Letters to the Editor
firefly82
Published Letters: 288 Editor's Choice: 30
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@ Anonymous
[Read the article: Here's looking at you, "Kid"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"...but many do have problems with substance abuse and/or mental illness, particularly mood disorders. Creative people can put their work first and the people in their lives second. They can be stubborn, self-absorbed and temperamental, as well as just plain selfish."
Right, because normal non-creative people are never like this.
Creative people go into the arts, despite--and yeah, sometimes because of--all the problems associated with the field, because they simply must to feel complete. Not because their parents "let" them.
I know some substance-abusing and narcissistic creative people. I know more who are kind, decent, and generous. All of them are genuine and ambitious, and mental illness splits pretty evenly between the two groups.
I feel bad for this kid, with the weight of so much attention on her shoulders. Real talent needs privacy and space to mess around and mess up in order to develop. If she's meant to be an artist, whatever that will mean to *her,* then she will be regardless of her parents.
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Really, John?
[Read the article: How did the T get in LGBT?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"A lot of gays have been scratching their heads for 10 years trying to figure out what they have in common with transsexuals, or at the very least why transgendered people qualify as our siblings rather than our cousins."
Try this: "First they came for...." You know how that one ends.
Now "they" are finally starting to get over you, but voila! They have an even stranger and more vulnerable, and less visible--therefore easier to ridicule and dehumanize to the ignorant--population to kick around and call an abomination.
And can't we stop wondering why *people*, any people, have to "qualify" as anything? Other than able to do their jobs, that is.
As a gay man, you have to wonder why all of us who have ever struggled for survival/acceptance/security among the fearful and often violent majority should stand with anyone who's shared that battle, just on a different front?
Anyone who has, and/or who stands up to protect liberty, protection under the law, and the right to earn a living for anyone else, qualifies as my sibling. How's that?
All that said, I reluctantly support passage of ENDA without the T. Your sections on how cultural conservatives have managed the campaign of fear and hate that they have were brilliant and clarifying. Yes, passage of this, in any substantial form (but not an empty, toothless one, as you say), would put this nation on notice that this is the direction things are going from now on.
But you're awfully ready to say that since gays don't understand the transgendered and what they have to do with your human rights, employers and legislators don't need to, either.
They need to. Right now. But they won't, so I'm all up for taking what we *can* get right now.
There's a poem by Karen Finley called "The Black Sheep" which explains more simply and elegantly than I can what in the world we all have to do with each other.
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First they came for
[Read the article: How did the T get in LGBT?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The saying concerns any human tendency to disown or ignore injustice towards others because you think it doesn't have anything to do with you. Just because it was written during and in reference to the Holocaust does not make it applicable only to the Holocaust. Which, sadly, was hardly unique in human history.
And I am categorically NOT saying that ENDA without the transgendered included will be like the Holocaust. I'm saying that in every battle over human rights, big or small, we all have a stake in each other, whether we like it or not.
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First they came for
[Read the article: How did the T get in LGBT?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The saying concerns any human tendency to disown or ignore injustice towards others because you think it doesn't have anything to do with you. Just because it was written during and in reference to the Holocaust does not make it applicable only to the Holocaust. Which, sadly, was hardly unique in human history.
And I am categorically NOT saying that ENDA without the transgendered included will be like the Holocaust. I'm saying that in every battle over human rights, big or small, we all have a stake in each other, whether we like it or not.
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Lavender
[Read the article: Life will kill you]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Seconding Silenced, yes, lavender oil was revealed in the New England Journal of Medicine a year or two ago to be able to spur breast development in boys who were regularly exposed to it. It breaks down to a molecule very similar to estrogen. When the parents of the affected boys were instructed to make sure there was no lavender or tea tree oil in their soap or bath products, the effects went away.
http://www.medicinenet.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=79274
I was similarly disappointed by the lack of citations and specificity of this article. But I do think that there's a larger valid point, that a lot of the commercial products and conveniences that we're told that we need...well, we really don't.
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Some of Cary's best ever
[Read the article: We're sick of Southern California! Should we move to the Midwest? ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I would only add that it depends where in the Midwest. Contrary to irritatingly popular urban belief, the Midwest is not one big homogeneous plain. Chicago is not Kansas City is not Wichita is not Iowa City is not Lawrence, KS.
Lawrence is heaven, though.
And one BIG thing to be conscious of is that most of the Midwest has no effective public transportation. Don't know if you're driving people, but it's hard to imagine how much you depend on public transit until you don't have it, and how much its presence or lack affects a city's character. I'm routinely heartbroken how the neighborhood where I grew up is increasingly just a massive road- and upscale stripmall building enterprise every time I go back to visit.