After so many years of not wanting to use WordPress, because I thought I had the skills to build my own websites (which I still do), I thought it was time to contribute more writing content than the art of building websites.

My style for building websites can be described as “minimalistic”. In fact, here was what my previous website looked like about 24 hours ago.

For 20 years, I have held on to this domain, thinking about what I want to say, and how to say it. Today, I know now.

This is a neurodivergent Millennial voice. For the last 25 years, this very day exactly, I saw the world turned upside down and with malevolent intent. However, many of the wicked architects that sought to derail my life and to quiet my voice have since passed.

Let’s start with a few of the obvious questions and answers. Had I ever considered doing that? No. Was I planning on doing that? No. Would I have ever considered doing that? No. Was I someone’s huckleberry in their long trend of not providing accommodations, information, and assistance? Yes.

I am a threat to the status quo. I always have been, I always will be.

But I don’t use weapons. I find them abhorrent, expensive, and–if you have seen enough internet videos over they years–a great way to injure yourself.

Meanwhile, 25 years later, there are generations of people who do not understand the evil that have happened. I was writing a tweet the other night and wanted to pick out of GIF on Tenor the other day when I saw probably the most confusing GIF I had ever seen.

In the 2000s, the website MySpace had a partnership with this site called Blingee, where it would make all these glittery-framed GIFs.

I got a response asking “What the hell is this crap?”

The answer I got was “there was a group of people on Tumblr who made websites and fan fiction about the Columbine Shooters.”

It is disturbing that rather than condemn one of the most egregious acts in American history that ruined so many lives and told the people of my generation “You have lost the debate on gun control, and there is nothing you can do to stop it”, there’s people online making the boys who were responsible for it seem like they were pop stars or like the member of a boy band that they had a crush on.

We never taught people that doing these horrible things was wrong. We only taught that the people who do these things are “outcasts”, that we emphasis what drugs they took or didn’t take, what mental illnesses they had (or though they had), how people “like them” are “dangerous”.

It’s these stigmas that have created a rift. That somehow I was responsible for why everything bad that happened to other members of my family were somehow my fault, when they weren’t.  I tried to emphasis that, but it didn’t seem it was enough. The damage had already been done because of something that happened hundreds of miles away in a place I could care less existed back then, by people with awful beliefs about how the world operated.

I will admit, my childhood, like a lot of other people’s my age with my disability was pretty shitty to say the least. I still managed to graduate high school and become an undergraduate in college with my Bachelors in Computer Science, but the echoes of the horrors of that day, and the people who exploited the misfortunes of those people to avoid being more accommodating, and to stop the bullying, and the indifference by adults who could so something about it, didn’t change the behavior of the people who still felt negative about me.

Of course, the zeitgeist of that event still was present, at Virginia Tech, in Newtown, in San Bernardino, in Orlando, in Parkland, in Las Vegas, in El Paso, in St. Louis.

Almost all of these things have one thing is common: Indifference. Rather than change what we know is causing all of these things to happen, excuses are made, scapegoats pointed out, and “thoughts and prayers”.

Other countries have made changes because people there tried to emulate the horrors we Americans have permitted. Laws were implemented. They have been effective. Our neighbors in Canada and Mexico have gun rights written into their constitution with more direct language. But the excuse every time is “it will take away our freedoms”.

It’s funny how conservatives are so concerned about “freedoms” being taken away considering they overturned Roe v. Wade (1973) with Dobbs v. Jackson (2022).  That need to take away the bodily autonomy of women has open the floodgates to take away the bodily autonomy of members of the LGBTQIA community and threatened to undo other things likes Loving v. Virginia (1967) and Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). It’s crazy how there is this need to undo all these civil rights cases that are 50 and 60 years old, and how there is this need to find out what teenagers had been transitioning their genders so that those kids and their parents could be made into outcasts even further by a far-right state attorney general and several far-right multistate “Christian” political organization who have no problem with rolling back a case on mixed-raced marriages from the 1960s, but if your are parent in 2024, your hair is turning gray from worrying that you will get the call that “something happened at school today…turn on the TV.”

These people who say they care about our “freedoms” don’t care about our freedom.  They don’t care about anyone else’s children except their own kids, which is ironic in that they don’t really care about their own damn kids.

The Culture Warriors want a more “Christian” society, by that the one of the Crusades, Joan of Arc, and the aggressive missionaries who sought to assimilate other cultures to their way of life or else.  They have no respect for anyone, not even the disabled, the autistic, the neurodivergent, or LGBTQIA. Heck, Missouri has tried to reduce the services available to people with disabilities, autism, and ADHD because it turns out there are gay people who are disabled, autistic, and neurodivergent. Never mind that discriminating against any of those groups I mentioned in the previous two sentence is federally illegal. But these “Christian” lawmakers are so concerned about “religious liberty” and “religious freedom”, just not in the way the First Amendment describes it.  These same “Christian” lawmakers who demand that African American history not be taught as part of the school curriculum, or that their entire library system needs an audit for sexually explicit material because someone “accidentally” added a new book into the library system on “how to become a porn star”.

Almost every time one of these moral panics/outrages happen within the vicinity of the Culture Warrior’s “j’accuse” only for it to turn into a “j’avoue”. We’ve seen this many times.

People have this terrible judgement of character. Missourians have more than asserted that fact by picking the most unbecoming people to run our state government for the last 20 years and to represent us in the federal government for about just as long. That bad judgement is persistent. It keeps a record of everyone they accused of being a threat but wants you to redact from your memory their own transgressions. They want you to make them the center of attention but erase everyone who matters, who is fighting for what is right, who is actually making a difference.

I mean, how is Josh Hawley still a senator, especially after what happened on January 6, 2021…or what people have mentioned about what he did back in high school 25 years ago?

This blog will talk about many things. It is a work in progress. However, after many years of being sidelined from a vocation that I had wanted, and being ignored and overlooked for employment to do what I love professionally, and being encouraged not to speak or write about the things that trouble me, the gloves are finally off.

I will speak frankly about many things, even if those things are not palatable to certain people in the audience fearing association to myself.  I honestly want to make this a professional blog and a hobby blog too. Talk about the things I’m doing, what I would like to do, and what I would do if there the individualistic society hasn’t isolated and atomized us, or made us put off the milestones out of fear and worry.

I want to be an advocate for disability and neurodivergent rights and I seek to be a better ally to the LGBTQIA community especially since the state of Missouri, with its current representation being influenced by far-right organizations, is willing to hurt, belittle, and infantize other protected groups to attack another group that is not compatible with their prosperity theology.

There’s a lot I want to do and say, but I have no place to say it as I have not been welcomed or well-tolerated. So here I am. No one to censor me. No one to ban me. No one to make false claims.

I hope that when people read about the real me, they will see what they had been missing, and what they need to pay attention to.

It’s time for another fresh start.