We can point fingers at governments and companies all day long, but unless something motivates them to change they’re not going to. Right now the only real mechanisms we have at our disposal are our votes and our wallets. If people throw up their hands and can’t even be arsed to leverage either of those things, nothing will change. Telling ourselves it’s someone else’s fault and doing nothing is the pinnacle of being part of the problem.

How about the statue of confederate Lieutenant General Nathan Bedford Forrest on horseback?

It’s ugly on the outside and the inside!

I’m looking forward to your tales of the young upstart bringing a new flavour of chaos to The Council!

No wonder she was scarfing down two cans in one go, she’s eating for multiples! Good luck resisting the temptation to keep a kitten… or two…

Relevant Natural History Short

Congrats on coming out and being your true self, that was a very brave thing to do.

Your mother, like many parents, had hopes and dreams about who you would become as a person. She’s now being faced with the prospect that those hopes and dreams are dead, that the person she thought you would become is gone. She’s going to need to grieve and from what you’ve written here it seems that process has started. Shock, denial, bargaining, some level of acceptance. I expect anger and depression might show up at some point. It doesn’t necessarily happen in sequence and can cycle too. She’s going to need some time to process, but what’s positive is she’s not outright rejecting who you are, there’s room for her to grow.

My parents weren’t hostile when I came out as gay, but I heard similar things - it’s just a phase. Are you sure? Was it something we did? Where did we go wrong? What will your life become? Over time they came to accept it and told my extended family (including my very religious Pentecostal grandmother). Everyone is now very welcoming of my wife and my parents are delighted to be grandparents to our kids. I know it’s not the same, but there is hope for things to get better, just keep being authentically you.

There was a Starbucks trend where they added olive oil to their coffees and it was giving customers the mega liqui-shits. Does that count?

Coffee mixology is also becoming a thing now. I imagine some crazy combos have or might come out of that.