We already ask too much of our teachers. Why are we expecting them to give their lives now?
As someone who works in the schools, I want to stress how important this is. I work with 11-14 year olds, and after Parkland a girl asked me what I would do. And I looked at their faces. I adore my kids, even the ones who make me want to pull the hair out of my head. And I was hit with this wave of love. Your kids come to school and you trust me with them, and in return I give them all of my love and respect and I care about every kid that walks through my door. And that’s when I knew I would die for them. Because if it saves even one of those precious kids it will have been worth it.
People that are so pro-gun give me chills because I have nightmares about a shooting happening at my school. I cant imagine my kids walking into class and seeing an empty desk and knowing that they won’t be back. I’m crying right now thinking about that. I dont particularly care what people do in their free time but are guns worth the lives of kids? Because that’s the question our nation is trying to answer. Personally, I think the answer should be obvious. Why isnt the answer obvious?
Tldr: I would quite literally die to protect my students. This is a political topic that gets me so emotional I nearly cry every time its discussed. The lives of children will always be more important than guns.
You know what I hate? When people who are pro-guns bring up the rise in stabbings in countries that have banned guns. Do you know how many people a lunatic with a gun can take down before the police arrive? A hell of a lot, especially since american police aren’t exactly the fastest people to take action in an emergency. A lunatic with a knife can take down a lot less people, and its a lot easier to stop them since knives are close range weapons. Its not exactly hard to come to this conclusion, they’re just trying to come up with halfassed excuses so they can keep their toys
Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love sleeping alone in my bed and being able to completely sprawl out. But there’s something about being woken up in the middle of the night to your person scooting over and grabbing you closer. Even when you sleep on your stomach and angled all weird yet they still find a place to comfortably lay their head on your back and intertwine their legs with yours.
That thing about how cats think humans are big kittens is a myth, y’know.
It’s basically born of false assumptions; folks were trying to explain how a naturally solitary animal could form such complex social bonds with humans, and the explanation they settled on is “it’s a displaced parent/child bond”.
The trouble is, cats aren’t naturally solitary. We just assumed they were based on observations of European wildcats – but housecats aren’t descended from European wildcats. They’re descended from African wildcats, which are known to hunt in bonded pairs and family groupings, and that social tendency is even stronger in their domesticated relatives. The natural social unit of the housecat is a colony: a loose affiliation of cats centred around a shared territory held by alliance of dominant females, who raise all of the colony’s kittens communally.
It’s often remarked that dogs understand that humans are different, while cats just think humans are big, clumsy cats, and that’s totally true – but they regard us as adult colonymates, not as kittens, and all of their social behaviour toward us makes a lot more sense through that lens.
They like to cuddle because communal grooming is how cats bond with colonymates – it establishes a shared scent-identity for the colony and helps clean spots that they can’t easily reach on their own.
They bring us dead animals because cats transport surplus kills back to the colony’s shared territory for consumption by pregnant, nursing, or sick colonymates who can’t easily hunt on their own. Indeed, that’s why they kill so much more than they individually need – it’s not for fun, but to generate enough surplus kills to sustain the colony’s non-hunting members.
They’re okay with us messing with their kittens because communal parenting is the norm in a colony setting, and us being colonymates in their minds automatically makes us co-parents.
It’s even why many cats are so much more tolerant toward very small children, as long as those children are related to one of their regular humans: they can tell the difference between human adults and human “kittens”, and your kittens are their kittens.
Basically, you’re going to have a much easier time getting a handle on why your cat does why your cat does if you remember that the natural mode of social organisation for cats is not as isolated solitary hunters, but as a big communal catpile – and for that purpose, you count as a cat.
The Archery Range 