Imagine that it’s a normal day for you. You’re hanging out with your friends goofing around and cracking jokes trying to be funny. Now let’s say that you did something or said something and one of your friends wanted to post it to social media. You let them as you think it will be funny and get a reaction out of people. That is exactly what happens to Lindsey Stone in Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Publicly Shamed but it lands her in a load of trouble. Lindsey’s poor judgement on posing for a photo while making obscene gestures and letting her friend post it to Facebook ended up in her being publicly shamed for months.
In 2012, Lindsey Stone and her friend, Jamie, worked for LIFE- Living Independently Forever. When talking to Jon, Lindsey said that LIFE was for “pretty high-functioning people with learning disabilities” (Ronson 206). Lindsey and Jamie took a group of people with learning disabilities on a trip to Washington, D.C. where they visited the National Mall, the U.S. Holocaust Museum, the Smithsonian, The U.S. Mint, and Arlington National Cemetery. When Lindsey and Jamie weren’t working, they liked to take pictures of themselves mimicking signs, such as, smoking in front of a no smoking sign.
When they were at Arlington National Cemetery, they saw a sign that read “Silence and Respect”. They thought it would be funny
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if Lindsey stood next to sign the sign making a gesture as if she were shouting and holding up her middle finger. Jamie asked if she could post it on her Facebook page and Lindsey let her, thinking that it was funny. However, her friends thought otherwise. One of her friends, who had served in the military, commented “This is kind of offensive. I know you girls, but it’s just tasteless” (Ronson 207). After seeing that others agreed with him, Jamie asked if she should take it down. Lindsey immediately said no thinking that people would forget about it. It wasn’t long until the picture became popular on social media and Lindsey was getting blasted for it. Lindsey and Jamie were out celebrating their birthdays when they noticed that their phones were constantly going off.
They went online and noticed that her picture went viral with many horrible comments directed towards Lindsey, some of which said: “Lindsey Stone hates the military and hate soldiers who have died in foreign wars,” and “The Face of a Typical Feminist. Fifty pounds overweight? Check. Sausage arms and little piglet fingers? Check. No respect for the men who sacrificed? Check,” and “HOPE THIS CUNT GETS RAPED AND STABBED TO DEATH,” and “After they fire her, maybe she needs to sign up as a client. Woman needs help” (Ronson
208-209).
When I watched FAT City the second time around, I made sure to stay awake! I paid close attention to the genius of Rick Lavoie’s experiment. He manipulated the operation in a way that enabled every participant, spectator, and at-home audience to identify with a student with learning disabilities, which is the most effective way to empathize and improve one’s interactions with students with learning
All these and more evidences used in the book support Peterson’s thesis and purpose—all of them discuss how having a disability made Peterson and others in her situation a part of the “other”. Her personal experience on media and
She told her readers that she has a muscle-wasting disease and she could only move three fingers on her right hand. She wrote that the reactions she got from most people were “Decidedly negative” (Johnson p.98) She wrote that she would hear thing such as “I admire you for being out; most people would give up.” And “You don’t let the pain hold you back do you?” (Johnson p.98) There is often talk about how popular culture teaches people to both see and not see the people with disabilities. Comments such as these are an example of such blindness. When a child sees a disabled person a parent’s first reaction would be to tell them not to stare. We teach children that it is impolite to be curious about people who live life differently than others. We carry the “its-not-polite-to-stare” idea into adult hood therefore when we come across a disabled we try not to make eye contact not as if we are being rude but because we are taught that it would offend them. All curiosity and attempts to understand are shut down at a young age for fear of offending someone. Therefore, any attempt to encourage is met with a deep misunderstanding of how the life of someone with disabilities truly works. Just because a person has a disability does not mean they are incapable of enjoying
The experience changed her life, she learned to rethink her own attitude and self determination. I learned that people with mental retardation are not to be separated from society or even treated with less respect because of their disability. “Riding the Bus with My Sister” taught me to never neglect people with mental disabilities. Readers learned that people with mental retardation, just like everyone else, have families, desires, and determination. They cry, they laugh, they have emotions just like the rest of us. We can learn new things from those suffering from mental retardation. ‘Riding the Bus with My Sister” taught me that civil rights apply to
Nancy Mairs, born in 1943, described herself as a radical feminist, pacifist, and cripple. She is crippled because she has multiple sclerosis (MS), which is a chronic disease involving damage to the nerve cells and spinal cord. In her essay Disability, Mairs’ focus is on how disabled people are portrayed, or rather un-portrayed in the media. There is more than one audience that Mairs could have been trying to reach out to with this piece. The less-obvious audience would be disabled people who can connect to her writing because they can relate to it. The more obvious audience would be physically-able people who have yet to notice the lack of disabled people being portrayed by the media. Her purpose is to persuade the audience that disabled people should be shown in the media more often, to help society better cope with and realize the presence of handicapped people. Mairs starts off by saying “For months now I’ve been consciously searching for representation of myself in the media, especially television. I know I’d recognize this self becaus...
Perhaps if everyone realized the wisdom in the famous proverb, “before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes”, people would have more empathy for those who may seem to be atypical. The video How Difficult Can This Be? The F.A.T. City Workshop presented by Richard D. Lavoie effectively gets participants to experience the feelings and stress of children with learning disabilities. Lavoie draws his participants into the classroom experience with well developed exercises that elicit the frustration, anxiety, and tension of children with
...ses a threat of humiliation and maltreating from other individuals that can have a detrimental effect on their lives. A person can go from being a normal school student to a laughing stock on a popular social network or even trend from a emotionally stable individual to a deranged, depressed critter who now hides in the shadows of society hoping never to be revealed. The informative thought of the re-occurrence of public shaming throughout history from Bennett allows the reader to question if this is an issue that is perpetual and something that will never go away. Furthermore, the author conveys the idea that publicizing oneself can be a burden; the darkside of Internet fame. Wrapping up her article, Bennett portrays a warning to the reader stating, “Shame...will always be with you”(115). Harassment from Internet fame can alter a person's life-forever.
As human beings, we like to make sure never to offend or judge anyone. We even have sayings like “never judge a book by its cover”. A metaphor that is often said whenever trying not to judge someone based on their outward appearance; however, it is not often that people practice what they preach. We judge people based on external factors within seconds. Even though we know what people see on the outside is not a defining factor or who we are as people. Nancy Mairs, author of On Being a Cripple, has to live through this every day. She knows this truth very well, and lives proudly with the fact that as she is disabled. Mairs is admirable for choosing to call herself a “cripple” and not be ashamed of it. Though the word is derogatory and a word that is avoided by society, Mairs identifies herself as a cripple because that is what she is. In explaining her disability, she says, “I haven’t always been crippled, ... to be whole of limb is ... infinitely more pleasant and useful. and if that knowledge leaves me open to bitterness … the physical soundness I once enjoyed is well worth the occasional stab of regret” (Mairs 186). What really
Nearby resident Stephen Sweetman provides examples of making and remaking on City Road, in relation to connections and disconnections between people. Disconnected with disabled people, until a severe disablement of his own, Stephen soon became further disconnected, this time with people from the outside world. Family members connected with Stephen by introducing him to the use of a wheelchair. This action enabled Stephen to connect with fellow wheelchair users yet, after experiencing ‘discrimination’ (Havard, 2014, p.77) held against disabled people; he remained disconnected with the rest of society. While acknowledging how far society has travelled, along the road to securing acceptable disabled rights, Stephen stated,
Mairs, Nancy. “On Being a Cripple.” Writer’s Presence: A Pool of Readings. 5th ed. Ed. Robert Atawan and Donald McQuade. Boston:Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2006. 183-193. Print
Someone’s mistakes can easily be debuted online, making the levels of public shame go beyond its limits. In Source C, “Is the Internet a Mob without Consequence?”, there is an article about an adult who got a massive amount of hate for an inappropriate tweet. In the document, the adult named Ms. Sacco received intense reactions and consequences: “Yet as soon as it was clear that she had made similar comments in the past, the Internet turned into a voracious and vengeful mob. Ms. Sacco was tried and judged guilty in a public square of millions and soon attacked in a way that seemed worse than her original statement. Within hours, people threatened to rape, shoot, kill, and torture her.” (Bilton 9-13). With the negative feedback, the lady realized her tweet was an awful mistake; however, when dealing with the internet, there is no “deleting” mistakes. Also, being shamed to the extent of having millions watch her in a public square and then threaten to do so many wrong actions like killing is just brutality wrong. The responses following the tweet are in fact far more disgusting than the single tweet posted which started the entire breakout. Furthermore, with the rise of social media, Monica Lewinsky also had her fair share in being harassed and humiliated online. Monica shares with the audience, “But the attention and judgement that I received, not the
Radley, M. (2009). Understanding the social exclusion and stalled welfare of citizens with learning disabilities. Disability and Society, 23(4): 489-501.
In the saying of “Character is what you are in the dark” by Dwight Lyman Moody, can meaning many different things. One being, “you are most yourself when no one is watching”, another one also being, “dark and troubled times bring out a person's true nature”, and “your true nature is on the inside”. This quote can or cannot apply to the play of “Romeo and Juliet” by Shakespeare.
In the article “The Shame Culture,” David Brooks is expressing his opinions on today’s colleges awash in moral judgement. He states many college students watch their words in fear to be accused as being incorrect. Many students feel they need to post to social media in order not be judged. Andy Crouch a Christianity Today publisher popularized between the guilt culture and the shame culture. In a shame culture, you believe what your community says about you, whether it honors or rejects you. In a guilt culture, you sometimes fell as you are doing something bad. Social media has created a shame culture where if you are not on Facebook and Instagram you dread of being expulsion and condemned. Finally, in an era full of social media its
In the essay “Disability,” Nancy Mairs discusses the lack of media attention for the disabled, writing: “To depict disabled people in the ordinary activities of life is to admit that there is something ordinary about disability itself, that it may enter anyone’s life.” An ordinary person has very little exposure to the disabled, and therefore can only draw conclusions from what is seen in the media. As soon as people can picture the disabled as regular people with a debilitating condition, they can begin to respect them and see to their needs without it seeming like an afterthought or a burden. As Mairs wrote: “The fact is that ours is the only minority you can join involuntarily, without warning, at any time.” Looking at the issue from this angle, it is easy to see that many disabled people were ordinary people prior to some sort of accident. Mairs develops this po...