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5:09pm August 3, 2015

alliecat-person:

I’m particularly rolling my eyes at people who think that their personal grievances should dictate the entire political strategy of a movement.

FFS, how self-centered can you possibly get?!!

I haven’t seen whatever’s causing this, but I’ve definitely seen it over and over and over again, and it pisses me off. 

In fact I was just thinking about it, because I’m sure someone somewhere is going to bring up the fact that Sharisa is supposedly a victim of something I did years ago (she’s not, but it doesn’t matter whether she is or not, for the purposes of anything important), and tell me that I shouldn’t write about what’s happened to her, or try to get anyone involved in saving her from the hell she’s been put into.

Except, I actually acknowledge that it doesn’t matter whether I like her, or whether she likes me, or whether we had a fight years ago, or whether she’s supposedly a victim of mine or I’m supposedly a victim of hers or anything at all related to that.  What matters is that she’s in trouble and I’m a person who gives a shit about whether people are in trouble.  There’s very few people in the world that I would not lift a finger to save if they were in this situation.  (And in those circumstances it would not be because I didn’t like them, but it’s really none of anyone’s business.)  To refuse to deal with this because we had a falling out years ago would be horribly petty when her entire life is at stake.

Also I actually have experience with having similar accusations made against my caregivers to attempt to institutionalize me for life and take me away from people.  Not a lot of people in the autistic community can say that.  Having experienced that firsthand, of course I’m going to spread the word when it happens to someone else.  I just wish I could do more than I’m actually able to do.  Which is mostly signal boosting and hoping that the number of followers I have means that the word will get out and something will happen.  I can’t even make phone calls, and writing letters would be close to impossible.

But I do fully expect someone to rail against me for getting involved in this, because who am I to step in or some bullshit like that.  Who I am is a person who isn’t so fucking petty and heartless that I’d throw someone to the wolves just because they don’t like me.  And if that’s a problem to anyone I’d suggest they re-examine their priorities.  Will Sharisa and I ever be close friends?  Likely not, there’s too much misunderstanding and bad blood between us for that.  Do I give a shit that she’s had her communication devices stolen, had her caregivers accused of making her sick, and been imprisoned against her will in a situation she doesn’t want?  Absolutely.  Twenty years ago something very similar almost happened to me.  I can’t not give a shit.

So please, if you want to bring up what happened between her and me ages ago, please just fucking stow it.  And actually, nothing directly happened between her and me, what happened was a situation occurred involving both of us, but that included no actual direct communication between us, but that I nonetheless got blamed for. (1)   [Note:  I’m putting the footnote under a Read More, so that nobody actually has to read my account of what happened between us unless they want to.  I felt that I should describe it just so people know that it was an ideological conflict rather than anything where either of us directly hurt the other one.  But I don’t want to force anyone to read a rehash of a long-dead fight.]

At any rate – there’s more important things to think about than who likes who and who dislikes who and stuff like that.  Like, saving someone’s life and getting them their freedom.

And in general, I see this all the time in the autistic community – people have a falling out, and then they base their actual political divisions and stuff on who is on whose side.  (Which really sucks for those of us who don’t want to be on anyone’s side, but that’s a whole other thing.)  And then they expect everyone to pick a side, and they expect everyone’s actions to mean they’re picking a side, whether or not they really are in the first place.  And then it becomes a big Thing.

Like there’s situations where things like that matter.  Where a conflict is more than just an interpersonal conflict.  For instance, the same stalker who deliberately placed herself between me and Sharisa (which is a side specialty of hers, splitting up alliances and friendships on purpose, when she isn’t threatening people’s lives), is someone who I would not work with a million years because there are actual safety issues there.  This is someone who threatens to kill people, that is not on the level of two people who just happen to not get along, it’s not even on the order of ordinary bullying. It’s in fact so far beyond the order of ordinary bullying that unless you’ve experienced something like it directly, you’d have a hard time believing it was possible to do the things this person has done to multiple members of the autistic community.  And there’s a tiny number of people like that, in the autistic community, and in any community – people who it’s just too dangerous to work with them on anything.

But most of the time, when nobody’s trying to kill or otherwise generally ruin each other?

Most of the time, people should be able to put aside their personal differences when there’s a problem to solve.  And even if two people hate each other so much that the two of them refuse to work together on anything, they should not try and force other people to pick sides, and to choose their ideological or political positions based on which side they pick.  That’s just cruel and divisive and self-centered and wrong.  People should know better than to play into that kind of thing.

NOTE:  Be aware, again, that past the “Read More” is a description of the falling-out between me and Sharisa.  It is only there so that you understand it stems from ideological difference over how inclusion should be practiced, rather than either of us trying to hurt the other in any way.  And also because most people have only heard her side of it, because I don’t generally run around telling people the details of things like this.  In reality, neither of us had any direct contact with each other the entire time things were going down, and I could not have changed things if I’d tried.  I was too busy trying to keep myself safe on a basic physical level, to care about who was on what board at what time and all that.  But at any rate, don’t click “Read More” unless this is actually something you want to know the details of.

(1) Basically I didn’t want someone who had directly threatened my life to be allowed to come watch me give a presentation.   The stalker who threatened my life contacted Sharisa claiming to, basically, be victimized by my desire not to be killed by her.  (That’s obviously not how she put it, but you get the idea.)  Sharisa took my stalker at her word, and furthermore believed that my desire to be kept safe in this manner was violating the principle of inclusion. 

The board of the organization putting on the conference, was going to vote about whether to allow this person at the conference.  I was not on the board, was not privy to board meetings, and was in contact with only one or two people on the board during this time.  The only direct contribution I made was to compile evidence of the death threats and the seriousness of the situation – something I was directly asked to do by a board member –  but I did not contact anyone on the board trying to influence their votes or anything like that.  Nor did I know much about what was happening on the board, as it was happening.  The whole conflict between board members over this issue took place behind closed doors.  But here’s what I was later told by a board member: 

Sharisa threatened to quit the board if they voted to ban my stalker from the conference, because she said she didn’t want to be in an organization that wasn’t 100% committed to inclusion.  She literally only had weeks left on the board anyway.  So the “sacrifice” she was threatening to make was not much of a sacrifice. The board voted, overwhelmingly apparently, to ban my stalker from the conference.  Sharisa followed through on her threat to quit the board, and wrote a public letter describing it as a ~forced resignation~ and blaming me for it.  Even though I was not on the board and did not vote and did not directly influence anyone’s votes.  Literally my only contribution was sending in evidence against my stalker, at the request of a board member.  The way the board voted based on that material was entirely up to them.

I’m describing this – my side of it, obviously – just so people know that it was a conflict over ideology, not a thing where either one of us actually did any harm to the other.  I respect her opinion and her commitment to her ideals, even though I think she was dangerously wrong in her attempted application of those ideals, and naive to believe in my stalker’s harmlessness.  And I also think that including people who threaten to kill people is actually a very exclusionary act, because it excludes anyone whose life would be threatened by the person in question.  So it may look like “a commitment to inclusion” to just say everyone who wants to come can always come and damn the consequences.  But in reality – from my perspective – if you’re committed to inclusion, you have to know when to say “Including this person would de facto exclude innocent people this person has threatened.”  But I also know that unless she was in my shoes, she might not understand that my fear of being killed was based on something real.  She seemed to think that threats that take place on the Internet aren’t to be taken seriously.  That’s a mistake a lot of people make.

I do seriously question the thing where her threatening to quit, and then quitting, was my fault somehow, because I never once said she should quit the board, that was entirely her idea.  Nobody, in fact, asked her to quit.  She said “I’m quitting if you do this” and people said “Okay, we might not want you to quit, you know, but we’re doing it anyway, because threatening to quit if we don’t do this isn’t going to change our opinions.”  And she quit – entirely her choice.  Plus quitting literally a couple weeks before the natural end of your term is hardly any loss anyway.  But my bullies, sensing a rift they could create between people (they love doing that), played it up as if she was a martyr to my supposedly huge influence over the autistic community.  Even if all that about my influence over the autistic community was true, what she lost was about two or three weeks of board membership, that’s literally all she gave up in my name.  But giving it up was her idea, not mine or any board member’s either.

I don’t know what she thinks of me these days.  In fact, I doubt she thinks of me at all these days, she’s too busy living out a horrifying situation.  If she is thinking of me during all this, I’d be very disturbed and would say that she should probably stop and focus on what’s important. 

And that’s the point of my post.  The above happened between us, and I’m writing it to acknowledge what did happen – and what didn’t happen – so that people aren’t in the dark about the details.  At least from my side of the story, which I’ve never told in public before because I’m not usually into rehashing things like this.  But at the same time, hopefully from my description you can see that nothing that happened between us should make either one of us hesitate to try and save the other one if something happened to us.  I will do everything within my (woefully limited, if only I had the level of influence my stalker likes to claim I do, I could use it in situations like this) power, to get the word out about this.

I hope that she would do the same if our situations were reversed.  I’m not sure, because I don’t know her personality well enough to know if she holds grudges on that level.  Some people do, some people don’t.  I am bad at holding grudges on any level, so while I’m a little wary of her on a personal level (entirely because she was, IMO naively, maintaining a connection with someone who threatened to kill me and friends of mine and took actual steps to try to get others to kill us), I’m horrified by what’s happening to her and want to help.  If, after reading this, anyone still has a problem with that, I suggest you re-evaluate your priorities in a huge, huge way. 

Also, I didn’t write this so I could argue with anyone about what happened.  Anyone who tries will get blocked.  That’s so much not my point.  (Although it would prove my point about how petty people can get.)