How FUCKED is this

[LadyJeanne]

So what's my excuse?

I worked, hard, for 20 years. At least three times I pulled a company I worked for's fat out of the fire.

What do I get for it? 'Doesn't get along well with fellow employees', 'Not properly respectful to those in authourity', 'unable to properly process paper work'.

No wonder I went insane. It became too obvious that no one gave a shit about my work, or my ability to get to the heart of the problem, or my adeptness at seeing a solution, or my willingness to work until the job was done.

It's been over ten years now. I've become inured to the fact that I'm never going to have a decent job again. The lack of letters after my name plus my long bout of mental illness guarantees that. Hell I don't even have clothes that I can wear to an interview and can't afford to anymore.

You look at life through the lens I described above and you might start to understand why some people stop caring about right and wrong.

What I understand from your life story is that you didn't stop caring about right and wrong. You haven't started breaking into people's houses and cars, you haven't started stealing, and you won't.

You've retained your dignity and respect for yourself and others.

 

[rgraham666]

What I understand from your life story is that you didn't stop caring about right and wrong. You haven't started breaking into people's houses and cars, you haven't started stealing, and you won't.

You've retained your dignity and respect for yourself and others.

And a fat lot of good it's done me, hasn't it?

 

[rgraham666]

Sche? try this.

Go through doormouse original post and replace 'abbo' with 'Welsh' or 'dyke'.

 

[scheherazade_79]

Sche? try this.

Go through doormouse original post and replace 'abbo' with 'Welsh' or 'dyke'.

If the person who'd broken into his car or house or whatever it was three times was Welsh or a dyke, then I wouldn't blame him in the least bit.

 

[kendo1]

Luckily the Welsh can't get out.

 

[scheherazade_79]

Luckily the Welsh can't get out.

Think again, boyo I was up in them fields of yours last night playin' with the sheep

By the way, and I'm saying this in complete honesty - you know the joke about the Welsh and inbreeding? Well guess what! I'm inbred! My parents are cousins

 

[LadyJeanne]

And a fat lot of good it's done me, hasn't it?

Well, it's certainly done ME a lot of good, as well as the others in the AH, who have been blessed to know your kindness, support, and humor, your creative imagination, and sexy porn. I imagine those you know you personally also appreciate you for who you are.

As to what good you've done for yourself, you know you've not hurt others and you have nothing to be ashamed of (and nothing to be jailed for!). If you lived in San Francisco, you'd be hanging out in bottomless cup coffeeshops and calling yourself a starving writer (without apology or explanation). If you volunteered every now and then with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence or walked the annual Bay to Breakers Run, you'd be as well respected as any techie, engineer, or PhD out here.

 

[fifty5]

Lots of stuff here, almost all laudable one way or another.

But...

1. For the Mouse - so sorry you suffered!

2. For Shereads - I'm with you. Of all the people I've come across in more than half a century, I can only remember 3 who were actually evil, all the other 'bad' ones were more victims of circumstance.

3. For everyone else - I can see where you're coming from.

4. For me - it's a long time since our house got broken into. The perpetrators were (to use a label) "white trash". Since then, we've kept one or two dogs (see the current av for the latest 2) and haven't suffered again. Meanwhile, our home is now surrounded by "Pakis" - and with at least one, we exchange Christmas/Eid cards. The stereotypes really don't work for individuals.

 

[shereads]

IBut again, when there's a clear cause for annoyance, how is "abbo bastards" any different from "blue-eyed bastards", "freckled bastards", or "ring-fingered bastards".

That's easy. Try to insult someone by referring to her as "blue eyed." She'll assume that you're jealous of her blue eyes. We don't live in a world where having blue eyes is widely considered to be a sign of a inferiority.

You could drop the word "bastard" from all four examples, and only one of the four would still be an insult. Like spic or nigger. White people don't use those words to compliment people. "What an intelligent, attractive spic." They are words that are only used as slurs, except when used among themselves by the people they're aimed at, in an attempt to diffuse the power of the word by claiming it for their own.

As Cloudy pointed out, the children of minorities learn to be ashamed of who they are just by reading the signals that are out there. If your ancestors were famous for losing everything they had and being herded onto reservations like animals, or if you are only a few generations removed from the only segment of society to be brought here in chains, complete with bills of sale, then you face challenges no white person will ever face. You can list examples of injustices toward white people until you turn blue, but for the foreseeable future there will never be shame in having been born white.

No matter how many special protections and affirmative action initiatives might be accorded to minorities, there isn't a white person in this forum who is so envious of them that we wish we could change places.

 

[CharleyH]

I don't care if I sound racist after tonight.

THe abbo little bastards across the road just smashed my car window and broke into my home for the THIRD time.

Well, my home for the first time. I'm three hours from home so can't even see what the little assholes stole. And I'm not covered by insurance grrrrrrr

My neighbour just called me. Not a fucking thing I can do until I get home... thankfully I have a convoy of brother-in-laws all driving there with me.

God it makes me sick that some little c#@t can smash a window and just help themself.

If I'm not online for a while, it's because I'm not in the fucking chatting mood. It's just thankful I had my tower with me getting it upgraded

Poor girl. Nothing is fucked, even when ... and even if. No, nothing is fucked unless you fuck.

Edit to add: but I am an eternal fucktimist

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

1. Breaking into someone's house, causing damage and stealing things.

Pretty low, criminal, bad.

2. Calling a group of people "abbo little bastards" in the heat of the moment

Pretty low, circumstantial, unpopular.

3. Calling someone a bigot without truly knowing the exact emotional circumstances of the moment.

Pretty low, presumptuous, definitely not the first time people jumped to conclusions about others.

 

[shereads]

Pretty safe. Pretty white.

 

[cloudy]

That's easy. Try to insult someone by referring to her as "blue eyed." She'll assume that you're jealous of her blue eyes. We don't live in a world where having blue eyes is widely considered to be a sign of a inferiority.

You could drop the word "bastard" from all four examples, and only one of the four would still be an insult. Like spic or nigger. White people don't use those words to compliment people. "What an intelligent, attractive spic." They are words that are only used as slurs, except when used among themselves by the people they're aimed at, in an attempt to diffuse the power of the word by claiming it for their own.

As Cloudy pointed out, the children of minorities learn to be ashamed of who they are just by reading the signals that are out there. If your ancestors were famous for losing everything they had and being herded onto reservations like animals, or if you are only a few generations removed from the only segment of society to be brought here in chains, complete with bills of sale, then you face challenges no white person will ever face. You can list examples of injustices toward white people until you turn blue, but for the foreseeable future there will never be shame in having been born white.

No matter how many special protections and affirmative action initiatives might be accorded to minorities, there isn't a white person in this forum who is so envious of them that we wish we could change places.

Thank you, Sher.

It's very hard for someone who's not been on the receiving end of those types of things on a regular basis to truly understand how hurtful it is, and over time, how demoralizing it is to a person - sense of worth as a human becomes near nonexistant. I understand very well the hopelessness that some feel. There but for the grace......you know?

Sometimes it's the very subtle things that end up doing the most harm....intentional or not.

 

[minsue]

[snip - for personal reasons]

I don't mean to minimize what happened to you, Door. I just really wish I'd never seen this thread.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

Pretty safe. Pretty white.

I sometimes wonder what it'd be like to be white.

 

[yui]

I sometimes wonder what it'd be like to be white.

Me, too. At least you get to be brown. I'm freaking yellow!

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

I will say, being whiter is advantageous. I don't go out in the sun very much (my picture is about as white as I get, which is sorta tan-tinted), because I'll get DARK really quick if I do. Never had a sunburn.

As a darker skinned person, I have a harder time getting some things done--socially. As a lighter skinned person, I find it is very easy to rise to the top of the scene. Expanding that out to professional things, I've only ever been promoted during winter-times... I get better reactions in interviews or conferences when I'm paler. I get way fewer questions as to my ethnicity (I got asked if I was Italian a lot growing up).

On the otherhand, I rode a comfortable train of minority scholarships in college; and my graduate work has a 3/4 cost waiver right off the bat. Being a minority is profitable. It just is. There's way more money for minority students than for caucasian students (on the individual level), and that money is easier to get.

 

[cantdog]

Love, cloudy

I wish we could have known one another. You're a pip, as my grandfather woulda said, and a regular lady.

He was a great man, and I always believed him.

 

[Delicious Blonde]

... anybody else wonder if the cute mouse got any of her stuff back?...

 

[cantdog]

Colonialism is far from dead, too. This sort of adventuring our country is into right now exacerbates the thing.

 

[shereads]

I sometimes wonder what it'd be like to be white.

Me too. I'm one-eighth beige. You walk into a job interview and at first, you're treated as if you're white, but then the interviewer gives you "the look" and says something like, "Do you have....any ancestors who are less than entirely...How shall I put this? Are you white? Or do you just look white?"

If I could bring myself to lie, I think I could pass for white. But the truth is, my great-great-great grandmother married a so-called "Black Irishman." Her family were White Russians. They never forgave her. In a sense, she blackened the family name and the family bloodline.

 

[scheherazade_79]

If your ancestors were famous for losing everything they had and being herded onto reservations like animals, or if you are only a few generations removed from the only segment of society to be brought here in chains, complete with bills of sale, then you face challenges no white person will ever face. You can list examples of injustices toward white people until you turn blue, but for the foreseeable future there will never be shame in having been born white.

I wasn't aware that the aborigines had been brought over to Australia in chains, but I'll overlook that point for now.

As for my ancestors... well, my country was invaded by a colonial power hundreds of years ago. To begin with it was just a case of losing political control and territory, but by the 19th century things had begun to take a sinister new direction. New schemes were contrived to stop people from speaking the native Welsh and begin speaking English, which was pretty much a foreign language to most Welsh people in those days. In school, if a child happened to utter so much as a word of Welsh, they'd receive a beating and be forced to stand in a corner for the rest of the day, with a big board hung around their heads that read "Welsh Not". Welsh culture pretty much faced the same fate as the language - gradually it was crushed out.

Ironically, thousands of my ancestors were brought to Australia in chains when the country was a penal colony. The aborigines, as far as I know, were spared that indignity as they were already there when their homeland became colonised.

Welsh roads were purchased by large English firms, who charged tolls for crossing them. Very often a farmer would have to pass along five such roads, paying a toll on each one on his way to market. When the Welsh made peaceful protests to these toll roads, dressing up in the middle of the night and breaking down the toll gates that were crippling them, the English brought in the militia.
Wales was rich in coal resources, so English firms bought those all up as well.
While there were plenty of regulations governing coalmines, for some reason the English mine owners didn't bother to implement them in Wales.

While 1966 is renowned for being the year that England won the football world cup, it's notorious in Wales as the year in which 144 people, 116 of them children under the age of 12, were killed when a badly-maintained slag heap from the nearby coal mine crashed onto their school. Although it was proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that the English coal board had been negligent, not a single person so much as lost his job.

My great uncle was a poet, who beat all odds to win a scholarship to Oxford. He was a really sweet, quiet guy, who'd come from a poor Welsh farming background. In over 60 years of marriage he didn't once raise his voice or accuse his wife of doing anything wrong. Yet at Oxford in the 1930s he was given hell by the other students for his accent and his parents' lack of money.

Things have changed since then - but not all that much, because I still got a pretty hard time over my accent in the university I went to.

Today the Welsh language and culture are soaring to new highs, but that's more a result of my country's tenacity than sinking to anti-social depths and making other people's lives a misery. Under the circumstances we could quite easily have turned into the people that fly passenger planes into buildings, or turn quiet neighbourhoods into no-go zones from hell. But we didn't.

So although my ancestors aren't famous for their struggle, the struggle is still there, nervertheless. Most of the foreign people I meet have been successfully convinced that Wales is actually in England.

I still don't understand the problem with calling someone a name that reflects who they are. There are so many people who have the name of Jones or Davies in Wales that added descriptors are an accepted way of life. In my grandmother's village there are plenty of people willing to introduce themselves as "Gypo Jones" or "Davies the Black", "Mrs Davies Daddy" (a woman who called her husband 'daddy' even in her 70s), "Fattie Jones", "Synagogue Jones" and "Miss Davies Eagle Eyes" (I think it was because she had an overactive thyroid).

I can imagine that many of you have you mouths opened aghast right now - either that or you're tutting and shaking your heads. But these people would actually phone up and introduce themselves like this.

I don't know. Maybe I'm not in a position to comment about this, but if that's the case it's not because I don't know what it's like to come from a minority.

 

[shereads]

... anybody else wonder if the cute mouse got any of her stuff back?...

Not a chance. Once those people have stolen something, they can't figure out how to use it. They can't give it back because they've all got this chip on their shoulder. So whatever it is, they usually burn it or bury it or eat it. (Those weren't dingos that ate Meryl Streep's baby.)

 

[ishtat]

OZ Bits

http://image26.webshots.com/27/5/22/86/304052286maNhUg_ph.jpg
This is the Australian possum. Endangered at home, but ninety million strong in little New Zealand. They call 'em 'pists' because their vowels are shifted.

In the hotels, we were 'gists.'

That movie was jist about six, and so on.

That Possum isn't endangered. In fact we have a pair (Brush tailed possums) living in our roof in Sydney as does both of our neighbors. They're pretty common and provided they don't pee on the ceiling are no problem.They are about as big as a cat and sound like a herd of elephants trampling around. Oz has :

20 million people
40 million roos
50 million wallabies
120 million sheep
Zillions of possums
snakes Crocs & sundry nasties.
200,000 wild camels & 2 million wild horses.

In the past 130 years we have made more large animals extinct than any other nation on earth. That list of extinct large animals includes the entire population of Aboriginal people in Tasmania who were shot on sight by settlers as a matter of government policy. Last one died in 1870 only 65 years after first Tasmanian settlement. Most Australians are more ashamed of the fact that until the 1940's we shot 250,000 koalas a year for their fur.

About 90% of Victorian Aborigines were similarly exterminated by disease or shooting in the 19th century.
In 1788 when Australia was first settled by Europeans there were about 400,000 aborigines, By 1960 their numbers were down to about 60,000. We rewarded them by recognising them as citizens in their own land - in 1967!!!

In most instances if you want to know the problems Aborigines have just think native Americans and substitute Aborigine.

One oddity I have noticed is that the Native Maori people of Ateroa ( NewZealand) have some significant similar problems they are nowhere near as bad possibly because the Maori are very good at sticking up for themselves (they will fight like hell) wheras the aborigines have on the whole been very gentle people

 

[cloudy]

One oddity I have noticed is that the Native Maori people of Ateroa ( NewZealand) have some significant similar problems they are nowhere near as bad possibly because the Maori are very good at sticking up for themselves (they will fight like hell) wheras the aborigines have on the whole been very gentle people

Oops, there goes our reputation as savages.

(and I sorta liked it, too)