Let’s get the big shout out of the way: A very happy FIFTH ANNIVERSARY to us here at DeadSplinter! A particularly big huzzah to Myo for building us this house and keeping it lit (and again, donations accepted on that end, please and thank you!)
I originally wanted to write something fun and funny — oh look, our little ragtag band of interneters outlasted the Confederacy, where’s our fuckin’ statue, Alabama? — but I realized my sense of humor is a little strained right now for various reasons you can probably guess at. Plus I did a list thing for the first anniversary and, as it turns out, I already did a list of things that lasted longer than the Confederacy too, so … um … maybe get a new idea, dude?
Self-plagiarism aside, this is not a particularly fun or funny time and while I live by the ethos of there’s no humor like gallows humor, I realized that there’s something better on this momentous occasion. So I ask for a little indulgence — not that I haven’t already, given that professional writers who write about their writing process as part of what they’re writing should probably be shot out of a cannon and yet here I goddamn am — while I write something altogether different about us.
Once upon a time, there was a certain chamomile blend that we’ll call Jim S … no, too easy, let’s call him J Spanfeller. He and his merry band of corporate puds were quite sure that they could synergize their leverages to aggressively but holistically optimize their KPIs and took a popular, profitable group of websites and ground it into value-free dust from which they derived many bonuses. Sure, it put people out of jobs and alienated thousands of would be subscribers, but man, did you see those synergies?
Had that little mugwort decided to enshittify some other industry, it’s likely we wouldn’t be here at all. You can picture a world in which G/O was G/One and the sites we loved, Deadspin, Gawker/Splinter, Jez, io9, yes, even those sickos on Jalopnik, were still available and productive and not squeezed into a chervil-flavored paste. And in that world, I might know your handle names — and thinking “Oh yeah, good comment” in a passing way. But I wouldn’t actually know you, or have ever face-to-faced with you over Zoom (or as has happened here, even occasionally a meeting out in the real world!) We wouldn’t be what we are now, which is, simply enough, a community.
There’s something beautiful that out of the death of Gawker Media has come so much new life, and flourishing new communities. Community comes in many different forms, but they’re an expression of affirmation, a belief in common values and fellowship, and a place to make new bonds and stitch a new social fabric. You could say they’re life itself, given how they grow and, if they’re be taken care of as if you’d take care of any living thing, they can thrive. For us, that’s Myo putting up the behind-the-scenes infrastructure of the site to everyone who writes, and everyone who comments and everyone else who just shows up to be a part of our little corner of the internet.
In that way, community is the true opposition to fascism and the mindless profit machine that came for Gawker Media, because all they have to offer is death and decay. Their form is an expression of negation and the rending of social fabric, though they’d also be happy to sell you back your used yarn at three times the price. Their idea of community is a shared ideal only of hatred and the denial of humanity of everyone they want to exclude and oppress: Blacks, women, Hispanics, Jews, Arabs, gays, lesbians, transgender folks, and on and on.
We have seen how well it works, and how dangerous it is. But there’s another side to the story, one that we’ve also seen, and that it’s not quite so easy to sell those lies when the listener doesn’t see their target as a stranger, but as a member of their community.
Given that I’m neither Christian nor religious, I don’t tend to toss around too many Bible quotes, but one that fits here: “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.” Many Christians, rightly I think, take that as a call to minister to the poor and indigent. (Jesus Christ, secret leftist?) But to consider people who aren’t your family as brothers and sisters takes community, and kindness, and empathy, all the things that fascists truly hate and fear.
Springfield, Ohio became ground zero for the vile slur of “the migrants are eating pets” that the right workshopped earlier this year. Yet even in a county that went 60-40 for Trump in 2020, most of the people living there did admit that they knew the refugees and they weren’t eating pets or conducting sacrifices or whatnot. Because as much as communities can change to fit the people who are in them, they also change the people who fit within them.
As you may or may not know, I have a son, and he has autism. I rarely write about it because I find so many parents with special-needs kids come off obsessive about it or weirdly strident about how other parents don’t understand it (probably true, but not really how you make them understand it?) In my case, my son has gone from being in small-group self-contained special ed classes to being in a mainstream fourth grade class. He still struggles with socializing at times, and he isn’t the most coordinated kid at recess. But he’s made remarkable gains from where he started, and inasmuch as I believe in looking up to people, he’s about as close to a hero as I’ve got.
I often think of how he might have fared going to elementary school when I was a kid, and I have to sigh pretty deeply because I think I don’t like the answer all that much. My own dealings with bullies were a part of why I was nervous about him going into a mainstream class in the first place — would he be bullied or made to feel bad? Could it be wrong to put him in that position? Would I regret this? Would he?
Except something very different happened: His classmates went out of their way to make him feel welcome. He got invited to birthday parties and other events. When he won an award announced at a schoolwide assembly last year I was trying to hold myself together. I was doing OK when they announced his name and he got up. But then I saw his class cheering for him, trying to high-five him as he walked up to the front of the auditorium to get his award. Their joy was my joy, and I lost it. He was one of them, a part of their community.
Hope is a precious commodity, often hard to find and easily lost. But the existence of a community is my hope, that people can do better, be better, and push back against those who would take it away. Because that is how love wins and how light drives out the darkness, and other incredibly cringe statements that are nonetheless completely valid.
So! We may be a small little internet island in a wider world, but we are a community here, and even in times of onrushing darkness — *coughs in November 5th* — that’s something worth hanging onto, and worth celebrating. So thank you for being here, and here’s to us, for five years of fighting the good fight, for being smart and fun and occasionally pedantic and refusing to accept that Jim Spanfeller can tell us to stop hanging out together digitally.
And when you’re feeling down, let us being here be your hope.
I appreciate the story about your kid, and schools have gotten to be much more humane places in recent years. Policies like anti-bully programs actually work, and that’s what’s behind a lot of rightwing handwringing about the “feminization” of schools. They want crackdowns.
It’s a big tell about somone’s own humanity in how they react to the public schools which educate a huge share of special needs kids. When people call public schools unredeemable pits, they’re actually calling the kids who go there and their families subhuman.
When obviously it’s the reverse that’s true.
Oh yeah, they’ve never liked public education as a concept but the idea of kids being taught that bullying is bad and kindness is good makes them extra enraged, for sure.
And it works, at least in part. My son has had really good experiences at school.
Beautifully written!
Thank you – just beautiful.
Great post, thank you for this.
That touched my heart.
amazing! thank you.
When we were kids in grade school, you couldn’t win. I was literally made fun of for being smart. Not “know-it-all, having-all-the-answers-all-the-time” smart, just “having an intelligent answer when called on and getting good grades” smart. Probably contributed to my hating everything and everybody, and underachieving all through high school.
Anyway, where my kids went to high school they have a “Unified Basketball” team. It’s special needs kids with a few [other? what’s the politically correct term I’m looking for here?] kids mixed in. We went to a game a while back, and it was the greatest thing ever.
…I can certainly lay claim to more than a few memories of someone saying “you think you’re so smart…” as a prelude to considering themselves justified in trying to fuck up my whole day to the best of their ability…& it always bugged me…I mean, it’d bug anyone in all the obvious ways…that being the object of the exercise & all…but the part where it flatly wasn’t true?
…I…don’t? …didn’t then…don’t now…don’t recall that ever coming up with the other answer in between the two…it seemed like certain people who claimed to know the difference would sometimes say I was…& the ones who’d say it the same way you’d say “what did you just say about my mum?”…at least strongly implied that they thought I was smarter than them & they were mad about it because clearly compared to them I wasn’t anything to write home about & I should learn to play my position & not try making the whole “smart” thing a variable in the pecking order…but…it never failed to make me think “if I knew how not to have to keep doing this bullshit day after day then maybe I’d think I was smart but here we fucking are & nothing about it strikes me as any kind of clever, now you mention it?”
…never did figure out whether that was the source of my problems…or being stubborn enough to generally get back up more often than it was fun to knock me on my ass
…but always kinda felt like the at least temporary intolerance for bullying that lasted through a sibling’s time at a school where a bunch of kids used to get the crap kicked out of them in some truly playing-up-to-stereotypes ways on a recreational basis by kids twice their age “in my day” was…instructive…in a few ways
…still…if I had my druthers…I’d pick other ways to “build character”?
My eldest played unified basketball, she hates basketball but had a blast. We used to go cheer them on. Then, she did unified bowling & she has never been a good bowler but her & her partner won the state championship! Those experiences made her think of going into occupational therapy for awhile but eventually the environment seemed a better choice for her to make a bigger impact on the planet.
IDK the politically correct terminology now but when I was in college it was “people with exceptionalities.” It was actially the name of a prerequisite course for child development & child psychology.
You and I might refer to ourselves as “regular, average, everyday, normal” guys, but I’m at least enlightened enough to know that none of those terms are really appropriate when juxtaposed with the term “special needs,” and using them will in fact get you eviscerated in certain forums, so what is the proper term I would be looking for? Help me out.
Neurotypical and neurodivergent are the terms my friends who have Autistic children and family members use to differentiate between groups of kids/adults.
Thank you. I think I knew that, but forgot to remember.
This is 2024:
https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/esdc-edsc/documents/programs/disability/arc/words-images/EN_word-images.pdf
It kind of contradicts itself.
That one drives MOST disabled folks (myself included!) Nuts!😆😂🤣
We’re Disabled–we have *dis*abilities–“abilities” that just don’t work sometimes.
Disabled, Disability, and Disabilities aren’t “dirty words,” they aren’t insults, it’s just… a truth, basically.
The prefix “dis” means apart/away/not of…
So Disabled *literally* just means “not abled”… it’s not a big deal–but for some reason folks suuuuuuuure get the “squick” about it, and feel like they “oughtn’t” use “disabled” because “it might insult the disabled person”… when disabled folks usually (not always, but usually!) feel *more* insulted & belittled, by the goofy “need” to frickin’ pretend our disabilities don’t exist.
They DO, and yeah, sometimes they suck.
But you just *acknowledge that*, and move the fuck ON with your daily life, as best you can. You don’t make a bg deal out of it, because then nothing you need done ever *gets* done!😉
@miluly the emphases, at least in the “exceptionalities” program i referred to, is on “putting the person before the disability” ie. “persons with disabilities” instead of “disabled people” “person with an hearing impairment” instead of “deaf person.”
i think it is meant to mean that the disability doesn’t define the person and the person is a person first and foremost?
Usually the word for what the other kids’d be called is, “Neurotypical” in a school setting, @LemmyKilmister😉💖
At least that’s what *we* typically use in my district.
And you’re 100% RIGHT!
This next generation of kids is–for the most part, a pretty damn GREAT bunch of kids–They’re kind, they look out for each other, they DON’T take to bullies or bullying.
As a Gen-Xer?
I see a *LOT* of the good things that were hoped for in *our* generation–which were cynically bullied, beaten, & burned *out* of ours, actually finding good soil and the ability to grow, in theirs💖💝💗
They’re the children of the Gen-Xers & Millenials, for the most part–and it *really* seems like many in our generations are trying HARD to fix the things which were fucked up, back when we were kids ourselves–and give *this* generation of young ones a real, honest, chance at meeting their full potential to be GOOD people.
Holy shit.
What a beautiful way to ‘member some guys, and some times. It’s been a wild… 12? years since Kinja first stomped into our lives. Feels like it’s only been a hot minute since the kinjapocalypse, though that’s more the lack of personal growth on my part rather than lack of [gesticulates wildly] everything going on in the world.
Glad your kiddo got a massive dub. Maybe there’s hope for us all? Maybe, just maybe, youths will be the ones to make some positive change out there? Lord knows Jim ‘Is A Herb’ Spanfeller won’t.
May a thousand shoots bloom.
Gotta say, I *adore* all those Herbal references in there, and YES, Herb Spanfeller is #StillaHERB 😉😈😂🤣