This is such an important and genuinely terrifying post. I could completely go off on the rise of anti-science, but for now I’ll just add: it isn’t just boomers that get deceived. This is a warning to all of us.
Pay ATTENTION to what you are being told. If you think you cannot be deceived, you leave yourself open to deception. Question, doubt, research research research. Learn about your personal biases, dig up any subconscious cognitive dissonance. Keep an eye on your mind.
I was gunna put this in the tags but it’s a lot. When i first started going through the process of getting a diagnosis, i was labelled with ODD. I immediately took issue with this, it seemed like an unfair diagnosis based entirely on the session the psychiatrist had with my parents (which mostly consisted of “my child is being really difficult on purpose”), and Hoo Boy when i tell you ODD immediately strips you of your ability to call out anyone on anything, that would be an understatement. I couldn’t even disagree or bring up my concerns about the validity of MY OWN DIAGNOSIS without it being labelled as oppositional defiance. Whenever i displayed any negative emotion the “treatments” did so much more harm than good. When you label someone as ‘defiant’ (ugh), when that word is put on their medical record, that person is never allowed to complain about anything again. Knowing that POC are disproportionately affected with this diagnosis makes me feel sick, i can only imagine what’s being swept under the rug as someone just being “defiant to authority”, not even just in the medical field but as justification for police brutality and mass incarceration. When i say medical racism kills people, this is what i mean.
that uniquely american cultural drive to preserve the corpse after death…. utterly horrid I tell you
not to go all Anti Capitalist here but like. making people feel like they’ve ‘failed’ their dead loved ones if they don’t put their chemically preserved corpses in a multi-thousand dollar hermetically sealed vault is absolutely fucking ghoulish the whole industry is built around taking advantage of grieving families. like it’s such a morbid topic but for real normalize decay… normalize the idea that a corpse, while an incredibly important thing, is temporary and isn’t meant to exist forever… normalize the transience of the body… also fuck every person who’s ever tried to wring money out of a grieving person by convincing them to by a fucking. waterproof burial vault. man
When we’re dead we’re supposed to become nourishment for fungi, bacteria and tens of thousands of insects and whether something catches and eats them or they live their own full lives and die, that’s how everything that built our bodies gets to go back to being built into new bodies for new things. The amount of nutrients sequestered away right now as embalmed bodies is probably tremendous and not good.
please also remember that this is specifically an American Christian thing. Most other religions have pretty set standards of not embalming, and strongly discourage elaborate burials.
