(Alternatively: Did It Take A Village To Create The Orlando Killer?)
Homophobia, mental illness, religion…. all different motivators. Does it matter? Is it more important to focus on gun control or the shooter’s incentives? Ultimately, micro-aggressions turn into macro-aggressions which turn into the worst kind of record breaking for american citizens.
All the debate at the moment can be summed up as a conflicting mess of who to think of; do we think of the victims and of the future; homophobia clearly matters right now and gun control matters because it was lgbt+ people being murdered with guns, the whole community is shaken, the line towards open bigotry because clearer and closer, people do not feel safe and perhaps they actually aren’t.
Or do we think of the shooter; of mental illness and religion and race? Because the shooter shot people so they must have been aggressive and therefore mentally ill (by “definition”), and the shooter claimed allegiance to conflicting religous islamic groups despite not being described as particularly religious and this being during ramadan, race because he wasn’t white so it must be factor and white people never murder people ever.
Or as less mainstream media sources say, shall we think on what we’re not being told; how the shooter was an authoritarian into police work and security and beating up his ex-wife…and why we aren’t being told it by the mainstream media? Is it, as many suspect, because it looks like a far larger number of people than limiting it to the mentally ill and muslims, both targeted groups in their own right.
“An inspector kills calls”, and who killed these people? What incremental steps were taken in each of these areas?
Cops have been consistently glorified for bravery in killing innocent people who were charged with no crime (because they were already dead by then), perhaps there aren’t enough people protesting that..
(Looping) Gif of Millions March NYC In Protest of Police Brutality in 2014
And even before that, there’s thousands of movies and media glorifying violent stories of battles of strength and blood, and there’s generations of women are blamed for making their men angry, what kind of culture around conflict does this make? One that produces mass murderers on a practically regular basis maybe?
Muslims are alienated and of course it’s nothing to do with with the oil in muslim countries and the battle for power in the mess that remains after colonialism (sarcasm; of course it is.).
Then 9/11 happens and overnight Muslims are completely transformed into simply “pale brown skin with beard maybe” plus “headscarves are bad for women” and a vaguely threatening “Other” because the confusing faith and the confusing attack are now linked forever.
And because the link is so vaguely defined, and the middle eastern tensions that caused both the attack and the initial alienation are so poorly understood, anyone now feels free to claim Islam as a whole as as a scapegoat…even the people who aren’t victims but victimisers. It’s a solid outsider scapegoat with a clearly targetable face, so hatred against it grows to the point where expressing Nazi-esque deportation dreams are not instant death to a political career. (and don’t challenge that narrative with the truth because it simply won’t get heard).
Mentally ill people are defined as dangerous. Dangerous people are defined as mentally ill. Again, it conflates and conflates and so now of course dangerous people don’t get treated with compassion and treatment, and so mentally ill people don’t either because they aren’t dangerous so they can’t be mentally ill and mental illness treatment is increasingly hard to come by and stigmatised. Now we have a constant scapegoat available just in case the muslim terrorist one doesn’t apply. Illness transcends all boundaries and demographics; what a perfect solution.
Celebrations after Supreme Court Marriage Ruling
Homosexuality is winning, America has gay marriage! People delight. Now homosexuality is fine but don’t let weirdo trans gender-benders in my bathroom, because they don’t need to pee, they must only exist to scare me (because they do) and therefore that means they are dangerous to me (see mental illness above), I’ll do whatever it takes to find evidence of this. Homosexuality is accepted but you can fire them for it if you want, you can refuse to serve them if you want. homosexuality is accepted but if you’re a gay character you are tragic and need to die in my show because real people need to know that they will never be gay and happy in this world where it is totally fine to be gay. america is a free country and does not endorse homophobia.
Gun control is too soon to talk about. It’s too soon but it’s also too late for these now dead people. But look at all the other issues hat it could be! Maybe more guns will fix it and the good guys with guns will never get killed only bad guys. (Police have guns and they kill people and they are the Good Guys TM, why can the rest of the world not be like this corrupt system which has systematic control over who is seen as good and bad, we see no reason why not).
Maybe he was a closet gay man! Fantastic, we can pin it on this aspect of the case, perfect! case closed, it’s circular like an Ouroboros, the fact that there is a closet definitely doesn’t come from the fact that you still have entire churches saying that gay is a sin , entire churches in multiple religions, and entire systems and societies casually endorsing and condoning homophobia and treating lgbt+ people like second class citizens and alien creatures who shouldn’t be seen.
So pick your demons
Who do you think it was? Was it homophobia, gun control, islam, mental illness, being gay, being an authoritarian who loved the force? It won’t bring the 50 people back. It won’t stop the hundreds who have yet to die in the future mass killings, not unless something changes.
Can you get rid of an entire religion because of someone who conflated two different sects whilst they committed their mass murder and who didn’t practise the faith? Can you get rid of people who want to live their lives and don’t want to kill people? Can you stop glorifying violence and force and start respecting love and peace, stop demonising mental illness and start treating it instead (how it needs to be), stop conflating danger with illness in a way that lets dangerous people off the hook?
Respecting the innocent dead is a good sentiment, but respecting the innocent living would be an even better start. Whichever demon is the one stopping this from happening for you, you pick that one, and then go change it.
Amazing report on autism in the workplace by Janine Booth for the Trade Union Congress. Could not recommend reading this more, it presents an in depth view of how the social model of disability interacts with the workplace for autistic individuals:
Scope, the disability charity, covers the social model of disability in more breadth from a variety of disability advocates in this beautifully straightforward video:
Actually amazing resource on female autism… It’s considerably underdiagnosed in AFAB people (note: the data lacks a distinction between sex and gender), so this is a really interesting and educational read.
The stigma around autism is, like most stigma’s, incredibly pointless. Life is a spectrum and we all have traits, and autism is just a name for having this particular group of traits, to some degree, and that is okay, because we are not all the same, and it definitely doesn’t mean there is, or has to be, a hierarchy involved. In fact, the talents of autism are often hidden or shamed, because of needless stigma.
Another very important factor to remember is that, even in the images in the blog post about symptoms, it’s illustrated with only white women, and that is reflective of the general norm. Alongside the higher male-coding of autism, it is also massively under-diagnosed and recognised in black and latinx people, often mistaken for Borderline Personality Disorder or psychosis. (More on that in its own post later.)
Amazingly educational post by tumblr user andreashettle; about how deafness covers more than people with zero hearing, and how music can be made more inclusive with the addition of lyrics. It’s actually ridiculous how misrepresented disability is in mainstream media and education, resulting in many people not understanding how blurred the spectrum of ability really is, and what disability really entails, and how to genuinely make a difference to being inclusive. A similar point would be the ability of some wheelchair users to stand or even walk short distances, and how this too is erased in popular media, resulting in public ignorance and assumptions about “lazy” wheelchair users. More on that later.
