Second, I actually had to google to find out if GoFundMe actually existed in the floating timeline, and yes it did. (It was about two years old as of tonight’s posting.)
It is. There’s actually a lot of sad stories about people who turned to GoFundMe or other crowdfunding sites in a last ditch attempt to try and scrape together the money they needed. There’s one particular story I remember about a guy who tried to get the money for just 1 month’s supply of insulin. He failed to get enough… And he died later that month from diabetic-related complications. And that’s just one of the many, many failures who never make it “viral” enough to cover their expenses.
What even worse is that the popular goFundme are of for tragic tales of people turning away from medicine to try for hyper-expensive psuedoscience treatments that don’t even work. Sometime for their kids. Sometimes for conditions that are actually easy to treat but lethal if you don’t treat it properly
The US healthcare system is designed to maximize the profits of insurance and pharmaceutical companies. It is not designed, however, to care about health. After all, the glorious divinity of the free market means that if companies whose job is related to healthcare are making a lot of profit, then it follows health must be excellent, because profits are the single and only measure of performances. Right? That’s the dogma’s everyone is brainwashed with, so it must be true…
It’s not dogma but ideology. Dogma dictates what you have to believe, ideology is how things are being run. The U.S. has embraced capitalism which employs avarice as the principal driving force running the country, with a legal system acting as a comparatively loose escapement mechanism.
A lack of profit is an indication for the driving force not being effective and the operation needing fixing or greasing.
If that sounds fucked up, it’s because it is. It also is successful, and it’s not like wars and other outlets of avarice were an invention of capitalism. Capitalism has only optimized them.
The US healthcare system is great for those outside the US, who get to benefit from all the advancements made in medicine for free. (A lot of which are funded by the masses of money collected by the US healthcare system).
lol @ “for free”, I guess you’ve never heard about a thing called “patents”.
I also guess you don’t know that there are medical universities and pharmaceutical companies outside of the US, and that they do their fair share of innovation because, guess what, they need to be competitive so as to survive.
Yes, and not just patents. Advancements in science and technology aren’t made available everywhere automatically at once just because somewhere someone made the discovery. There’s a lot of forces at play of how that gets transmitted. (Check out the work by Paul M. Romer, this year’s Nobel prize winner).
If the US was putting all of the costs but the rest of the world was benefitting “FOR FREE”, the US, the most profit-driven and petty nation in the world, would have stopped investing there a long time ago. It would make no sense.
This idea of a sector of the population in the US where you can just ignore what the rest of the world is doing, then simultaneously look back and go “you’re not doing anything! we’re pulling all the weight here!” is quite exhausting. It’s like there’s a simultaneous martyr and saviour complex.
Ob, I live in the UK. Some of the world’s most amazing medical advances have come from here — here, with the NHS.
The first full-body MRI scanner
Cancer immunotherapies
currently, the development of an artificial uterus (for the treatment of extremely premature babies)
…just to name a few.
Some of the world’s most successful drugs have been and are being developed outside the US. In fact, there have been specific, detailed studies to determine whether the US pharmaceutical profits are disproportionately funding R&D (like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866602/) — and the short answer is, no, the US contribution to drug development is large but in no way either overwhelming or disproportionate.
The short version is this: the profits that the US pharmaceutical companies and insurers make are not ploughed back in to R&D. They are overwhelmingly sucked out of the system to profit shareholders.
Oh, yeah, there’s loads of wonderful research done outside the US… funded by selling it inside the US. People bizarrely miss the point when this is said – of course other countries do good research. Then the fruits of that research get sold around the world, and it’s economically viable because one large country’s getting hosed.
You overestimate the comments, granted this is definitely a moment where I have no patience for Walky even though I normally try to defend him. Part of that may be from my own experience as an older sibling though.
Why would we? Like. I mean, I get it. Especially at that age, siblings can be shitty to each other and Walky *thinks* he’s just fucking around, but for instance – that last panel has a pretty nasty subtext knowing what we know about how Sal was treated by her parents.
To Walky’s defense, however slight it might be, he didn’t realize how differently their parents treated them until he got to college. So while what he’s doing here is still shitty, and the fact that he never realized it is also something that counts against him, he isn’t doing it out of spite. I realize that isn’t much, and I have been in Sal’s position(though not nearly to the same degree) so again it I still would love to see her thump him a good one.
Only if you catch him, and given that you’d be twins you’d only have an edge in doing so if you’d spent most of your life running around all athletic-like while he spent most of his life bumming around in front of a television scarfing down unhealthy snacks.
Let me tell you something as an older brother:
This is normal. Your work as siblings is annoy the shit out of each other. Needle each other. Love each other.
He’s def being an awful little shit here, but I’m not sure he realizes how awful exactly. Not that that makes it any better, but just in general this is standard “horrible preteen boy” awful and not “wow Walky’s a terrible person forever” awful
Same. It’s honestly kind of sad that he has no empathy for this godawful situation, and I entirely blame his parents until I see reason otherwise, but Sal is definitely getting the worse of it.
Betting that tuning out Sal’s emotional talk was at least partly a ‘I don’t want to think about how angry she is at Mom and whether or not she’s right’ thing, for a start.
Also the toxic masculinity, but parental expectations and modeling shape that too.
The strip in question has him say that ’emotional feel feel crap’ is too complicated for him to navigate, so he tunes it out to get in less trouble. Sounds like Sal tried to talk to him, he didn’t understand and she got frustrated, so he tunes her out now. Or, alternatively, he tried to say something when she and her parents were fighting, got told to ‘mind his business’ or something like that and so tuned it out.
I definitely would be willing to cut him some slack! The slack being “well, this is more cruel than he cares to know, but he’s just a kid so maybe he will grow out of that.”
……
Right so Walky is the bratty little brother getting his sister in trouble. Not really surprised by that. And yes I DO love extended flashback sequences why do you ask?
Wait. . .It just clicked . . .did Sal try to rob that gas station to get the rest of the money for Marcie? That . . .is both heartwarming and heartbreaking.
That’s been the general assumption for a while now, although it’s of course always possible that it’s a red herring and Willis is going to throw us a curve ball.
Nothing mixed about that metaphor at all. The curveball is a red herring. That’s the twist. You expect a ball and instead they throw a fish at you with some wicked spin on it. Boom red herring curveball.
I wonder if that’s a dominance play on Sal’s part. I grew up with fraternal twins as neighbors and neither ever referred to the other as the “little sibling”.
I grew up with fraternal triplets as cousins. There is one they consider the “baby”, and there’s one who’s widely treated as the oldest, even though they were born literally less than two full minutes apart (emergency C-section). I also had two friends who were identical twins, and another two who were fraternal twins. Neither set of twins had an “older” kid except as a joke when we were little. When they were 8, the girl of the set of fraternal twins developed T1 diabetes. After that, her brother started calling himself her “big bro” and taking on more of a caretaker role.
From my experience, it seems to depend a lot on whether the parents treat one kid as younger or otherwise baby one kid over the others, and also on whether one kid has a health issue. In both cases where a “baby” developed, the “baby” had a health issue (CP and spina bifida in one case, diabetes in the other), but also, in the fraternal twins, the kid with CP and spina bifida wasn’t the only kid with health issues, just the one who got babied for it. If the parents treat one kid as younger, the kids will pick up on it and respond accordingly (which seems to be what Walky is taking advantage of here), even if they don’t register it consciously.
Side note: In every family that plays favorites that I’ve encountered, the kid(s) who’s not the favorite always knows who the favorite is. The kid who is the favorite almost always thinks they’re treated fairly. If that aint a great metaphor for privilege dynamics in society, I don’t know what is.
On that note – I’ve seen a lot of stories about mixed race twins, where one looked or even was just considered ‘whiter’. They tended to consider themselves ‘mixed’ or ‘beige’. Meanwhile, the other twin almost always called themselves ‘Black/Latina/South Asian/etc.’
Yeah I really think this will be the origin of all that. These are the main points that support that.
– Sal sees the injury as her fault.
– One of her first concerns when talking with her father was about money.
– She gave Marcie her allowance and said she’ll get more.
– Sal doesn’t look like the kid who wants money for herself.
– Sal doesn’t seem to resort to violence except for defense or vengeance, but not one to rob a store for the fun of it.
Yeah, it seems pretty clear at this point.
I’m kind of disappointed. I’d liked the idea of a Sal who really was just acting out and getting on a bad path, but who’d managed to straighten herself out. Not sure I like the revelation that she really was just desperately trying to do good all along – even if she went about it in a bad way.
We’ll see how it plays out. Hopefully Willis can pull it off in a way that satisfies me. 🙂
We know that lashing out against her parents was at least part of it – it’s why she didn’t wear a mask, because she wanted to get caught. I suspect after the first one (which is likely for Marcie), we’re going to see some Grade A Fuckery from Linda and/or Charles.
Extended flashback sequence? I am very curious to see the exact circumstances leading up to the convenience store, but I also wanted to see Sal and Ethan talk. So I’m half delighted and half frustrated beyond words. Is there a word to describe this sensation?
I realize it’s generally inappropriate to wish violence on a child, but I really hope Sal smacks him because what the FUCK? He’s 12, he’s old enough to not make jokes about a girl he knows needing a damn gofundme to pay for an ambulance.
Siblings do that. They do get into fights and they do hit each other. I doubt that there is a way to prevent it until they get old enough to express frustration in a more mature way.
Ah Sal…I know that feel. It’s the exact feel I had when I tried to raise money to cremate my uncle. Long story short, my family is shitty and the cousin who was supposed to take care of our deceased uncle instead stole money from the family and left his body to rot in the freezer. I only raised about ten bucks, my mom and aunts had to cram together to raise enough money on the fly or else my uncle would have gotten a pauper’s funeral and we’d never get his ashes.
Thank you kindly, C.T. Phipps! It was a hard period of time, but we managed to get through it by jumping through a lot of hoops. That cousin of mine can fuck right off though.
People are mad at Walky. I’m mad at that hospital bill. What the hell surgery does she need exactly that costs that much?
I know it’s not unrealistic, especially if she needs multiple operations and doesn’t have insurance, but still…
The only thing we’ve seen Sal promise to pay for was the ambulance. It wouldn’t surprise me if she tried to take on more but that’s the only thing we’ve seen thus far. Also, depending on state, city, hospital, and ambulance company, prices can vary DRASTICALLY. I’ve heard so much about the US healthcare system, I’d believe 65K even if it ended up not being true.
Usually, no. On the other hand, I know one of my old roommates was in a car accident and they had to life flight her out and that cost upwards of 300k. (Which she’s still trying to deal with because even though she had good insurance, they wanted to do some weird thing where they mailed her a partial paper check to mail to the helicopter people and now the two companies refuse to talk to each oher ever again or some shit?? Capitalism.)
So yeah, just as a reference. Depending on what she needed it COULD just be the initial hospital stay, that can definitely hit 65k between tests and doctors and horrifically inflated “literally $300 for one aspirin” uninsured prices.
ER care is expensive. Especially uninsured, since you don’t get the benefit of those negotiated prices.
My last visit would have been around $50K without insurance and they didn’t actually do anything other than various tests and keep me overnight.
My last visit to the ER (over a skin infection my doctor — a real MD and everything — didn’t want to deal with) included me asking a nurse-tech a question. She said: Let me go ask the doctor (ER attending physician, not my doctor). 30 seconds later, she came back with: Doctor says “no.” — and that was a $700 item on my bill, “negotiated” by my insurer to $250.
I have a few asthmatic friends in the US and I always boggle when I see their bills. 150 for a prednisone tablet (prednisone is literally 10 cents a pill here in Canada). 600 for a nebuliser treatment of ventolin (a nebule costs $8 here, and the entire nebulizer assembly costs $50. No, I did not miss a 0. Fifty dollars. You could literally buy TEN new for less than what they charge). I could go on.
USians, you guys really need to get on the single-payer health care schtick. What they charge you is highway fucking robbery. Health care does not cost that much to administer. If they say it does, they are fucking lying.
Canada definitely could improve. We could stand to fund preventative health more, and medication coverage needs work (if I didn’t have private insurance I would spend more on meds than on my car payment because i had the shitty luck to have bronchopulmonary dysplasia and asthma from preterm birth. I legit was born this way).
Back when I was in grad school and my insurance was shitty and pay was shittier, there were several months when I had to choose between meds and food. While the uni president with his free house and million dollar porch and half a million dollar salary argued against paying us grad students anywhere close to the national average (let alone poverty line).
Do you know what it is like to decide you can make two cans of tuna, a pack of minute rice and half a bag of beans last 2 weeks because your asthma flared up and you need the 70 bucks you were gonna spend on food for the meds so you can breathe? And then have the fucking fat cat to end all fat cats offer you free budgeting seminars?
It sounds like it. I can’t blame TAs and grad students for striking because the pay is garbage, especially when they keep offering those shitty one year, no job security contracts.
Yeah, we definitely need to expand drug coverage… And dental. (And put optical, back, dammit…I was going to get new glasses this summer, but the cost of the eye test put that out of my range.) But imperfect is still better than total trash.
American health care is for-profit (unlike just about every other western country). That’s why it costs more per capita and covers fewer people.
If they were willing to put caps on the various costs that ~might~ slow down research but it would ~definitely~ cut into the income of a helluva lot of rich people. Which is why it won’t happen.
Also, nice transition in the first panel. I woulda shaded the right half flashback blue though.
Netflix did a series called DIRTY MONEY which explains that the cost of healthcare in the United States is actually a scam by the pharmaceutical companies on the insurance companies. They charge outrageous amounts of money for pills that people need to survive then the insurance companies pass the expenses for these onto other people.
If GoFundMe can raise 400,000 dollars for some random homeless guy, I’m confident we could get 65,000 for throat surgery. And that’s without holding up any convenience stores. People give away money for way stupider reasons.
I’m guessing Sal only tried the robbery after this failed. And Marcie needed money pretty quickly, I doubt Sal was willing to wait and try again.
(And again: betting Sal didn’t know how to spread her campaign and that any authority figures were as supportive as we’ve previously seen them. That’s a lot to put on a kid that young and I guarantee she tried to shoulder way more than she could handle. I’m sure the Diaz parents helped, but crowdfunding like this works best when you already have an established audience or know someone who does and that’s not a whole lot of people. These things are hard and take a whole lot of luck.)
Half of crowdfunding success is in networking it – especially with medical bills, because there are so many people who need to do these sorts of things. Random internet strangers simply can’t afford to back every medical GoFundMe, so you need them to reach the widest possible audience to compensate for all the people who don’t or can’t pitch in. (I’ve seen the ‘I have a few extra bucks this month so I’ll help with these because people helped with my emergency bill’ phenomenon before, for instance.)
*Gets the tissues and popcorn, and settles into the Blanket Fort of Inevitable Sorrow*
And we see another reason why Sal didn’t try and reach out to Walky when he didn’t try with her. Like, if everything were functional and this WEREN’T something so serious that Walky’s indifference comes off so assholeish, then this would be playful banter! Walky probably thinks that’s what it is and remembered it as such.* But given Linda plays them off each other, and that this is clearly a sore spot for Sal even without the promise she made, it just makes things even worse.
* Also puts a parallel in Carla’s out of bounds teasing the last couple strips if that’s Walky’s thought process too. Actually it explains a lot of Sal’s interactions if this was her baseline. Which is sad.
Also – Walky’s straight up said that when Sal was having problems with feelings or emotions, he tuned her out, so…yeah, no wonder Sal’s brushed him off as ‘not dependable’.
… Yeah barely-teen or no, that’s beyond insensitive. And clearly in play here because who asks the person staring at the GoFundMe for their best friend’s ambulance ride for money? He knows she has other priorities!
(How much effort do you think Charles and Linda put into this, by the way? My guess is ‘one link post on Facebook apiece talking about Sally’s little friend’, and maybe Charles gave Sal the information she needed to set things up.)
Yeah, enough effort to convince themselves they’re good, loving parents, but not enough to actually…y’know, be good, loving parents. Maybe they chipped in like $20.
And we know they have contacts. We know some of those contacts have money. Probably not enough to fund it singlehandedly (Though I mean, we can’t rule it out from the Billingsworths, it’s just that Billie’s dad WOULDN’T,) but enough that they probably could’ve broken $500 or $1000 leveraging everything properly.
And all her friends apparently have an expectation of their children being doctors or lawyers? This is a well-to-do circle.
(I keep thinking Walky and Billie went to private school, and that the Leland flashback was at a private school as well, because the circle seems so affluent.)
Willis has confirmed public school, but considering how property values influences school funding, a public school in their neighbourhood probably may as well have been.
Assuming Sal even told Charles and Linda.
Given Linda’s snobbery re Marcie and attitude towards Sal, I wouldn’t be surprised if Sal didn’t tell them. She wouldn’t expect them to support her efforts and might even try to interfere.
Does gofundme allow people under 18 to create fundraisers? Do they require financial info/addresses? If so, I can’t imagine they don’t know. They’re jackasses, not completely oblivious.
Yes, but Walky as particularly so. Billie’d just shown up acting like a, to quote Marcie, ‘crazy bongo’ and Sal still singled Walky out to Joyce as ‘not dependable’. Seems she thinks so in general, not just to her.
Well, gee. Here we are, lower-upper class at least, perhaps middle-upper, and my daughter’s all passionate about raising money for her best friend’s operation to prevent her from being disabled for a lifetime but of course she can’t raise that much because most kids don’t know how to do that. I mean that’s the sort of money that only an upper class person can afford to donate on a whim, and even then they’d probably have to have connections and a network that includes people like, I dunno, dean of a major university where they get oodles of NIH money to do medical research or something. And what possible reason would someone like THAT have to help someone like my daughter’s friend out so Sally doesn’t tear herself apart with worry and guilt and pain? I can’t think of a one!
Yeah, I mean, why would someone who knows people like the dean of a major state university and the big bucks super connected Billingsworth family POSSIBLY want to help a little girl who’s either going to become or has become disabled? It’s such a shame there’s nothing Linda could do, like bare minimum ask her super connected friends to repost the link on Facebook or whatever. It’s just too difficult to figure out for Sally.
I mean, if it were David, maybe, but for Sally? So difficult.
I’m not certain how much the dean makes – could be anywhere from upper $60,000 a year to upper $160,000, I’m not entirely certain his pay grade – but I feel certain he could give at least $50 to a campaign like this when a friend asked and worry no further.
(The truly ridiculous thing would be if they knew the football coach. THAT GUY could fund Marcie’s campaign and then back another on the ‘We name our firstborn after you’ tier.)
Yeah, I was just checking the administrative pay grades rather than comparing, he can match the pledged amount and I’m certain he’s not the only one of their contacts who could.
I’m equally certain most of said contacts are stingy douchebags given what we’ve seen of the dean and heard of Billingsworth Sr., but if Linda really cared she could call in some favors and I’m certain she hasn’t.
Again, at this point, I would take her asking them to post the links on their social media. I’m sure their twitter followers would be able to handle it by themselves.
Aso, this just reminds me that like, half the reason I’d like to see Sal/Tony in this universe is to see Linda’s face if Sal showed up with the dean’s son on her arm.
…Okay, fine, and to see Tony’s frustration with Walky again because that was always kinda hilarious to me.
Just imagine the awkward dinner parties with Linda and Dean McHenry, too.
DOA Tony seems way better-adjusted than Walkyverse Tony, even. Almost certainly too low-drama to stay on cast without the parents around, but if they did interact he could be a great short-term guy. (Carla for the ‘fuck you I’m perfect and loaded’ would work too. Or Roz and Sal being each other’s Fake Holiday Dinner Date to spite their families. Roz’s reputation is so much worse but there would still be delicious drama.)
Plus, if nothing else, seeing how one of the kids reacts to the death of a parent could be interesting, especially if Tony’s still got a lot of anger around it.
Even if they didn’t put in a single cent of their own, between them they’d have the know-how, access, and contacts to put on one hell of a charity fundraiser. I mean getting money for the university is one of the dean’s jobs and it’s not like he can’t provide a venue and doesn’t have a discount with a catering service.
Plus, it’s easy good publicity! Giving a little girl in need of medical bills help is one of the easiest feel good ‘faith in humanity’ warm fuzzies towards skeezy business people tricks in the book.
The student newspapers would be all over it. And the alumni messages, at that.
Seriously Linda twenty minutes of caring about your daughter, her best friend, and her immense pile of guilt and trauma could’ve saved you so much embarrassment.
Forget student newspapers, I’m sure SOME legit news publication would take the chance to write about how heartwarming and faith restoring Mr. Billingsworth’s generous help was. Perfect timing for when he’s about to start pushing to get homeless people shipped out of town (which has to happen after the robberies, because Sal wasn’t present for it).
Even thinking on it on the most basic level – Charles and Linda were probably better equipped to handle an unexpected cost like the ambulance ride. Charles notices Sal is traumatized and maybe blaming herself, tells her what that cost… they could have offered to help the Diazes shoulder that cost rather than Sal giving her allowance which was clearly Sal’s idea. (Then again, Sal got the ride too. Maybe they were both billed and that’s how Charles knows what it cost? )
It sounds like it went to the Diazes, since Sal only knew about it from what her dad said. And while Charles meant well, telling your daughter that a possible disability is ‘sure to have some surgery or something that can fix it’ is just…not a good idea because you’re almost certainly wrong (and regardless, he has to know that even if such a surgery did exist, the Diazes could never afford it). And yeah, I’m guessing they didn’t offer the Diazes much help, if anything at all, beyond maybe ‘liking’ or posting the link on Facebook and maybe chipping in like $20. And that’s at my most generous guess.
Though even if it had gone to the Walkerton’s it would have gone Charles and Linda, Sal still wouldn’t have seen the bill or known the cost until he told her.
Honestly, I’m not sure how he knew, unless the Diazes told him. The hospital certainly shouldn’t have told him anything about Marcie’s care.
The Diazes probably told him. Marcie and Sal have been best friends since they were five, it’s unlikely they aren’t (relatively) familiar with the Walkertons.
Walkertons seem to be upper middle class, and the Billingsworths are apparently loaded enough Billie can hand out twenties like candy, even if she’s not quite ‘offer stock options for minor favours’ rich like Carla.
I believe it’s been confirmed that Sal is right and they just arbitrarily decided to favor the light-skinned boy over the darkish-skinned girl because internalized societal bigotry sucks.
Not literally lighter skinned, but straighter hair, fits better into mainstream American (i.e. white American) culture, has fewer traits racists associate with black people (like Sal who actually pushes back against injustice and so gets dubbed the ‘bad behaved’ one).
Something of a chicken and egg thing there. I’d assumed the pushes back part came after the dubbed “bad behaved” part and the initial impetus was more the physical characteristics. Probably with some sexism mixed, in though I don’t think that’s been brought up.
The flashback at the end of Teenage Churchmouse implies that even from a really young age, Linda was picking Walky for opportunities over Sal. And that’s one that Walky remembers.
Yeah, that’s what I think is likely. When they were really little, it might even have been things like ‘Sally’s noisier, fussier, etc.’ – I hear those about black children a lot.
And parents project on their babies A LOT – kind of inevitable to some degree when the only thing a baby can really express is crying. Some of it is harmless, like ‘oh look, he grabbed at the onesie you got him, he must like it,’ but it’s easy to say ‘oh this is the Smart One because *some milestone was achieved slightly earlier*’ or those creepy Straight People comments about how a boy baby is such a flirt because he smiles at old ladies (actual story) or assuming Boy baby and Girl baby who play together must develop romantic feelings. Between unconscious bias and all kinds of things the twins could have been a touch different on at birth, I can easily see Linda choosing Walky as her favorite before the flashback and before the twins could consciously remember. (Maybe Sal was sick more often, or took a minute longer to soothe. Maybe Walky could clap or laugh or smile a little earlier. Maybe one of them always woke up first and that impacted things. Who knows? Babies are always different.)
Walky’s said before that Sal is black and he’s “Generically beige” – now I’d imagine at least some of that is down to his hair texture being white-read and what have you but yeah.
There’s a very limited number of nose shapes in this artstyle, for instance. If they’re subtly different, it could be recognizable from birth, but they’re clearly not so different as to change the character art.
Walks doesn’t fight with people, as far as we know. Pacifist, coward, or just haven’t had the right reason, we’ve never seen him actually hit someone, even when threatened (though we have seen him talk about hitting Mary and actually lunge at Joe for what may or may not be a joke).
Sal will and does fight. She even fought over the immigrant child (parent’s pov).
Walky is friends with the daughter of the rich politician guy.
Sal is friends with the immigrant child who may or may not cause issues at her school.
Walky is happy and cheerful.
Sal is brooding and questions authority.
Walky has straight ish Hair.
Sal has nappy hair.
Those are plenty of reasons they might favor Walky over Sal. They’re not good reasons, but since they’re not especially good parents, that’s nit a surprise.
Well, that was sweet of Sal and certainly fits her. It also fits that Walky literally refused to get it. Yeah, they were as troublesome as any other kids could be but I really don’t get why Linda told herself that Walky was the one of her kids who needed the least help!
In this strip, the first frame is in normal color even though the flashback has begun. It shows Sal in a similar pose undergoing a falling cigarette/pencil take as at the end of the previous strip with Carla and Sal.
Our host has used this device before. In the last frame of this strip we see present-day Amber; the first frame of the next strip shows five-years-previous Amber in the same pose in full color, with the flashback coloring beginning in the next frame.
I can see where this is going – the crowd-raising thingy won’t work out, and Sal consequently (tries to) hold up a store to get the money necessary for Marcie. Everything makes sense now!
It is odd so close off the Mike ones, but we’re long overdue for Sal’s perspective on the robberies. The second one changed her life completely and gave her a permanent disability, so us only seeing it from Amber’s perspective couldn’t really hold.
(The Mike ones were good and contributed to things thematically, but we didn’t necessarily need to know Ethan’s had this crush for five years or Amber’s shitty school situation to understand the situations they’re now in. The biggest deal was Mike having a role in putting Amber and Blaine in a car together on that field trip, and even that is super-ambiguous as to his intentions. But we’re suddenly moving a whole lot closer to Sal finding out about Amber now that the Walky/Amber ship is a go, and that means knowing what Sal thought of the whole scenario is going to be really important. Better to have it all now than drop the story out for weeks when the reveal does come before we actually see Sal or Walky react.)
Plus, whatever happened leading up to Sal’s robberies is going to colour her relationship with Marcie. We know Marcie’s showing up in this storyline later, so that information is probably going to be relevant.
If they hadn’t completely gotten a handle on ASL by the time she was sent away (and that seems likely, since it was, at most, a year between her losing her voice and the robbery) then Sal working to learn it in Tennessee for when she saw her might have done a lot to help that.
I wonder if anyone considered the possibility that Walky is acting “normal” to lighten Sal’s mood?
He tried it for Billie and this COULD be the same thing.
*reads comment section*
Nope. Doesnt look like it.
The suggestion is his making light of the situation is an attempt to make Sal feel better. Even if better in this situation means chasing her brother instead of refreshing the page for the hundredth time in the hour.
Sure, it seems like it’s a general defense mechanism of Walky’s. Defense mechanisms aren’t always bad – only when they become maladaptive. In Billie’s situation, levity provided assistance. Here, it seems surprisingly callous.
So in Sal’s mom’s eyes Sal was a troublemaker, but all the crazy things she did where for her friend. Walky on the other hand was absent minded, and that is why in his mom’s eyes he was perfect, like something she could shape to her liking.
Hey Willis, is it hard in flashback sequences to not give Sal a Southern accent? Cuz as I was reading the comic I had to mentally tell myself to not give her one since, yknow, no Tennessee boarding school yet.
12 years old is old enough to know not to be a jackass about someone’s best friend requiring 65K for medical bills.
I don’t think he has a complete lack of empathy, but he’s definitely being shitty here and I wouldn’t say he’s ‘grown out of it’ – he’s still prone to putting his foot in his mouth and can be very dickish in situations where he doesn’t notice (or care) about the problem. That doesn’t make him a terrible person overall, but there’s a difference between him being totally awful vs him not doing anything wrong here and having grown out of it.
I mean, I don’t expect Walky to be perfect, and I like his character arc. My complaint’s not about his character or Willis’ writing, but about a whole bunch of people justifying his shitty actions in ways that have proven to have shitty real world consequences.
I mean, here he is literally saying he cares more about nachitos and soda than the well being of his sister’s friend. To her face. As a joke.
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Gofundme is the worst national healthcare plan
First, you are correct.
Second, I actually had to google to find out if GoFundMe actually existed in the floating timeline, and yes it did. (It was about two years old as of tonight’s posting.)
It is. There’s actually a lot of sad stories about people who turned to GoFundMe or other crowdfunding sites in a last ditch attempt to try and scrape together the money they needed. There’s one particular story I remember about a guy who tried to get the money for just 1 month’s supply of insulin. He failed to get enough… And he died later that month from diabetic-related complications. And that’s just one of the many, many failures who never make it “viral” enough to cover their expenses.
What even worse is that the popular goFundme are of for tragic tales of people turning away from medicine to try for hyper-expensive psuedoscience treatments that don’t even work. Sometime for their kids. Sometimes for conditions that are actually easy to treat but lethal if you don’t treat it properly
The US healthcare plan is barbaric and an international embarrassment.
Sincerely,
Someone in the third world who didn’t have to pay a cent for her cancer treatment.
The US healthcare system is designed to maximize the profits of insurance and pharmaceutical companies. It is not designed, however, to care about health. After all, the glorious divinity of the free market means that if companies whose job is related to healthcare are making a lot of profit, then it follows health must be excellent, because profits are the single and only measure of performances. Right? That’s the dogma’s everyone is brainwashed with, so it must be true…
It’s not dogma but ideology. Dogma dictates what you have to believe, ideology is how things are being run. The U.S. has embraced capitalism which employs avarice as the principal driving force running the country, with a legal system acting as a comparatively loose escapement mechanism.
A lack of profit is an indication for the driving force not being effective and the operation needing fixing or greasing.
If that sounds fucked up, it’s because it is. It also is successful, and it’s not like wars and other outlets of avarice were an invention of capitalism. Capitalism has only optimized them.
The US healthcare system is great for those outside the US, who get to benefit from all the advancements made in medicine for free. (A lot of which are funded by the masses of money collected by the US healthcare system).
Well, that’s great! If we go to a single-payer system they’ll have to pick up the slack.
Won’t be too hard. Other countries are already catching up and about half of the most advanced hospitals in the world aren’t in the US.
And those advanced hospitals pay peanuts. No one’s going to “pick up the slack” because no one would want to.
lol @ “for free”, I guess you’ve never heard about a thing called “patents”.
I also guess you don’t know that there are medical universities and pharmaceutical companies outside of the US, and that they do their fair share of innovation because, guess what, they need to be competitive so as to survive.
^ Also this.
Yes, and not just patents. Advancements in science and technology aren’t made available everywhere automatically at once just because somewhere someone made the discovery. There’s a lot of forces at play of how that gets transmitted. (Check out the work by Paul M. Romer, this year’s Nobel prize winner).
If the US was putting all of the costs but the rest of the world was benefitting “FOR FREE”, the US, the most profit-driven and petty nation in the world, would have stopped investing there a long time ago. It would make no sense.
This idea of a sector of the population in the US where you can just ignore what the rest of the world is doing, then simultaneously look back and go “you’re not doing anything! we’re pulling all the weight here!” is quite exhausting. It’s like there’s a simultaneous martyr and saviour complex.
“It’s like there’s a simultaneous martyr and saviour complex.”
Yeah, America in a nutshell, right there. Certain segments of it, anyways.
Ob, I live in the UK. Some of the world’s most amazing medical advances have come from here — here, with the NHS.
The first full-body MRI scanner
Cancer immunotherapies
currently, the development of an artificial uterus (for the treatment of extremely premature babies)
…just to name a few.
Some of the world’s most successful drugs have been and are being developed outside the US. In fact, there have been specific, detailed studies to determine whether the US pharmaceutical profits are disproportionately funding R&D (like https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2866602/) — and the short answer is, no, the US contribution to drug development is large but in no way either overwhelming or disproportionate.
The short version is this: the profits that the US pharmaceutical companies and insurers make are not ploughed back in to R&D. They are overwhelmingly sucked out of the system to profit shareholders.
Oh, yeah, there’s loads of wonderful research done outside the US… funded by selling it inside the US. People bizarrely miss the point when this is said – of course other countries do good research. Then the fruits of that research get sold around the world, and it’s economically viable because one large country’s getting hosed.
Wow, Walky, way to be a shitty brother
Yeah, no kidding.
Not to mention a shitty unintentional inspiration for the robbery spree (if two can be considered a spree).
You know, though, someday Walky’s probably going to have kids of his own… and when he does, some Christmas…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyCJZCejFXo
Revenge is a dish best served cold.
God damn it, Walky.
Correct gravatar.
Fuckin…. walky….
That’s… awful. 🙁
Wow, seeing Walky as a kid really hammers home how much he has changed.
Just look at that completely different behavior.
And the untied shoes, and junk food addiction… It’s like he’s a completely different person!
Says the cerial killer.
Fuck yeah, give me that flashback.
Also it’s ,so weird to see someone calling Sal “Sally”. Unsettling, even.
Does she look like a fuckin’ Sally to you?
….. aaaand html doesn’t like bold inside of links, apparently.
It should, unless the comment system parses it out for some reason.
It’s entirely possible that I found a different way to screw up html.
I’m sure the comment section is going to cut Walky some slack, given he is like 12-13 here.
…okay, probably not.
12’s old enough to know better than to be a dick in this situation.
You overestimate the comments, granted this is definitely a moment where I have no patience for Walky even though I normally try to defend him. Part of that may be from my own experience as an older sibling though.
Why would we? Like. I mean, I get it. Especially at that age, siblings can be shitty to each other and Walky *thinks* he’s just fucking around, but for instance – that last panel has a pretty nasty subtext knowing what we know about how Sal was treated by her parents.
To Walky’s defense, however slight it might be, he didn’t realize how differently their parents treated them until he got to college. So while what he’s doing here is still shitty, and the fact that he never realized it is also something that counts against him, he isn’t doing it out of spite. I realize that isn’t much, and I have been in Sal’s position(though not nearly to the same degree) so again it I still would love to see her thump him a good one.
I’ve never even been in Sal’s position, but if it were me, Walky’d STILL be walking around with a bright red handprint on his face.
Only if you catch him, and given that you’d be twins you’d only have an edge in doing so if you’d spent most of your life running around all athletic-like while he spent most of his life bumming around in front of a television scarfing down unhealthy snacks.
….
…. waaaaait…..
Sal does wear a couple of shirts that seem to be work out shirts (like ‘fitness’).
Let me tell you something as an older brother:
This is normal. Your work as siblings is annoy the shit out of each other. Needle each other. Love each other.
He’s def being an awful little shit here, but I’m not sure he realizes how awful exactly. Not that that makes it any better, but just in general this is standard “horrible preteen boy” awful and not “wow Walky’s a terrible person forever” awful
Yeah, like I think Walky’s saying something terrible here, but I don’t hate him now or anything.
Same. It’s honestly kind of sad that he has no empathy for this godawful situation, and I entirely blame his parents until I see reason otherwise, but Sal is definitely getting the worse of it.
Betting that tuning out Sal’s emotional talk was at least partly a ‘I don’t want to think about how angry she is at Mom and whether or not she’s right’ thing, for a start.
Also the toxic masculinity, but parental expectations and modeling shape that too.
The strip in question has him say that ’emotional feel feel crap’ is too complicated for him to navigate, so he tunes it out to get in less trouble. Sounds like Sal tried to talk to him, he didn’t understand and she got frustrated, so he tunes her out now. Or, alternatively, he tried to say something when she and her parents were fighting, got told to ‘mind his business’ or something like that and so tuned it out.
Strip in question:
http://www.dumbingofage.com/2013/comic/book-3/03-answers-in-hennessy/to-navigate/
I definitely would be willing to cut him some slack! The slack being “well, this is more cruel than he cares to know, but he’s just a kid so maybe he will grow out of that.”
……
If this wasn’t a flashback, we might even buy that
Right so Walky is the bratty little brother getting his sister in trouble. Not really surprised by that. And yes I DO love extended flashback sequences why do you ask?
Wait. . .It just clicked . . .did Sal try to rob that gas station to get the rest of the money for Marcie? That . . .is both heartwarming and heartbreaking.
That’s been the general assumption for a while now, although it’s of course always possible that it’s a red herring and Willis is going to throw us a curve ball.
That seems like a bit of a mixed metaphor, unless you’re from Melmac.
Nothing mixed about that metaphor at all. The curveball is a red herring. That’s the twist. You expect a ball and instead they throw a fish at you with some wicked spin on it. Boom red herring curveball.
Lew Zealand all over. “I throw the fish away, and it comes back to me.”
I appreciate you so much for that reference
Well, it was meant to be two separate metaphors, not one mixed one, but that works too I guess. 😛
Except that Walky isn’t the bratty little brother; he’s Sal’s twin. He’s pretty much a callous, clueless spoiled brat- just like most kids his age.
Sal’s the older twin.
Puts a pretty small limit on how much older, though. 🙂
Still older enough that she refers to him as her ‘lil bro’.
Even if he came out first, he’s still the lil’ bro.
I wonder if that’s a dominance play on Sal’s part. I grew up with fraternal twins as neighbors and neither ever referred to the other as the “little sibling”.
I grew up with fraternal triplets as cousins. There is one they consider the “baby”, and there’s one who’s widely treated as the oldest, even though they were born literally less than two full minutes apart (emergency C-section). I also had two friends who were identical twins, and another two who were fraternal twins. Neither set of twins had an “older” kid except as a joke when we were little. When they were 8, the girl of the set of fraternal twins developed T1 diabetes. After that, her brother started calling himself her “big bro” and taking on more of a caretaker role.
From my experience, it seems to depend a lot on whether the parents treat one kid as younger or otherwise baby one kid over the others, and also on whether one kid has a health issue. In both cases where a “baby” developed, the “baby” had a health issue (CP and spina bifida in one case, diabetes in the other), but also, in the fraternal twins, the kid with CP and spina bifida wasn’t the only kid with health issues, just the one who got babied for it. If the parents treat one kid as younger, the kids will pick up on it and respond accordingly (which seems to be what Walky is taking advantage of here), even if they don’t register it consciously.
Side note: In every family that plays favorites that I’ve encountered, the kid(s) who’s not the favorite always knows who the favorite is. The kid who is the favorite almost always thinks they’re treated fairly. If that aint a great metaphor for privilege dynamics in society, I don’t know what is.
Really? Every set of twins I’ve known of knew who was ‘technically’ oldest.
On that note – I’ve seen a lot of stories about mixed race twins, where one looked or even was just considered ‘whiter’. They tended to consider themselves ‘mixed’ or ‘beige’. Meanwhile, the other twin almost always called themselves ‘Black/Latina/South Asian/etc.’
Oh they know who is oldest they just don’t give one the family status of oldest, if that makes sense.
Fair enough, though in my experience, the oldest likes to (at least try) to act like it (in the ‘boss siblings around’ sense).
Yeah I really think this will be the origin of all that. These are the main points that support that.
– Sal sees the injury as her fault.
– One of her first concerns when talking with her father was about money.
– She gave Marcie her allowance and said she’ll get more.
– Sal doesn’t look like the kid who wants money for herself.
– Sal doesn’t seem to resort to violence except for defense or vengeance, but not one to rob a store for the fun of it.
Yeah, it seems pretty clear at this point.
I’m kind of disappointed. I’d liked the idea of a Sal who really was just acting out and getting on a bad path, but who’d managed to straighten herself out. Not sure I like the revelation that she really was just desperately trying to do good all along – even if she went about it in a bad way.
We’ll see how it plays out. Hopefully Willis can pull it off in a way that satisfies me. 🙂
We know that lashing out against her parents was at least part of it – it’s why she didn’t wear a mask, because she wanted to get caught. I suspect after the first one (which is likely for Marcie), we’re going to see some Grade A Fuckery from Linda and/or Charles.
Aww, it’s just like an IW! strip!
… Except for the part where they didn’t know each other at that age in IW!. Hmm.
And the part where Walky doesn’t seem to know how to fight.
*looks at alt text*
Dammit Willis.
Hey, at least these aren’t red panels.
…..
…. crap, I summoned them, didn’t I?
The chapter’s called “Flying Into the Red” so yes, be prepared for some red panels.
…I mean, when you put it like that…
Extended flashback sequence? I am very curious to see the exact circumstances leading up to the convenience store, but I also wanted to see Sal and Ethan talk. So I’m half delighted and half frustrated beyond words. Is there a word to describe this sensation?
There’s three – Damn you, Willis.
Ah, yes, the proverbial holy grail of phrases for these situations. Thank you.
Not that you’d have seen Sal and Ethan talk at all with with carla in the picture…
periorgasmic?
I kind of hope this segues into their talk later ‘today’, even though that would probably skip us ahead at least a couple hours.
Opera singers are supposed to think with their stomachs. Perhaps Walky missed out on his vocation.
*plays “96 Tears” by ? and the Mysterians on the hacked Muzak*
I realize it’s generally inappropriate to wish violence on a child, but I really hope Sal smacks him because what the FUCK? He’s 12, he’s old enough to not make jokes about a girl he knows needing a damn gofundme to pay for an ambulance.
Omg that’s so problematic. You realize you’re literally condoning violence against children, right?
Siblings do that. They do get into fights and they do hit each other. I doubt that there is a way to prevent it until they get old enough to express frustration in a more mature way.
Violence between children isn’t quite the same thing, I think – at least children who are basically peers. And when it’s not a bullying pattern.
I can’t tell if that was sarcasm or not
Ha!
Wait, did Sal’s cigarette magically turn into a pencil…?
Looks like flashback!Sal was chewing her pencil.
Ohhhhhh. I get it now. The first frame being colored normally threw me off, but I realize now it was to illustrate the suddenness of the flashback.
Ah Sal…I know that feel. It’s the exact feel I had when I tried to raise money to cremate my uncle. Long story short, my family is shitty and the cousin who was supposed to take care of our deceased uncle instead stole money from the family and left his body to rot in the freezer. I only raised about ten bucks, my mom and aunts had to cram together to raise enough money on the fly or else my uncle would have gotten a pauper’s funeral and we’d never get his ashes.
Also Walky what the fuck is wrong with you.
I am very sorry.
Thank you kindly, C.T. Phipps! It was a hard period of time, but we managed to get through it by jumping through a lot of hoops. That cousin of mine can fuck right off though.
I’m also sorry to hear about what happened and I’m glad everything worked out alright.
Thank you BBCC <3
People are mad at Walky. I’m mad at that hospital bill. What the hell surgery does she need exactly that costs that much?
I know it’s not unrealistic, especially if she needs multiple operations and doesn’t have insurance, but still…
Welcome to America.
It’s not even surgery – Sal’s trying to pay for the damn ambulance.
Nope. I’ve been given the price of an ambulance ride in 2012. It was more than I was willing to pay, but it wasn’t $65k.
Unless you’re joking. In which case, apologies for missing the joke.
The only thing we’ve seen Sal promise to pay for was the ambulance. It wouldn’t surprise me if she tried to take on more but that’s the only thing we’ve seen thus far. Also, depending on state, city, hospital, and ambulance company, prices can vary DRASTICALLY. I’ve heard so much about the US healthcare system, I’d believe 65K even if it ended up not being true.
It’s not 65 thousand. More like two thousand or so.
Yeah, I just checked and Sal said Marcie’s ambulance cost around 2K. So she must’ve also agreed to at least try with the other medical costs too.
Ouch. I think I heard my wallet crying.
Welcome to American healthcare, where someone’s profit
eering every step of the way.Pretty sure an ambulance ride would not cost $65,000.
Usually, no. On the other hand, I know one of my old roommates was in a car accident and they had to life flight her out and that cost upwards of 300k. (Which she’s still trying to deal with because even though she had good insurance, they wanted to do some weird thing where they mailed her a partial paper check to mail to the helicopter people and now the two companies refuse to talk to each oher ever again or some shit?? Capitalism.)
So yeah, just as a reference. Depending on what she needed it COULD just be the initial hospital stay, that can definitely hit 65k between tests and doctors and horrifically inflated “literally $300 for one aspirin” uninsured prices.
ER care is expensive. Especially uninsured, since you don’t get the benefit of those negotiated prices.
My last visit would have been around $50K without insurance and they didn’t actually do anything other than various tests and keep me overnight.
My last visit to the ER (over a skin infection my doctor — a real MD and everything — didn’t want to deal with) included me asking a nurse-tech a question. She said: Let me go ask the doctor (ER attending physician, not my doctor). 30 seconds later, she came back with: Doctor says “no.” — and that was a $700 item on my bill, “negotiated” by my insurer to $250.
I have a few asthmatic friends in the US and I always boggle when I see their bills. 150 for a prednisone tablet (prednisone is literally 10 cents a pill here in Canada). 600 for a nebuliser treatment of ventolin (a nebule costs $8 here, and the entire nebulizer assembly costs $50. No, I did not miss a 0. Fifty dollars. You could literally buy TEN new for less than what they charge). I could go on.
USians, you guys really need to get on the single-payer health care schtick. What they charge you is highway fucking robbery. Health care does not cost that much to administer. If they say it does, they are fucking lying.
All of this.
Canada could also stand to step more towards universal healthcare, but I still prefer ours to the US’s.
Canada definitely could improve. We could stand to fund preventative health more, and medication coverage needs work (if I didn’t have private insurance I would spend more on meds than on my car payment because i had the shitty luck to have bronchopulmonary dysplasia and asthma from preterm birth. I legit was born this way).
Back when I was in grad school and my insurance was shitty and pay was shittier, there were several months when I had to choose between meds and food. While the uni president with his free house and million dollar porch and half a million dollar salary argued against paying us grad students anywhere close to the national average (let alone poverty line).
Do you know what it is like to decide you can make two cans of tuna, a pack of minute rice and half a bag of beans last 2 weeks because your asthma flared up and you need the 70 bucks you were gonna spend on food for the meds so you can breathe? And then have the fucking fat cat to end all fat cats offer you free budgeting seminars?
It is maddening.
It sounds like it. I can’t blame TAs and grad students for striking because the pay is garbage, especially when they keep offering those shitty one year, no job security contracts.
Yeah, we definitely need to expand drug coverage… And dental. (And put optical, back, dammit…I was going to get new glasses this summer, but the cost of the eye test put that out of my range.) But imperfect is still better than total trash.
American health care is for-profit (unlike just about every other western country). That’s why it costs more per capita and covers fewer people.
If they were willing to put caps on the various costs that ~might~ slow down research but it would ~definitely~ cut into the income of a helluva lot of rich people. Which is why it won’t happen.
Also, nice transition in the first panel. I woulda shaded the right half flashback blue though.
Netflix did a series called DIRTY MONEY which explains that the cost of healthcare in the United States is actually a scam by the pharmaceutical companies on the insurance companies. They charge outrageous amounts of money for pills that people need to survive then the insurance companies pass the expenses for these onto other people.
I’m really impressed by Sal setting up a GoFundMe.
…impressed in a “ohShitSheIsForcedToGrowUpTooDamnedFast”-kinda way
And then there’s Walky. Right there. Same house, same parents, same time. What a contrast >.>
Oh no. Was Walky the one who put the idea into Sal’s head that gas stations have large amounts of easily accessible money?
Well, that they have at least four dollars.
If GoFundMe can raise 400,000 dollars for some random homeless guy, I’m confident we could get 65,000 for throat surgery. And that’s without holding up any convenience stores. People give away money for way stupider reasons.
A few good examples does not constitute a reliable solution.
Neither does robbing a gas station. I still think GoFundMe is a better plan.
I’m guessing Sal only tried the robbery after this failed. And Marcie needed money pretty quickly, I doubt Sal was willing to wait and try again.
(And again: betting Sal didn’t know how to spread her campaign and that any authority figures were as supportive as we’ve previously seen them. That’s a lot to put on a kid that young and I guarantee she tried to shoulder way more than she could handle. I’m sure the Diaz parents helped, but crowdfunding like this works best when you already have an established audience or know someone who does and that’s not a whole lot of people. These things are hard and take a whole lot of luck.)
Half of crowdfunding success is in networking it – especially with medical bills, because there are so many people who need to do these sorts of things. Random internet strangers simply can’t afford to back every medical GoFundMe, so you need them to reach the widest possible audience to compensate for all the people who don’t or can’t pitch in. (I’ve seen the ‘I have a few extra bucks this month so I’ll help with these because people helped with my emergency bill’ phenomenon before, for instance.)
Man, fuck our medical and economic systems.
True. The system is set up to profit. Not to help people.
For every successful Go Fund Me, there’s a 100 unsuccessful ones.
And here we finally are.
*Gets the tissues and popcorn, and settles into the Blanket Fort of Inevitable Sorrow*
And we see another reason why Sal didn’t try and reach out to Walky when he didn’t try with her. Like, if everything were functional and this WEREN’T something so serious that Walky’s indifference comes off so assholeish, then this would be playful banter! Walky probably thinks that’s what it is and remembered it as such.* But given Linda plays them off each other, and that this is clearly a sore spot for Sal even without the promise she made, it just makes things even worse.
* Also puts a parallel in Carla’s out of bounds teasing the last couple strips if that’s Walky’s thought process too. Actually it explains a lot of Sal’s interactions if this was her baseline. Which is sad.
Also – Walky’s straight up said that when Sal was having problems with feelings or emotions, he tuned her out, so…yeah, no wonder Sal’s brushed him off as ‘not dependable’.
… Yeah barely-teen or no, that’s beyond insensitive. And clearly in play here because who asks the person staring at the GoFundMe for their best friend’s ambulance ride for money? He knows she has other priorities!
(How much effort do you think Charles and Linda put into this, by the way? My guess is ‘one link post on Facebook apiece talking about Sally’s little friend’, and maybe Charles gave Sal the information she needed to set things up.)
Yeah, enough effort to convince themselves they’re good, loving parents, but not enough to actually…y’know, be good, loving parents. Maybe they chipped in like $20.
And we know they have contacts. We know some of those contacts have money. Probably not enough to fund it singlehandedly (Though I mean, we can’t rule it out from the Billingsworths, it’s just that Billie’s dad WOULDN’T,) but enough that they probably could’ve broken $500 or $1000 leveraging everything properly.
At this point, I’d settle for Linda asking her PTA friends (she seems like a PTA kinda mom) to post the link on Facebook.
And all her friends apparently have an expectation of their children being doctors or lawyers? This is a well-to-do circle.
(I keep thinking Walky and Billie went to private school, and that the Leland flashback was at a private school as well, because the circle seems so affluent.)
Willis has confirmed public school, but considering how property values influences school funding, a public school in their neighbourhood probably may as well have been.
Given how Linda is portrayed I imagine she’s deeply depressed at Sal being friends with a *clutch pearls* illegal.
Nah, she just thinks Sal can make ‘better friends’ because Marcie’s so ‘rough’ and ‘a little vagabond’.
Fuck I hate her.
Assuming Sal even told Charles and Linda.
Given Linda’s snobbery re Marcie and attitude towards Sal, I wouldn’t be surprised if Sal didn’t tell them. She wouldn’t expect them to support her efforts and might even try to interfere.
Charles almost certainly knows since he told her how much the ambulance was. Wouldn’t be surprised if he knew how much the rest was.
But did she tell them she was trying to raise the money?
Does gofundme allow people under 18 to create fundraisers? Do they require financial info/addresses? If so, I can’t imagine they don’t know. They’re jackasses, not completely oblivious.
Sal regards every single person in the world – with one exception – as not dependable.
Yes, but Walky as particularly so. Billie’d just shown up acting like a, to quote Marcie, ‘crazy bongo’ and Sal still singled Walky out to Joyce as ‘not dependable’. Seems she thinks so in general, not just to her.
WAIT! Sal’s face in the first panel of today’s strip and her face in the last panel of yesterday’s… Holy shit, Willis, that’s such a nice touch!
Cue the Royal Teens by way of an old Nair commercial:
Who likes flashbacks?
We like flashbacks!
So apparently even back then Walky didn’t tie his shoelaces. How has he never tripped over them?
Practice, I suppose.
Meanwhile Linda’s thinking:
Well, gee. Here we are, lower-upper class at least, perhaps middle-upper, and my daughter’s all passionate about raising money for her best friend’s operation to prevent her from being disabled for a lifetime but of course she can’t raise that much because most kids don’t know how to do that. I mean that’s the sort of money that only an upper class person can afford to donate on a whim, and even then they’d probably have to have connections and a network that includes people like, I dunno, dean of a major university where they get oodles of NIH money to do medical research or something. And what possible reason would someone like THAT have to help someone like my daughter’s friend out so Sally doesn’t tear herself apart with worry and guilt and pain? I can’t think of a one!
Yeah, I mean, why would someone who knows people like the dean of a major state university and the big bucks super connected Billingsworth family POSSIBLY want to help a little girl who’s either going to become or has become disabled? It’s such a shame there’s nothing Linda could do, like bare minimum ask her super connected friends to repost the link on Facebook or whatever. It’s just too difficult to figure out for Sally.
I mean, if it were David, maybe, but for Sally? So difficult.
I’m not certain how much the dean makes – could be anywhere from upper $60,000 a year to upper $160,000, I’m not entirely certain his pay grade – but I feel certain he could give at least $50 to a campaign like this when a friend asked and worry no further.
(The truly ridiculous thing would be if they knew the football coach. THAT GUY could fund Marcie’s campaign and then back another on the ‘We name our firstborn after you’ tier.)
Indiana University Bloomington professors make between 112K to 188K. I would not be surprised if the head dean made more.
Yeah, I was just checking the administrative pay grades rather than comparing, he can match the pledged amount and I’m certain he’s not the only one of their contacts who could.
I’m equally certain most of said contacts are stingy douchebags given what we’ve seen of the dean and heard of Billingsworth Sr., but if Linda really cared she could call in some favors and I’m certain she hasn’t.
Again, at this point, I would take her asking them to post the links on their social media. I’m sure their twitter followers would be able to handle it by themselves.
Aso, this just reminds me that like, half the reason I’d like to see Sal/Tony in this universe is to see Linda’s face if Sal showed up with the dean’s son on her arm.
…Okay, fine, and to see Tony’s frustration with Walky again because that was always kinda hilarious to me.
Just imagine the awkward dinner parties with Linda and Dean McHenry, too.
DOA Tony seems way better-adjusted than Walkyverse Tony, even. Almost certainly too low-drama to stay on cast without the parents around, but if they did interact he could be a great short-term guy. (Carla for the ‘fuck you I’m perfect and loaded’ would work too. Or Roz and Sal being each other’s Fake Holiday Dinner Date to spite their families. Roz’s reputation is so much worse but there would still be delicious drama.)
Oh god, Carla would be even better because you KNOW she’d rub the Rutten name in their faces.
Plus, if nothing else, seeing how one of the kids reacts to the death of a parent could be interesting, especially if Tony’s still got a lot of anger around it.
Possibly literally. With Sal’s sleeves.
Even if they didn’t put in a single cent of their own, between them they’d have the know-how, access, and contacts to put on one hell of a charity fundraiser. I mean getting money for the university is one of the dean’s jobs and it’s not like he can’t provide a venue and doesn’t have a discount with a catering service.
Plus, it’s easy good publicity! Giving a little girl in need of medical bills help is one of the easiest feel good ‘faith in humanity’ warm fuzzies towards skeezy business people tricks in the book.
The student newspapers would be all over it. And the alumni messages, at that.
Seriously Linda twenty minutes of caring about your daughter, her best friend, and her immense pile of guilt and trauma could’ve saved you so much embarrassment.
Forget student newspapers, I’m sure SOME legit news publication would take the chance to write about how heartwarming and faith restoring Mr. Billingsworth’s generous help was. Perfect timing for when he’s about to start pushing to get homeless people shipped out of town (which has to happen after the robberies, because Sal wasn’t present for it).
Even thinking on it on the most basic level – Charles and Linda were probably better equipped to handle an unexpected cost like the ambulance ride. Charles notices Sal is traumatized and maybe blaming herself, tells her what that cost… they could have offered to help the Diazes shoulder that cost rather than Sal giving her allowance which was clearly Sal’s idea. (Then again, Sal got the ride too. Maybe they were both billed and that’s how Charles knows what it cost? )
It sounds like it went to the Diazes, since Sal only knew about it from what her dad said. And while Charles meant well, telling your daughter that a possible disability is ‘sure to have some surgery or something that can fix it’ is just…not a good idea because you’re almost certainly wrong (and regardless, he has to know that even if such a surgery did exist, the Diazes could never afford it). And yeah, I’m guessing they didn’t offer the Diazes much help, if anything at all, beyond maybe ‘liking’ or posting the link on Facebook and maybe chipping in like $20. And that’s at my most generous guess.
Though even if it had gone to the Walkerton’s it would have gone Charles and Linda, Sal still wouldn’t have seen the bill or known the cost until he told her.
Honestly, I’m not sure how he knew, unless the Diazes told him. The hospital certainly shouldn’t have told him anything about Marcie’s care.
The Diazes probably told him. Marcie and Sal have been best friends since they were five, it’s unlikely they aren’t (relatively) familiar with the Walkertons.
at most universities, the dean makes 6-10x what a typical associate professor makes. So yeah, the Dean earns a lot more.
Given he was on a first name basis with Robin, I’m assuming upper end, so scratch that: he could easily double the current pledge amount and be fine.
She lives next door to Billie’s family, which has been established to have a maid. I don’t think they’re all that poor.
Walkertons seem to be upper middle class, and the Billingsworths are apparently loaded enough Billie can hand out twenties like candy, even if she’s not quite ‘offer stock options for minor favours’ rich like Carla.
Whoops, misread your comment.
Honestly, I am surprised she was able to raise that much money… (not on her end, Sal is being amazing)
I LOVE extended flashback sequences!
This makes me wonder why Walky was the favored child.
I believe it’s been confirmed that Sal is right and they just arbitrarily decided to favor the light-skinned boy over the darkish-skinned girl because internalized societal bigotry sucks.
Not literally lighter skinned, but straighter hair, fits better into mainstream American (i.e. white American) culture, has fewer traits racists associate with black people (like Sal who actually pushes back against injustice and so gets dubbed the ‘bad behaved’ one).
Something of a chicken and egg thing there. I’d assumed the pushes back part came after the dubbed “bad behaved” part and the initial impetus was more the physical characteristics. Probably with some sexism mixed, in though I don’t think that’s been brought up.
The flashback at the end of Teenage Churchmouse implies that even from a really young age, Linda was picking Walky for opportunities over Sal. And that’s one that Walky remembers.
Yeah, that’s what I think is likely. When they were really little, it might even have been things like ‘Sally’s noisier, fussier, etc.’ – I hear those about black children a lot.
And parents project on their babies A LOT – kind of inevitable to some degree when the only thing a baby can really express is crying. Some of it is harmless, like ‘oh look, he grabbed at the onesie you got him, he must like it,’ but it’s easy to say ‘oh this is the Smart One because *some milestone was achieved slightly earlier*’ or those creepy Straight People comments about how a boy baby is such a flirt because he smiles at old ladies (actual story) or assuming Boy baby and Girl baby who play together must develop romantic feelings. Between unconscious bias and all kinds of things the twins could have been a touch different on at birth, I can easily see Linda choosing Walky as her favorite before the flashback and before the twins could consciously remember. (Maybe Sal was sick more often, or took a minute longer to soothe. Maybe Walky could clap or laugh or smile a little earlier. Maybe one of them always woke up first and that impacted things. Who knows? Babies are always different.)
Yeah, for all we know, Sal started being ‘the bad one’ because she didn’t sleep as well or cried louder or something.
Walky’s said before that Sal is black and he’s “Generically beige” – now I’d imagine at least some of that is down to his hair texture being white-read and what have you but yeah.
Skin color is canonically the same, but there are plenty of other racial markers – Sal’s natural hair being the most obvious.
Plus some markers may not be discernible in this art style.
There’s a very limited number of nose shapes in this artstyle, for instance. If they’re subtly different, it could be recognizable from birth, but they’re clearly not so different as to change the character art.
Willis has said he pretty much doesn’t get super detailed about things like nose and mouth shape, for instance.
There doesn’t have to be a reason, but Sal thinks it has to do with internalized racism.
It’s also not uncommon with twins for parents to arbitrarily pick a favourite because they’re ‘better behaved’ or ‘more like mommy/daddy’.
Sal trying to do right by her friend probably solidified their impressions. But yes, they wrote her off early.
Walks doesn’t fight with people, as far as we know. Pacifist, coward, or just haven’t had the right reason, we’ve never seen him actually hit someone, even when threatened (though we have seen him talk about hitting Mary and actually lunge at Joe for what may or may not be a joke).
Sal will and does fight. She even fought over the immigrant child (parent’s pov).
Walky is friends with the daughter of the rich politician guy.
Sal is friends with the immigrant child who may or may not cause issues at her school.
Walky is happy and cheerful.
Sal is brooding and questions authority.
Walky has straight ish Hair.
Sal has nappy hair.
Those are plenty of reasons they might favor Walky over Sal. They’re not good reasons, but since they’re not especially good parents, that’s nit a surprise.
Hip hurray twin on twin violence! *sarcastically waves flag and foam #1 finger*
Well, that was sweet of Sal and certainly fits her. It also fits that Walky literally refused to get it. Yeah, they were as troublesome as any other kids could be but I really don’t get why Linda told herself that Walky was the one of her kids who needed the least help!
Sal befriends illegal immigrant children. Walky gets spots on Christian television shows.
That Cigarette Pencil moment is a great reflection of Kubrick’s
Bone Spaceship moment in 2001
(Except, in reverse… timewise.)
(I also never noticed the likeness between Linda and a Glasses-Free Ruth before! 🙂 )
Yeah, I had to check the tags myself. My first thought was: “Wait, Ruth knew young Sal and Walky? How old is she anyway?”
In the Walkyverse, she was Walky’s babysitter.
Here she’s a only a couple years older.
By the time the flashback ends, Ethan will have gone to class !
In this strip, the first frame is in normal color even though the flashback has begun. It shows Sal in a similar pose undergoing a falling cigarette/pencil take as at the end of the previous strip with Carla and Sal.
Our host has used this device before. In the last frame of this strip we see present-day Amber; the first frame of the next strip shows five-years-previous Amber in the same pose in full color, with the flashback coloring beginning in the next frame.
why yes, I LOVE extended flashback sequences.
Oh. OH!
I can see where this is going – the crowd-raising thingy won’t work out, and Sal consequently (tries to) hold up a store to get the money necessary for Marcie. Everything makes sense now!
I’m so tired of flashbacks.
Well according to the comments, you’re the only one. I’m personally hype for this
do you want your money back
I’m weak, call OUT this incessant negativity Willis, please
I love flashbacks 😀
It is odd so close off the Mike ones, but we’re long overdue for Sal’s perspective on the robberies. The second one changed her life completely and gave her a permanent disability, so us only seeing it from Amber’s perspective couldn’t really hold.
(The Mike ones were good and contributed to things thematically, but we didn’t necessarily need to know Ethan’s had this crush for five years or Amber’s shitty school situation to understand the situations they’re now in. The biggest deal was Mike having a role in putting Amber and Blaine in a car together on that field trip, and even that is super-ambiguous as to his intentions. But we’re suddenly moving a whole lot closer to Sal finding out about Amber now that the Walky/Amber ship is a go, and that means knowing what Sal thought of the whole scenario is going to be really important. Better to have it all now than drop the story out for weeks when the reveal does come before we actually see Sal or Walky react.)
Plus, whatever happened leading up to Sal’s robberies is going to colour her relationship with Marcie. We know Marcie’s showing up in this storyline later, so that information is probably going to be relevant.
Yeah, can’t imagine Marcie was thrilled by Sal’s actions, on her behalf or not.
Not to mention, Sal was probably learning to sign with Marcie and the change of locations and stabbing would have impacted that.
If they hadn’t completely gotten a handle on ASL by the time she was sent away (and that seems likely, since it was, at most, a year between her losing her voice and the robbery) then Sal working to learn it in Tennessee for when she saw her might have done a lot to help that.
I wonder if anyone considered the possibility that Walky is acting “normal” to lighten Sal’s mood?
He tried it for Billie and this COULD be the same thing.
*reads comment section*
Nope. Doesnt look like it.
I think that’s very likely. That has been his goto solution in almost any crisis we’ve seen him in.
If so, I think this comic serves as an excellent illustration of why intent is not always the most important aspect of a situation.
You say that like this being his normal behaviour isn’t still being a shitty sibling.
The suggestion is his making light of the situation is an attempt to make Sal feel better. Even if better in this situation means chasing her brother instead of refreshing the page for the hundredth time in the hour.
That’s…not better. Anger doesn’t generally rate above worry. Besides, Walky most certainly doesn’t seem to want her chasing him around to happen.
Sure, it seems like it’s a general defense mechanism of Walky’s. Defense mechanisms aren’t always bad – only when they become maladaptive. In Billie’s situation, levity provided assistance. Here, it seems surprisingly callous.
So in Sal’s mom’s eyes Sal was a troublemaker, but all the crazy things she did where for her friend. Walky on the other hand was absent minded, and that is why in his mom’s eyes he was perfect, like something she could shape to her liking.
Except Sal was already the troublemake in her parent’s eyes before she met Marcie.
looks like my transition gofundme =(
I’m sorry.
Hey Willis, is it hard in flashback sequences to not give Sal a Southern accent? Cuz as I was reading the comic I had to mentally tell myself to not give her one since, yknow, no Tennessee boarding school yet.
Did we ever get the real story on what happened to Marcie? I know Sal feels guilty but…why?
All we know is it had something to do with a fight Sal was involved in.
Huh. Baby Marcie’s picture reminds me of Old Marcie, from before her skater girl-ness was established.
http://itswalky.tumblr.com/post/113145224587/lets-have-a-quiet-moment-of-reflection-for-that
Y’know, after this week, you’d think some people would be less likely to condone the shitty behaviour (and complete lack of empathy) of a young man.
Guess not.
he is literally twelve, and we have *seen* him grow out of it.
12 years old is old enough to know not to be a jackass about someone’s best friend requiring 65K for medical bills.
I don’t think he has a complete lack of empathy, but he’s definitely being shitty here and I wouldn’t say he’s ‘grown out of it’ – he’s still prone to putting his foot in his mouth and can be very dickish in situations where he doesn’t notice (or care) about the problem. That doesn’t make him a terrible person overall, but there’s a difference between him being totally awful vs him not doing anything wrong here and having grown out of it.
This.
I don’t think Walky is totally awful.
I mean, I don’t expect Walky to be perfect, and I like his character arc. My complaint’s not about his character or Willis’ writing, but about a whole bunch of people justifying his shitty actions in ways that have proven to have shitty real world consequences.
I mean, here he is literally saying he cares more about nachitos and soda than the well being of his sister’s friend. To her face. As a joke.
Oh, no.
I had a suspicion. God. Damn it.