Quickly- I am at the library with a scant few minutes of internet time before closing. Watch me type so fast my fingers flame

Here’s your top ten list of things not “cured” by shame, punishment or restriction:

1) Homosexuality
2) extra-marital sex (either pre marital or adultery)
3) rape (when the shame, punishment, restriction is aimed at victims or potential victims instead of rapists)
4)disease (did shame ever cure an AIDS patient? Or a lung cancer victim?)
5) obesity (if fat shaming worked we’d all look like Ralph Lauren models)
6)mental illness
7) immigration- legal or otherwise. (go back and ask the Irish if “No Irish Allowed” kept them from immigrating 150 years ago. Ask the Chinese in San Francisco if shame kept them out?
8) poverty
9)poverty
10)POVERTY

Einstein famously said that “insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting to get a different result”. I think it’s more stupidity.

Several things above don’t need to be cured at all, they are blights on society (homosexuality, extra-marital sex, immigration, obesity)

The others are illness or disease, which last I checked only got cured through medical science, and poverty.

Poverty has been a source of shame for those who live in it since forever. Punishment doesn’t cure it either, whether it’s Workhouses or debtors prison or Welfare to Work policies.

We’ve tried shame, punishment, and restriction for eons to end poverty. Perhaps it’s time we tried something less stupid. Perhaps it’s time we realized that poverty is not the result of personal, individual failures but of a society that refuses to provide basic living requirements to the least powerful of it’s members.

(It is probably a good thing that our internet died when it did- as I was so angry at the fauxgressive, sexist, classist, fat shaming going on at Change.org that my blood pressure was seriously rising. I have no more patience for helpful wolves in sheep costume)

PPS– I cannot type blog posts from my phone, but I can read comments and might be able to respond, so consider this an open thread. I miss you peeps.