For the longest time, I thought that I was the only one to have ever crossed the boundaries of the multiverse. Over the past few April Fool’s Days, I learned I was wrong. For whatever reason, I seem to have stumbled into a social group with a high number of individuals who come from worlds very much like our own, but with a few fundamental social differences. Perhaps this phenomenon is more common than we realize, and it’s just more openly acknowledged among the people I’ve met.
Many of the reports from other multiverse-hoppers such as myself identify a point of divergence between our timelines. If I had known that I was about to be thrust into such a radically different world, I might have studied up on history so that I would be better able to pin down that exact point. Based on my somewhat vague recollection, my timeline’s reactions to the horrors of the World Wars, the Holocaust, and the widespread involuntary commitment of the physically and mentally disabled was different from yours. What most made us sick to our stomachs and fearful of our own species was not the widespread taking of lives, but rather what so many people were forced to endure with no idea when they would finally be allowed to die.
As horrifying as we found it, the people of my universe acknowledged as you do that war involved killing, and that war wasn’t going away any time soon. Like you, we also wanted to declare certain actions beyond the pale even in wartime, so that at least a fraction the amount of human suffering could be prevented. We decreed as you did that such atrocities as murdering civilians, impersonating medics, and using prisoners of war for medical experiments should be treated as crimes against humanity, no matter by who or against whom they were committed. We seem to have had approximately the same degree of success in enforcing our rules as you.
Unlike you, we included in our Geneva Conventions an absolute prohibition against keeping a human being alive against their will. We called this “vivicoaction”, a word that as far as I can tell does not exist in this timeline. There’s not even a single google result for it! I still can’t fully wrap my mind around how you managed to go without a world for the most horrific inhumanity. Imagine what it would be like to find an entire planet of humans with no word for rape. How could such an obvious evil be so ignored that it didn’t even appear in the dictionary?
I first started to realize that something was off when I went to see a counselor at my alma mater. I had been to therapists before, and by then was used to being asked to read a statement of my rights as a patient. Prior to that day, every such statement had included my absolute, inalienable right to a painless death in a reasonable amount of time. What counted as “reasonable” was, of course, somewhat contentious, in the same way that both our universes seem to be unable to form a precise standard for what counts as a “speedy trial”. Regardless, very few people from my world disagreed about an individual’s right to suicide, any more than most people from your world would ever seriously advocate lynching. In the middle of the worst bout of depression of my life, I hadn’t ever expected the additional blow of seeing my college therapist’s office threaten me with a war crime.
Your world doesn’t just look the other way at vivicoaction. It LEGALLY MANDATES that it be carried out by those who have sworn an oath to do no harm. It treats as deviants those who would refuse to hand over their closest and most vulnerable friends to have their rights and dignity stripped away. Even terminally ill patients in unbearable pain are handcuffed to the bed if they attempt to end their suffering. Hardly anyone gets to even have the comfort of dying painlessly while surrounded by their loved ones. Instead, you simply through your elderly and infirm into prisons where no one has to see their misery.
I don’t know how to communicate to the people of this world that such things are morally wrong. How would you persuade someone who, for example, believed that it was a moral imperative for parents to place their children in solitary confinement? I see moral panics about people killing themselves impulsively, but how are they supposed to talk it over if anyone they open up to will treat them worse than war criminals? I wish I could pull out some hard evidence, but that evidence doesn’t even seem to exist in this world, since as far as I can tell there is not any single developed country on your version of Earth that can serve as a case study.
My life is better now than it was in college, but I still don’t know what I’ll do if things ever get intolerably, indefinitely bad. There’s no one with authority that I can turn to for protection. No foreign country I can flee to for asylum. No sympathetic media outlets who will take my side. Even if things go smoothly for me all the way through retirement, I don’t know what I’ll do when I’m too slow to run, too weak to fight off the doctors and police, and too senile to plan an escape. I want to go home.
Something I wish everybody would understand about bigotry of all sorts is that the thing our society is punishing is non-conformity. The more you do not conform the more you are punished.
Nonconformity can be anything from something as small as being goth, or generally not dressing like everybody else, to things as big as being a different race than the majority, or a different religion.
When you start thinking of bigotries in this context it really puts things into perspective. This might be a really helpful lens to look at these things through and help you understand political retoric and theories.
For some examples of this theory, let’s look at racism. Dark skinned people have been talking about light-skinned privilege forever. While light skinned black people do still deal with racism, they’re closer to conformity than dark-skinned people so they are punished less.
It’s the same thing in the trans community. People who “pass” or are otherwise not immediately visibly distinguishable as trans are punished less than people who are visibly trans.
The same is true with anti-Semitism. Jews who do not keep a kosher diet and observe Jewish holidays are punished less than the ones who do because they are not conforming, while the ones who don’t observe Jewish holidays are conforming.
And of course the same is true with disabled people. If you have the sort of disability that is invisible and doesn’t need much accommodation you generally aren’t punished very much by society, comparatively. But if you have a visible mobility aid and/or you do need accommodation you are viciously punished. But even if your disability is invisible, punishment is waiting the moment you don’t conform. As a disabled person with an invisible disability, I am always shocked by how quickly and viciously I am punished on rare times when I do need accommodation.
But perhaps the best proof that what’s actually being punished is non conformity is the treatment of intersex people like myself. Bigots will cry all day about the horrors of gender assignment medical procedures when they’re used by trans people to live as their authentic selves, but they’re suspiciously quiet about those same treatments being used on intersex kids. It’s because those treatments are perfectly acceptable when being used to make an Intersex kid conform, but when they’re used by a trans person to stop conforming to their assigned gender it’s a horrible dangerous violence and should be banned.
That’s why I’m suspicious of political movements that try to broaden the definition of what conformity is rather than trying to end the practice of punishing anybody who doesn’t conform.
It’s mentioned to be advanced, with surgery not currently being an option due to the size and location of the tumor. (It’s mentioned to be treatable tho.)
The site will let you donate to his treatment. VAs are paid absolute garbage (yes, even the “legendary” ones), so if you’ve enjoyed his work this is a good time to toss him five bucks.
My tiefling cleric has come a long way. She started out as a Saturday-Morning cartoon villain to chastising the gods on what it truly means to have mercy on someone.
and it’s a zeugma where one of the words is literal and one is metaphorical which is the BEST KIND
I didn’t know about zeugmas until just now! That is so awesome, everybody:
zeug·ma
ˈzo͞oɡmə/
noun
a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g.,John and his license expired last week ) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g., with weeping eyes and hearts ).
