Good people aren’t wealthy.
Let me make this clear here. It’s actually impossible to hoard millions in personal fortune and also live an ethical life.
Some people are taking this as a personal attack against their families, who make something in the six figure range. This post is not about you. In full scale, families like that are not what I’d consider to be “wealthy”.
I’m talking about the multi-millionaire/billionaire CEOs, politicians, and media moguls. This isn’t about your uncle who’s a surgeon and saves people’s lives. Please don’t misinterpret that. They’re not nearly on the same scale of “wealthy”.
But if your uncle is the head of a multinational corporation that utilizes cheap overseas labour and exploits third world countries, fuck that guy actually.
Tag: important
Steve Rogers and Mental Illness
captainsteverogersdefensesquad:
So, many people discuss Tony Stark’s mental health, and they usually go along the lines of “Tony has a debilitating mental illness! He has PTSD and anxiety!” And later use to it excuse any bad things he’s done. And yes, Tony has mental illnesses that’s true but like…have we ever talked about Steve?
He obviously has PTSD (and most likely depression and anxiety) as a result of serving in freaking WWII. Watching friends (Bucky and Dr. Erskine) and fellow soldiers get killed, and being exposed to all other horrors of war, is bound to leave mental scars. Not only is he a veteran, but a man out of time. When Steve put that plane in the water, he was fully expecting death but instead woke up to a new century, where everyone he knew and loved was either dead or, in the case of Peggy, barley clinging to life and his memory. Seeing his old love, once full of life, in such a state likely made his depression worsen.
His PTSD is explicitly shown in The Avengers (the flashback scene in the gym where he is remembering the war, Peggy, and the plane crash) and Age of Ultron (his worst fear literally being not being able to live without war) and more subtly over the course of the Captain America trilogy. This isn’t even mentioning all of the trust and abandonment issues he likely has after being manipulated by S.H.I.E.L.D. and Tony (“you don’t deserve that shield!”) As well as finding out his best friend is alive and has been brainwashed to be a Nazi assassin.
Steve also displays a lot of suicidal tendencies, even before the war. He gets into fights with bigger, meaner bullies constantly and recklessly puts his life in unnecessary danger. Bucky even comments on this, “It’s almost like you like getting punched.” Later, in the barracks, Steve’s first instinct is to jump on a grenade to protect the other soldiers, instead of finding a solution that doesn’t endanger his life. These tendencies come from his (albeit stubborn) desire to do the right thing no matter what, protect people and show that he, skinny, sick, weak and “useless” in the eyes of 1940’s America, is good and that his life means something.
“Bucky, come on! There are men laying down their lives. I got no right to do any less than them. That’s what you don’t understand. This isn’t about me.” “Right. Cause you got nothing to prove.”
“I know I’m asking a lot. But the price of freedom is high. It always has been. And it’s a price I’m willing to pay. And if I’m the only one, then so be it. But I’m willing to bet I’m not.”
“You’re not the guy to make the sacrifice play, to lay down on a wire and let the other guy crawl over you.”
In his quest to stop bullies, protect the little guy and stand up for what’s right, he equates being a hero with sacrifice, the ultimate sacrifice being his own life for the greater good. Steve didn’t feel like he was good enough then, and he doesn’t feel like he’s good enough now. The only way to proven to himself that he is enough is to sacrifice himself for a cause, which leads to reckless behavior and a disregard for his own safety in favor of worrying about others.
(He obviously has a lot of unrealized and unresolved problems, but unlike Tony he uses healthy coping mechanisms (exercise, talking it out, making new friends with similar problems) to deal with his mental illness instead of hurting the people closest to him.)
Steve Rogers has mental illnesses that should not be forgotten about. Remember why he fights, what he fights for and what he has to overcome to fight at all.
Speak on it! Also I’m pretty sure Steve had daddy issues it’s a well known fact that his dad was an alcoholic and often abused his mother and I’m pretty sure him sometimes. And don’t forget that line in age if upfront right before they went to sokovia when Steve said “I’ve got no plans tomorrow night.” Thanks for the awareness!
Just FYI, in the films Steve’s father died before he was born, fighting in WWI, from mustard gas. (Steve was born in July 1918, his father dies from Mustard gas in the war which ended in Nov 1918, but the official MCU date is May 8th 1918 from supplemental material).
So in the films it seems Steve never knew his father, which bring it’s own set of Daddy issues, interestingly, none of which Steve feels the need to take out on other people. But it probably does add an extra layer to how quickly he became attached to the kind older male figure of Dr Erskine, he’s probably the closest thing to a father figure Steve ever had, as brief as it was.(Not forgetting that the project was called Project Rebirth–so he is in a way Steve’s father, the Steve who came out of the capsule after the serum)
To be honest Steve’s portrayal in some ways IMO is more realistic. In reality, many are quietly struggling with anxiety, depression, PTSD and most people who know them wouldn’t even know it. Only those who are closest, which is how it is with Steve. Sam for example, clearly knows. Being a therapist himself, he immediately recognized what Steve was dealing with and comments on it in his first conversation with him.
It’s also why he uses the excuse of impressing the girls at work to invite him to come to see him at the VA.
I think it’s safe to say Natasha can see it too, which is probably one of the reasons she was always encouraging to go out on dates and be more social in Civil War and wanted to make sure she was there for him at Peggy’s funeral.
PLUS we also know even prior to entering the war and having all this stuff happen to him(mentor murdered in front of him, violent war, dying, man out of time, etc) if you look at the medical issues listed on his enlistment forms, one of the things mentioned is “nervous trouble of any sort” which was basically a catch all phrase for anxiety and/or panic attacks. It’s still used on Army forms, but now it actually has “anxiety or panic attacks” in parenthesis afterwards.
And given all his ailments, a number of which were quite serious, plus the frequently with which he was bullied, it’s probably no surprise if he sometimes had some anxiety.
On another note Steve’s mother died from Tuberculosis, which as we know was a painful and slow way to die, she died a few months after he turned 18 in Oct 1936. So Steve would most likely have spent at least his last few years of high school basically watching her die(not to mention she may have been put into quarantine where he would have been limited in how much he could see her, if he could see her at all – I do wonder if the filmmakers considered this, because that would have meant he may well have been trying to support himself, pay for an apartment and go to school on his own by the time he was 16 or so).
Point is, Steve Rogers life has been filed with pain, poverty, loneliness and trauma – and some of these stans think he doesn’t have trauma simply because he isn’t always acting it out on everyone around him?
All. This.
All this.
I know Tony’s on-screen visible panic attack was important to a lot of people. I dont want to belittle that at all. But I dont understand why Steve gets treated like this isnt an issue for him at all when it so obviously is. His symptoms in fact are much closer to mine. In his case its cultural, that a man of his time doesnt share those things. In my case, it wasn’t safe for me to visibly have panic attacks. But the end result is similar. And those results are routinely portrayed in the films.
It’s like the MCU fandom forgets or doesn’t want to hear or know that YES! there are fans who identify with Steve’s issues, Steve’s PTSD, Steve’s outlook.
Yes, believe it or not, there are those of us who identify with Steve.
can we please bring back “in poor taste” as a concept
Because at some point it got folded in under “problematic,” and now every damn thing that has Unfortunate Implications or deals with sensitive topics indelicately enough to raise hackles or gores somebody’s sacred cow is treated as a grave injustice or a threat to society. Online activism culture has lost the vocabulary to express “this deals with touchy stuff in a way many people might find inappropriate, and you should probably avoid it if insensitivity on this subject gets you angry/upset, but it’s not promoting hateful ideas or demeaning people or affecting anything but my opinion of the creator’s sense of tact.”
I think this really an important post.
We’ve fallen into such a rut of “everything is right or wrong, no inbetween” that stuff that’s merely in poor taste is conflated with things that are actually offensively malicious.
this is so well worded like i been trying to say this for awhile thank you
Damn. This is the thing.
I also kinda dislike that people started saying ‘problematic’ when they could be specific about what someone did wrong. It becomes this vague scary thing that someone ‘said something problematic’ and you don’t know whether they passionately defended nazis or made a clumsy joke about retail workers. And because we don’t know what someone means but we do want to be safe a lot of us just assume to worst and avoid people labelled ‘problematic’. This makes is a very effective tool to bully out people for minor flaws and to reinforce purity culture and disposability culture.
If a cis person, a straight person, a gamer, a white person, or a member of another non-oppressed group asks, “Where’s MY pride parade? Where’s MY special flag? Where’s MY exclusive club?” Then they must also ask…
“Where’s my fabric patch that my people were forced to wear on their clothing during the Holocaust?”
“Where are the laws that deny me being able to adopt children, marry my partner, or freely use the public bathroom that makes me feel safest?”
“Where are the politicians and religious figures that openly murder and imprison my people?”
If none of these questions make any sense in regard to their group, then perhaps they should next ask, “Why am I trivializing the traumatic history of oppressed people trying to survive in a world that violently tries to make them disappear?”
rocky horror is the worst and is also transmisogynistic can we please finally get over this shit movie
ok but like the writer is transgender nonbinary and the language used in the play was the preferred language by trans people of that time can we not deny parts of our history because we’ve evolved since then thanks
So fucking much this.
PS, youth of today: you’ll be saying the same damn thing about art from this time before too long, for good or for ill. Terminology will, in fact, change. Definitions will, in fact, shift. It always does, they always do.
PPS, it is pretty much impossible to overstate how life-alteringly important this movie was to kids who didn’t conform to standard expectations of gender and sexuality, back in the day. Especially when back in the day was the mid-to-late 1980s, when the only queers you saw on TV were neutered AIDS tragedies, Bowie was playing straight, and even Elton John was married to a woman, and midnight showing of RHPS were pretty much the only place that felt like home. It was mental life raft for a lot of people.
I was one of them.
rocky horror was a lifeline.
y’all have NO IDEA how isolated we were before the internet, before mobile phones. imagine never having an unsupervised conversation with your friends. literally never. you were at school, or you were on the landline in the same room with your parents. imagine never having access to reading material that wasn’t mainstream-published. imagine never seeing a video that wasn’t network tv or hollywood. imagine every single bit of information you had access to being thoroughly filtered and vetted by the majority-mainstream. imagine all this under ronald reagan and margaret thatcher and the ussr and a divided germany, the cold war still threatening to go nuclear and violent religious extremists rising in the middle east, a bunch of dirty little wars festering in central and south america, china gutting mongolia, north korea defiantly starving to death…
it felt like the literal end of the world, and you were completely fucking alone.
and then there was this cultural phenomenon. this unapologetically senseless movie, morbid and silly and full of genderweird and catchy songs and cheesy tropes. the places that did the midnight showings were financially unimportant, out of the way, under the radar, and it was safe to be weird there. you could convince your parents to let you go because you’d go in a group, and since it was at a theater or college cultural center they knew you wouldn’t be drinking and doing drugs and having sex (Just Say No!) and you were technically under adult supervision – but the theater employees were generally college students and didn’t give a fuck as long as you didn’t wreck the place or get arrested.
you could dress up, you could be loud, you could play with gender, you could camp it up and let your hair down. you could be free. and for just one night of the week, you could forget that it was the end of the world.
too lazy; didn’t read: you’re talking out your ass and you need to clench up.
i went to a very open and sexually liberal performing arts highschool in the aughts like twenty years later, and RHPS was still a wonderful thing to experience as a teenager sorting out gender and sexuality issues. i was surrounded by girls trading yaoi comics and boys trading yuri comics and theater kids that had every line of RENT memorized. and i saw RHPS in ninth grade, i think, and made sure to go to showings nearly every year thereafter, at older friend’s parties and at college media screenings and outdoor park showings and in independent theaters. i still go when i can. i think everyone over fourteen or fifteen should. it’s a piece of history and it’s a very vibrantly alive and relevant cultural tradition, and the atmosphere is so weird and so welcoming, and the movie is so profoundly silly. it’s absurd to me that anyone could say we’re done with it.
Bolded, above. I was in uni just as the internet became a way to connect. It was still so new, not yet a part of our lives as fully as it is now.
RHPS was freedom. It was your neighbour’s roommate in gold hot pants and no apologies, being able to kiss your girlfriend in the middle of a crowd and not be attacked, it was corsets on DMABs and three-piece suits on DFABs, and everyfuckingthing was queered. Right there, on stage, in living colour.
It was amazing.
Don’t sneer at the old guard, kidlets. Every generation forges the media it needs at the time.
Always reblog this. Especially now at the 40th anniversary.
Reminder: I grew up in *Manhattan.* My parents, in the grand scheme of things, were pretty liberal and open and accepting.
I still desperately needed RHPS as my place to be weird and discover myself.
It was important, and that importance should not be discounted.
backup from Tumblr 