I live in New York, one of the most northern and blue states around, and have my entire life. In 7th grade I decided I didn’t like saying the Pledge of Allegiance, the name alone sounded odd to me, like why are children pledging themselves to a country, when we can’t even really understand what that means? So I stopped.

The school staff lost their minds.

Luckily my parents taught me to be firm in my beliefs, if I had truely thought about them and believed them. So I stuck to my choice, and my parents backed me up on it when they arrived at the school 45 minutes after the Pledge normally ended.

On a side note, I had read ahead in my Social Studies textbook that week, and learned about Nationalism in Nazi Germany, and it had sounded strangly familiar to me. Not long after the Pledge of Allegiance incident happened.

This is pure speculation, but since we found Lead caused so many development issues when it was so prominent in everyday life, and plastic has been likened to this generations lead- poisoning, I wonder if there is a link between the prevalence of micro plastics and the increase in ADHD and ASD.

A

“Thoughts and prayers” seems to have crossed the pond. I genuinely hope they are more useful over there, because they are absolutely worthless here and usually indicate that nothing of consequence will be done about the matter.

I see someone else also listens to Factually! podcasts.

No Man’s Sky

Then you didn’t donate anything, you sold it.

“I sold some of my own body parts to try and escape crushing debt.”

There, fixed that for you. Unfortunately, many of us are in the same boat, so I sincerely hope you can escape now, good luck.

The logic of this is nonexistent. An argument could be made very convincingly that cars are dangerous to allow in the hands of criminals. 2 tons of metal, well known for and capable of ending a life, with the ability to aid criminal enterprises and avoidance of law enforcement. So should car sales now require a criminal background check? All this would do is further disenfranchise convicted felons, regardless of the actual crime committed, and create new difficulties for a group that includes a very high percentage of people already proven to give no shits about the law who will find and exploit ways to continue activities despite any laws attempting to restrict them.

I did a seasonal stint at a Target Warehouse recently, and while there wasn’t anything blatantly antiunion, the effort is absolutely there. There is alot of talk about open door policies, open communication lines between management and workers, and a culture of “trust”. My emphasis, their words. They also have a standing policy that, out of context, is very odd. Knowing what I do about antiunion measures, it’s very blatant. They have a fiercely reinforced policy that there is to be no distribution of any papers or solicitation of any kind during work hours or on Target property. They attempt to rationale it with an example of people “asking for kids fundraising orders or public funding websites”. Personally I’ve never known those to be even a mild distraction at any workplace.

I’ve been having a similar problem the last couple days, can’t seem to find a solution yet however.

Perhaps look into the symptoms of ADHD? I had this same issue for a long time, swinging between being hyperfocused and then not being able to stand the task or project for a second longer. Turns out I have ADHD and just never got diagnosed. Now, I have a name for why I swing between these two extremes.