I started thinking absently about Steve Rogers’ jogging route during my run today and then i couldn’t STOP thinking about it because there’s literally NO WAY it makes sense unless you accept that he is specifically fucking up his entire morning routine to get another look at the cute boy he clocked on his run. I got home and started to make a post about it but it was like
so you’re just going to have to trust me
Enough people asked me to Get Into This that, you know what, fine. Let’s get into it. Under the cut please enjoy my doctoral dissertation, There Is No Carol In HR, or Captain America Is a Big Ol’ Creep and I Can Prove It with Maps.
let’s be honest though, millennial hate is totally a thing rich folks started because they’re pissed that we have really unpredictable consumer habits and it isn’t as easy to get us to buy into stuff, so they’re mad we aren’t just money giving/traditional economy supporting machines like they expected us to be
like look at how much millennial hate articles are things like “millennials aren’t eating cereal and it’s hurting the cereal industry” or “millennials aren’t buying houses and that’s bad” or “millennials #1 utmost priority isn’t trying to make as much money as possible” and rich folks are mad about it, so just posturing our unpredictability/nontraditional values as “laziness” gets everyone else on board the hate train in some weird attempt to collectively subdue us
“You are Doing Capitalism Wrong and it scares me” – bitter Boomers to Millennials who are not buying into their shit (or buying their shit)
Keep in mind that the subprime mortgage crisis was at a pretty pivotal time in Millenial’s lives, and taught them that financial institutions are not on your side, will lie to you, and specifically will lie to you about what you can afford.
Like, this isn’t coming from nowhere.
I mean boomers refuse to pay a living wage to anyone and then wonder why those people don’t buy anything? I am sorry but what exactly is the disconnect here?
Millennials value work that has meaning above work that pays well and they hate that as well. It means we can’t be shut up with busy work while they’re made to seem like they’re running a well oiled machine. They come from a generation of a boss being someone who says “do what I say because I told you to” and we come from a generation who values a boss that says “what can I do for you that will help you excel at your job?”
Millennials do not cope well with meaningless busy work so their boss looks better. They don’t cope with being talked down to or not being assisted by their boss when they have a problem. They do not deal well with their innovative ideas being shut down because “that’s not how we do it here.” and I don’t see how any of those things is a problem.
Millennials are also the first generation since the internet was a prominent thing to utilize it as a source of information in a way that is empowering for each other. A single millennial can buy a product and then inform anyone who wants to know about the quality of said product. It only takes a handful of millennials to say “this is a substandard product” to render all the millions of dollars spent on advertising that product completely useless.
Big business has been a blotch on millennials lives since before most of you could even assume a role in adulthood to effect it, so you trust one another more than you trust advertisements or sponsorship, etc.
On the flip side, though, you enthusiastically will push and promote things that you love.
Big business and their baby boomer CEOs and presidents HATE this. Because it means that they can no longer provide a substandard product while making the consumer feel there is nothing better out there.
In the past, if every dish soap was awful, you just had to continue using awful dish soap. Now, you can crowd source an alternative. You can post in a forum, your facebook, a mass text, etc and say “I hate every dish soap, what can I do?” and you will be directed to actual good brands or you will be taught how to brew your own.
You’re a great generation, I’m really proud of you guys.
Seriously, tho.
I’d love to buy a house, but I can’t afford a down payment and can’t be certain that I’ll have the same income levels for thirty years and I don’t actually know whether the banks will accept my highly-fluctuating, self-employed-and-seasonal-labor income as stable enough or high enough to be approved for a mortgage.
And also every new housing development I’ve seen in the past five years has been “Executive Housing, Starting At 390K” and the realtor websites are full of last decade’s foreclosed subdivision homes in the $275K region, and there’s legit no one, including the zoning board, that’s going to help me find or make a cute little house on a tenth of an acre in the region of $50-60K, let alone every other millennial who might like to settle down in a place that suits her desires and means.
Oh, and that same zoning means five people aren’t allowed to share that $300K, 5-bedroom McMansion, because fuck us, that’s why.
And what else? The refrigerator that recently conked out on me was manufactured in 1967. That thing lasted almost fifty years, and today if I walk into a big box store’s appliance department to buy a new refrigerator they will tell me I should really buy a warranty to cover the apparently-substantial risk that it will break within two to five years.
Oh, and there’s apparently a $400ish premium to buy one with a convenient configuration because if you want the refrigerator on top and accessible without bending down for anyone taller than your average first grader there aren’t any of those in the entry-level price range. Once again, fuck us.
Then there’s the labor market itself, where “entry level” positions want three-to-five years of experience, and everybody won’t shut up about the trades but even that requires a $5K+ outlay to go to school for it, and every fast-food restaurant out there has a permanent “Now Hiring” sign up because they drive employees away as fast as they can replace them.
And so many food-service jobs involve being forced to throw away loads of food as it expires but if you eat it or take it home it’s viewed as stealing, and retail jobs sometimes require you to smash perfectly good computers with a sledgehammer so nobody can use them, and fuck all of this, yes, I’m gonna make my own goddamn laundry detergent from a recipe I found on the internet, and I’m gonna buy as much of my vegetables as possible in seed form, and I’m gonna fucking read the consumer reviews on shit before I buy it and I’m going to source a refrigerator from Cragislist for approximately the price of the warranty on a new one, and if The Market wants me to buy a house, it can bloody well wait for me to have the money.
Because seriously, with its “Ask not what your economy can do for you, ask what you can do for your economy” mindset and historic, far-reaching fuckery, the business side of the equation has little room to complain about millennials being the selfish ones.
Since joining Tumblr, I’ve met a lot of young queer people. Look, I’m a bisexual man in a gay relationship, and I’m approaching 30. I was still a kid when Matthew Shepard’s story was being covered on the news. I remember thinking, “I better keep my mouth shut about these feelings I’m having.”
And then I met Dominic when I was 12, and people could see how in love we were. And we got the shit beat out of us. The year I met him, some kids in the grade above me held me down against the bleachers in our gym and stomped on my hand until my fingers broke. Instead of sending me to the nurse, the teacher sent me to the assistant principal to explain the situation. She asked why the kids had beat me up. I said, “They were calling me gay.”
Her response was, “Well, are you?”
My, “I don’t know,” earned a call to my parents, and I was outed. Efforts were made to keep me from seeing Dom. Throughout high school, Dom’s stepmother intensified these efforts. He slept in the basement of the house. Although he was an incredibly talented student, he was prohibited from participating in any extracurriculars. He suffered a lot of physical abuse during those years.
The day he turned 18, he packed up everything he had and walked to my house, and we’ve lived together ever since. Things are better, but they’re not perfect. I’ve had trucks pull up next to me at stoplights and, seeing the pride sticker on my car, through old drinks and garbage into my window. I no longer speak to my dad’s side of the family. I haven’t been to see them for Christmas or Thanksgiving in years. One of my uncles had cornered me at Thanksgiving when I was 17 and said, “I’m not going to judge you, but I’d be happy to break your neck so God can do the judging a little sooner.”
I joined a support group for trans and intersex people. When I joined, 40 people attended regularly. Within the year, the group was half the size it had been. Some couldn’t make it anymore, because they were staying at the shelter, where their stay hinged on them agreeing to instead to attend homophobic sermons. Some were put in correctional therapy. Five of them died. Three of those, I didn’t know, but I knew Alex, the 19 year old who was fag-dragged in Kentucky and died a day later in the hospital, and I knew Stephanie, who went home to Alabama to care for her mom in hospice and was beaten to death with a baseball bat by her mom’s boyfriend.
Tumblr is not reality. The dynamic here does not reflect the dynamic out there. Here’s the part where I finally make a point, and it might be extremely unpopular – but guys, value your allies.Value each other. We are met with enough hate in our daily lives to enter an online safe-space and meet more hate from our own, over petty things. Don’t go after one another over every little thing you find problematic.
Learn to see nuance. Maybe the word “queer” bothers you, and you see a gay man using it as an umbrella term. Maybe someone called a trans man a trans woman because they’re confused about terminology, but the post where they did it was voicing support for the trans community. Maybe someone is just asking a question, wanting to learn more. Stop. Attacking. These. People.
Allies are being driven away. Members of our own community are being ostracized. Others are feeling nervous and estranged, and it’s largely because of places like Tumblr, where the social justice movement is quickly becoming violent and radical. I am begging you, stop nitpicking “problematic” things and start directing your efforts to create real change. When it comes to comes to your allies, forget the “social justice warrior” mentality and put down your torch. Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving. And I’m certainly not saying that your anger doesn’t have a good place – when you are met with bigots on the street, congress members who want to pass hateful laws, violent protesters, abusive parents, prejudiced teachers, that is when you need to be a warrior. That’s when it counts. In the real world. When you have the opportunity to protect people from real harm. Attacking your would-be allies via anonymous asks is just going to lose us ground in the long run. And we don’t have time for that, not when trans women of color are being murdered every day, not when states are still fighting against marriage equality, not when there are politicians in office who believe that trans people are possessed by demons, not when we’ve just lost 50 brothers and sisters to one gunman, not when the media won’t even admit that the attack was homophobic.
Please step back. Look at the big picture. Look at where we are, globally. Don’t just log on to your safe space and attack your allies over small missteps. That’s like washing the dishes in a house that’s on fire, kids. Let’s fight on the battlefield, and when we come home to each other, let’s just focus on bandaging up our wounds so we can go out and win the war.
Signal boost to this unbelievably important message.
Thank you for this.
Allies are being driven away. Members of our own community are being ostracized. Others are feeling nervous and estranged, and it’s largely because of places like Tumblr, where the social justice movement is quickly becoming violent and radical. I am begging you, stop nitpicking “problematic” things and start directing your efforts to create real change. When it comes to comes to your allies, forget the “social justice warrior” mentality and put down your torch. Educate calmly. Be respectful. Be understanding. Be forgiving.
Today is more or less the day that the Democratic nominee is decided.
It is in, in fact, very decisively going to be Hillary Rodham Clinton.
I can already feel the outrage that is about to pour out on this site: the conspiracy theories, the bungled attempts at “math” (which, btw, are almost always inaccurate or wrong), the ugly, sexist memes of HRC that we can all laugh at because hey, if it’s HRC, who gives a fuck?
But before you angrily typesmash into your keyboard about how the establishment is rigged and how the DNC better abide by the “will of the people” and hand the nom to Sanders on a silver platter, I’d like to ask you to take a deep breath and step back for a moment.
First, you need to accept that the fact that Sanders has come so far is a big fucking DEAL. Last year, he was an unknown. This year, he proved to be an excellent challenge to the Democratic establishment, and he’s already inspired dozens of copycats around the country to challenge establishment corruption. It’s a GREAT thing.
But let’s not pretend that he was/is a perfect candidate. I’d actually argue that him and HRC are probably no more and no less “corrupt” or “twisted” than the other. This was especially true in the last few weeks of the campaign, where he got especially ugly and weird, whether it was racking up no less than 639 pages of FEC violations (the irony) to not denouncing the violence and personal death threats sent to super delegates (how hard is it to JUST say “that’s not OK!”? i mean really) to falsely accusing HRC of FEC violations (spoiler: she has none). Honestly, if Tumblr had bothered to vet Sanders even a quarter as much as they did HRC, he would not be this site’s favorite grandpa.
But that’s all counterproductive now. So as tempting as it is, I’m gonna let it go.
Now I’m gonna say something controversial:
HILLARY CLINTON? SHE’S NOT A TERRIBLE PERSON.
There. I said it. What a shocker.
People go on and on about how Sanders got the millennial vote (and handily, at that), but what they always leave out is that HRC got literally EVERY OTHER demographic. Why?
No really, why?
Simple: she LISTENS to them. And then she translates what she’s heard into policy.
Her job isn’t to preach at the bully pulpit. She listens. There’s a reason why she doesn’t hold rallies of thousands, but has garnered the vote of top people at practically every demographic or movement , whether it was the mothers of the movement (incl travyon martin and sandra bland’s mother), the fuckING human rights campaign, planned parenthood, literally every minority vote EVER, and others.
And she turned those inputs into real policy. No for real. Go read her policy statements. They are the most well-researched, detailed, boring things ever. They are GREAT. Her inner policy nerd probs came out because her plans are the most well researched of any candidate possibly ever, and will also put you right to sleep because of how disgustingly long and well written they are.
Now ppl are gonna say “oh she panders” or whatever but yA KNOW WHAT?!?
She also fucking follows through. For real.
Let’s take a famous example: HRC was against gay marriage until like 2013!1!1
(so was Obama, but i mean whatever right? he’s a guy so we cut him slack)
Also, she is the ONLY presidential candidate to have walked in a lgbt pride parade, EVER. (this pic is circa like 2002)
How’s that #throwbackthursday for ya?
My point is: she’s not right on the issues 100% of the time (wow she’s human?!? no wAY) BUT she will fight for the issues and get shit done.
So my plea is this:
Look for the good in HRC.
She’s a thoughtful person and a listener – those who know her have said that the former is in fact her best trait. Think she’s too center or right on your fave issues? FUCKINGTALK ABOUT IT.Let her campaign know.
I’m not asking anyone to tattoo HRC on their chest or start phonebanking for her tomorrow or anything like that. (In fact, don’t, that’s weird as shit)
Vote for Bernie in whatever primaries are left and do not feel the need to suddenly become a living breathing campaigner .
This has been a tough, tough election and I get that it will be very hard to get over the negative image you have of HRC, but I trust that people are smart enough to get it done. So do it, I beg of you.
And finally, like every pretentious ass post on this website ends…
REBLOG. SPREAD THIS SHIT LIKE WILDFIRE.
thx
There’s also the story Andrea Mitchell told tonight on MSNBC – about Hillary during her tenure as First Lady, traveling to China to give a speech about women’s rights, despite the resistance from the State Department. She hid the speech from them during the trip overseas, refusing to allow it to be vetted. There are dozens upon dozens of stories like that, before, during and after when she was last in the White House.
A lot of people either don’t remember or weren’t alive to know just how galvanizing, how much of a force Hillary was when Bill Clinton took office, and how unprecedented it was (outside of a few powerful examples, such as Eleanor Roosevelt) for a First Lady to be quite so strident and purposeful in matters of state – how much of a shock to the system it was to Washington. Hillary has always been controversial and a firebrand in her own way; she has always been despised by the GOP, which has thrown everything they have at her for almost 25 years but never taken her down. She has been tested, burnt, bowed but never broken. She’s been fighting for the issues she believes in since before she was Hillary Clinton. And she never stops working.
A rare politics reblog because the primary is finally over and we have ascended to the next level of hell.
This post has a more rah-rah than I generally prefer or espouse but it has useful information that many of you may not be aware of and also an image of Hillary Clinton with a watch on a shoelace around her neck which is, I cannot lie, the main reason I am reblogging it.
I’d like to add a couple of things: first, Rachel Maddow devoted her A block last night to the history of women running for president in the US and it almost made me cry. Please watch. Second, Rebecca Traister’s profile of Hillary Clinton, which you may already have seen, is the best piece of writing on her so far this election.
I keep thinking about Ezra Klein’s piece from Tuesday night (ETA: forgot the link) about her skill as a politician and how it’s essentially un-male:
But another way to look at the primary is that Clinton employed a
less masculine strategy to win. She won the Democratic primary by
spending years slowly, assiduously, building relationships with the
entire Democratic Party. She relied on a more traditionally female
approach to leadership: creating coalitions, finding common ground, and
winning over allies. Today, 208 members of Congress have endorsed Clinton; only eight have endorsed Sanders.
[…]
In this telling, in order to do something as hard as becoming the
first female presidential nominee of a major political party, she had to
do something extraordinarily difficult: She had to build a coalition,
supported by a web of relationships, that dwarfed in both breadth and
depth anything a non-incumbent had created before. It was a plan that
played to her strengths, as opposed to her (entirely male) challengers’
strengths. And she did it.
Hillary Clinton is a generationally talented politician — albeit
across a different set of dimensions than men tend to be talented
politicians.
He references her frequent comments that she is not a “natural” politician like Obama or Bill Clinton, and draws on Traister’s suggestion in her piece that “charisma” as we understand it is arguably a masculine trait:
She can’t just suffer through the
indignity of campaigning and then hole up with her policy papers. It’s
not enough to have a plan; you have to sell it to the country, over and
over again. Obama proved to be particularly adept at using the media to
disseminate his administration’s messages to the audiences it was trying
to reach, but he is a masterful orator. Bill Clinton, too. Even George
W. Bush was charismatic in his way.
But if, as in this election, a man who spews hate and vulgarity, with
no comprehension of how government works, can become presidentially
plausible because he is magnetic while a capable, workaholic woman who
knows policy inside and out struggles because she is not magnetic,
perhaps we should reevaluate magnetism’s importance. It’s worth asking
to what degree charisma, as we have defined it, is a masculine trait.
Can a woman appeal to the country in the same way we are used to men
doing it?
Hillary Clinton is not a perfect presidential candidate because nobody is a perfect presidential candidate. But I think that Klein has hit on something important, which is that she got to a place where she could feasibly become a presidential candidate in what is likely the only way a woman in this country could, certainly the first time: she fucking networked. A woman could not have run Obama’s campaign. She would not have been taken seriously. And a woman could not have run Sanders’ campaign, because if a woman had somehow managed to be elected to Congress for ~25 years and then gone around the country yelling about The System, having not actually passed any meaningful legislation during her time in office, and not gotten endorsed by almost any of her colleagues, she would have been ripped to shreds inside of a month.
Instead, Clinton worked and worked and worked. And her punishment for that is now that people penalize her for having done so because she is an insider. Well, no shit. How the hell else could she have gotten to this point? I hope that in future we will be able to have female politicians who have an easier route. But if they do it will in part be due to her working her ass off for 25 years and getting shit on the entire time for doing so.
I honestly can’t decide if I identify with Crowley or Aziraphale more because. On one hand I too am a neurotic mess that raises houseplants and worries too much about being cool and constantly fucks up but wants people to love me. And on the other hand, I too am testy and wish humans would leave me alone so I could read and love food so much I would be willing to try and stop the apocalypse so I could continue eating.
Okay here’s the thing – having never read Good Omens I honestly cannot tell which of these is the demon and which of these is the angel
that’s honestly so incredible like that’s kind of the point of good omens tbh
love that movie civil war for the way it Nails the clash between people’s external reads on tony vs The Truth
– backstage MIT people ready to kiss tony’s ass like he wants a fanfare and parades in his honor when really he’s looking for random excuses to ditch the adulation and leave through the back door
– mrs spencer thinking tony won’t give a shit about her son when in reality her struggle becomes a key factor pushing him to the accords
– steve assuming pepper was pregnant, like this guy heads off into the horizon and people assume happiness and then tony’s pretty much like “actually no i am Miserable” in not so many words
– “you alright?” “always,” tony answers, fucking literally clutching his own chest after almost non-successfully talking ross out of approaching steve with a killing squad
– scott lang like “this is your conscience, we don’t talk a lot these days” when in the beginning of the movie tony literally has an “it helps ease my conscience” line i’m just fuckinG
– natasha like “are you incapable of letting go of your ego for one god damn second” literally 1 milisecond before pointing out herself that ross & co practically have tony on a leash and he literally spent the entire movie begging
– tony being like “i was wrong” and sam, who presumably barely ever talked to tony responding like “that’s a first” when he clearly doesn’t hold steve to the same “openly admitting i’m wrong” requirements and like lmao tony was actually The First to say “i was wrong” in the movie and like literally his first scene has him standing in front of an audience like “have a live sneak peak of a MOMENT I REGRET”
bonus points for doing that without compromising the characterization of the IM1 guy who came out of the cave ready to make OPEN HONEST AND PUBLIC AMENDS the guy whose first “back from captivity” press conference speech starts with an honest and personal comment about his incomplete relationship with his father, and moves on to an admission of guilt. the guy who went up in front of journalists and said he wasn’t the hero type because of all his character defects, this guy, My Guy, the guy who has a deleted (WHY) line about how reputations stick with you and he was never entirely comfortable with his, My Guy, My Tony Stark, is finally Back, complete with the tragic Struggles of a reputation he can’t free himself from even though he will Fucking tell you In Person, with minimal prompting, that his conscience is Heavy
Today is more or less the day that the Democratic nominee is decided.
It is in, in fact, very decisively going to be Hillary Rodham Clinton.
I can already feel the outrage that is about to pour out on this site: the conspiracy theories, the bungled attempts at “math” (which, btw, are almost always inaccurate or wrong), the ugly, sexist memes of HRC that we can all laugh at because hey, if it’s HRC, who gives a fuck?
But before you angrily typesmash into your keyboard about how the establishment is rigged and how the DNC better abide by the “will of the people” and hand the nom to Sanders on a silver platter, I’d like to ask you to take a deep breath and step back for a moment.
First, you need to accept that the fact that Sanders has come so far is a big fucking DEAL. Last year, he was an unknown. This year, he proved to be an excellent challenge to the Democratic establishment, and he’s already inspired dozens of copycats around the country to challenge establishment corruption. It’s a GREAT thing.
But let’s not pretend that he was/is a perfect candidate. I’d actually argue that him and HRC are probably no more and no less “corrupt” or “twisted” than the other. This was especially true in the last few weeks of the campaign, where he got especially ugly and weird, whether it was racking up no less than 639 pages of FEC violations (the irony) to not denouncing the violence and personal death threats sent to super delegates (how hard is it to JUST say “that’s not OK!”? i mean really) to falsely accusing HRC of FEC violations (spoiler: she has none). Honestly, if Tumblr had bothered to vet Sanders even a quarter as much as they did HRC, he would not be this site’s favorite grandpa.
But that’s all counterproductive now. So as tempting as it is, I’m gonna let it go.
Now I’m gonna say something controversial:
HILLARY CLINTON? SHE’S NOT A TERRIBLE PERSON.
There. I said it. What a shocker.
People go on and on about how Sanders got the millennial vote (and handily, at that), but what they always leave out is that HRC got literally EVERY OTHER demographic. Why?
No really, why?
Simple: she LISTENS to them. And then she translates what she’s heard into policy.
Her job isn’t to preach at the bully pulpit. She listens. There’s a reason why she doesn’t hold rallies of thousands, but has garnered the vote of top people at practically every demographic or movement , whether it was the mothers of the movement (incl travyon martin and sandra bland’s mother), the fuckING human rights campaign, planned parenthood, literally every minority vote EVER, and others.
And she turned those inputs into real policy. No for real. Go read her policy statements. They are the most well-researched, detailed, boring things ever. They are GREAT. Her inner policy nerd probs came out because her plans are the most well researched of any candidate possibly ever, and will also put you right to sleep because of how disgustingly long and well written they are.
Now ppl are gonna say “oh she panders” or whatever but yA KNOW WHAT?!?
She also fucking follows through. For real.
Let’s take a famous example: HRC was against gay marriage until like 2013!1!1
(so was Obama, but i mean whatever right? he’s a guy so we cut him slack)
Also, she is the ONLY presidential candidate to have walked in a lgbt pride parade, EVER. (this pic is circa like 2002)
How’s that #throwbackthursday for ya?
My point is: she’s not right on the issues 100% of the time (wow she’s human?!? no wAY) BUT she will fight for the issues and get shit done.
So my plea is this:
Look for the good in HRC.
She’s a thoughtful person and a listener – those who know her have said that the former is in fact her best trait. Think she’s too center or right on your fave issues? FUCKINGTALK ABOUT IT.Let her campaign know.
I’m not asking anyone to tattoo HRC on their chest or start phonebanking for her tomorrow or anything like that. (In fact, don’t, that’s weird as shit)
Vote for Bernie in whatever primaries are left and do not feel the need to suddenly become a living breathing campaigner .
This has been a tough, tough election and I get that it will be very hard to get over the negative image you have of HRC, but I trust that people are smart enough to get it done. So do it, I beg of you.
And finally, like every pretentious ass post on this website ends…
REBLOG. SPREAD THIS SHIT LIKE WILDFIRE.
thx
There’s also the story Andrea Mitchell told tonight on MSNBC – about Hillary during her tenure as First Lady, traveling to China to give a speech about women’s rights, despite the resistance from the State Department. She hid the speech from them during the trip overseas, refusing to allow it to be vetted. There are dozens upon dozens of stories like that, before, during and after when she was last in the White House.
A lot of people either don’t remember or weren’t alive to know just how galvanizing, how much of a force Hillary was when Bill Clinton took office, and how unprecedented it was (outside of a few powerful examples, such as Eleanor Roosevelt) for a First Lady to be quite so strident and purposeful in matters of state – how much of a shock to the system it was to Washington. Hillary has always been controversial and a firebrand in her own way; she has always been despised by the GOP, which has thrown everything they have at her for almost 25 years but never taken her down. She has been tested, burnt, bowed but never broken. She’s been fighting for the issues she believes in since before she was Hillary Clinton. And she never stops working.
This headcanon started its
life as simply, “How much more meaningful would the gift of the two
candlesticks be if Myriel was a rabbi rather than a bishop?” (To
celebrate Shabbat, one lights two candles.) As I developed this
concept more, it evolved into an entire fix-it AU. Speaking only for
myself, for me the most life-changing distinction between my experience
of Christianity (ok, Catholicism) and
my experience of
Judaism is this: my experience with Catholicism often glorified
martyrdom and suffering, whereas Jewish culture celebrates surviving and
experiencing life. I think this distinction would make a world of
difference in the way Valjean responds to many of the situations in his
life; that he would not be so needlessly self-sacrificing and would
instead let himself enjoy happiness when it comes to him. He would live
out his life in joy and peace with Fantine (who survives in this AU),
Cosette, and Marius. And every Shabbat, he would light the candles and
remember this warm, kind, and loving man who changed his life.
eirenical17 