ravensrandoms:

queeranarchism:

queeranarchism:

thatsillyfucknvegan:

queeranarchism:

Anyone that tries to encourage me to take political action (from signing a petition to donating to protesting to going vegan etc) by exposing me to horrific images without my consent can fuck right off.

The amount of injustice out there (and for many, in our own lives) is extremely difficult to bear. It takes so much strength for us all just to keep fighting. Because we care. And your shock tactics just make it harder for us to act, precisely because we care so fucking much.

How dare you prioritize one more signature over our mental health? What sort of fucking solidarity is that?

So if you saw horrifying images of war to help you understand why we should stop war, that’s just a sleezy tactic to guilt you and traumatize you into not liking war?

I don’t want to see graphic images of people being shot cops or by mass shooter to understand why there should be better gun laws and better police training, but seeing the truth or the reality always hurts and that’s the idea I suppose to spur us into action.

or like those anti cigarette ads that show diseased lungs designed to scare people away from smoking doesn’t seem all that helpful more like smug pretentious nonsense.

if it’s all done with an intention to build fear to profit off your fear and emotions, then obviously that’s wrong. i completely understand that.

Have you ever noticed how white activists often spread ‘awareness’ by distributing images of the dead bodies of black people while black activists often spread awareness by distributing stories and photos of the life the person had? That’s not a coincidence. 

If you are a person of color or another frequent target of police brutality, seeing  graphic images of people being shot cops is incredibly emotionally disturbing and a long string of these images can wear down your mental health. 

And in general, if you are a person with any sense of empathy and any kind of existing awareness of the scale and nature of the injustices happening right now, frequently seeing graphic images of these injustices takes a very heavy toll on your mental health and on your ability to gather the energy and courage to fight those injustices.

Take a moment to do a 3 step check in with yourself:

1. Think for yourself how you feel when you see a graphic image of someone who died do to injustice, whether it’s from police brutality, poverty, deadly borders, transphobic violence, etc…
2. Estimate for yourself how many of those images you could process in a week and still be okay. One? Or two? five? Or do you need 2 or 3 weeks just to process the one story?
3. For one week from today, keep track of the amount of these stories that you actually see.

Ask yourself: does this constant bombardment of images really help? does it make you more likely to act? or does it make you more likely to break down?

The idea that we are just unwilling and ignorant, and that what we need is a little shock tactics to spur us into action is

1. very inaccurate
2. incredibly insulting
3. incredibly ignorant of the weight of the injustices that we already feel
4. actively damaging our mental health
5. and as a result actively damaging our ability to gather the energy and courage to fight injustices.

So yeah, fuck that.

We are not unwilling. We are not ignorant. Let’s stop doing this to each other. 

Quite extensive research has been done into the use of graphic images in Holocaust education and it turns out that showing the most graphic images of the holocaust is counterproductive. People who see these images shut down and absorb less information and less awareness, not more. 

Guidelines on the website of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum provided by the ITF, suggest, for
instance, that teachers avoid using ‘horrific imagery’ such as ‘piles of naked bodies’ to
engage their students. ‘Engendering shock and revulsion is unlikely to constitute a
worthwhile learning experience. It can, however, have a dehumanising effect and
reinforce a view of Jews as victims’. 

The House of the Wannsee Conference re-opened its newly designed permanent
exhibition in January 2006. It deliberately reduced the number of shocking images
which had been on display during the previous exhibition [..] 

Indeed, the images
may have done more to numb our consciences than to provoke us. 

(source)

People usually try to escape adding to their trauma load, especially if they’re already traumatized. And even the ones who aren’t particularly exposed to or susceptible to the frontline of trauma become desensitized, the imagery blending into the background of repeated exposure.

Hell, the Humane Society here learned this. They changed from “adopt one of these sad animals so we don’t kill it” campaigns to one that was adorable cartoony graphics of people joyously uniting with animals, with variations on an “end petlessness!” theme. It was the most successful thing they’ve ever done, the campaign has continued for years, and adoptions went way up. Because people went “yay, get me a cat; stop being petless!” whereas before they turned away from the sad, traumatic, depressing version to the point that they missed the message and actively avoided engaging with anything that exposed them to the negative imagery.

Think of those commercials on tv. The ones with Sarah McLachlan on loop over heartbreaking, devastating images of neglected, abused, tormented animals. I literally can’t remember if it’s for the ASPCA or PETA or what – because the very moment that first note wails out of the speakers, I change the channel because I absolutely cannot bear what’s to come.

Exposing the people you’re trying to reach to gratuitous traumatic content is not the most effective route to take. At the least, they become numb or indifferent (or have already been made so by previous inundation) and fail to process or pay attention to or care about what you’re trying to say. Beyond that, the people who live among the trauma have just been further damaged by your actions, whether by throwing it in their face yet again or by helping desensitize other people to their trauma or plight or essential humanity. Well-intentioned or not, you’ve made them props.