I was mortified and ashamed and ended up lying there in bed every night, wondering how something I’d looked forward to so much could end up so terrible. I wanted nothing more as a child than to be good and win adult approval, and somehow I’d made all the adults there dislike me. I thought it was my fault.
I’d love to see all of these people again now, as an adult myself, and tell them what I was going through.
Tell them, “did you know, when you made fun of me all week back then, when you made me feel untrustworthy and called me a liar, I was grieving the loss of my father. I went away to try to stop thinking about him and the fire and losing my home and everything else, just for a week, and you stole that from me? You ruined that for me?”
Be. Fucking. Nice. To. Children.
Okay this is so important though. As much as they may act like adults and want to be treated like adults, high schoolers are still developing and maturing and it is So. Very. Important. To be kind and supportive of them. If you’re in your 20’s, a high schooler is no more your peer than the 10 year old next door is. They will expect to be (and should be) treated differently than a 10 year old, but you are still a role model/support system to them.
I went to Michaels the other day to get all the Halloween goodies and there was a lady in her early thirties there with a cart LOADED with stuff. She looked over at me and said:
“My husband said I’m only allowed to decorate one room of our house for Halloween, because otherwise I go a bit overboard. Joke’s on him, though, because we just bought a new house and I made him pick the one with an open floorplan. He hasn’t figured it out yet.”
A+ plan, lady. Good job. And thank you for helping me get stuff down off the tall shelves because I am smol.
“In 2000, Virginia legislators got involved, asking Governor Jesse Ventura to return their captured icon.
‘Why?’ he asked. ‘We won.’”
LMAAAAO
All the salty racists in the comments are a cherry on top.
Die mad about it energy strong af
Okay but this is a story that @dadhoc loves to talk about because this is a REALLY BIG DEAL in Minnesota.
I have heard the story of The First Minnesota at LEAST ONE HUNDRED TIMES in the course of my marriage and now I GET TO TELL THE REST OF YOU.
So. It’s not just ANY Confederate flag. It is the Confederate flag that the First Minnesota captured on July 3rd, 1863. The First Minnesota prevented the Union line from crumbling by keeping the Federalists from being pushed off of Cemetery Ridge on July 2nd, and on July 2nd, the First Minnesota sustained 82% casualties.
EIGHTY-TWO PERCENT CASUALTIES. They started out as 262 men and ended as 47. But they held the line. They held. The. Line. Then on July 3rd they were placed in one of the few places where the line was breached, and they thus had to charge in again and retake the line breaches, and they did.
It was during one of these charges – remember, they’d already lost eighty-two percent of their friends – that Private Marshall Sherman of Company C captured the flag. He was awarded the Medal of Honor for this.
The survivors of the First Minnesota at Gettysburg served through the rest of the war.
Now, Virginians have asked for it back repeatedly, saying ‘it’s our heritage.’ But the response from the Minnesota Historical Society has basically been, as @dadhoc has summed it up, “to us, this is the legacy of 215 men who were killed or wounded in the preservation of the Union. What, exactly, is its legacy to you?”
No one’s been able to give an answer that isn’t ‘it’s our legacy of trying to destroy the US over slavery,’ because there isn’t one.
Fuck Virginia wanting that flag back, it belongs in Minnesota.
So what you’re saying is Virginia needs to muster 262 men to get the flag back?
Y’all couldn’t hold on to it 160 years ago. Probably just trip over your boot laces and go ass over teakettle into a diorama of Fort Snelling and get a splinter.
See you people telling me about getting your ears pierced at 15 is very funny to me because my ears were pierced and have stayed that way since I was 1…Icon of earring wear
why your parents piercing infant ears??? infants can’t consent to body modification, and it introduces a whole host of health risks at a time in your life when you are super illness-prone and vulnerable to ailment!
anyways many cultures practice ear piercing on infants and babies or young children.
there is no decisive evidence showing that children w pierced ears are more prone to infection or illness related to the piercing than they would be later.
In fact, in some cases it’s recommended children have their ears pierced young to avoid complications like keloid formations when there is a family history of it.
and the whole “babies can’t consent” thing is just… they also can’t consent to being assigned a gender or a name or literally Anything else. of all the things kids are subjected to, a painless cosmetic procedure w no long-term effects or severely stated risks is really ridiculous to cause a fuss over.
White ppl act like we cuttin the tips of their toes off its not even completely permanent. They can always be taken out whenever
As a Texan this caused such a potent, visceral chemical reaction of rage in me that I immediately vomited blood
“hi yes i will take an infant-sized portion of meat with no sauce or sides on a platter the size of an average door, that’s what humans eat right?”
This is just sickening, this is TERRIBLE brisket. The smoke ring looks like it’s maybe a millimeter tops? The meat looks the way brisket does when it is steamed, not smoked. That fat looks unrendered. The bark looks soft. This looks simultaneously soggy AND YET dry and tough. This would be mush. It wouldn’t pass the pull test and it would taste like skunky smoke. 1/10. Fuck you, this brisket. How dare New York show this to me. Be a sewer, you awful town.
kinda funny when english teachers say stuff like “i can tell if you didnt read the book” or “i can tell when people bs their paper”
no you cant. you can tell when people are bad at bs-ing their paper. i didnt even read the sparknotes and i barely skimmed the wikipedia and you gave me an A. you kneel before my throne unaware that it was born of lies
“YOU KNEEL BEFORE MY THRONE UNAWARE THAT IT WAS BORN OF LIES” IS ONE OF THE GREATEST SENTENCES I’VE EVER READ AND I CAN’T FUCKING BELIEVE IT’S ON A POST ABOUT BULLSHITTING ON ASSIGNMENTS.
vanhalenofficial 