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Do you ever ask yourself..?
"Why can't I look like this?"..?
I do. :P Well, anyway, moving right along... MoveOn's contest to come up with the best Beat Bush ad campaign produces some fire-breathing doozies -- and the Democrats should pay attention.
Teasing and taunting led girl to end her life The last article I posted seemed "funny" (in a "gotcha" kind of way), because the victims got their "day in court" and made those who stood by and did nothing pay a high price. But sometimes the results of teachers' and administrators' inaction are deadly and tragicand nobody wins. This article describes a tragedy that took place several years ago now, but I just came across it today. Together with the previous one, it illustrates a critical concept: whether it's disability, race, religion, sexual orientation, or just being "different", teasing can hurt teens so deeply that they take their own lives, andas it took a debacle like Columbine to show the publicsometimes even those of others. High-dollar lawsuits, suicides, murders, and yet it seems that enough people still aren't getting it... I do not believe that children or teenagers (or any people) are "naturally" cruel to one another. They learn whatever cruelty they know from the society in which they are formed. And yet the country goes right on electing leaders to our highest offices who think that making discriminatory statements and laws against those with minority ways of being and acting is just fine and jolly dandy... How many teenage suicides? How many brutal murders? How many hate crimes? How many Matthew Sheppards? How many Tempest Smiths? How many Brandon Teenas and Gwen Arujos? How many defaced synagogues and mosques? How many more shattered lives before people realize that "One Way" is NO WAY to live together as a society??!! What will it take for people to see through such folly as "Focus on the Family"'s shabby defense of its dangerous anti-gay rhetoric as "simply promoting the traditional family" or its inane argument that "all crime is hate crime"? "Crimes motivated by bigotry usually arise not out of the pathological rantings and ravings of a few deviant types in organized hate groups, but out of the very mainstream of society." Jack Levin and Jack McDevitt, Hate Crimes: The Rising Tide of Bigotry and Bloodshed
California School District Settles Harassment Suit by Gay Students New York Times: Education After a five-year legal battle, a school district near San Jose has agreed to pay six gay students $1.1 million and provide mandatory awareness training for school staff members. ...
It's my high school(!)...hehehe Two Fathers, With One Happy to Stay at Home New York Times An emerging population of gay men are not only raising children but are also committed to the idea that one parent should leave the workplace to do it... Blind, Deaf People Object To Being Compared To Bush Administration BLIND, DEAF PEOPLE OBJECT TO BEING COMPARED TO BUSH ADMINISTRATION Demand Apology From Paul O'Neill After former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill likened President George W. Bush in his Cabinet meetings to a "blind man in a roomful of deaf people," representatives of the blind and the deaf demanded a prompt and total apology from the former administration official. ... For his part, President Bush today released a statement comparing himself to "rubber" and Mr. O'Neill to "glue." gustatory: Dictionary.com Word of the Day Word of the Day for Monday January 12, 2004 In a land of ice and chains and endemic suffering, caviar provided gustatory salvation from grief and black days, a sensual escape from temporal woes. Why . . . would something that provides such gustatory pleasure turn out to be supposedly the worst thing you could ever eat? P.S.
George W. Bush
is "a miserable failure on foreign
policy and on the economy and he's got to be replaced."
George Bush Has Got to Go! *** Flush Bush! *** Anyone But Bush in 2004! *** Have you taken a good look at George W. Bush lately? |
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—> All of this rambling is © 2004 Madeline Althoff <—