lies about the civil war my history teacher told me (tw)

I grew up in Alabama from first grade on and attended public school there, a transplant from the North at the age of 7. Many people are aware that a Confederate apologism is taught about Civil War history throughout the south, one full of outright lies, the results of the same whitewashing campaign spearheaded by the Daughters of the Confederacy which erected confederate statues around the country after the Reconstruction ended in 1877.

When I was fed this bullshit at 14, I was prepared for it to be wrong, and I found that none of my classmates (about 50% southerners, the remainder being the children of transplants associated with the local university) were convinced either. I was revolted and angered at the time, but the more time passes, the worse it all looks to me - which is not usually the case since normally an adult understanding of human foibles and better empathy at least conveys some understanding of the mistakes of the adults around me, which I was fairly unforgiving of as a child. But this is different.

Here are the ( high points: trigger warning )

The more I think about it, the more unforgiveable I find the act of teaching this propaganda. I've recently started to think that each teacher who passed along these lies - which, yes, are mandated by the state curriculum, so I'll say each teacher who passed it along without making clear where it was a lie - is individually responsible for the harm they cause, and that harm is systemic. I used to make excuses for the southern system along the lines that the southern history teachers were educated in the same propaganda from childhood, but outside of the strictest fundamentalist cults, that doesn't really hold water; these are college-educated people who had to study history at a higher level (a minor concentration alongside their major in education) in order to teach it in secondary school. These are adults with adult responsibility and intelligence who live in the world and have witnessed racial injustice their whole lives, who have the ability to recognize patterns and who don't have the excuse of rejecting the reliability of facts and the knowledge of authorities. My history teachers may have been brainwashed, but I knew them and their intelligence well enough to say that if they were deceived about racial reality around them and the history of the Civil War, it's because they wanted to be deceived.

You don't have to have reason to mistrust the source in advance to reject an idea like slavery being "kind" or a "big proportion" of people being contented with it or happy about it; it's an idea that the unprepared and uneducated default human instinctively rejects. Anyone who has ever allowed themselves to be persuaded of this laughable claim has had to work hard to suppress their empathy and knowledge of other people to do so! Yet they have the shamelessness to feed this bullshit to the entire public school population and require them to learn it and recite it back for a grade.

My history teacher had her Confederate reenactor husband come to the school and give a presentation in uniform to us, showing off his Civil War memorabilia! At the time I was angry, yes, but now I can hardly believe it. I have no idea where to find her now but I've toyed idly with the idea that she and everyone like her deserve personal letters of rebuke in light of current events. I mean, I wouldn't because it would be likely fruitless and I shy from social contacts in general, but I do feel that every teacher out there in her situation owes society and their students an apology.

Why not a 'list of licensed suppliers' or something? Come on guys

I've done so much knitting in the last week and a half that my right thumb has given out again. I have hitchhiker's thumb at about 120° on both hands, and when knitting the right needle is held against the flat of my thumb, which results in the pressure of the grip sort of pushing the thumb back into the hitchhiking position, essentially stretching it and pressing it into the stretch, rather than the grip pushing the force through the joint held straight - which is only possible if I improvise a splint to hold the thumb curved in a little bit.

The last joints of all my fingers are somewhat hypermobile and depending on what I'm knitting, this can tire out the final joint in my right forefinger as well. (There are other tasks that can do that too, but few tasks that I do that keep such sustained pressure on these joints.)

I know that finger splints would be of use to me, but did some research into them last year or... somewhere in there... and determined it would be impossible to figure out the right size without one of those sizing sets, and I couldn't find out where I could go for that service by using publicly available internet pages. So I concluded I would probably have to mention it to a GP, who would refer me to whoever does that - presumably a physical therapy practice or maybe just the places that supply them. I was talking to Wax about it today when I was forced to stop knitting prematurely this evening to rest my fingers, and she thought she'd be able to find a lead through an Ehlers-Danlos foundation or association, but so far no dice. (Catalogs and manufacturers of various orthopedics, yes. Information about regional practices, suppliers, etc, no.) It's not really a good time to be visiting multiple offices or making appointments just to ask questions in person, but perhaps it would be possible to find out through phone inquiries or emails I guess? Ugh... I hate making inquiries.

ETA: I have found out that you can order a single oval-8 plastic ring splint, which cost like $43 for a set of 13 in the US, for 40€ apiece. There's a shop in Turku that you can't order from, only buy in person, and they cost 45€ there. There's a similar brand made in Sweden that isn't sold retail in Finland, only through occupational therapists, that apparently cost around 20€ in Sweden at least. I cannot find any sign of occupational therapy in the area that you can get without being referred from a GP.