Trigger or Treat: Halloween Is Filled With Uncomfortable Images
Halloween is all about frightening ourselves with death, dying, and the undead.
Triggers or Treats! Collecting candy corn on our street might be safer than a contemporary university celebration of Halloween, but surely not by much. At New York University's Law School only anodyne depictions of the ghastly are apparently permitted to mark the passage of All Souls Eve. Given the "open letter" below, the university administration might be allowed to show old Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons, but perhaps ghosts are being marginalized since so many of us decline to believe in them and their struggles for recognition.
All kidding aside, suicide is indeed a serious issue. But the point of Halloween is to be transgressive. The Mental Health Law and Justice Association has a perfect free speech right to demand that people apologize for indulging the macabre, but the macabrists have a perfect free speech right to tell them to go to Hell.
If NYU's Dean Belk and Dean Morrison do, as demanded, issue a public apology concerning NYU's Fall Ball, they will be intellectual cowards who are giving in to moralistic bullies.
The open letter from the self-appointed scolds from the Mental Health Law and Justice Association is below:
Dear Dean Jason Belk and Dean Trevor Morrison,
The Mental Health Law and Justice Association writes this open letter in order to express grave concern and outrage at the triggering, disrespectful, and harmful suicide imagery displayed at Fall Ball.
During last night's Fall Ball, which was organized by NYU Law's Office of Student Affairs, there were video projections on the windows inside of Greenberg Lounge of silhouetted people engaging in what we can only imagine were intended to be "spooky" activities. One of the images projected displayed a man dying by suicide. Because MHLJA follows the recommendations of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention to not discuss suicide methods and firmly believes in publishing content that is safe for all members of our community, we will not provide any more details about the projection. However, members of our organization do have photographs of the images, should your administration need corroboration.
Suicide is the second leading cause of death on college campuses. Worldwide, someone dies by suicide every 40 seconds. For members of our community who have lost someone to suicide or who have had personal experiences, this topic is not a Halloween gimmick.
In addition to the suicide imagery, MHLJA condemns other projections displayed, which showed violence against women and interpersonal violence.
Our campus should be a safe space for all members of our community, particularly those who are most vulnerable. Violence and the difficult mental health challenges people face are not a joke, a gimmick, or a spectacle.
In addition to publicly expressing our concern, the Mental Health Law and Justice Association makes itself available to all members of our community who would like to find a safe and welcoming space to reflect on these issues. We encourage all who are interested to reach out to us by emailing [address deleted] or [address deleted]. We also encourage all students who may have been triggered yesterday to visit NYU Counseling and Wellness, located at 726 Broadway, 4th Floor, Suite 402. Walk-in hours are available today from 10am to 6pm, Saturday from 10am to 3pm, and Monday—Thursday 10am-8:30pm. At the end of this letter, you can also find a list of off-campus resources.
To all members of our community: If you or someone you know is thinking about suicide, please seek help. You are important to us and we want you to stay.
Because we believe that this unfortunate situation is the result of the stigma surrounding mental health and widespread misunderstanding of suicide, the Mental Health Law and Justice Association will be hosting an event on suicide prevention at the law school. Anyone who would like to be involved in helping us plan this event can contact [address deleted] or [address deleted].
Dean Belk and Dean Morrison, we urge you to issue a public apology to all members of our community who may have been triggered and ask that you make a commitment to ensuring that all future events, communications, and programs are verified to avoid harm to members of the mental health community and those whose lives have been touched by suicide. The Mental Health Law and Justice Association makes itself available to the administration to discuss how this can be achieved moving forward.
In Solidarity,
The Mental Health Law and Justice Association
Happy Halloween folks!
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“In Solidarity,”‘
Up yours, pal!
Dang. Beat me to it, Sevo.
Casper appears to be quite proud of his wood wang in that picture.
might be allowed to show old Casper the Friendly Ghost cartoons, but perhaps ghosts are being marginalized since so many of us decline to believe in them and their struggles for recognition.
I prefer to think he’s being marginalized for his constant displays of “white privilege”!
Hey! Everyone look at Susanna Griffith and Viviana Bonilla L?pez! Look at them! They’ve reached the summit of Mount Moral Superiority! Everyone come and look at them all the way up there!
“Our organization is committed to building a safe space where both students with lived experiences and their allies can organize, learn, educate, share, and develop.”
Allies?
“lived experiences”
First of all, what the he’ll does that Even men? As opposed to what? Necrophiles? Why the othering?
The allies of the students with lived experiences would presumably be the suicides with no-longer-lived experiences.
From the link:
“One in four American adults has a mental illness.”
The jokes just write themselves!
Based on all of the articles like these. I’m surprised it’s that low. I guess it’s no coincidence that this organization is run by lunatics though. Trigger intended.
Fuck Casper.
Sorry excuse for a ghost.
He might be there with you right now.
He lookslike a Klan Dragon to me….triggering?
“”‘Halloween Is Filled With Uncomfortable Images””
Yes
That’s not the Reason DC office pic.
If you pet your little dog his brow furrows and all your human tears spill into those little canyons and roll down on his sweet jowls and his little tongue laps up those tears and he smiles like lasers into your brain and on the carpet with the moon shining through the window your face smiles because your little doggie is so fucking badass, boys.
Seems like non-sensical terms and phrases are a theme with them. Wouldn’t mumbo jumbo be triggering to people who can’t discern reality?
It’s not just the suicidal either. Lots of traditional Halloween imagery is problematic and can be triggering for those who suffer from eating disorders like anorexia nervosa.
You’ve posted that at least 3 times before. Take a timeout over there in the corner.
Considering the amount of twerk videos I linked to, I feel I need to throw sarcasmic a bone once in a while.
I can’t quit eating dark chocolate until it’s all finished (so I only rarely buy a just a small bar). Is that an eating disorder?
Nope.
Yes, get treatment.
Nights are dark and I know witches.
Witches walk in the moonbeams.
Under the dreams of the lost hearts.
Witches look for fallen sunrises.
bonds meant to last until coffins
beaten dreams
lost fucking sails
broken under the thumbs
of of cracked wings of of
broke break fucking
so so so fucking down
and fucking beneath
man of of
so fucking goddamn hurt in my fucking
earth legs of
and fucking shit my arms are weeping tears
because my life is losing a favored coupling
my so so of of beat beat oh oh sos sos
winds of my heart. she is divorcing my best friend
my lovely sister is divorcing my best friend.
I agile am dying in my oceans of tears I will
fall under the dark mists
as they draw pictures of evening
on my heart, man
i am sorry reason for sharing this with you.
I am sorry
the most lovely minds on earth
are found on the whited galaxy
underneath the scribe’s cry
the men and women of the most
volatile freedom lover pulse
come and gather
and pile under this tent
under the pouring rains of aside even while
the sun of beauty
brands the souls standing under the awe of beautiful think
the clouds gather and pour their love on this forest
piercing its gathering with strings and wings and lost
thoughts breaking with tides of freedom and trails breaking
the tunnels of funerals and lost pictures.
i should go
Nah, you’re always welcome here.
you are not, tho. so maybe you should pretend to be a crippled cereal for a chunk.
the cereal rolls on concrete with his fucked up legs and shit but is wearing
a goddamn batman costume and the cereal cranked up his fucking rockets
but knew that a crack broke his moms back so goddamn batman crippled fuck grew
some motherfucking wings like a goddamn crippled boss and broke through
my fucking forehead and his wheels used the back of my bleeding skull to
punch through the insanity of modern day existence and beat down the bitches
of the non-rainbow traveling gypsies and fucking shit and then lightning ate your
ass and your entire insides glowed with earth power and cereal and then
a festival on the space you want to roll on swished like UAE meth/cocaine on all your friends
and the most superman party ever started under a . lonely. moon… but not our moon..
a moon … way the fuck out there…. fuckin so deep moon and shit… super deep moon..
yea.. all those people get tortured in the UAE with John McCain’s blessing while the UAE family
eats coke, meth, whores, pills, booze, witches, and shit every single fucking night….
FUCKING arabs have American pols bent over with their shitty nasty dicks up our azzzzzzzzzzzz
Someone help me! I’ve been triggered!
What’s the big deal about getting “triggered” if it doesn’t get somebody to go off on everyone?
I’m just going to leave this here.
agile love him a sammich of mulatto lasers.
I will break the kerosene of prints and i won’t ruin this thread with my shit, boys. but the
lost echoes of my sadness reverb back into my melting skull.
so, i will drink tons of beer tonight and I don’t even fuckin care if the goddamn bitch feds watch me I will do lines of coke tonight… fuck the gov and their silly girls the news media.
The best way to stop triggering would be to ban reruns of Roy Rogers and potentially fatal episodes of Howdy Doody, that might induce shock in students allergic to the peanut gallery.
The Mental Health Law and Justice Association writes this open letter in order to express grave concern
Emphasis added. Oh, you *zany* Mental Health Law and Justice Association!
Also, “triggering”
the strange way of travel is coins and credit cards on
very clever machinations where fucking bored horrible and sad
people under blue glow play games and pay tons of actual
dolllars for digital animals to sing or toss or collect shit
for them and i pause and ask my heart to eat a harpoon
from moby on the whited caps of death…
fuck the drug of tiny screen…
no one goes to prison for it
and it doesnt come close to heroine
The War on Fun continues apace.
we;; ;;ll offo youuoy seeees shittihs magiccigam
fucking double brains
is the fucking stars bleeding into our human goddamn scream world, brother SdU
stars killed by ninja space stars thrown with volatile anger from dark lonely empty matter
SdY or sDu or Cdu or CdeeU
tons o varia
I demand to know if Cyborg is trippin on Halloween.
Playa from the manhattan is the streamin tick tock trick track dink dank twain twink swink wank frobolo… flurrrrrr… dosschwzzznaen…. under the falls streakin into the dark deep pill pools of swirling lightnings and the screaming bodies already dead are foiling us as we travel this path, playa so hold my hand, boy, and I hope we don’t die because if you bend back and do acid and the plants wrap around your body like little green arms and your legs fall down but your back grows wings and then… shit… your upper body, playa just ripped off your legs which are bleeding all over my fucking shit and your goddamn upper body is flapping up to the fucking three winds and angel suns… shit, i have playa blood on my shit. is playa dead? or is this a fucking hallucination? i thought if his arm blood went in my heroine I would plant peas in my garden on mars, bros.
i should prob go, because i am fucked up on drugs and crap.
but i love this place and i love its scribe scribbles and scribble downs
like garden soil like hell dirt like undertow but scribes without massive pounding hammer flows
arent proven scribes… the only fuking place that does this is the inward tunnel of reverse evo Reason
under the blinging swing fucking bamma lamma fuck swuka fuck jassm…
well i am not sure what happened there..
so I will run off and smoke some pot, loves
WTF is a trigger warning? Doesn’t make sense. The victims are guns that fire when a word or image pushes the trigger? Just like “common sense gun control” advocates blame everything but the person who is actually pulling the trigger. Child proofing the world by fucking with people who are simply exercising their rights. Fascist pussies.
Your tax dollars at work.
I’m sure the flowers found a good home.
Ridicules but why in the hell would you do that anyways? What is the motivation?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orchid_hunting
Orchid hunting is serious business.
William Arnold got into a confrontation with another orchid hunter which almost ended up in a duel. When Arnold wrote about this to his employer, he was ordered to follow the other man, collect the same specimens he did, and try to urinate on the other man’s collection in order to kill his orchids.
That makes no sense to me
The fact that women sometimes turn me down for sex is triggering. It gives me the sad. I feel that college campuses should be safe spaces for me.
If suicide is so common people shouldn’t bothered by depictions of it.
OK, sure, the American Halloween has become unmoored from its roots so that celebrants no longer give even lip service to the fact that it’s supposed to be a preparation for All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.
It’s like how those college students in New Orleans who would look confused if, during Mardi Gras, you said “ah, one last day of celebration before beginning the sober observance of Lent.”
But these “mental health” guys aren’t exactly trying to return Halloween to its Christian roots. They’re trying to replace modern celebrations with…with what, exactly?
Visit our HTML tutorial“Happy Fun Day? (By the way, I found that site by Googling “Happy Fun Day” on a whim, wondering if such a day existed. God Bless America!)
Oops – Happy Fun Day:
http://web.mit.edu/daveg/Humor/happy-fun-day
“OK, sure, the American Halloween has become unmoored from its roots so that celebrants no longer give even lip service to the fact that it’s supposed to be a preparation for All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day.”
yeah, which is why we traditionally carve the face of the devil in turnips or run around in the moonlight with a little sack and a tiny bronze scythe.
sickle, traditionally
Super Happy Fun Land exists. Poopy Lungstuffing pronounces SHFL acronymically like “shuffle”.
Halloween has at most a Xtian stem. Its roots are non-Jehovist.
Halloween’s roots go back to Samhain, a Celtic holiday celebrated in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Isle of Man etc.
like every other Christian holiday, the roots are pre-Christian and appropriated from pagan roots.
Easter? Germanic goddess Oestera. Eggs and rabbits? Fertility rites.
Christmas tree? Yggdrasil, and possibly Irmunsil. Mistletoe? The only thing able to kill Baldr. Stockings? Odin would wander and if families left hay for his 8 legged horse Sleipnir, he would fill their shoes with sweets.
Is this supposed to disprove Christianity? To me it makes the Church Fathers sound brilliant for “culturally appropriating” pagan holidays!
What’s even more brilliant is that apparently it was Syrian Christians appropriating Germanic pagan ideas.
They’re trying to replace modern celebrations with…with what, exactly?
Therapy, in their office, at $100/hour.
All Saints’ and All Souls’ isn’t part of the Byzantine calendar, you silly Latin.
It’s ok to touch me there.
http://hotair.com/archives/201…..-genitals/
Too bad you posted this on a Friday night before halloween when no one is reading. There’s a bottomless well of material here which, if probed correctly could offend everyone… Except maybe straight men. We’re kind of hard to offend.
I suggest that our killjoy Neo-Purtans go as old-timey Puritans.
http://fast1.onesite.com/commu…..g?v=227400
They’d have to give up their iPhones and subscribe to a slightly more ascetic viewpoint first.
It’s kind of creepy how they’re going full circle back to Puritanism… I’m sure they’ll adopt asceticism with the reason that luxuries are oppressive to marginalized peoples or some shit, since that was the thesis to that NYT nail salon pants-wetting article. The “unsustainability” of meat and other delicious foods will probably push them into diets of organic soy milk lattes and quinoa.
Of course, this only goes for the “useful idiots”; the hoi polloi of the progressive movement. The leaders will live in luxury, just like the commie dictators of old.
Puritans put a big emphasis on working, however… Not sure how that would be worked in; progressives seem to think that everything should be provided for them at the expense of some nebulous mass of “rich people”.
And at least Puritans encouraged husbands and wives to have plenty of sex. These prudes think any heterosexual sex is rape.
Someone needs to write that novel before its too late!
I’m pretty sure rhe open coller on the one in fronts blouse would get her a few hours in the Stockade at the very least.
Stockade? Or stocks? Which is worser?
They could be in stocks inside the stockade. Just don’t let them at the stocks, if you know what I mean.
Dean Belk and Dean Morrison, we urge you to issue a public apology to all members of our community who may have been triggered and ask that you make a commitment to ensuring that all future events, communications, and programs are verified to avoid harm to members of the mental health community and those whose lives have been touched by suicide. The Mental Health Law and Justice Association makes itself available to the administration to discuss how this can be achieved moving forward.
In Solidarity,
The Mental Health Law and Justice Association
Good fucking grief.
“We’re sorry. Sorry you’re such a bunch of humorless retards.”
^^THIS^^
The surprising thing is that this particular group of SJW’s didn’t get the memo that Halloween is a big, big LGBT and Wiccan holiday and is supposed to be celebrated in a big, anything-goes way to offend fundy Christians. I live in a big LGBT and Wiccan town that is going to be pissed to hear that their prog “allies” are trying to suppress it.
I dont think it is so surprising. If one attempts to follow progressive “thought” to its logical conclusion, they will be forced to eventually destroy each other. It would be fun to watch except for the fact that they will try to take the rest of us down with them.
Beautifully put.
Some years ago Mrs. Animal and I had a number of friends in Denver’s sizable Wiccan community. Most of them weren’t what I’d call progtards (except some on issues involving Free Shit.) In fact, a bunch of them mobbed me at a big dinner once when the found out I was a shooter and amateur gunsmith – they all wanted shooting lessons. They also loved the occasional gifts of fresh venison.
Most of them weren’t really proggies, nor (certainly) were they libertarians – they were off in a weird world of their own.
Were the projections a practical joke to fool people into thinking actual acts of violence were going on inside? Then I could understand the complaint. Otherwise the complaint would apply to all stage or screen depictions of violence. Do they complain whenever there’s killing in a play on campus?
Dig him up and execute him? It’s the North Korean way.
The Mental Health Law and Justice Association is aptly named. Like most liberals, they seem to be mentally ill. Perhaps they should confine themselves to old Romper Room re-runs.
Romper Stompers are triggering for me.
Dear “Mental Health Law and Justice Association”:
Nobody wants you at their parties, so we don’t give a flying fuck what you’ve got your panties in a bunch about. Kindly fuck off and kill yourselves.
-jcr
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Wait…so they’re method of preventing suicides is to not discuss suicide?
If nobody tells you it’s possible to kill yourself, how would you figure it out?
Shhhhh…..
http://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com…..W_460s.jpg
Are they “demanding” anything? They say “urge” in their letter. I think you wrote “demand” to paint them negatively.
People are constantly writing letters to other people along the lines of, “I don’t like what you did, please stop it” or “I don’t like what you did, please apologize”.
I think these trigger-guardians are more sensitive than they need to be, probably to a ridiculous degree, but I don’t see how that makes them “bullies”.
No, it’s existentialism.
That’s not an argument, you’re just contradicting me.
+1 beer on keyboard.