Posted by Larry Hoover on March 5, 2006, at 12:07:17
In reply to My apologies, fellow Babblers, posted by Larry Hoover on March 5, 2006, at 10:11:56
I'd like to try and explain to you what the difficulty is, that I and the sensitized face, within the Babble domain.
Imagine that a community meeting has been called to discuss something very important, and that the meeting will be held at city hall. And you are in a wheelchair. You trundle off to city hall, wanting very much to have your voice heard, your arguments considered, and you arrive at the appointed time and place. To your horror, you find a staircase between you and the entrance to the building.
You are excluded. You are silenced. You are denied. Because of your history. Because your life is limited by your being disabled. The people inside don't even know you can't get in. They don't know what it's like. But you face a barrier to participation. A barrier to participation, because other people didn't consider what it's like for you.
So you sue. You protest. You force them to build a ramp. You force them to make rules that require them to build ramps wherever they're needed, so that wheelchair-people can exercise their full rights of being alive. Yes, you inconvenience people who do not need wheelchairs, by adding to their cost, to force them to build a ramp they don't even need. But, before this protest is made, they never even thought about this barrier to participation. So, you make them think about it. You make them do it. You make them make rules.
You can't even go to a movie that hasn't been screened by a rating committee. You know what to expect in a G-rated movie. You really don't have much of an excuse if you went to an R-rated movie, and you were shocked.
I think there is a core group of posts, ones which graphically or explicitly describe violent situations (many flavours in there, both violence to self or others), which need an R-rating. The content can be anything we've always talked about here. Graphic and explicit descriptions of human experience have always been accepted here, and I'm not trying to change that in any way. I want a warning of that content. Surely we can come to a simple
description that expresses the idea that it's the stimulation of an image of violence in a sensitized person's mind that is the problem. I can talk about cutting without describing it. Describing the act, though, is too much for me. Do you see the difference? For me, the difference is HUGE. It is a barrier to participation. Your small step is my barrier to participation.Lar
poster:Larry Hoover
thread:614568
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20060225/msgs/616178.html