First off, this isn’t a debate. I want to know what groups you feel special sympathy towards so your own opinion is incontrovertible for your post. This may or may not include those that you are most willing to help through time, money, or anything else. You don’t have to give a reason and criticizing others choices isn’t allowed under any circumstances but supporting them is. A group could be as large as blacks around the world or it could be as small as the two homeless kids living in your neighborhood. You can include 1, 2, or three but no more.
Here are mine:
Americans with mental illnesses - because they are mocked and stigmatized like few other groups for something that they were largely born into through genetics. This is getting better however.
Those living with or under the stigma of a substance addiction - almost no one who doesn’t have one knows how hard it is to break a substance addiction once it starts and fighting it lasts for life. It is not just a matter of deciding to put it down one day.
I’m with you on #1 (not that I’m against you on #2 . . . ), and would add HIV/AIDS patients to that list. I think people are more educated and less knee-jerk about it now, but talk about a stigma!
Transgendered people. Homosexuality is slowly making its way into the mainstream. TG/TS isn’t even on the radar screen. And lots of people aren’t just ignorant, they find the entire topic repulsive and unnatural.
Quadriplegics. How do they relieve sexual tension?! Are there people that ‘help’ in that regard? Imagine being horny as hell but being unable to do anything about it! (hmm, sounds like the first 14 years of my life! )
These people are truly between two worlds…and picture yourself growing up on some isolated reservation. You try to live the way your ancestors did…but you are exposed to TV, and you want nice clothes and a car…and your income is perhaps a few hundred dollars a year. So, you turn to drugs.
Honestly, I wonder if it would have been better idf the native Americans has been forcibly integrated with the rest of society…I do not see how youndg people (of Native American stock) can expect to live on a remote reservation, herding sheep for pennies.
Those who have lost the use of vital, basic bodily functions - walking, talking, eating normally, etc.
LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgendered) folk. It’s getting better for gays and lesbians, but bisexuals seem to still get a pretty bad rap for “not being able to make up their mind”. I don’t understand why someone would care what someone else wants to do in their own private love life. The very concept that that aspect of someone’s private life is anyone else’s business just doesn’t make any sense to me. How does it even affect anyone else?
Those who have been disenfranchised and tortured as political enemies of the state. Everything from Holocaust survivors to Iraqi Kurds to Bushian enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Graib (sp?).
It varies from day to day…there’s so much in the world to feel bad about.
Queers (I’m pretty sure I’m going to feel bad about this constantly until my brother-in-law and his partner can get married)
Working poor people (I live in the San Francisco Bay area, housing is freakishly expensive), actually anybody who can’t afford to take time off work occasionally.
Good-hearted Christians (being associated with Jesus is one thing, but being associated with the weird-ass psycho hate mongering “Christians” who make it onto the news is a very different thing.)
I have great sympathy for anyone who is unable to lead a normal life due to circumstances beyond their control. The worst, I think, would be to have a sound mind but to be unable to move or communicate.
Some years ago there was a woman in the news who had been totally paralyzed due to taking some bad drugs. Her condition was like that of the patients in “Awakenings”. After about 20 years, some new medicine or technology was able to end her paralysis. When she was asked how she’d felt during her paralysis, she said, “very very depressed”.
In one scene in “Awakenings”, someone asks the doctor if the patients continue to think normally while they are paralyzed. The doctor said “no”, and he was asked why. He said, “Because the alternative is unthinkable”.
My younger sister has cerbral palsy and has the mental abilities of a four year old, if that, despite being 21 physically. My mom recently had to give her up to the state because she has rage problems and is only getting stronger while my mom, at 50 years old, is only getting weaker and has too many medical problems to have to deal with the problems of taking care of a perpetual toddler.
It’s making me sad just typing this… especially since I’ve only called her once since she was given up. How do you talk to someone on the phone when they only know six words? I hate this situation.
As a caretaker for someone with MD, I also have sympathy for the physically disabled. I’m currently in a wheelchair myself but will eventually be up and walking around whereas my employer will not. I always thought losing some inherent ability would be rough and now that I know just how annoying it is, I feel even worse for people that have to deal with it the rest of their lives.
I try not to patronize them by telling them how tough and brave they are though. If one more person tells me how lucky I was to have “only” this injury, I’m going to run over their foot and tell them how lucky *they *are that I didn’t run over both.
And, finally, homosexuals. As a bisexual, it’s a little personal to me that these people get the full rights of American citizens and is depressing to me that so many people would casually make them into second class citizens. What the fuck does it matter who I or anyone else is attracted to?
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