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fremedon:

nonasuch:

Talking to a customer about classic children’s lit and how many of them firmly believe that fresh air and sunshine will cure any number of unspecified Victorian illnesses. I mentioned The Secret Garden and how much I like that the protagonists are basically just feral gremlin children who are very unpleasant to be around until they somehow manage to socialize each other.

Then I said, out loud, “on a scale of Sarah Crewe to Mary Lennox, how well did you handle being raised by a nanny in Edwardian India,” and realized that tumblr really has ruined my speech patterns for all time.

THE THING ABOUT THE SECRET GARDEN THO. Is that Colin very likely has rickets. For which sunshine is a specific remedy!

There actually was a late-Victorian through Edwardian uptick in rickets among the upper classes: after the discovery of pasteurization, but before we understood about vitamins–and, consequently, before we figured out the temperature range that kills tuberculosis in milk without destroying vitamin D.

Colin is born prematurely to a mother who dies in childbirth. His father was already paranoid that Colin was going to inherit his disability, and Colin being sickly and weak as a result of his premature birth kicked his paranoia into overdrive. Colin would have been raised on what the dietary science of the time considered the safest, healthiest food: the bland Victorian nursery diet, crossed with the bland Victorian invalid diet. Pasteurized milk, bland starches, and vegetables rarely and boiled within an inch of their lives.

And the longer Colin stays small and weak for his age, the more his dad worries and keeps him inside away from chills (and out of the sun), and the more the lack of vitamin D causes his legs and spine to bow.

And for a child who was still growing, all of this could be largely reversed by massive amounts of vitamin D, via sunlight and virtually any fresh foods. And the other thing Mary and Dickon do, besides getting him out into the sun, is smuggle him raw milk from the farm, which he is not supposed to have.

(Don’t drink raw milk. You have other vitamin D sources, including milk pasteurized by less-destructive modern methods; you are not immune to tuberculosis, brucellosis, E. coli, Salmonella, or fucking plague.)

6balls:

time for another round of which reason for a 3 year old tantrum are you

was not able to turn her head all the way around

MUST take off sweatshirt; MUST NOT take off sweatshirt

he “just want[ed] to stand [t]here all day”

wanted to take someone else’s dress off them and wear it

trains must have 9 cars. no more or less

another child was standing nearby

wanted to have several little plates to separate his lunch items onto

I opened his granola bar “too far”

wanted milk and hadn’t noticed the cup of milk already in front of her

woke up

See Results

I’m sorry to come to you like this since you probably wanted someone to come in for a reason for hope but I’m freaking out and have no one to talk to about this rn. A music artist I follow put this stuff in their story on instagram..how are things getting better??? I’m so confused and scared. I’m terrified to be alive. I should’ve died in election night. Idk if I can do this anymore. I don’t want the world to end nor live in an apocalypse/dystopia. I can’t do this. I’m not strong enough. I’m going to die before I even reach the age of 25 or 30 instead of dying of old age😥😥😥😥😥

reasonsforhope:

First, breathe.

Second:

Go read these links. Keep going down the list until you feel better:

Read:

*it’s a fantastic article in many ways but warning for (brief but serious) fatphobia and some annoying Western-centrism

You should not have died on election night. Absolutely not. Yes, there are great injustices in the world. But this too shall pass. Literally everything does.

Some notes:

This isn’t the end of the world. It’s not about to be an apocalypse. And, if the world wasn’t a dystopia when half of all people died before the age of 15 (aka all of history until the past 250 years), it’s definitely not a dystopia now, imho. (x, x)

Literally every single week on Fix the News, I see the news that some country has ended some disease! Usually I see multiple stories about that each week! We’re making real progress that has saved billions of lives!

In 1900, 120 years ago, there were 5 full liberal democracies in the entire world. Now, about 97 countries (out of approximately 195, depending on how you count) are democracies. That’s almost half the countries in the world! This is actually, writ large, a time of massive expansion of human rights, hard as it is to believe from looking at the news. (x, x)

Also Imho the most likely explanation to the Fermi Paradox is that we’re only 0.13% of the way through expected lifespan of the universe (x, x). Very little time for life to evolve, comparatively.

Finally:

Unfollow this person. Unfollow everyone who posts something that makes you feel suicidal – literally and ongoingly, every time you see a post that makes you spiral, immediately unfollow that person.

It’s not about sticking your head in the sand. If you want, you can calendar time to check ACTUAL news sources (NOT social media) a couple times a week to make sure you’re staying up on things.

But you know what? The number one priority is keeping yourself alive.

How are things actually getting better? To quote the first article I linked:

“I could tell you that a little more than 200 years ago, nearly half of all children born died before they reached their 15th birthday, and that today it’s less than 5 percent globally. I could tell you that in pre-industrial times, starvation was a constant specter and life expectancy was in the 30s at best. I could tell you that at the dawn of the 19th century, barely more than one person in 10 was literate, while today that ratio has been nearly reversed. I could tell you that today is, on average, the best time to be alive in human history.”

Stay alive. And do what you need to do to keep yourself that way.