Honestly the only way they’ll ever change is if enough people fight back. Most people don’t want to deal with the hassle or be perceived as a “Karen” type. My wife and I routinely go to one another appointments to advocate for one another and it’s drastically improved our outcomes.
While being a polite Karen (insisting, forcing my way up the chain of command, getting shit done when noone wanted me to succeed), a state representative once called me "a significant disruption." while they were being forced to fire 3 prominent public-facing employees over time fraud, documentation fraud regarding who physically had an at-risk nonverbal special needs child in state custody, and racism respectively. Gave me such a rush I almost got it tattood on my chest. It was my job to advocate for the mom of that special needs child at the time. :)
And yes my wife and I go to eachothers appointments. Thankfully we found a doctor who doesn't try to mess with us now.
I still daydream about that tattoo but I'm too worried about autoimmune reactions and pain/fear of needles lol (I hate someone else needling me, I can stick myself for medication and IVs).
I have MCAS, so as soon as I heard that tattoo ink can travel into the lymphatic system I got concerned.
I'm thinking about doing something little as a test spot first. Ya know like a little brown freckle-sized heart on my ankle or wrist, or something pretty inconspicuous.
I finally have a good doctor and I will sing his praises till the day I die. It's amazing because after the upfront investment of going through my history with me, he rarely needs to see me for more than a few minutes because we have great communication and he has fixed many of my issues. Being a good doctor took effort in the short term but has rewarded him with free time in the long term, as well as a very compliant patient who will be fully honest and who refers literally everyone to him.
My first few visits with my good doctor were quite long, because I had a huge gap in my medical history due to doctors refusing to send me to the correct specialist, so I stopped bothering, because they'd be like "I can't help with that but you're not unwell enough to see a specialist, lose weight fatty."
I got to see the specialists I needed, and I'm losing weight thanks to hormone correction (I literally could not lose weight before, I'm eating more than ever but still losing weight now that the hormones are being managed).
One of my favorite books, Snow Crash, (which yes, is rather pulpy but-in a self-aware way, it's great) contains the following passage:
This is the guy. Raven. This is the guy that Juanita is looking for. The guy Lagos told him not to mess with. And Hiro has seen him before, outside the entrance to The Black Sun. This is the guy who gave the Snow Crash card to Da5id.
The tattoo on his forehead consists of three words, written in block letters: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL.
Hiro startles and actually jumps into the air as Vitaly Chernobyl and the Meltdowns launch into their opening number, "Radiation Burn." It is a tornado of mostly high-pitched noise and distortion, like being flung bodily through a wall of fishhooks.
These days, most states are franchulates or Burbclaves, much too small to have anything like a jail, or even a judicial system. So when someone does something bad, they try to find quick and dirty punishments, like flogging, confiscation of property, public humiliation, or, in the case of people who have a high potential of going onto hurt others, a warning tattoo on a prominent body part.
POOR IMPULSE CONTROL
Apparently, this guy went to such a place and lost his temper real bad.
And your anecdote made me imagine you with a similar tattoo, but worn as a badge of honor.
The most charitable take would still be 'anti-hero', at best. There's some defensible motivations behind a lot of their actions, but they're overall pretty rotten, sorry to say. It's a foundational work in the cyberpunk genre if that's something you're into, though.
89
u/catlandid Aug 01 '26
Honestly the only way they’ll ever change is if enough people fight back. Most people don’t want to deal with the hassle or be perceived as a “Karen” type. My wife and I routinely go to one another appointments to advocate for one another and it’s drastically improved our outcomes.