My first biology professor had an ‘inadequacy drawer’ full of things to remind him he wasn’t, in fact, the dumbest and laziest person to ever exist. It was mostly Darwin, notably these two bits:
‘But I am very poorly today and very stupid and hate everybody and everything.’
‘I am going to write a little Book for Murray on orchids and today I hate them worse than everything.’
“I am at work on the second vol. of the Cirripedia, of which creatures I am wonderfully tired: I hate a Barnacle as no man ever did before, not even a Sailor in a slow-sailing ship.”
-Charles Darwin on a letter to his cousin
Charles Darwin: unexpected depression hero.
I knew about “I am very poorly and very stupid and hate everybody and everything,” but not the others.
“I hate myself, I hate clover, and I hate bees” is A Mood.
My favorite Darwinism: “I am dying by inches, from not having any body to talk to about insects”. Hits me right at the center of my hyperfixated soul.
In the documentary, How to Survive a Plague they mention this very fact. Reagan was the president during this time and do you know what he did when the LGBTQ community begged him for help? He fucking laughed at us. His administration CELEBRATED that finally, ‘God’s judgement in the form of a plague’ was striking down queer people. They saw it as a form of divine population control. Reagan could have given a rats ass about us…
Until the plague began to effect straight people. THEN his administration cared. Because the people that mattered were finally getting sick. And finally the millions of dollars in research money was poured into finding a treatment for HIV. But by then, so many LGBTQ individuals had died. More people died from the initial HIV epidemic than the Vietnam war.
So when straight people complain about being ‘oppressed’ and why there isn’t a straight pride parade? Go fuck yourself. No one has ever tried to wipe you out through a plague, ignored your cries for help as a disease wiped out massive amounts of your community.
Interesting how a pandemic can be shown to disproportionately affect oppressed groups and conservatives can plan to claim negligence when they decide to weaponise it. I hope nothing like that ever happens again.
“It is not by delusion, however exalted, that mankind can prosper, but only by unswerving courage in the pursuit of truth.”
— Bertrand Russell, “The Pursuit of Truth”, The Collected Papers of Bertrand Russell (via philosophybits)
