One of the stories my grandmother did tell me about the Blitz was-
– there was this girl she knew who was apparently so chill about the prospect of imminent death or maiming that she couldn’t be arsed to get out of bed and go to the air raid shelter one night. So her mother dragged her out to it, made her sleep in there, and the next morning this girl’s bed had been torn to pieces by bombs.
(Sure, that sounds pretty stupid, but it’s somehow also a good example of give-no-fuckery.)
Welcome to the Haile Sand Fort. (It’s not small, it’s just far away!) This is where my great-grandfather Edward worked during World War II as a blacksmith building the submarine nets.
It was pretty dangerous work, since Cleethorpes was constantly being bombed by the Germans. My grandmother (the one who just turned 90!) told me that she worked in a shoe shop during the war, and she turned up for work one morning to find the whole thing gone, and other times she would emerge from the air raid shelter to find whole streets wiped out. Cleethorpes lost about 196 people in all to air raids, I think. Most of them to butterfly bombs.
What life was like out on the fort I don’t know, but I do know that people are strongly discouraged from trying to walk to it from Cleethorpes beach, even though my grandmother says she used to do it when she was a girl.
Also if you have £350,000 lying around, you can buy the fort! It went up for sale in February.
If I could somehow find everyone who ever bullied me and ask them why they targeted me, not a single one would say it was because I was autistic. None of them even knew I was.
Instead they’d say it was because I liked Pokemon too much after it stopped being cool, or my clothes looked ridiculous and I wore the same pair of jeans 3 days a week, or that I was just weird/nerdy/unpopular. In many, many cases, that is what neurodiversity looks like. Not someone with an obvious disability, but someone who’s just weird.
I see so many allistics and neurotypicals on here that claim to be anti-ableism but turn around and make jokes at the expense of people who are eccentric but harmless.
If you’re an allistic that claims to support autistic people, but then you turn around and make fun of the woman who wears a bizarre outfit or the guy who speaks in a monotone or the teenager who carries a teddy bear everywhere, you’re a bad ally and I don’t trust you.
This is why I’m really, really done with tumblr’s ‘lol nerd’ humour. You know the sort I mean, right? Stuff like this (that’s one of the milder examples). It’s always done under the banner of ‘well….superwholock/sherlock/supernatural/whatever is problematic anyway, so it’s alright to mock its fans, even if they’re not displaying any offensive behaviour whatsoever, just enthusiasm.’ –
– or when tumblr decided the best response to nerd culture being so white-male-dominated was to start making jokes about shoving nerds into lockers, that sort of thing. When it is usually not privileged, allistic people who get physically assaulted in school…
Anyway, ableism hiding under the guise of progressiveness (huh, I wonder if That One Terrifying Anti-Superwholock Blog is still around? You might know the one if you’ve followed me for long enough) is the worst, but it’s everywhere. School, tumblr, adult life – you can’t escape it. It depresses me no end.
(Someone smarter than me could probably make the claim that almost all bullying is rooted in ableism, and I’d believe them. I have no idea if I’m autistic – I kinda don’t care now – but I definitely have a few traits that are kinda autistic traits? Stimming and the like? Anyway-
-this post sums up my school life, and the school life of people close to me whom I would have liked to protect, really well. So honestly, when I see people making fun of other people for dressing in uncool clothes, or being ‘too obsessed’ with an uncool thing, or for being slow to understand jokes…I probably won’t trust you, yeah.)
There’s this one bit of poetry that will thoroughly get ground into your head if you go to school in Britain (and elsewhere? I don’t know) – Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum est. I still remember the last few lines –
…My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent(14) for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
But….the last verse of “Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story” from Hamilton has that exact same rhyme scheme. And because that bloody poem was drilled into my head so much at school, whenever I get WLWDWTYS in my head it always switches into something like:
Let me tell you what I wish I’d known
When I was young and dreamed of glory
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.
The worst thing of all? That actually kinda works.
