so uh i might have cried into my pint of ice cream at an entire squad of past elphabas and glindas singing For Good together for the Wicked 15th anniversary concert
post apoc media is always banging on about the necessity of macho survival skills but frankly it’s the gardeners/farmers who know 150 preservation techniques for winter beets and who understand the art of good pH balance in compost who will survive on our non energy dependent farms while you all butcher each other with katanas in burnt out shopping centres
As someone who’s reported alt-right harassment and rhetoric on various
social media sites and been told “there’s nothing here that violates our
TOS,” seeing what RPGnet is doing is a welcome breath of fresh air.
Services at Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh start at 9:45 A.M. Samet, who is 80 years old, pulled into a handicapped spot in front of the building on the morning of October 27 at 9:49.
“Somebody knocked on my window,” Samet said the next day. “There was this guy. Very calm and respectful. [He] told me, you better back up, there is an active shooting going on in your synagogue.”
It took Samet sixty seconds to process what the man was saying. Samet was born in Hungary. He turned eight years old at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany. He spent five and a half years in an orphanage in Israel. He has been a member of Tree of Life Congregation for fifty-five years.
“My God, my story doesn’t end,” he said.
Samet turned. Standing three feet away from him, on the other side of the car, was a police officer with a pistol drawn. “He was popping his head out from behind a wall and shooting,” Samet said.
Samet looked to see who the police officer was shooting, and saw a man aiming an automatic weapon in his direction. “He was shooting towards the cop, who was about four feet away from me,” Samet said. He saw the men exchange fire.
“I saw smoking coming out of his muzzle,” Samet said. “I was in the line of fire.”
Samet tried to back his car out of the parking lot, but other cars were trying to do the same thing. The attacker wasn’t aiming at him. “None of the bullets hit me or hit my car,” Samet said. “The policeman could kill him.”
Samet knew virtually everyone who the attacker, Robert Bowers, allegedly murdered that day. He was a leading figure at Tree of Life; had been the designated Torah chanter for four decades, and had led morning services for years. Two years ago, he led services at the shiva for synagogue member Joyce Feinberg’s husband. She was shot dead on Saturday morning. “She was a real lady,” Samet said. “She completely dedicated her life to the synagogue since her husband died.”
Samet was friendly with Sylvan and Bernice Simon, the 86 and 84 year old who were murdered together in the synagogue sanctuary. Samet and Sylvan Simon would talk about their time as paratroopers, Samet in the Israeli army and Sylvan in the U.S. army.
Irving Younger, 69, usually stood by the door of the sanctuary, Samet said, and greeted people as they arrived. He would have been the first person the attacker saw when he assaulted the service. [Younger] was among the dead on Saturday.
Cecil Rosenthal, 59, who was developmentally disabled, also sat near the door. “Everybody loved him,” Samet said. He and his brother, David Rosenthal, were both murdered.
Samet said that Rose Mallinger, who was in her 90’s, would attend the service each week with her daughter. “They sit behind me,” Samet said. “If I was inside the synagogue, I would be in the line of fire.”
More than anything on Sunday, Samet seemed to be going back in his mind to the 1940s, when the Nazis tortured and murdered his family. His father died of typhoid shortly after the war.
“My mother was the interpreter,” he said. “She spoke fluent German. She saved hundreds of Jews.”
The Nazis put Samet’s family on a train to Auschwitz, but Slovakian partisans blew up the railroad line. The Samets ended up in a large lumberyard owned by a man with a large swastika tattooed on his chest, which he would show the family.
“My mother taught us never listen what they have to say,” Samet said. “Look at their hands. Because words cannot kill you.”
On Sunday afternoon, Samet was preparing to travel to a local church to tell the story of his family’s experience in the Holocaust. He said he would likely say something about what he had been through the day before.
Asked what his mother, Rachel Samet, would have said about the massacre he survived on Saturday, Samet said: “It just never ends.”
“Allegedly murdered” I’m sorry, there’s no allegation about it. He murdered those people.
Putting my lawyer hat on here: When news media and organizations use “alleged” or “allegedly”, they do so for liability reasons so they do not open themselves up to defamation suits. Also, due process is still a thing. Until a suspect is convicted or pleads guilty to a crime for which they’re accused, they are referred to with a qualification like “alleged.”
I once said to my therapist after a particularly hard week, “I wish I could just fix all of my problems and move on to live a normal life”
And he looked at me and said, “There is no finish line”.
Those words felt like a stab in my heart, but they were words that I desperately needed to hear. There is no finish line to my problems. It’s not possible to get through a certain point in life and have my problems simply disappear. And it’s unhealthy to think that way. Up to that point in my life, that’s what I though recovery was. I thought it was like working your way forward until it seems like your problems never existed in the first place.
The finish line does not exist. Instead, everyone has a capacity for recovery. You may never completely rid yourself of whatever causes you pain, but you will move miles from where you started. Don’t set your expectations too high and create that theoretical finish line in your life, or you will only end up chasing it. Instead, focus on your own capacity for recovery, and be proud of yourself for every step you take.
Just saw Eighth Grade and reblogging the heck out of this bc wow it gets so much better if you just take it one step at a time
Okay but I cant help but hear “there is no finish line” and immediately respond with “then why am i running the race?” What is the point*? Where is the benefit of putting in the effort if its not going to ever end? If i am always going to battle I would rather just give up the fight.
*(Im not saying recovery is bad or whatever ppl wanna reach for, this is my personal view)
That’s the thing, though: it’s not a race. It’s a garden.
No matter what your garden looks like in the beginning, you have to weed it before it can grow into what you want it to be. And when your flowers are planted and growing, you still have to keep up with the weeding. You have to keep up with the weeding even after your flowers are tall. A garden can’t survive on its own. There will always be weeds.
But there will be flowers, too, if you give them space to grow. Give them room, give them time, and keep checking in to make sure the weeds don’t get too tall. You will always have weeds, but you will also have flowers.
And maybe your garden doesn’t look exactly like you imagined it would. Maybe you aren’t sure how to get rid of that one big thistle in the corner. Maybe you’ve got bindweed and nutgrass (which will always, always come back). Either way, you’ve got flowers now, and it’s a nice place to sit and look around, and it looks nicer than it did before, and it’s yours. Keep going with it. If you miss a few days, or months, or years, that’s okay. Pull up the weeds when you’re ready, uncover your old flowers and plant some new ones, and keep going.
Gardening is a process, not a project or a problem that can be solved. The same is true for your mental health. Weeds will grow, but you’ll get better and better at pulling them, and you’ll grow flowers, too.
The whole Pepsi commercial thing reminded me that people always mis-remember the famous flower in the gun barrel photo as being a young woman. It wasn’t. The photo, taken by Bernie Boston, is of George Edgerly Harris III better known by his stage name Hibiscus. He was a member of the San Francisco based radical gay liberation theater troupe the Cockettes. He died of AIDS in 1982 at the time AIDS was still referred to by the name GRID which stood for Gay Related Immuno-Deficiency. The photo was taken at a protest at the Pentagon.
I had no idea who he was, thank you.
This is one example of the Mandela Effect phenomena, where an iconic moment is reenacted with a hippy woman so many times that people think that’s the story and thus another gay man is written out of history. Thanks for the photo.
I had no idea. Wow.
This photo was taken by Bernie Boston, a black/native man who willingly stood up to a chapter of the KKK and earned their respect among other things
I get the subject is important, but please dont erase Bernie. I knew him personally and he deserves to be remembered and by only remembering the subject, a white man, you erase a black man.
@vaspider could you reblog this version too, please? I am deeply upset by Bernie’s erasure from his own work.
SlythKris (tumblr backup babey) 