Max•He/Him•23•generally queer
“We are here, and this is now.” Constable Visit, a strict believer in the Omnian religion, occasionally quoted that from their holy book. Vimes understood it to mean, in less exalted copper speak, that you have to do the job that is in front of you.
--Terry Pratchett, Night Watch
"It shouldn't be like this."
"There isn't a way things should be. There's just what happens, and what we do."
--Terry Pratchett, A Hat Full of Sky
On 12 March 1990, dozens of disabled people descended on the US Capitol and carried out a protest which became known as the Capitol Crawl. Participants were protesting against the stalling of a proposed law, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which would prohibit discrimination against disabled people.
Around 1000 other protesters watched and cheered while dozens of members of ADAPT, a group campaigning for public transit access for disabled people, abandoned their wheelchairs and mobility aids and began crawling up the steps of the building housing Congress.
It was a powerful illustration of the difficulties faced by many disabled people faced with a hostile environment which had been constructed without their needs in mind.
Michael Winter, one of the participants later reflected: “Some people may have thought it was undignified for people in wheelchairs to crawl in that manner, but I felt that it was necessary to show the country what kinds of things people with disabilities have to face on a day-to-day basis. We had to be willing to fight for what we believed in.”
In the wake of the protest, Congress passed the bill and it was signed into law in July 1990. https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.1819457841572691/2229212140597257/?type=3
Today, the BBC World Service aired an interview with one of the ADAPT activists who participated in the Capital Crawl. (Unfortunately, and supremely ironically, there is no transcript at the site where this interview streams, but if you can, and want to, you can listen to the interview here):
(9 minutes)
"He used to say: 'Truth be told, I shall tell them I would pay to be allowed to write.'
"I thought it was best not to tell that to the publishers."
Shortly before he died, Terry Pratchett assured me that, if there is an afterlife, he would give me a ring and let me know. That was ten years ago - and still no call.
From which, incidentally, I draw no firm conclusions. What if there was an afterlife, but with no phone signal?
But of course there is one place where Terry indisputably lives on: in the pages of his books and in the minds of the millions of readers around the world who turn those pages and continue to find them funny and true. For, while his words live on, so does Terry, and that will be the case, no question, not just for this one decade so quickly gone, but for many further decades to come.
So let me join Lyn and Rhianna in raising a glass today to the magical persistence of books and to Sir Terry; gone but still so very firmly with us.
Rob Wilkins
i’ve seen a lot of really messed up images in my time on the internet, weird fetish shit, even a few IRL gore images but nothing. NOTHING evokes such a deep seated, gut wrenching fear in me like this image of the fucking water slide from Action Park with the loop in it
hey what the fuck
Action Park baby.
It had teeth
boxxed-juice asked:
have a new svsss rarepair of meng mo x madam meiyin. i think theyd fuck so nasty they invent sex 2, the sequel to sex
gaywarcriminals answered:
Idk if it’s just because he’s in Binghe’s brain (terrible place to be re:sex) but Meng Mo strikes me as a bit of a prude. It would be fun to see Madam Meiyin trying to coax him into using dream magic for nasty sex.
that’s exactly why i think its a great pairing. shes showing off her heaving bosom and meng mo is Not Looking.
I realized this evening it had been ten years since pterry died and my heart skipped a beat. GNU.
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the only things i know about jimmy carter are:
-he looked straight up dead when he turned 100 and voted early cos he was straight up dead and now he's actually dead dead
-was president during the three mile island reactor partial meltdown incident and because he had worked on nuclear subs before he knew that shit was fine and went over there to be like lalala i <3 reactors while the media were shitting their britches over a teeny tiny amount of radiation
look at this shit he was deader than prince philip was
look at him swagged out in nothing but yellow booties to protect him this man knows his nuclear reactors and he doesn't gaf about this supposed dangerous radiation the only thing dangerous here is the mud which might dirty his shoes
Okay so I realize you're being lighthearted here and I don't mean to take away from that (he would appreciate you noting both his civic duty and his education in nuclear energy), but I will never turn down an excuse to talk about why I love my man Jimmy Carter.
--personally brokered multiple peace agreements as a mediator between other countries--basically he was the guy who kept things calm and civil so stuff could get signed, both during and after his presidency. This included the Camp David Accords, widely considered the most important peace document in the Middle East
--not actually a very good president BECAUSE HE WAS TOO HONEST
--was a peanut farmer and got a ton of flak for it because "lol poor peanut farmer" but it was his family's farm and he was genuinely proud, not ashamed, of his work
--Married to his wife Rosalynn for 77 years and they were so deeply in love that when she died I said "he won't last a year now" and I was right, they were really two halves of one very incredible whole
--worked for Habitat for Humanity after his presidency, and not as an admin, either; there are lots of people out there who can say Jimmy Carter helped build their house
--he and Rosalynn fought for DECADES to eradicate Guinea worm, which is an extremely painful and disabling parasite, AND THEY ALL BUT SUCCEEDED. When they began their work in 1986 in tandem with the WHO, over three and a half million people were infected every year. In 2023 there were twelve. To be clear: not twelve million, not twelve thousand, not twelve hundred. TWELVE. One-two with no zeroes after it. As of today, his death date, the 2024 case count is seven. One digit. If we can hit zero in 2025 and 2026 it will be only the second disease in all of human history to be eradicated completely by humans (the first was smallpox)
--there is increasing evidence that he actually did solve the Iran hostage crisis and Reagan bribed the Iranian government to not release the hostages until after the election in order to make Carter look weak and boost his own chances
--left the Baptist church because while he considered himself a devout Christian he absolutely could not abide their views re: women, and said women should be full equals with men
--established the Department of Education
And finally:
--during his reelection campaign, he met my uncle. My uncle is mentally disabled. Carter was visiting his workplace. My uncle biked right past the Secret Service, which they took about as well as you'd expect, held out a hand, and said "hello, Mr. Carter, my name is David Lastname and I sure am glad to meet you." Carter would have been perfectly within his rights to have my uncle arrested as a security risk, and in 1980 basically nobody would have come to my uncle's defense. Instead he waved off the Secret Service, shook my uncle's hand, and said "hello, Mr. Lastname, my name is Jimmy Carter and I sure am glad to meet you." I don't know if he intuited that mirroring is one way we help my uncle to understand stuff or if it was a natural habit of his, and I don't care. What I care about is that more than a decade before the ACA he made a conscious decision to take the time to treat a mentally-disabled man with courtesy, kindness, and dignity, with no idea whether that man could even vote.
Jimmy Carter was not a great president, but he was a great man. There's a saying in Christian circles that if you have lived well G-d will greet you at the gates of heaven with "well done, thou good and faithful servant," and let me tell you, if heaven exists but that isn't standard procedure then G-d damn well better have made an exception today. He was a good and faithful servant, to all of us.
May his memory be for a blessing.
