I'm having kind of a tough time with this all, because when I was a kid, my boyfriend, who was autistic (and, even 20ish years ago, this was not a thing that people understood or made space for the way they do today), got tased repeatedly for noncompliance, and this caused them epilepsy and so they killed themselves.
And never in my life did I really get any like, acknowledgement of how fucked all that was from the adults or kids around me.
It pushed me into the kind of radicalism that most folk imagine is reserved for "when the revolution comes,"
and now those same folk who have been pretending life is good and fine, our whole lives, are doing their part to perform shock and horror on the Web.
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Who, today, is getting the experience of my friend, back then?
If tasing kids has become the norm, what are we doing to the unusual kids?
Use that big adult brain you have, that understands consequence so well, to imagine *this* trajectory.
And understand that things will only get worse if you, yes you personally, don't make them better.
Because I tried from the moment I learned they needed to be better to make them better, and all that's shown me is that it takes everyone doing everything they can to make things better, or else we will let other folk turn things to shit.
