Years ago, my aunt went Christmas shopping. It was only in early December, so they hadn’t started playing Christmas music yet. She actually went to the service desk and complained about this, asking how they could expect customers to get into the holiday mood if they weren’t playing Christmas music, blah blah blah. She told my mother this, and was royally pissed when my mother didn’t take her side.
THEN there was the time that Hurrican Ivan hit Pittsburgh – we got some major flooding in my area. We’re lucky since our house is up on a hill, but the people down below lost everything. Well, our basement started filling up with water (it ended up only being like, an inch or two, but when I originally went down there and saw a couple of things floating, naturally I was a little concerned, especially considering what was going on down the street).
So I’m down in the basement, trying to bring things upstairs, and then Auntie calls and wants to talk. I’m like, “Hey, I’m sorry, but our basement is flooding right now, so I really can’t talk.”
She gets all butthurt and starts lecturing me about how rude I’m being and how I should be more polite when she calls, and all that. Not in the mood to deal with that, I hung up on her. Now, like I said, it all ended up being okay, but at the time, I didn’t know that.
Two days later, my GRANDMOTHER calls, and lectures me. Apparently she went and called my grandma, and whined that I was mean. :smack:
Don’t get me wrong – I love my aunt, but the woman has no common sense whatsoever.
Munchausen’s, maybe?
Ugh! :smack: You had to bring this up. There are 2 radio stations in this area that begin playing 24 hour Christmas music on N:eek:vember 1st! These stations are normally on my preset favorite buttons, so it affects me. I like what they play during the rest of the year (one is oldies the other is light rock).
To make it worse, I’ve never, ever observed Christmas in my entire life. So there is no “mood” for me to get in! Except pissed, I guess.
Good for you, with the dash cam. That thing, where I’m on the right, with the empty road and some jerk comes up and tailgates me? Annoying.
I had a wreck today. I’m sore all over and my car is probably totaled. Apparently, for some people, turning around when you miss your street is a sin against God or something. The car in front desperately needed to make a left turn and stopped very quickly to do so. The lady in the tank behind them stopped short and off to the right. I couldn’t see past her before then and had no idea what was coming. I tried to stop but hit her back bumper on the driver’s side. It tore back my hood and looks to damaged the engine pretty badly. I was going the speed limit or less and wasn’t following too closely. I just had no time to react. The tank was fine. The bumper was bent in a little but she was able to drive it home. I wasn’t given a ticket and insurance is handling everything. If that other person had just taken a minute, minute and a half, to turn around and come back up to their turn off I could have had a good day.
One year, at Christmas, I was standing in a long, long, line, waiting to pay for my selection. The line got worse when there was more than one person trying to do exchanges and the clerk had no idea how to do it. The line got longer and longer behind me, and nobody came to assist the clerk. Eventually, after a long wait, I got to the front of the line. And another clerk came up to the front of the line, handed the clerk a stack of things that belonged to a woman who was with her, and the clerk running the line proceeded to start ringing up this woman’s purchases, ahead of me.
Now, if the line had not been so long and had I not been so perturbed by all of the exchanges that had gone on for so long, I probably would not have reacted the way I did. When I objected and was told I wasn’t as important as the other person, I threw my selection at the clerk and told her what she could do with them.
I have the satisfaction of knowing that the entire chain of stores has gone out of business.
Since I can’t sleep, I might as well post about some other stuff that’s been weirding me out lately.
Really? He throws out your spaghetti and meatballs and that warrants setting him on fire? The link includes a mugshot. What the hell is she so happy about? Now we have a picture to go next to the definition for “malicious glee”.
Man decapitates self in broad daylight in the middle of a New York road.
Bolding mine. Do you think just maybe? I’m wondering about the reporter on this one. Oh no, mentally healthy people do this kind of thing all the time. This guy was a rare exception. :dubious:
Mother Admits To Killing Her Three Disabled Children — Will Not Face Murder Charges
I’m sorry, whaaaaaaat? :eek:
It’s nothing new that the lives of the disabled are considered less valuable and worthwhile than the lives of the able-bodied.
A stance I strongly disagree with, by the way.
Once upon a time when I was still driving an Altima, I had stopped on a 2-lane road waiting for oncoming traffic to clear so I could make a left turn into a gas station. A Highly Important Person in an Acura stopped behind me about two inches from my bumper. Suddenly a guy driving an early 80’s Land Boat turned at the intersection behind us too quickly and hit the Acura, pushing him into my bumper. We all pulled into a nearby parking lot and waited for the police to arrive. When the officer showed up, I was the only one who was declared not at fault in the accident. 
I decided to go home and skip getting gas (I wasn’t that close to the E) while the Acura guy was screaming about how his frame was bent.
I had a once very satisfying moment when I tapped the bumper of the car in front of me (I had new front brakes I was still getting used to). My little Geo Metro got the hood buckled slightly, but I hit it with my fist, and it popped back into place. The huge panel van I “hit” had no damage whatsoever, but the driver insisted on calling the police, because he was driving a company car. There was already a lot of rust damage to the van, but the guy said it was his company’s vehicle, and he didn’t want to get in trouble with his boss. I said I’d give him all my contact and insurance info, but that wasn’t good enough. The cops let me go with no ticket or point of anything. The van guy had to get towed, because his plates should have renewed more than a month earlier. Also, I think, because the cops were annoyed at being called to she scene of something so trivial.
FWIW, I have been in a couple of serious accidents, one of which was totally my fault, and I admitted it, so I know when something is nothing, if you get my meaning.
Let me be clear: what the mother did was criminal, and she should go to prison for a long time. The rest of her life might not be too long a sentence. I hope this act haunts her.
However, children dying from an inborn lethal defect are different from normal disabled people. Someone who is just Deaf, just blind, just has cerebral palsy, but has a normal lifespan, can get a high school diploma, go to college, marry, pursue a career, raise children, is in an entirely different category from someone with Tay-Sachs, or someone in a persistent vegetative state. There is no slippery slope, for example, in allowing people with no brain function, or to cortical function, to die, and suggesting the same thing should be done to normal blind people, or normal Deaf people.
“Allowing to die,” by the same token, is far cry from willful murder. If this woman has more than one child with this condition, I wonder than she didn’t have amnios done for subsequent pregnancies after the first child.
If I had three kids who were severely disabled, just the thought of that is overwhelming, and I could certainly believe I might snap and do something regrettable.
I’ve taken over as the chair of the registration committee for a convention with almost 400 people in attendance. I’ve been warned that I can expect a lot of special requests and that I need to work with the facility’s events coordinator to find out what’s normally offered and what actually has to be specifically requested. I’m hoping to have an FAQ about this, but I’m not holding my breath that people will read it.
These children almost certainly had normal brain function despite their disorder. There’s a wide gap between “disabled” and “vegetative state” or “brain dead”. SMA affects the ability of the body to move, not the brain to think. These were awake and aware people who were summarily executed by someone else, and who were not consulted as to whether or not their lives were worth living.
Maybe we should have put a bullet in Christopher Reeves’ head, too, while we were at it - he was even more disabled than someone with SMA. Oh, wait - he wanted to live, didn’t he? Maybe these kids did, too. How about our member blinkie, who has locked-in syndrome? Oh, wait, he wants to live, too, despite not being able to move (well, not much - he communicates largely by blinking his eyes, which is also how he controls his computer). We have a member of this forum raising a child with severe SMA - you might want to check it out. Yes, there are hardships but I don’t he wants to kill his little girl.
Too often someone with a severe neurological disorder is presumed to not be able to think or have an opinion or be dying when in fact they aren’t any of those things.
The PROBLEM here is not severely disabled kids, it’s inadequate support systems for their primary caretaker(s). OF COURSE the woman cracked under the strain, but why wasn’t there help for her long before she got to that point?
It’s a rare disease, I’m not even sure there IS a prenatal test for it.
Regardless - the prognosis is highly variable. Some people even with the severe forms of SMA have lived into adulthood. The biggest problem is that proper care is expensive.
Check the ages- a 4 year old and 3 year old twins. It’s quite possible they never had a dianosis for the first kid before the second pregancy was well underway- or even until they were actually born.
I know my cousin didn’t get an SMA diagnosis for their elder son until he was nearly 3 (or about the point the younger son was born- thankfully, he doesn’t have it).
Yeah, but you would expect to go to prison for the rest of your life, right? However long that is since you would likely face the death penalty. There’s regrettable (screaming, maybe beating) and then there’s taking the time to hold each of three, struggling children down long enough to smother them. How long does it take to suffocate? How long did they each have to panic and suffer as the life slowly ebbed out of them? How long did she have to stop and think, “What the fuck am I doing!?”.
Then for the prosecutor of all people, to say there was anything understandable about it? Nuts. Just plain nuts.
That first story has charges I don’t get either. The woman is clearly laughing as they book her into jail.
How is this not attempted murder? As far as I know, being on fire tends to kill humans. She would have known that beforehand. She poured a flammable substance on a man and set him on fire because he threw out her spaghetti. She doesn’t seem to feel the least bit bad about it, either. I guess I would be happy too, if I thought I was getting away with something like that.
She attempted suicide, and her note asked her husband specifically not to try to save her - I don’t think she expected life in prison, and was not afraid of the death penalty.
Regards,
Shodan
Did you read where I said what the mother did is indefensible? I don’t even think murdering someone in a vegetative state is defensible, if by murder you are talking about putting a bullet in someone’s head. Allowing someone to die naturally in consultation with the person’s doctor is something entirely different.
I have seen only one case of SMA up close and personal, and that child had cranial atrophy as well. I didn’t realize that isn’t always the case. He would die when his brain deteriorated to the point that he lost breathing function. Until then he was tube-fed, and had odd seizures that only occurred in his head, because his spinal cord didn’t work. His parents were considering going to court to be allowed to stop feeding him.
To me, there is a big difference between him, and the Deaf professors I had at Gallaudet. That was all I was saying.
Maybe the headline should have specified what was wrong, instead of saying “disabled” children.
Please don’t try to get me to debate the value of the lives of disabled people, because the point I was trying to make was that disabled people are more like you and me than they are like people in vegetative states, who sometimes should be allowed to die (but not be murdered). I objected to the use of “disabled” for kids with SMA because of my limited experience with it. Ignorance fought.
I think this means she wouldn’t want them living hooked up to breathing machines and feeding tubes from adolescence through an adulthood that could last decades, unable to care for themselves even in the smallest way. I offer no personal opinion on this, but I think this is what the prosecutor agreed with.
Absolutely. I wasn’t justifying her behaviour in any way.
I’d expect to go to jail if I killed someone in any kind of circumstances*, even in self defence. That’s what should happen to every killer.
*With the possible exception of war time, though even that’s complicated
ON A LIGHTER NOTE, there was the time I was working at the science center, and we were hit by a severe storm. The windows and atrium roof blew in, there was glass everywhere, rain was pouring in, kids crying, total mess, etc. So we’re herding people downstairs to the theater lobby, trying to calm kids down, giving some people their money back (even though we closed in in hour :rolleyes:), and this one woman comes up to me.
She starts asking me if this meant the Boy Scout sleepover that weekend would be cancelled, if so, would there be a refund. I tell her, I’m not sure, that she needs to call the office and ask the people who are in charge of that, and that right now, our main priority is making sure everyone is safe.
“Well, could you just check and see?” Grrrr. So to humor her, I go and ask my boss, who basically face-palmed and told me to tell her to the same basic thing, and emphasize the part about safety. Which I did, and she stomped off, muttering.
Well, yes, I agree with that being a strong supporter of palliative care, hospice, and helping my own mother die in her own home.
I get most frustrated about situations where the real problem is lack of support for the caregivers, which this seems to have been.
That’s understandable.
Yes, definitely.
The thing is, both medical personnel and people who are able-bodied consistently rate the quality of life of the disabled worse than the disabled themselves do.
There are also cultural aspects to this - one reason people with ALS/Lou Gehrig’s/motor-neuron disease live longer in the UK is that the British seem more tolerate of living dependent on a ventilator than Americans do. I wonder why that’s so?
I’ve met a ventilator-dependent quadriplegic. He had come to terms with needing the machines. It’s amazing what a person can adjust to.
What about the drivers who think they have the right to take over half or even more of the pedestrian crosswalk? You’re trying to cross and this car inching toward you? Getting two feet closer makes a big difference.
I’ve been known to just stand in front of the car and glare at them for two or three minutes.