Eventful events are eventful

As promised, a long-delayed blog post!

These past couple of weeks seem to have been conspiring against me getting online again. But I found a place that actually fixes power jacks for cheap and without a bunch of caveats, so here I am again! Yay! The little beast is working better than it has in years, so I am hopeful of maybe now having it for some years to come yet.

It’s been frustrating not having the laptop since work has been so busy I haven’t been able to do much more than sometimes clean out my in-box of emails that didn’t absolutely need to be answered and mark everything in my RSS feed as “read”. If you said something that you were really hoping I in particular would read, and I haven’t responded, give me a holler. Sorry for the inconvenience.

At least, the laptop woes coincided with the weekend Carapace and I had planned to go to TRF. I have some pictures, and I will post a few later if all goes as planned. We camped, as usual. As is not usual, the weather was as close to perfect as it can get for a Texas autumn and Carapace managed to have not one single significant seizure! I, sadly, had my usual allergies keeping the entire campground awake (ha! That’ll teach those guys who put their tent right up against ours!) and, despite my efforts to plan, perimenopause played the hormone roulette wheel and came up red. Still, that did not negate the very important experience I had using a pair of hiking sticks instead of just my cane, or even pair of canes. With the hiking sticks, I escaped having notable leg and hip pain for the first time in years–and that despite my period! It had gotten to be so bad previously that I wasn’t even looking forward to going. So, I highly recommend getting yourself some if you are a cane-user and have started to miss out on events that require a lot of walking.

My niece is out of the woods as far as the overdose is concerned. She’s facing a long stint in psyc rehab, though. She prefers that to going home, I know, since the home environment is currently unstable due primarily to financial strains. There are other issues, too, but I don’t like talking out of school about other people’s personal lives. The one thing I will say is that, my family is in denial about how pervasive mental illness is in our family. It isn’t just one individual with a problem. Most of us are untreated, uncounseled, and our coping skills are ad hoc, to put it nicely. I really admire Glenn Close and her sister, Jessie, for their decision to speak out about mental illness in their family. I hope that it will encourage other families, including my my own, to take positive action and be more supportive of each other emotionally. (And, in case my family stumbles onto this and puts two and two together, I love you all. Just, wouldn’t it be nice to stop pretending and start dealing with reality instead?)

In more horrifying news, a coworker of mine has an aunt who is likely to not emerge from the coma that her husband put her into. It is a classic case of an abuser first isolating his victim, and then escalating the abuse. I am astounded that the husband is out on bond. How can this be? Why isn’t domestic abuse taken more seriously?

Oh, and finally, much less universally depressing but potentially more annoying for me personally, it looks like I have a torn rotator cuff. And that I am actually going to have to do something about it, what with not being able to use my left arm being a real nuisance, what with me being left-handed and the driver’s side door being on the left in the US. I don’t know if it will mean surgery and then PT, or just PT, but, either way, I have a feeling I am facing a lot of PT. And I hate PT. So, expect a lot of griping.

Against Stigma

Over at Writhe Safely, Flawedplan says what I have been thinking about the liberal response to incidents like the NIU shooting in WaPo Good, Huffpo Bad.

Don’t draw the wrong lessons from Virginia Tech’s misfortune

What happened Monday at Virginia Tech was deplorable. I have nothing but concern for the students of that institution, and for their friends and family. Well, there is something else. They have my respect.

From everything I have read, not only did the students and faculty behave bravely while under attack, students and faculty had been as proactive as they could. Professors made a point of referring him for counseling and students tried to reach out to him. Seemingly, everyone recognized that he was greatly disturbed.

And that is what the news is focusing on. Mentally-ill person on campus! The evil ADA won’t let schools and workplaces throw out the crazies! Virginia had just passed a law that colleges can’t expell students simply for having a mental illness or seeking counseling. You know it’s true and important, because the New York Times says so. Quick, everyone, jump on the Lock Away the Nutters bandwagon while there’s still room! After all, we just can’t ever know which one of them will “snap.”

I suggest that the NYT take a deep breath and consider the real problem. The real problem? How about that Cho had been picked up for stalking two women? That he had been tossed out of class for taking inappropriate videos of female classmates and intimidating them? Yes, Cho had committed crimes which were all the justification VT would have needed to expell him. So why didn’t they? Apparently, no charges were filed, the girls involved being simply relieved to put distance between themselves and him. Did they get any encouragement from VT to file charges? I’m guessing the answer to that is “no.” One campus counselor is quoted as saying “It is very difficult to predict when what someone perceives as stalking, is stalking.” And the hospital that ultimately evaluated Cho as posing a danger to others also let him go.

In the light of recent blogosphere talk about Kathy Sierra and the Imus incident, I would hope more people are alert to the degree to which threats against women are blown off as irrelevant, with women being advised to simply grow a thicker skin. What if, instead of considering Cho’s actions toward women as vague and not worth follow-up, VT had been encouraged and allowed by law to expell Cho and press charges for repeated intimidation?

OK, you’re not convinced. You really don’t care if a few, or even many, women are made to fear for their lives by a creepy guy who stalks them and takes unauthorized pictures up their skirts.

How about that he was an arsonist? What was wrong with VT’s administration or, perhaps, its police department, that it didn’t act immediately to have a fire bug removed?

The point is, we don’t need to abandon recent efforts at inclusion and de-stigmatizing of people with mental illness. What we need is to take violent crime seriously, and understand that violent crime does indeed include intimidation, stalking, and arson. They aren’t youthful errors. They aren’t jokes. They aren’t just little things that should be ignored. They are steps on a ladder of violent escalation.

I hope that all colleges will learn from this, not that mentally ill people are dangerous, but that crime is dangerous.