Stickers Black And White Quotes

If my mother were a bumper sticker, she would read THAT'S NOT APPROPRIATE. Taylor's mom would read WHY THE F*** NOT?

New Rule: Stop pretending your drugs are morally superior to my drugs because you get yours at a store. This week, they released the autopsy report on Anna Nicole Smith, and the cause of death was what I always thought it was: mad cow. No, it turns out she had nine different prescription drugs in her—which, in the medical field, is known as the “full Limbaugh.” They opened her up, and a Walgreens jumped out. Antidepressants, anti-anxiety pills, sleeping pills, sedatives, Valium, methadone—this woman was killed by her doctor, who is a glorified bartender. I’m not going to say his name, but only because (a) I don’t want to get sued, and (b) my back is killing me. This month marks the thirty-fifth anniversary of a famous government report. I was sixteen in 1972, and I remember how excited we were when Nixon’s much ballyhooed National Commission on Drug Abuse came out and said pot should be legalized. It was a moment of great hope for common sense—and then, just like Bush did with the Iraq Study Group, Nixon took the report and threw it in the garbage, and from there the ’70s went right into disco and colored underpants. This week in American Scientist, a magazine George Bush wouldn’t read if he got food poisoning in Mexico and it was the only thing he could reach from the toilet, described a study done in England that measured the lethality of various drugs, and found tobacco and alcohol far worse than pot, LSD, or Ecstasy—which pretty much mirrors my own experiments in this same area. The Beatles took LSD and wrote Sgt. Pepper—Anna Nicole Smith took legal drugs and couldn’t remember the number for nine-one-one. I wish I had more time to go into the fact that the drug war has always been about keeping black men from voting by finding out what they’re addicted to and making it illegal—it’s a miracle our government hasn’t outlawed fat white women yet—but I leave with one request: Would someone please just make a bumper sticker that says, “I’m a stoner, and I vote.

The car housed a hysterical bumper sticker: Save the Planet, and I permitted a moment of contemplation to truly bask in this thought. Save the planet? What a joke. Save the planet from what? From ourselves? And save it for what? For ourselves? It was a kind of perpetual stupidity in a tug-of-war battle over trivial matters. Only imbeciles see things in black and white: liberal or conservative, yes or no, this or that. Those in power laugh at those people in their morally inverted shades of grey, basking in the labels they've created so the people are easier to control.

I also had to deal with the fact that I simply could not express the level of antiracist outrage I wanted to, knowing something that no one else would know unless I said it out loud: despite my politics and liberalism, when a group of young black men in my neighborhood walk by, my gut reaction is to brace myself  in a different way than I would if those men were white. I hate this about myself, but if  I said that there is not residual racism in me, racism that — after forty-four years of being reinforced by messages in the media and culture around me — I simply do not know how to escape, I would be lying. Even if  I do own an “eracism” bumper sticker.

If someone were to slap a warning label on you, what would it say? For me, I'd imagine one of those black and white parental advisory stickers with the words "I'm Weird" written across my forehead.

The massive wardrobe, decorated with stickers and posters of Jack’s favourite bands, stood in the corner. I went to it and opened both the doors – then stepped back in amazement.   It was like something out of a fashion spread. Footwear was aligned in two perfectly straight lines along the bottom of the wardrobe, with boots at the back and shoes at the front. Each pair was polished and had a pair of socks folded up in the left shoe or boot. Above the shoes, Jack’s clothes were hung up on fancy padded hangers, organized by colour going from black through grey, white, pale pink, dark pink, purple and then blue. One quarter of the wardrobe was taken up with closet shelves, where every item, from T-shirts to jeans to scarves, was folded into a perfect geometric square that I wouldn’t have been able to achieve with two helpers, a ruler, and sticky tape.   I turned my head and looked at the chaos of the room. Then I looked back at the wardrobe.   No wonder she never let me see inside before.   “Jack, you big fat fake.” I let out a laugh that was half sob. “Look at this. Look! She’s the worst neat freak of them all, and I never even knew. I never even knew…”   Trying not to mess anything up too much, I searched through the neat piles of T-shirts until I found what seemed to be a plain, scoop-necked white top with short sleeves. I pulled it out, but when I unfolded it, there turned out to be a tattoo-style design on the front: a skull sitting on a bed of gleaming emeralds, with a green snake poking out of one eyehole. In Gothic lettering underneath, it read WELCOME TO MALFOY MANOR.   Typical Jack, I thought, hugging the shirt to my chest for a second. Pretending to be cool Slytherin when she’s actually swotty Ravenclaw through and through.

Common wisdom has it that people grow more conservative as they age, that the proverbial “Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac” comes for us all. I’m the opposite, having moved further and further left with every year, growing more progressive as I, a straight cisgender white woman from a middle-class background, learn all the ways the world is rigged in my favor, even as I myself have been severely let down by the status quo. The more I learn, the more mortified I am by the myths I once accepted as irrefutable facts. For so long, I believed there was one correct path for my life, that having lots of academic and then professional ambition was the key to success, in whichever way I’d choose to measure success, money, or happiness. I believed that my job would love me back, that meritocracy existed, and that hard work was the key to fulfilling my every material and emotional desire. I believed I’d own a home one day (I guess I’m still hoping), and that regularly contributing to a 401(k) would be all that was required to retire comfortably. I thought that having Type 1 diabetes couldn’t define me, that I should strive to be “normal,” never mind the fact that I had to worry about my blood sugar all of the time. I certainly always thought that insulin would be available and affordable to anyone who needed it. I thought there was a proscribed way to behave if you wanted to have successful romantic and personal relationships, and I believed that women’s magazines could show me how. I thought that being skinny was a tremendously worthy goal, that beauty required pain. I had little vocabulary to talk about sexual politics, so I thought that carrying a rape whistle and avoiding strange men skulking on the street late at night would keep me safe from harm. I believed that abortion would always be legal in the United States. I thought you should call the police if ever anyone was in danger. I thought that labor organizing was impractical. I thought that acid rain was the biggest threat to the environment, and that as long as we worked to close the hole in the ozone layer, our planet would be just fine. I was wrong—about everything. I see now how unquestioningly I bought into the promises of democratic institutions that I later came to realize were at best deeply flawed, at worst irreparably broken. I didn’t consider how enormously privileged it was to believe that such systems could work in the first place. The American Dream of my parents, and of boomers more broadly, has become less and less attainable for the next generation, and especially for the people who were never intended to dream such dreams in the first place: Black and Brown people, poor people, differently abled people, genderqueer people. And ultimately, these systems didn’t even work out so well for me. So here I am coming out as a late bloomer, a fortysomething former “good Democrat” who got angry and became radicalized and is stronger for it. Who finally has more faith in mutual aid than in government assistance. Who will never again donate to a national political campaign when there are people right outside my door I can help directly. Who is still actively choosing every day to break away from the self-centeredness of rugged individualism in favor of community and solidarity. I want to share with you all the ways that I was wrong. Maybe you were wrong, too. Maybe we, together, can grieve what we thought the world was and hope for something better.