Fandoms are Beautiful
they make
us
laugh
and they
make us
cry
but they teach us love
hope
and friendship
and that even
when
we fall
they will always be there
to pick us back up
so get up
brush yourself off
and smile
we’ll always be here to catch you when you fall
Why does this not have more notes?
#FOREVER REBLOG
this for real made me tear up
Johnlock–it’s not just for fans anymore. (Sherlock SPOILERS)
You know, I have never been one to actually buy into fannish ships. I mean, they’re fun to run with, and it’s fun to take things from the show and reinterpret them with a different spin.
But really and truly, I had not, previous to this season, believed that Sherlock and John canonically had a Thing. When the writers called ‘no homo,’ I believed them.
But after this episode, I no longer ship Sherlock and John ‘fannishly.’ I no longer buy the writers’ insistence that these characters are not attracted to each other. I don’t think it’s the people who want a queer reading they’re lying to. I think the ones they’re lying to are the homophobes they (or the BBC) are afraid they’d upset with an explicit queer relationship.
Fine, we may never see them snogging explicitly on screen. But it’s IN THE TEXT.
There was an old record player stashed behind Sherlock’s chair at the base of the bookcase. He couldn’t remember where it came from; a remnant from a case or perhaps a permanently borrowed item from the family house. All he knew was that it was there, and at some point he had decided that it needed records for it to play. A music shop in Soho offered him free repairs for his violin when and if he should need them, and on one visit he noticed it housed an impressive collection of records, old and new. Upon expressing an interest in starting a collection but unsure of where to begin, the owner insisted on a few of her favourites (‘Free as well of course for you, Mr Holmes’). He had taken them home and been pleased with her selection, as had John, and so he returned time and again irrespective of the needs of his violin to acquire more for his eclectic accumulation.
He found he had become rather attached to the old thing. As much as he enjoyed the ease and refinement of modern technology, he had always been able to appreciate the charms and elegance of the retro and the aged.
He possessed another item which held such a spell over him. A scuffed silver box of an ornate design, lined with velvet rarely seen these days. A little box, no larger than the length of his hand, that John Watson had never seen, though he had searched for it’s contents on many occasions.
The player had remained silent since his return and he hadn’t seen his little box in far longer. That night, however, he would make use of them both. He pulled a record from the alphabetised line on the bottom self of the bookcase, let the sweet tones of the singers voice fill his ears, before sitting himself in his chair and opening the box.
It seemed fitting, surrounding himself with the old and familiar things in his life. Things that had been with him for years, things that he clung to for comfort.
After the slight prickling sensation in the crook of his elbow faded, he raised his eyes to the vacant seat across from him, and pushed down the plunger of the syringe.
There was guilt, and shame, and loneliness.
And then the world slipped away, wrapping him in a darkness, as it all slowed down.
——————
I’m having a lot of post-Sign of Three feelings. Rumer wasn’t helping.
For years, I opened my 11th-grade U.S. history classes by asking students, “What’s the name of that guy they say discovered America?” A few students might object to the word “discover,” but they all knew the fellow I was talking about. “Christopher Columbus!” several called out in unison.
“Right. So who did he find when he came here?” I asked. Usually, a few students would say, “Indians,” but I asked them to be specific: “Which nationality? What are their names?”
Silence.
In more than 30 years of teaching U.S. history and guest-teaching in others’ classes, I’ve never had a single student say, “Taínos.” How do we explain that? We all know the name of the man who came here from Europe, but none of us knows the name of the people who were here first—and there were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of them. Why haven’t you heard of them?
This ignorance is an artifact of historical silencing—rendering invisible the lives and stories of entire peoples.
[…] In an interview with Barbara Miner, included in Rethinking Columbus, Suzan Shown Harjo of the Morning Star Institute, who is Creek and Cheyenne, said: “As Native American peoples in this red quarter of Mother Earth, we have no reason to celebrate an invasion that caused the demise of so many of our people, and is still causing destruction today.” After all, Columbus did not merely “discover,” he took over. He kidnapped Taínos, enslaved them—“Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold,” Columbus wrote—and “punished” them by ordering that their hands be cut off or that they be chased down by vicious attack dogs, if they failed to deliver the quota of gold that Columbus demanded. One eyewitness accompanying Columbus wrote that it “did them great damage, for a dog is the equal of 10 men against the Indians.”
Corporate textbooks and children’s biographies of Columbus included none of this and were filled with misinformation and distortion. But the deeper problem was the subtext of the Columbus story: it’s OK for big nations to bully small nations, for white people to dominate people of color, to celebrate the colonialists with no attention paid to the perspectives of the colonized, to view history solely from the standpoint of the winners.
Bill Bigelow, Rethinking Columbus: Towards a True People’s History
Just your random reminder that this is a banned book.
In January of this year, district officials came into Tucson’s high schools, confiscated the offending books, put them in boxes, and carted them away. These books were taken while classes were in session, so that the teachers and students wouldn’t miss the point.
What’s even more terrifying is that their actions were in compliance with an Arizona state law.
HB 2281 has terminated Tucson’s Mexican American Studies program, a virtually one of a kind social studies and humanities high school program that seeks to close the “achievement gap” by encouraging Tucson students (of whom at least 60% are Latino) to look at American history critically in regards to race, gender, and ethnicity.
But Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal will have none of it, and threatened to withdraw 14 million dollars in state funding to the Tucson Unified School District if it failed to comply with the law, which criminalizes, among other things, “any courses or classes that…advocate ethnic solidarity…”
And so hundreds of students have had their curriculum literally snatched away from them at mid-year; their teachers are now required by law to assign them more “traditional” reading material that ignores the racial, gender, and class biases that have so tragically shaped our country.
Another gentle reminder that there are *ahem* various places I could be arrested for teaching this to you in school.
(via abandonthefort)
This is just like in the Palestinian territories where teachers are banned and can be sanctioned, fined, or imprisoned by the Israeli government for teaching significant events of Palestinian history like the nakba.
(via tevelum)
