this is sort of a tangent to the question of the EFFECTIVENESS of water (water works! i will hammer this point till i go to my radical-medic GRAVE) so imma spin it out into it's own thread of Why I Hate When People Spread These Rumours.

i been a medic a long time. https://twitter.com/NarchoArmChair/status/1265549021176893446

like, a loooong time, in street medic years. i am not one of those people who thinks it gives you some kinda Status, but i do have *experience*. i had already been a medic over a decade before i went to ferguson. im often the longest term medic in a room or at an action.

i have been to literally hundreds of scrubs, big and small, on several continents. all kinds. ive been tear gassed and pepper sprayed. a LOT. i have treated these things. a LOT. i do not say what i say from a lack of experience.

and when i say "water works" it is not because water is *the only* thing that will work ever, but for many of the reasons i gave in the other thread, it is the quickest, most easily available, and it is AS EFFECTIVE as anything else you have heard to use in the streets.

i say it works because it works, and it has none of the potential drawbacks other things MIGHT have, and in a chaotic stressful moment, nobody is going to get confused and forget whether it was 3 parts X and 1 part Y, or what kind of Z to use. it's just water. simple.

easy to get, easy to remember, easy to access, easy to use. and. it. works.

but here's the part where i actively get stressed out when these rumors spread about how it does not work: because in the streets, when you get pepper sprayed or gassed, it is going to hurt like a motherfucker. sorry but it will. it will be scary and people will be panicking.

and in those moments they will REALLY want there to be a Magic Bullet to fix it and fix their pain. and there is not one. that sucks, it does! it's awful. pigs are fucking awful, they're inflicting cruelty and that's a fact.

but when they're in pain and someone comes along and is like "yes i have X and it will FIX THIS" they desperately want to believe that is true. (it is not going to be true.) (i do not blame a single pepper sprayed/tear gassed soul who thinks it is)

and... as a black person, a black medic, a black medic with DECADES of experience under my belt, i can not TELL y'all how many times -- it's happened a LOT -- i have been actively treating a patient, with a water eye flush, and some WHITE PUNK runs up and says --

-- that medic doesn't know what they're doing! water doesn't work! i saw on twitter/fb that ONLY milk/lemon juice/eggs/milk of magnesia/apple cider vinegar works! and

and physically drag my patient away, or get other people to take my patient away, because The Internet told them that water doesn't work.

then, ten minutes later, i gotta go get that same patient and clean up their face from both the pepper spray and whatever weird ass gunk has been applied to it. this has happened far too many times.

it's exhausting, sure, the fact that Random Internet Rumors make it more difficult to do my work and help white people delegitimize me, but it's angering to me that Random Internet Rumors have so continuously contributed to ACTIVELY increasing the pain of my communities

who are. already. in a lot of pain at that moments. this is unnecessary.

so anyway imma keep hammering on my point that water!! is!! great!! and i greatly do appreciate any amplification it gets. it helps us out there in the field.