- So, it's the first night they had curfew in Minneapolis,
I was lining up a shot through the tear gas
and then my face exploded.
The first coherent thought I remember having
is shut your (bleep) eyes
and walk away from the goddamn cops.
I threw up my hands.
I started screaming, "I'm press, I'm press!"
Protesters physically grabbed me.
My goggles had been shattered and come off,
and I remember somebody saying,
"Just keep walking, we're taking you to the medics,
"we're taking you to the medics."
Tweeted at some point, "I'm safe,
"but I'm about to go into surgery.
"I think I got hit.
"I'll see you on the other side."
And then the next thing I remember, I woke up the next day
and there was a doctor telling me that I was blind.
(ominous piano music)
Yeah, it's very dark.
It has to be dark
because if it's any amount of light (beep) with me.
I'm having trouble focusing
because my right eye is not used to taking 100% of visual,
and my left eye keeps trying to focus on light
and make sense of it, and so I get is racing headaches.
I'm the sort that runs into the structure fire
to get a picture.
So I'm incredibly frustrated at being sidelined.
The estimates that I've heard is that this is gonna cost me,
out of pocket, somewhere between $50 and $500,000.
It's the rest of my lifetime's earnings.
I've been uninsured for a very long time,
and not only that, I've been a journalist covering insurance
and the uninsured for a very long time.
(dramatic violin music) I'm Linda Tirado,
and for the longest time, I worked minimum wage.
After about 15 years of that,
I wrote a very long comment on a message board
that said it sucked to be poor that went viral,
and they let me write a book
about how much it sucked to be poor.
Ever since then, I've been a journalist and a writer
and a photojournalist.
I've written about economic and class issues.
I've written a lot about race in America.
I embedded in Ferguson.
I embedded in Malheur
when the Bundies took over the wildlife reservation.
I never expected police to target me as a journalist.
Hundreds of thousands of people saw what happened,
and they didn't necessarily know I was a journalist.
They didn't necessarily know what capacity I was working in.
It's one of those things
where it's your face on all the stories,
but none of the stories get all of the facts right.
People found my Venmo and my PayPal,
and then a whole lot of people trying to call me out
as some sort of hero,
as though I meant to step in front of a bullet
and becomes some sort of icon,
and then a whole lot of people
who are really in the Trump lane,
they're happy to tell me I got what I deserved.
You can almost see the polarization of the country
based on the response of what happened to me
in my mentions on Twitter,
which has been both heartening and disheartening
depending on the moment.
I live near Nashville.
I do not tell you the mile range.
I do not tell you the zip code.
I do not tell you anything.
Women aren't supposed to talk about being on the internet,
because you're not supposed to give oxygen to trolls.
When people knew what town I lived in,
they showed up to my house with guns.
Four weeks ago, if I got a threat of violence or rape threat
or somebody said I hope you and yours get killed
and we know where you live,
I kind of knew the tone and tenor
and the beat of those things.
This has changed.
It's only been a few weeks since I've lost my eye,
and so I'm kind of coming up against the backlog
of my e-mails and my DMs and stuff
where people are calling me an enemy of the people
and a threat to the nation, there's tiers.
A lot of people hiding behind whatever account saying,
"You should have stayed there and let them shoot you again,
"and if I ever see you in my hometown,
"don't trust I won't finish the job."
And then there's people who detail their violent fantasies.
They draft page long emails in loving detail
of what they would do
if they were ever in range to capture you
and what you deserve,
and then there's the dudes or people
who send you information nobody should know.
You notice any interview I give is the same shop behind me
of a nondescript house against a porch and some trees.
I actually ran down the bird calls.
The birds is that are native to the place that I live
are also native to 1,000 mile range.
So you couldn't even target by the bird calls 1,000 miles
of where I live,
and it's a hell of a thing to have to do that.
When I first went viral
and they photoshopped my toddler's head
onto child porn and they published that.
My kid's face is child porn that people buy and sell.
You can't help but live with that.
If I need to, I'm confident enough to get around
which is also new.
It would scare me to get out of bed
because what if there was Barbie things on the floor
and I didn't see it and then I fell and I hurt my eye,
but we found a way to set up the room
and reset the furniture and now I know where it is.
I have no idea, having never become disabled before,
what it's gonna be like.
(calming dance music) It's gonna take adjustment.
It's gonna take patience.
I'm gonna be super frustrated.
Honestly, my worst fear is that I can't go out
and document these things because maybe
what if not having sight on my left side
makes me a safety hazard.
What if not having that full range of vision means
that I'm not suited anymore to the kind of work
that I was doing?
I think sometimes valor is knowing when to step back
and knowing when to take a support role.
It's a lot of change of expectation.
The instant I'm cleared to go back out,
I'm a front-line journalists, that's what I do,
and I don't think losing an eye necessarily has to stop me.