In honor of Britney Spears’ birthday (December 2), I want to remind everyone that this woman was publically ostracized for struggling with the onset of mental illness, divorce, and losing custody of her children after years of media scrutiny and hypersexualization starting at the age of 17. No, she is not just a crazy woman who shaved her head. She’s the victim of an industry that loves to build a woman up before tearing her down.
These heartbreaking and incredibly moving images show the affection and love shown during the height of the Aids crisis. Photographer Gideon Mendel’s project The Ward began in 1993 when he spent a number of weeks on the Charles Bell wards in London’s Middlesex Hospital. All the patients on the ward were dying with the knowledge that there was no cure for the disease. During this time antiretroviral medications were not available and patients on the ward faced the prospect of an early death.
In no time the friends were sauntering into the local bank to get a loan for their new business, “wearing jeans, smelling of herbs, and armed with Tupperware containers of Mo’s 36 and Sleepytime blends.” They called their company Celestial Seasonings, after co-founder Lucinda Ziesing’s flowername.
But there might be another reason they named it “celestial.” Mo Siegel and John Hay, two of the founders, were avid believers in a new-age bible called The Urantia Book, which followers call “an epochal revelation authored solely by celestial beings.” The book touches upon everything from mind control to a eugenics plot to eliminate the “inferior races” of our great nation.
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