#anyways SPACE LATINOS UNITE

[frauleiiin]

I manifested the charro pants on Cassian 💀💀

[aamy2100982]

My thoughts on Venom 3. SPOILER ALERT - LONG POST

Let's start with the fact that I saw it in the cinema with Latino Spanish dubbing, so anything lost through translation is not my fault.

Damn, how do I start with all this?

☆ Why doesn't Spiderman appear?

I think based on the post-credits scene of Venom 2, we all assumed that in this new movie Venom and Eddie were going to go into the MCU universe and meet Spider-Man. But for those who saw the movie it was confirmed that that wasn't the case. Now, what's my theory on what happened?

I think the original intention was to give the rights to Venom to the MCU, but for some reason or another they didn't do it. And they decided to continue the story from Sony.

So Venom didn't meet Spiderman because the MCU doesn't have the rights to Venom yet, and Sony hasn't wanted to hand them over yet.

(I don't know, maybe money issues. Sony should make a considerable amount from the Venom movies)

☆ Portals

I actually didn't really like how the interdimensional portals are handled. Venom has never been a character who plays with space-time and the universe on his own (actually a bit in the comics, but not in the movies), so I don't understand how they inexplicably changed universes.

In the post-credits scene of the second movie it was about... connecting to the symbiote hive? But then what? Knull brought them back??

I don't know, I just didn't like that brutal change of plot direction.

☆ I changed my perception of the symbiotes in the movies

So, in the first movie the symbiotes arrive on a meteorite to earth and are captured by the Life Foundation. In this film, the symbiotes are made to look like an invasive species, the kind that goes from planet to planet looking to deplete natural resources. But apparently this wasn't the case.

From what I could understand, the symbiotes were escaping from Knull's awakening, so they weren't trying to invade Earth to drain its resources, but to save themselves from Knull.

This makes Venom look extremely selfish, because during the movie he tells Eddie that his fellow symbiotes only live to harm the Earth and he doesn't want Riot to reach Kyntar to pass this information to other symbiotes who need to escape from Knull and find a home.

There's also the possibility that this was the initial idea (that the symbiotes were an invasive species), but they made last-minute script changes that said otherwise.

☆ There was a Flash Thompson reference in the movie!!

It wasn't a small reference, it was a military man named Thompson and there's an entire scene that was almost too cruel of him losing his legs. I don't know if Sony has any rights to Flash's image, but it would be great to see him in an upcoming movie (if there is one).

☆ Rex was there too!

Does anyone remember Rex?

You know, the military man... who had a symbiote... and the symbiote became fond of him... but then he died and the symbiote stole his identity... You know! Rex!

He doesn't have a symbiote in the movie, and really only has the name and the face, because apart from being a military man and being related to sumbiote he has nothing to do with the one in the comics. It was a nice reference anyway. I personally like Rex the symbiote, even though he had limited appearances. I thought his story was nice.

But I guess it was just a reference in the movie because inventing new characters is not that simple either.

There is also this Doctor Payne

I honestly don't know who she is, I don't know if she was part of the comics or if she's an original character from the movie. I looked up her name, but it seemed like another character that I think has nothing to do with her...

☆ Codex

I didn't like how the codex was treated in the movie and I didn't fully understand how it worked.

I didn't like the way it was handled in general, that the codex only exists while both exist because they died and came back to life... How... only Eddie and Venom were united and were the only symbiote and host who died and came back to life?? In the ENTIRE universe?

And why does the codex disappear/is not visible when Venom isn't encasing Eddie? Shouldn't it still be there since it's stuck in Eddie's spine?

☆ The Hippie Family

They were fun and somewhat endearing characters. But while they were good for moving the plot forward, I didn't care that much about them.

It just helped remind me how sad it makes me that Eddie is a man who wanted to start a family and couldn't because of his own mistakes and mental problems.

☆ The other symbionts

The only comic book-based symbiotes I recognized were (besides Venom) Lasher and Agony. The rest I think were original for the movie.

Honestly, at first I thought the green-water snake-like symbiote was Lasher, but no. (I also didn't realize that the host was the cop from the previous movie until very late, almost after he was killed.)

It would have been great to see the quartet (Scream, Agony, Lasher and Plague. No Riot, because he died lol). But it wasn't that important, because in the end most of them died anyway.

☆ Characters from past movies

So Anne and Dan didn't appear in the movie. I don't have any hard feelings about it, I actually think they would have been a waste of time and their appearance always just brings this... weird geometric love thing where Eddie still has feelings for Anne, Venom... I don't know what Venom feels for Anne, I don't know if he sees her as a friend or has feelings for her too, Anne just sees them as friends and Dan is just constantly there being awkward.

Mrs. Chen was there. I must admit, she looked beautiful in that red dress!

look at that lady!

Honestly, I didn't think her appearance in the film was that important, but I'm not saying they were bad scenes.

☆ Knull

I think Knull was a completely computer-generated character. Understandable because all he does throughout the entire movie is sit down anyway xd

I don't have much to say about him. The design was well done and at least the voice acting in Latino Spanish seemed spectacular to me. Maybe he could have had more participation, but whatever, the movie was fine as it is. Adding more powerful antagonists would have made the movie 3 times longer.

☆ Eddie and Venom's relationship

I hate to use the term. But Eddie is a total Tsundere... Throughout the three movies he just keeps saying that he hates Venom and that he wishes he could go back to normal, now that he's been given the chance he feels empty.

As I know, "Not even death can separate them" or whatever the phrase on the movie poster said, completely lied.

☆ The end.

If I had to describe it in one word... bittersweet.

It was a good ending, dramatic, sentimental. But at the same time it leaves you with that feeling of emptiness, because Venom died and he is a protagonist and therefore he shouldn't die.

In the post-credits scene, a cockroach appears next to the small tube that contained a Venom extract. But it wouldn't make sense, because there wasn't a moving extract of the symbiote and anyway that extract later became who I think is Agony. It had her design but also had Dr. Payne's "hidden powers".

I honestly didn't like the ending at all. That "Well, now everything is like it used to be." BITCH, NO!

Especially since I heard here and there that Tom Hardy wasn't so sure he could continue participating, for reasons I still don't understand, so I'm convinced there will be another part. Either as a movie or a series.

☆ as a theory

I don't think Sony owns the rights to Agent Venom. But in case they do release another Venom, without Eddie Brock, that's my theory.

There was a reference to Flash in the movie and how he lost his legs. So maybe the next movie will be about them going back to Area 51 to look for the remains left after the massacre. Whether it's symbiotes that are still alive or just information they need to start a new area of ​​research.

They find layers of Venom, but he's like a baby, they use their abilities to turn him into a weapon, they give him to Flash Thompson, boom! Agent Venom.

Just a theory, obviously. Maybe the saga will end there and we won't have anything more about Venom until they start another separate saga.

☆

Honestly, I would have preferred them to fight Spiderman. Not so much because of the Spiderman fight, but because that would put them in the same universe as other powerful characters and they would have made a movie with a bigger Knull, similar to what Infinity War was.

You know, with all the characters fighting to save the world, but still having the movie center around Venom. Not exactly like in the comics, where Eddie becomes God (because that went really wrong for the comics), maybe just having him defeated and the symbiotes being free.

☆

ALSO! I think there was a kiss missing in the scene before Venom sacrificed himself, when they were on the fallen helicopter... I really needed it... And it didn't happen... understandable, I mean, there would have been a drama about it, but damn! It was the perfect moment to, at least, get close.

☆ The end of this post

The movie was good... Yeah... yeah, kinda.

I think for those who only watch the movies, or who only watched this movie, they could say that it's pretty good. It's fun, it's not as rushed as movie one, and it has a dramatic ending. I think that in itself it's a good movie.

But from my perspective, where I expect more coherence regarding everything and the extensive universe behind Venom as a character, I did find more plot holes, things that didn't make sense to me and things that I think would have been preferable to what happened.

Would I like to see another movie? Yeah, I think it would be great to really wrap up what happens with Knull and obviously have Venom come back to life, like... Venom? or Agent Venom.

Or even this gives a chance to convert the remaining extracts of the symbiote into Eddie becoming Anti Venom. But I'm just dreaming.

If you took the time to read everything I had to say, please let me know what you think! I'd love to read what you think of the movie or my opinions and theories!

[kevin-keller-artistic-director]

The Lodges and Jones reaction abilty to alter to the narrative

Theses scene are so similar in the sense that both jug and Veronica admit a a older family member Ronnie her Abuelita and Jug his dad aka FP with the fact that their son/daughter (Hiram and JellyBean) did some crazy ass shit that traumatized V and Jug Lourdes and Jug however are not around alot or weren't for a long time from JellyBean and Hiram Jellybean leaves the text after the highschool graduation because jughead is writing the universe and he doesn't go to therapy (I know she's with her grandparents but like literally all of Betty's family and even Ronnie's while family we know are their so it makes a lot of sense that jug chose that himself)

I think this interesting because Lourdes is exists in a way that is source of protection for Veronica post time jump

Lourdes 3rd time in Riverdale is when Veronica kills Hiram and When Lourdes comes to the funeral after learning about Ronnie killing Hiram and she meets Heraldo through her Abuelita who becomes like her body guard (I don't know if the specifics but it's not really important why he's with her besides the hint in his name) and he is like her dude for a while

Anyway after Ronnie's gotten rid of Hiram we meet the embodiment of white systemic power and colonialism Percival Pickens Veronica superpower arrives to protect her when her lips become poisonous it's possible that happened around the time Heraldo was their because he was to weak to overcome the power that Percival holds but he dies Herald a sign of change and Veronica changes physically to protect herself from Percival

When Lourdes returns for the last it's not of her own free will its because she's being mind controlled by Percival but I think it's interesting to note that we know Percy is our White systemic oppression but Hiram the son of Lourdes is the product and aftermath of that white systemic power and colonialism

So Lourdes is being mind controlled to shoot Veronica but eventually both of them get things under control and when Lourdes is back to normal and they clean up

This all note worthy because Veronica unlike Jug cannot just remove her family from the narrative she has to kill it herself Veronica is Latino but like both in the most vague way possible and I would argue that her relationship with the land is on par with Toni (Toni is both a black and indigenous woman she takes up that space mostly by herself with the occasional black character non angel tab and Josie) Veronica is like Mexican indigenous but she's like every brown Latino identity that populates the United States

The brown girls in Riverdale (tab is an angel for most of the time we see her so like she doesn't act like she's annoyed by jug because the angels need her save the world and that's her priority) our burdened by the men of colors delusion and ability to lean into the violence or subservience Lourdes changes the dynamic by giving Ronnie the patent reprimanding Hiram so that later when Veronica gets the point that she feels the need to kill her dad to protect herself she can protect herself

Jughead is alone because he was neglected and because he has no mama but also he has the excuse to remove things from the narrative he exists he gets remove parts of himself because he is white but Veronica's strength and burden is that she can't ignore it

[megagrind]

Disney applications please I just want an internship not a full blown identity crisis whyyyyyy

[resilientreview]

What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

📷By Stephen Sawchuk — May 18, 2021 10 min read Education Week is the #1 source of high-quality news and insights on K-12 education. Sign up for our EdWeek Update newsletter to get stories like this delivered to your inbox daily.

Is “critical race theory” a way of understanding how American racism has shaped public policy, or a divisive discourse that pits people of color against white people? Liberals and conservatives are in sharp disagreement.The topic has exploded in the public arena this spring—especially in K-12, where numerous state legislatures are debating bills seeking to ban its use in the classroom.In truth, the divides are not nearly as neat as they may seem. The events of the last decade have increased public awareness about things like housing segregation, the impacts of criminal justice policy in the 1990s, and the legacy of enslavement on Black Americans. But there is much less consensus on what the government’s role should be in righting these past wrongs. Add children and schooling into the mix and the debate becomes especially volatile. SEE ALSO 📷 EQUITY & DIVERSITYWhat Black Men Need From Schools to Stay in the Teaching Profession School boards, superintendents, even principals and teachers are already facing questions about critical race theory, and there are significant disagreements even among experts about its precise definition as well as how its tenets should inform K-12 policy and practice. This explainer is meant only as a starting point to help educators grasp core aspects of the current debate.Just what is critical race theory anyway? Critical race theory is an academic concept that is more than 40 years old. The core idea is that race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.The basic tenets of critical race theory, or CRT, emerged out of a framework for legal analysis in the late 1970s and early 1980s created by legal scholars Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado, among others.A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas. SEE ALSO 📷 EQUITY & DIVERSITY SPOTLIGHTSpotlight on Critical Race Theory (PDF Download) June 11, 2021 Today, those same patterns of discrimination live on through facially race-blind policies, like single-family zoning that prevents the building of affordable housing in advantaged, majority-white neighborhoods and, thus, stymies racial desegregation efforts.CRT also has ties to other intellectual currents, including the work of sociologists and literary theorists who studied links between political power, social organization, and language. And its ideas have since informed other fields, like the humanities, the social sciences, and teacher education.This academic understanding of critical race theory differs from representation in recent popular books and, especially, from its portrayal by critics—often, though not exclusively, conservative Republicans. Critics charge that the theory leads to negative dynamics, such as a focus on group identity over universal, shared traits; divides people into “oppressed” and “oppressor” groups; and urges intolerance.Thus, there is a good deal of confusion over what CRT means, as well as its relationship to other terms, like “anti-racism” and “social justice,” with which it is often conflated.To an extent, the term “critical race theory” is now cited as the basis of all diversity and inclusion efforts regardless of how much it’s actually informed those programs.One conservative organization, the Heritage Foundation, recently attributed a whole host of issues to CRT, including the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, LGBTQ clubs in schools, diversity training in federal agencies and organizations, California’s recent ethnic studies model curriculum, the free-speech debate on college campuses, and alternatives to exclusionary discipline—such as the Promise program in Broward County, Fla., that some parents blame for the Parkland school shootings. “When followed to its logical conclusion, CRT is destructive and rejects

the fundamental ideas on which our constitutional republic is based,” the organization claimed. (A good parallel here is how popular ideas of the common core learning standards grew to encompass far more than what those standards said on paper.)

Does critical race theory say all white people are racist? Isn’t that racist, too? The theory says that racism is part of everyday life, so people—white or nonwhite—who don’t intend to be racist can nevertheless make choices that fuel racism.Some critics claim that the theory advocates discriminating against white people in order to achieve equity. They mainly aim those accusations at theorists who advocate for policies that explicitly take race into account. (The writer Ibram X. Kendi, whose recent popular book How to Be An Antiracist suggests that discrimination that creates equity can be considered anti-racist, is often cited in this context.)Fundamentally, though, the disagreement springs from different conceptions of racism. CRT puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified. Among lawyers, teachers, policymakers, and the general public, there are many disagreements about how precisely to do those things, and to what extent race should be explicitly appealed to or referred to in the process.Here’s a helpful illustration to keep in mind in understanding this complex idea. In a 2007 U.S. Supreme Court school-assignment case on whether race could be a factor in maintaining diversity in K-12 schools, Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion famously concluded: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” But during oral arguments, then-justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said: “It’s very hard for me to see how you can have a racial objective but a nonracial means to get there.”All these different ideas grow out of longstanding, tenacious intellectual debates. Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear.What does any of this have to do with K-12 education? Scholars who study critical race theory in education look at how policies and practices in K-12 education contribute to persistent racial inequalities in education, and advocate for ways to change them. Among the topics they’ve studied: racially segregated schools, the underfunding of majority-Black and Latino school districts, disproportionate disciplining of Black students, barriers to gifted programs and selective-admission high schools, and curricula that reinforce racist ideas.Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives. Many educators support, to one degree or another, culturally relevant teaching and other strategies to make schools feel safe and supportive for Black students and other underserved populations. (Students of color make up the majority of school-aged children.) But they don’t necessarily identify these activities as CRT-related.As one teacher-educator put it: “The way we usually see any of this in a classroom is: ‘Have I thought about how my Black kids feel? And made a space for them, so that they can be successful?’ That is the level I think it stays at, for most teachers.” Like others interviewed for this explainer, the teacher-educator did not want to be named out of fear of online harassment.An emerging subtext among some critics is that curricular excellence can’t coexist alongside culturally responsive teaching or anti-racist work. Their argument goes that efforts to change grading practices or make the curriculum less Eurocentric will ultimately harm Black students, or hold them to a less high standard.As with CRT in general, its popular representation in schools has been far less nuanced. A recent poll by the advocacy group Parents Defending Education claimed some schools were teaching that “white people are inherently

privileged, while Black and other people of color are inherently oppressed and victimized”; that “achieving racial justice and equality between racial groups requires discriminating against people based on their whiteness”; and that “the United States was founded on racism.”Thus much of the current debate appears to spring not from the academic texts, but from fear among critics that students—especially white students—will be exposed to supposedly damaging or self-demoralizing ideas.While some district officials have issued mission statements, resolutions, or spoken about changes in their policies using some of the discourse of CRT, it’s not clear to what degree educators are explicitly teaching the concepts, or even using curriculum materials or other methods that implicitly draw on them. For one thing, scholars say, much scholarship on CRT is written in academic language or published in journals not easily accessible to K-12 teachers.What is going on with these proposals to ban critical race theory in schools? As of mid-May, legislation purporting to outlaw CRT in schools has passed in Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, and Tennessee and have been proposed in various other statehouses. SEE ALSO 📷 STATES INTERACTIVEMap: Where Critical Race Theory Is Under Attack June 11, 2021 • 2 min read The bills are so vaguely written that it’s unclear what they will affirmatively cover.Could a teacher who wants to talk about a factual instance of state-sponsored racism—like the establishment of Jim Crow, the series of laws that prevented Black Americans from voting or holding office and separated them from white people in public spaces—be considered in violation of these laws?It’s also unclear whether these new bills are constitutional, or whether they impermissibly restrict free speech.It would be extremely difficult, in any case, to police what goes on inside hundreds of thousands of classrooms. But social studies educators fear that such laws could have a chilling effect on teachers who might self-censor their own lessons out of concern for parent or administrator complaints.As English teacher Mike Stein told Chalkbeat Tennessee about the new law: “History teachers can not adequately teach about the Trail of Tears, the Civil War, and the civil rights movement. English teachers will have to avoid teaching almost any text by an African American author because many of them mention racism to various extents.” The laws could also become a tool to attack other pieces of the curriculum, including ethnic studies and “action civics”—an approach to civics education that asks students to research local civic problems and propose solutions.How is this related to other debates over what’s taught in the classroom amid K-12 culture wars? The charge that schools are indoctrinating students in a harmful theory or political mindset is a longstanding one, historians note. CRT appears to be the latest salvo in this ongoing debate.In the early and mid-20th century, the concern was about socialism or Marxism. The conservative American Legion, beginning in the 1930s, sought to rid schools of progressive-minded textbooks that encouraged students to consider economic inequality; two decades later the John Birch Society raised similar criticisms about school materials. As with CRT criticisms, the fear was that students would be somehow harmed by exposure to these ideas.As the school-aged population became more diverse, these debates have been inflected through the lens of race and ethnic representation, including disagreements over multiculturalism and ethnic studies, the ongoing “canon wars” over which texts should make up the English curriculum, and the so-called “ebonics” debates over the status of Black vernacular English in schools.In history, the debates have focused on the balance among patriotism and American exceptionalism, on one hand, and the country’s history of exclusion and violence towards Indigenous people and the enslavement of African Americans on the other—between its ideals and its practices. Those tensions led to the implosion of a 1994

attempt to set national history standards.A current example that has fueled much of the recent round of CRT criticism is the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which sought to put the history and effects of enslavement—as well as Black Americans’ contributions to democratic reforms—at the center of American history. The culture wars are always, at some level, battled out within schools, historians say.“It’s because they’re nervous about broad social things, but they’re talking in the language of school and school curriculum,” said one historian of education. “That’s the vocabulary, but the actual grammar is anxiety about shifting social power relations.” The literature on critical race theory is vast. Here are some starting points to learn more about it, culturally relevant teaching, and the conservative backlash to CRT.Brittany Aronson & Judson Laughter. “The Theory and Practice of Culturally Relevant Education: A Synthesis of Research Across Content Areas.” Review of Educational Research March 2016, Vol. 86 No. 1. (2016); Kimberlé Crenshaw, ed. Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. The New Press. (1996); Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy,” American Educational Research Journal Vol. 32 No. 3. (1995); Gloria Ladson-Billings, “Just what is critical race theory and what’s it doing in a nice field like education?” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education Vol 11. No. 1. (1998); Jonathan Butcher and Mike Gonzalez. “Critical Race Theory, the New Intolerance, and Its Grip on America.” Heritage Foundation. (2020); Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction. 3rd ed. New York, NY: New York University Press. (2017); Shelly Brown-Jeffy & Jewell E. Cooper, “Toward a Conceptual Framework of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: An Overview of the Conceptual and Theoretical Literature.” Teacher Education Quarterly, Winter 2011.A version of this article appeared in the June 02, 2021 edition of Education Week as What Is Critical Race Theory, and Why Is It Under Attack?

[mymoonjin1]

13th Doctor Reaction

As usual, this one is a bit long, so bear with me. Ok, here we go. I think we all knew it was happening. They kept throwing hints here and there, ever since Missy, ever since Hell Bent, and more recently in this series finale with Bill and John Simm’s The Master making some comments about it. And it finally happened. The Doctor is a woman. (Still not ginger, sadly, but okay).

First of all, I’ve only seen Jodie Whittaker on Broadchurch, but I think she is a fantastic actress, she did an amazing job on that show and she brought me to tears a few times. And I’m sure she’ll do brilliantly on Doctor Who as well, so please don’t hate on her. Would you turn down the role as The Doctor? Probably not. So don’t hate on her for only doing her job. I’m getting real tired of looking at angry reactions on every single Facebook post about the new Doctor. It’s done. There’s no point in staying angry forever. Let it go. Also, I kinda wish they’d waited a bit longer to make the announcement. Peter Capaldi is still the Doctor, will be the Doctor until Christmas, and now he’s being overshadowed by this whole thing. He deserves a proper farewell, tbh.

But anyway, now let’s talk about the matter at hand, changing the Doctor’s gender. Look, in my opinion, there was nothing wrong with the Doctor being a man because that was the show’s original concept. Hear me out before raising the torches and calling me names. When they started the show, they didn’t know William Hartnell was going to be the first Doctor, he was just the Doctor, who happened to be a man. A cranky old British man. When they had to replace him, it felt only natural to do so with another cranky old British man, with a few different personality traits. And then they kept changing these personality traits, making each Doctor unique. But the character always remained a father, a grandfather, a man who lost everything during the war, a man who showed the universe to his friends as a coping mechanism, to remind himself that there were still things worth living for. And to me that is a beautiful thing, a story about an old man traveling around time and space picking up friends along the way, showing them stuff he has seen before but that are completely new and magical for them.

So you might say: if the character’s an alien, what’s so wrong about a woman doing the same thing? Well, of course there is nothing wrong about it. I am a woman, I’m all about girl power and proper representation on tv. But I also think that feminism is not about getting rid of men. It’s about equality. Men are not the enemy. If we keep seeing them as such we are never going to move forward. If we keep attacking men they’ll never be on our side. The Doctor is a feminist character, particularly the 12th Doctor. Boys do need an example like that. I’m not saying they can only learn to be respectful towards women from a man’s example, but they do need to see more men being on the right side of things. #HeForShe, and all. Now more than ever we need to be united, there is too much hatred in the world already. And I’m sorry, but making “the future all girl”, as the Master put it, is the wrong way to look at things. The Empress dismissing all men and only listening to Bill didn’t work. Bill automatically assuming the future was “bloke utopia” because they gave the Doctor more food (when it was because of his two hearts) is just stupid, tbh. The Master being sort of attracted to Missy is beyond stupid, as if men had no self control around women, even when she was his future self. The way they handled all those hints was condescending and wrong. That’s not the way to do things.

So, as much as I think change in Doctor Who needed to happen and that Jodie will kill it, I also think maybe it happened a regeneration too soon. In my opinion, keeping the Doctor male but switching his race would’ve been a not so drastic change that would’ve eased people’s minds into accepting a different sort of actor playing the Doctor. People are used to things being a certain way. I mentioned this on another post a while ago, but I, as a Mexican, have never expected the Doctor, a character from a British television show, to become a Latino man. It’d be a bit unrealistic to expect that, frankly. Nevertheless, the U.K.’s current reality is not the same it was 50 years ago. It is an incredibly diverse country, and that is a beautiful thing. But sadly, people still need to be reminded of this. It would’ve been an awesome statement to cast a Muslim actor to play the Doctor, for example.

But I’m getting off topic. Just because people are used to a certain character being represented a certain way doesn’t mean all of them are bigoted or sexist. Remember that every single time the Doctor’s regenerated people have had a hard time accepting the new one. I am certainly not ready to let go of Peter Capaldi. To me, he understands the character perfectly and is the perfect combination of both classic and new Who. So I’m gonna miss him to death, that doesn’t make me a bad person. I have my doubts about the new Doctor, just like everyone has had with every single newcomer. That doesn’t make me a bad person either. But Doctor Who is my all time favorite show, and I do not intend to give up on it. Like with all previous Doctors, I think we owe Jodie a chance to prove herself. I saw someone’s tweet saying that it’ll be wonderful seeing little girls dressing up as the Doctor as well for Halloween, and of course it’s an amazing thing to look forward to. It might be weird right now, but essentially, this Doctor is still the two hearted alien we all love. Be kind, this is just my opinion. Thanks for reading.

[wanderlusttheorist]

A Conversation from Six Years Ago: “Good Enough”

Last night, I read on the Guardian and heard on the BBC’s Wales website that a Welsh-born teacher, who coincidentally also happens to be Muslim, was barred from entering the United States. This teacher was going to the US as part of a school trip with fellow colleagues and students. Seeing their teacher being escorted off the plane for a “random inspection” led to confusion. The British teacher felt powerless against authorities and embarrassment. 

In light of the recent Muslim ban that barred citizens from specific countries, one of them wasn’t the U.K. (unless they had dual-citizenship). This teacher, of Bangladeshi descent, isn’t a dual-citizen. He is a British citizen.

This story unsettled me. Yet another one of the many, many stories and reports from the U.S. that have been unsettling me for weeks now.

This morning, I woke up with the recollection of a conversation I had six years ago. 

Six years ago, I was living in Dijon, France. I invited two of my fellow Americans to come to my place so we could bake the most quintessential of American cookies: the chocolate chip cookie. 

(Petit info pour mes amis français: ce que vous appelez “le cookie” est connu comme “chocolate chip cookie” aux States, car le mot “cookie” est le terme global pour parler sur tous types de gâteaux/biscuits.)

Oh, I was so excited to bake chocolate chip cookies! I got the Nestle Tollhouse recipe, bought all of the necessary ingredients, and made the conversions from ounces to grams and mL. 

The two Americans, a Californian and a North Carolinian, came over. We mixed all of the ingredients, evenly spaced out the dough on the baking sheet, and baked the first batch. As the cozy aroma of melting chocolate and crystallized sugar enveloped the kitchen, anticipation for when we could burn our tongues made the twelve-minute wait unbearable. 

The oven went “ding.” Out came the baking tray. Our fingers jolted at the cookies’ heat. 

Before we ate our first cookies, the North Carolinian asked me if I had any cold milk.

Me: “Yeah, I’ve got some in the fridge. What for?”

North Carolinian: “Uh, so we can eat cookies with milk, duh.”

For most Americans, the reflex of pairing cookies with milk comes as naturally as seeing carrots and peas together. For me, it was a habit I never embraced because of my taste preferences of wishing to have non-soggy cookies. (I typically don’t like soggy foods, ugh.) As a consequence, my disgust for spoiled, mushy cookies automatically meant that I had not thought to accommodate to others’s likes. 

Still, it was a minor thing. I could adapt.

I got up, opened the fridge, and took out the 1-liter carton of milk. I also furnished two glasses wide enough for dipping the cookies in. I decided to voice my differences about eating cookies, albeit not as eloquently as I would have liked.

Me: “I’ve never eaten chocolate chip cookies with milk before.” (I had tried a similar experiment with Oreos; never again.)

North Carolinian: *scoffs* “Uh, are you sure you’re American?”

Even though she had asked this in a jovial tone, I was nevertheless taken aback by such a question. For NO ONE had ever asked me that before. It wasn’t something that was ever up for debate.

Me: “Well, yes. I mean, I was born in the United States--”

North Carolinian: *smiling* “That’s not good enough!” 

That’s not good enough?

What may have seemed minor to this North Carolinian wasn’t for me. Being a first-generation American of Cuban and Colombian descent, the idea of cultural identity is one that comes with a delicate circus-show balancing act. I’m not “Colombian” enough. I’m not “Cuban” enough. I’m TOO Cuban. I’m TOO Hispanic/Latina. I’m not Hispanic/Latina enough.

But I’m not “American” enough? My damn birth certificate, passport, upbringing, education, and cultural notions disagree. I’ve stated the Pledge of Allegiance and sung the National Anthem every damn day at school, right hand placed on my chest. So sorry if my dislike of disintegrated sludge cookies automatically disqualifies me as being “American” enough. 

To this day, I regret not having voiced my dissatisfaction at such a flippantly-stated comment, but in that moment, I was honestly too stunned to react accordingly. I brushed it off and tried to be a good hostess despite my seething discontent.

That was six years ago. I now live in a different part of France. I feel relatively safe and at ease with my heritage as my French friends fully recognize me as being an American who just so happens to be of Cuban and Colombian descent. 

And not only do I still make chocolate chip cookies, brownies, and flan de queso crema, I can also make brioche from scratch. (My croissants still need more practice...)

Now, in 2017, my country is being run by a racist, xenophobic, crack-down government that targets minorities. For now, they are using the excuse of  only going after so-called “illegal immigrants.”

FOR NOW. 

I’m afraid of waking up and hearing a story about how an American who just so happens to be of Mexican-descent faced expulsion from their birth country. It’s already happened in the past, anyway.

What’s to stop one zealous idiot from arguing that being born in the U.S. is no longer “good enough” for feeling at home? Let alone people like me? Both my Colombian grandmother and mother are naturalized U.S. Citizens. I fear that soon may not be “good enough” for them. They thankfully live in Miami where Latinos and Hispanics of all cultures mix and mingle with relative ease and safety. When will that no longer be a guarantee that is “good enough?” When will the distinctions be forgotten? 

Even now, six years later, this memory makes me sad. I may make some chocolate chip cookies to make me feel better.

More cookies, less racism.

[wildgrave]

a long ass post in which i discuss my v interesting day (including discussion on the racial inequality in the justice system & how we can stop conservatives from yelling about how undocumented immigrants are “taking our jobs”).

in race & ethnicity, we’re on our crime & punishment unit, and today one of my classmates spoke to our class about his experience with incarceration. 

essentially, he and a friend stole $57. he was a minor, and got 20 years. his friend was an adult, and got 18 months. all the other variables were the same -- same record, same judge, same public defendant -- except for race. the guy in my class is black, and his friend is white.

he talked a lot about his experience in prison and how fucked it is. how they do nothing to help or change or educate you, and how everything he learned while in prison was from his fellow inmates or from his own self-reflection (he spent a year in solitary confinement). he got out after 6 years after appealing his case with money he didn’t have (he was being paid 50 odd cents an hour) and is now on parole until 2037. and, of course, besides being given no help with rehabilitation, he’s also marked a felon for life, meaning that he can’t vote and it’s almost impossible to get a job (and part of his parole is that he must have a job).

he talked for about an hour, and everything he said was moving in one way or another. but the most moving thing by far was at the end, when a girl asked whether or not he regretted stealing the money. he said he didn’t, because otherwise he would have never known how fucked the system was, and wouldn’t now be able to advocate for change.

after class, i thanked him, and told him that he moved me. what i didn’t say was that he had literally changed my entire perspective. of course, i knew about racial inequality in the criminal justice system. 1 in 3 black men will be incarcerated. 1 in 6 latino men. 1 in 17 white men. i knew the numbers, but there’s a difference between reading a textbook and listening to someone who has been through it all speak to your face.

but it made me reconsider my entire career objective. i know i want to do something that helps people, and that i’m altruistic and want to make change -- why not this specific area?

but i had to go to my next class, which ended up being equally as interesting, but for completely different reasons.

we started off with a group presentation which is supposed to take 10 minutes. it took 45 minutes, because it sparked a debate. “debate” is putting it nicely. crudely put, we tore em a new one.

the presentation was about immigration from central and south america to the united states. the first two guys in the group both seemed liberal, but when the third guy started talking, it was clear where he stood, because the other two literally looked miserable as he rambled on and on about how dangerous undocumented immigrants are and how most of them bring drugs and how a wall is a good solution.

at the end, he asked for questions, which is where it all started.

first, i asked why he kept saying “they’re taking our jobs”. why does he feel that it’s his job to begin with? why does he feel a sense of entitlement for a job he doesn’t even want.

then, another guy, who it has been revealed to me has done extensive work to help undocumented immigrants (among other things), started SPITTING STATISTICS. this guy was literal fire. first he backed up my idea about american citizens not even wanting the jobs undocumented immigrants take -- 5% of american citizens are unemployed. out of that, 85% do not even look at jobs taken by undocumented immigrants. that means that less than one percent of americans are actually in competition for jobs with undocumented immigrants. 

seriously, this guy was amazing. he knew facts on top of facts off the top of his head, and he came for these guys. he questioned their sources and countered their claims.

after 45 minutes into class, my professor cut him off because we needed to actually do our lesson. i have no idea what it was, by the way, because i proceeded to start tweeting about unionization and undocumented immigrants -- you know, your classic liberal staples.

at the end of class, i approached the guy who had DESTROYED the presenter and told him how much i liked what he had to say. we ended up going to the cafeteria and talking for nearly two hours about various political things. he was really, really well read and interesting. he worked for a lot of things i like, like bernie’s campaign & black lives matter & this program to help relieve marginalized and migrant women of the poverty cycle. overall, v cool dude.

it wasnt until around 5pm that i remembered i had a project due at midnight. so i said goodbye and went home and FOUND OUT I CAN PUT MY BANGS INTO SPACE BUNS, TAKE THAT LONG HAIR, and just finished my project!

the assignment was to write a memo to a politician addressing an issue and providing a solution. i had no idea what to write about, so being under a time crunch, naturally i checked twitter. and i saw what i had been tweeting during class. and i thought, why not?

so i wrote my memo to senator tim kaine with an idea. and, keep in mind, i have no idea if this is actually plausible, but it theoretically makes sense, and i have some historical context so that its logical. 

essentially, my idea was on how to combat the issues that conservatives claim undocumented immigrants have on the economy/job market. the two main problems i was combating were 1) american citizens jobs being taken, and 2) benefiting from public goods without contributing thru taxes. i personally know that neither of these things are really an issue, but i was trying to find a solution to get republicans to shut up.

the solution i made up? repeal right-to-work in virginia & allow undocumented immigrants to unionize (which, coincidentally, is THE most left-wing sentence i have ever spoken).

i started off by explaining how right to work is NOT in the state constitution (we voted against adding it on election day) and therefore it is able to be repealed. then i made the historical comparisons between how we talked about black ppl post-civil war and how we talk about undocumented immigrants now. that is to say, white ppl have been using the same “they’re taking my job!” rhetoric for a long ass time.

my main comparison was during industrialization, when rly the only jobs black people could get were factory jobs or manual labor. since there werent many employment opportunities, they were willing to get less $$$. aside from replacing white workers with black workers aka cheaper labor, corporations also called in black ppl when white ppl went on strike. this created somewhat of a race war in the factory industry, which benefited neither race, but DID benefit the corp. a helluva whole lot, bc now they had workers COMPETING, and they could lower wages even more.

what solved this, you ask???? ALLOWING BLACK PPL INTO UNIONS. that way, they too could get fair pay, and since everyone was being paid the same, stopped racial competition in factories (for the most part; im generalizing a lot tho). 

so why not do the same thing now?? get rid of right to work in VA, and allow undocumented immigrants to join unions, thus stopping the undocumented workers vs. american citizen workers dichotomy that republicans especially have been trying to (and succeeding in) shoving down our throats and creating FEAR.

in addition, it puts an end to the “they don’t pay their fair share!” rhetoric. since undocumented immigrants are now apart of unions, their pay is no longer under the table. its legal. its traceable. its taxable. no more hearing ppl bullshit around about freeloading.

overall, i have no idea if thats actually, like, feasible, but i’d say it’s a pretty good idea for a project that i did in an hour. 

anyway that was my day & i know i rambled a LOT but cmon guys its ME, what did you EXPECT?>>>??

[wbwest]

New Post has been published on WilliamBruceWest.com

New Post has been published on http://www.williambrucewest.com/2017/02/10/west-week-ever-pop-culture-review-21017/

West Week Ever: Pop Culture In Review - 2/10/17

Last night, my friend Mike and I went to check out The Lego Batman Movie. Seeing as how we were the only two people in the theater, I’m not quite sure what its weekend box office is gonna look like. I bet John Wick: Chapter 2 takes #1, since that’s where everyone seemed to be heading. Anyway, I LOVED the film. First up, it considers EVERYTHING canon. If you saw it onscreen, then it happened in that universe. The whole thing is kind of surreal, as the movie focuses on Batman’s loner status, while also confronting his complicated relationship with The Joker. On the Batman Beyond cartoon, there’s an episode where old Bruce Wayne and his protege, Terry McGinnis, go to a Batman-themed musical. Bruce can’t get over how goofy the whole thing seems, but I feel like this film is the movie version of that musical. It doesn’t have the camp of the ’66 show, but it’s a movie that never really takes itself seriously. I loved the liberties they took, like making Jim and Barbara Gordon people of color (voiced by Hector Elizondo and Rosario Dawson). It doesn’t hurt the story any, while bringing some diversity to the Lego world. I also liked how it tied in concepts from The Lego Movie, such as the fact that Batman is a Master Builder. I’m not going to spoil the movie for you, but I feel like it’s strong until the middle of the second act, at which point it switches from a Lego Batman movie to a Lego Dimensions movie. Trust me, you’ll understand when you see it, and I think you’ll agree that the story gets a bit weaker at that point. In any case, I can’t wait for it to hit Blu Ray, so I can rewatch it a thousand times to catch all the Easter eggs.

This week, we got a trailer for a new season of Arrow. Wait, what? That was actually for Iron Fist? Huh. Yeah, I was really underwhelmed by that trailer. Finn Jones doesn’t seem like a great actor, there’s not a lot of Kung Fu on display, and it seems like it’s more focused on corporate takeover, as Danny Rand tries to reclaim his family’s business. Since it’s a Netflix Marvel show, there’s also Rosario Dawson and another damn hallway fight. I welcome the former, but I’m SO over the latter. I’ll get around to watching it, but the days of me binge-watching a Marvel season the weekend of its release are long gone. Considering I still need to watch Daredevil season 2 and Luke Cage, I’ll be lucky to get around to it in 2017. That said, I know a lot of y’all will binge it that day, and will tell me if it sucks or not.

In other TV news, it’s rumored that NBC wants to spin Saturday Night Live‘s Weekend Update segment into a weekly 30-minute show. I guess they looked at John Oliver and Samantha Bee, and realized they might be leaving money on the table. Still, Jost and Che as “polarizing”, at best, and I’m not sure if that segment has the legs to air 30 minutes every week, in the same format. Plus, would it also remain a part of SNL, or would it be excised completely? I think this would’ve been a good idea in an election year, as there’s just so much news to cover, but now that all that is behind us, I’m just not sure this is going to work. And then what happens? If it does leave SNL, would it come crawling back next season, with its tail between its legs? The difference between Last Week Tonight/Full Frontal and Weekend Update is that those cable shows are actually smart, with smart hosts. Plus, they can get away with a bit more because cable. Weekend Update has gotten a lot more biting since Trump was elected, but is it too little, too late? Are the SNL writers up to the task of this project? I just feel like it’s a bad idea that will dilute the Weekend Update and SNL brands.

It was also announced that Viacom will be rebranding Spike TV as the Paramount Network. In my lifetime, I don’t think I’ve witnessed a network go through as many format changes as that one. As far back as I can remember, it was The Nashville Network. Then, to appeal to a wider audience, it became The National Network. Then, to appeal to dudebros, it became Spike TV. Now, I don’t even know who they’re targeting. I also don’t know why they chose this particular name. It’s like they have short memories or something. After all, there’s already been a Paramount Network. Sure, most of us referred to it as UPN and not the United Paramount Network, but that’s what those letters stood for. And it was the definition of “failed experiment”. Sure, it hobbled along for about 10 years, but its legacy is basically Star Trek: Voyager, America’s Next Top Model and Girlfriends. Outside of that, it gave us such critical darlings as Shasta McNasty, Homeboys In Outer Space, and The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer. Hey, let’s see how many shitty (that means all of them) UPN shows I can list without looking them up: DiResta, Legend, Platypus Man, Hitz, Good News, Sparks, Dilbert, Marker, The Watcher, The Sentinel…yeah,that’s enough to make my point, which is you probably don’t remember any of these. UPN did NOTHING for the Paramount brand, and its effects are still being felt 11 years after its demise. So why, WHY would Viacom want to go down this road again? Anyway, the early plans for the rebranding call for the network to be a warehouse for hit Viacom programming from their other networks. It’s basically just gonna be the Now That’s What I Call Viacom Channel, posting the highlights from MTV, Nick, Nick Jr, etc. In fact, there are no concrete plans for the future of other Viacom networks, such as VH1, CMT, and TVLand, but reports say that there’s no immediate push to shut them down.

It was also rumored that there are already talks of an American Idol revival, but this time on NBC. Now, keep in mind the show just ended its run on Fox last year. The idea is that The Voice would be reduced to one cycle a year, and then they would slot Idol in one of its old slots. I feel like NBC sees the value in that show in that it actually creates household names – something The Voice has failed to do after 11 seasons. The focus is too much on the judges, and the winners have gone nowhere. Quick, name a winner of The Voice without looking it up. Hell, I watched the first season, and I can’t even remember that guy (I looked it up: Javier Colon. Who? Right). So, there’s definitely something to be gained from acquiring the franchise. That said, though, I also feel like a network only gets one of those shows. Fox had Idol, NBC had The Voice, ABC had Rising Star, and CBS had some show that got canceled that I forgot. Fox hurt Idol by double-dipping and picking up The X-Factor. That show never caught on in the US, and it hurt the Fox singing competition brand. If NBC picks up Idol, it’s going to do the same to The Voice. I mean, how much longer does America want to see Blake Shelton and Adam Levine bicker at each other? Sure, there’s a new dynamic now that Blake and Gwen Stefani are dating and both judges, but unless the show breaks them up, I don’t know how engaging that’s gonna be. And Miley Cyrus as a coach? Now, let me say that Bangerz was a great album. I’ve written about how awesome it was. But I don’t think Miley is established enough as a singer to be coaching anyone. She’s more known for her antics than her music. Then again, Paula Abdul was a has been, judging the talent of tomorrow, but that was intrinsic to the formula. Ultimately, America chose the Idol, and the show brought in established stars as coaches. The Voice has an unnecessary layer. They have talented judges, but then they also have the coaches, and then America. As Idol showed us, ANYBODY cane a judge, which is going to be an important thing for NBC to remember once it comes to for contracts to be renegotiated. Anyway, I think Idol needs to rest a few more years before they dust it off. It was once a powerhouse, but television AND music changed over time. Let the industry figure out its next steps before trying to reenter it.

I don’t know about you, but I grew up with women, which meant I did a tour of duty with soap operas. I started with Days of Our Lives back in the late 80s, then shifted to The Young and the Restless, and then shifted back to Days in the 00s. And besides Victor Newman, there is no soap villain quite as diabolical as Stefano DiMera. Well, the actor who portrayed him, Joseph Mascolo, died back in December, but his final filmed episode aired yesterday.  Although Mascolo had been battling Alzheimers for the past few years, he had portrayed the character for around 30 years. For some reason (I haven’t watched in a while), he was in prison (he’s killed/led to the death of a lot of folks. But they typically come back after contract negotiations), and at the end of the episode, he escapes! What a beautiful ending, knowing that he will be forever “in the wind”, as they can’t really catch him again unless they recast him. Seeing as how the rumor is Days is coming to an end this year, they won’t even have time to do that, with scripts written about 6 months in advance. So, here’s a toast to one of the greatest villains to ever grace the television set. You will be missed, you evil son of a bitch.

Let’s get a little controversial, shall we? This week, comedian George Lopez got in hot water for kicking a woman out of one of his shows when she objected to a racially-charged joke he told. Basically he said, “There are only two rules in the Latino family: Don’t marry somebody black and don’t park in front of our house.” Apparently, a woman gave him the finger after that joke, to which he began to tell her to “sit [her] fucking ass down or get the fuck out.” Now, comedians are on his side because they say he was just shutting down a heckler. Meanwhile, the general public is on her side because they’re offended by the joke, and don’t see why he had to kick her out for objecting. Here’s my take: First of all, he’s told variations of this joke for years. He used to joke about how his grandmother wouldn’t even want President Obama in her house. If you’re familiar with his material, then his joke the other night shouldn’t surprise you. Now, for the folks offended by the joke: was he wrong? All I know is my own life experience. I dated a Cuban, and as polite and Ivy League-educated as I could be, I was still the Black guy who could only illicit grunts from her father. And I don’t know anyone named Esmeralda Jenkins or Manuela Johnson. Growing up where I did, Black guys didn’t get Latinas or Asian girls. Those girls’ families weren’t gonna stand for that! So, this is one of those jokes that’s grounded in truth. It might rub some folks the wrong way, but it’s not necessarily untrue. Where I stand, I don’t think he really did anything wrong. After all, that’s how comedians handle folks who they feel are interrupting their show, and the joke itself was par for the Lopez course. I wouldn’t say it was “haha funny”, but it wasn’t wrong.

Things You Might Have Missed This Week

An animated series based on the Castlevania video game is coming to Netflix later this year. Hopefully it will star gay Simon Belmont from Captain N: The Game Master.

Kate McKinnon will voice Ms. Frizzle in Netflix’s reboot of The Magic School Bus

Speaking of Netflix, Love, The OA, and Trollhunters have all been renewed by the streaming service.

Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin, announced that she’s retiring after her next album is released.

After 25 years over covering the Olympics, Bob Costas announced he’s handing the reins over to Mike Tirico

Entertainment newsmagazine show The Insider has been canceled after 13 seasons.

Formerly of USA’s Satisfaction, Blair Redford has been cast as the first mutant in Fox’s X-Men TV series

Not to be outdone by Beyoncé, it was announced that George and Amal Clooney are expecting twins. Those Hollywood In Vitro clinics are working overtime these days!

Speaking of babies, Jason Statham proved he’s the Transporter of Sperm, as he announced he’s expecting a baby with girlfriend Rosie Huntington-Whiteley

I don’t like Tom Brady. Don’t like a thing about him. I find it odd that you can be suspended for cheating AND win the Super Bowl in the same damn season. That said, that was a Hell of a comeback during Sunday’s Super Bowl LI. Somehow, the Atlanta Falcons blew a 25-point lead, allowing the New England Patriots to mount an amazing comeback and win their 5th Super Bowl title. It was the first Super Bowl to go into overtime. There was Edelman’s amazing catch. Some are calling it the most exciting game of football ever. But in the end there can only be one winner, and that was the Patriots. So, with that in mind, the New England Patriots had the West Week Ever.

[newstfionline]

Has Political Correctness Gone off the Rails in America?

By Philipp Oehmke, Der Spiegel, Jan. 5, 2017

It’s a Friday afternoon in Oberlin, Ohio, around one month before the country heads to the polls to elect Donald Trump as its next president. The final classes and lectures of the week have just ended, and a young woman comes walking by in bare feet with a hula hoop gyrating around her waist while others are performing what seems to be a rhythmic dance to the African music that’s playing. Two black students are rapping.

It’s the kind of scene that could easily play out on a beach full of backpack tourists, but this is unfolding at one of the country’s most expensive universities.

Many female students here have dyed their hair green or blue, they have piercings and their fashion sense seems inspired by “Girls” creator and millennial star Lena Dunham, who, of course, also studied here.

In such a setting, it seems almost inconceivable that this country could go on to elect Donald Trump as its president only a few weeks later. Yet pro-Trump country is just a few miles away. Oberlin is located in Ohio, one of the swing states that made Trump’s election possible. Drive five miles down College Road toward town, and you start seeing blue “Trump Pence 2016” signs on people’s lawns.

Places like Oberlin are the breeding grounds of the leftist elite Trump’s people spoke so disparagingly of during the election campaign.

Only a few months earlier, a handful of students claimed they had been traumatized after someone used chalk to scrawl “Trump 2016” on the walls of buildings and on sidewalks at Oberlin and at other liberal universities. It triggered protests on some campuses, with students demanding “safe spaces” where they would be spared from hearing or seeing the name of this “fascist, racist candidate.”

In the months prior to the election, “safe spaces” had been one of the most widely discussed terms at Oberlin. The concept has its roots in feminism and describes a physically and intellectually sheltered space that protects one from potentially insulting, injurious or traumatizing ideas or comments--a place, in short, that protects one from the world. When conservative philosopher and feminism critic Christina Hoff Sommers was scheduled to give a speech at Oberlin last year, some students did not approve and claimed that Sommer’s views on feminism represented “microaggressions.”

When Sommers appeared anyway, leading some Oberlin students to create a “safe space” during the speech where, as one professor reported, “New Age music” was played to calm their nerves and ease their trauma. They could also “get massages and console themselves with stuffed animals.”

“Microaggressions” are the conceptual cousins of “safe spaces”--small remarks perceived by the victims to be objectionable. In addition, there are also “trigger warnings”--brief indicators placed before a text, image, film or work of art alerting the viewer or listener of the possibility that it could “trigger” memories of a traumatic experience or the recurrence of post-traumatic stress disorder. Such a warning surely makes sense for people who have experienced war, who have fled their home country or who have otherwise been exposed to cruelty and violence.

But at Oberlin, one student complained to the university administration and requested a trigger warning for Sophocles’ “Antigone.” The student argued that the suicide scene in the play had triggered strong emotions in him and that he, as someone who had himself long been on suicide watch, should have been warned. In an article he wrote for the Oberlin Review, the student, Cyrus Eosphoros, compared a trigger warning to the list of ingredients on food items. “People should have the right to know and consent to what they’re putting into their minds,” he wrote. Eosphoros has since dropped out of the school.

The call for safe spaces and trigger warnings in addition to complaints about microaggressions all fall under the term “political correctness” in the United States.

Few other expressions are as ideologically charged and contested as this one. It is most widely used as an invective: Coming from the mouths of the right-wing, including Donald Trump and his millions of followers, the term is used to describe self-censorship. They consider it an expression of a victim culture, within which the hypersensitive “leftist mainstream” (also used as an epithet) seeks to isolate itself from every deviation from its own worldview. Opponents of political correctness consider it to be an overwrought fixation on the needs of minorities and one’s individual identity, on skin color and gender.

Now, two months after the election, those looking for clues as to how Trump’s victory became possible quickly arrive at the refusal of many Trump detractors--including members of Hillary Clinton’s own campaign team--to confront the uncomfortable fact that there are legions of Trump fans all across the country. It’s almost as if, in the face of Trump, liberal America collectively retreated to a “safe space.” And when they finally resurfaced after the election, Trump had won.

There was a time when political correctness wasn’t yet synonymous with hypersensitivity, feel-good oases or censorship. Originally, it was associated with the counterculture, not as a project of the academic elite and the establishment as it is today. Initially, it was an attempt to free the public debate from prejudices based on race, gender and background--from the apparently casual yet hate-filled and disparaging comments that frequently caused suffering, particularly among minorities and the weaker members of society. It was intended as an effort to get the voices of these minorities heard in the first place.

One of the primary assumptions of political correctness is that thinking starts with language. Those who use disparaging language must think that way as well. Another assumption is that of constant progress. That people evolve over time, that discrimination and inequality diminish over the centuries, from the elimination of slavery to women’s suffrage to same-sex marriage and the growing acceptance of transgender people. Progress was seen as the integration of the formerly suppressed and of minorities. At least in theory.

In the last decade, however, the obsession with minorities and their victimhood may have gone overboard. In a much-discussed opinion piece for the New York Times last month, Mark Lilla, a professor at Columbia University, argued that American liberalism in recent years has been seized by hysteria regarding race, gender and sexual identity. Lilla says it was a strategic error on the part of Hillary Clinton to focus her campaign so heavily on African-Americans, Latinos, the LGBT community and women. “The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups,” he wrote.

Even as the white working class and lower class flocked to Trump in droves, students at Oberlin were busy organizing a protest against the food served at the Afrikan Heritage House. A few students had pointed out that the dishes there were at most Westernized interpretations of the original recipes, a state of affairs which showed a lack of respect toward African traditions. This offense, too, has a term: “cultural appropriation.”

Meanwhile, Asian students complained that the cafeteria served bánh mì using inauthentic ingredients, prompting accusations of cultural imperialism.

The college took the complaints seriously, as it does with all grievances lodged by students. It has a reputation to protect--and must also protect itself from the lawsuits that many of its students’ parents can easily afford.

The cafeteria had to issue a public apology. But it shouldn’t have been only the Vietnamese students who felt insulted--it should have been everyone. After all, another term often used at Oberlin is “allyship.” The theory basically goes like this: Someone who has spent his life as a heterosexual white male will never be able to understand how an incorrectly-made sandwich could trigger a trauma. Nor would he ever truly be able to comprehend the systemic microaggressions that a black woman might be exposed to. But he could make himself her “ally,” by taking her experiences seriously and accepting them at face value, whether or not he is able to comprehend them personally.

For some professors, it has gone too far. One of those is Roger Copeland. On a recent Friday afternoon, he made his way to the Slow Train Café, the only place at Oberlin where everybody meets up during the day--professors, students and activists. He has come to talk about everything he believes has destroyed his profession. He has recently accepted an early-retirement severance package and will be leaving the school in a few weeks. Professor Copeland has taught for over 40 years at Oberlin. He is a theater professor and he looks the part. He arrives wearing a Hawaiian shirt and speaks, even in normal discussion, as if he were reciting Shakespeare from the stage.

Copeland himself took to the streets in protest in the 1970s: against the Vietnam War, against Watergate--the big things. On two occasions, he was arrested.

Today, though, it’s personal pronouns that his students are squabbling over and Copeland has little understanding. He says students no longer want to be addressed as “he” or “she,” but as “X” or “they” or newly created personal pronouns. At Oberlin, terms like “Latina” or “Latino” for people with Central or South American backgrounds have been replaced with the gender-neutral “Latinx.”

Two years ago, Copeland asked a young student who was editing a video during rehearsals for a stage production if she would manage to finish editing the footage by the end of the week. He didn’t get the immediate response and things were hectic. “Yes or no?” he called out in his exalted way. “Yes or no?”

The student, who Copeland says is an Asian-American lesbian woman, stormed out of the rehearsal, not that uncommon of an occurrence in theater. Later, the dean ordered Copeland to his office and accused him of having berated a student and of creating a “hostile and unsafe learning environment.” There was that term again: “unsafe learning environment.” The dean handed him a document and asked him to sign it. Copeland refused and provided the names of others who had been present and who could attest that he hadn’t berated the student. The dean said it didn’t matter. What mattered was that the “student felt unsafe.”

The matter led to a formal Title IX investigation for sexual misconduct. Copeland hired a lawyer and the probe was dropped after a year. The whole thing cost Copeland thousands of dollars. Worse yet, he says, he lost his ideological compass.

What was going on? Where, if not here, did young men and women have the opportunity to mature into citizens, into people who could also confront unpleasant views?

Copeland self-identifies as a leftist. He’s a man who has fought for social justice, for the rights of the weak, for freedom and for free speech. Now students were dismissing him as some old, reactionary grandpa who knew nothing about the vulnerabilities created by identity, skin color and gender, whether it be male, female, gay, lesbian or transgender, the full spectrum of LGBTQ, as people call it today--or “cisgender.”

Cisgender is a relatively new word and Copeland only recently became aware of it. He also learned that it is often used as an insult. It describes pretty much to a “T” what he is: a white, heterosexual man who is certain that he doesn’t want to be a woman and isn’t even a little bit bi-sexual.

Copeland isn’t the only victim. Across the country, “social justice warriors,” as they are disparagingly called, are leaving a trail of destruction in their wake, attacking professors, artists, authors and even DJs along the way.

At a bar at the University of North Carolina, a student named Liz Hawryluk complained to the DJ on a Saturday night in 2014 when he played Robin Thicke’s “Blurred Lines.” The song was a major summer hit, played at nightclubs around the world, but Hawryluk demanded the DJ immediately stop playing it.

The song includes the line, “Good girl? I know you want it.” Allegedly words a rapist would speak.

When the DJ refused and the girl continued insisting, she was asked to leave the bar. She then wrote about her experience on Facebook, arguing that line in the song is a “trigger” for victims of sexual assault that can reawaken their trauma. After her post got shared a number of times, the bar publicly apologized and fired the DJ.

In 2015, feminist film researcher Laura Kipnis, a professor at Chicago’s Northwestern University, became the subject of an investigation after she published an essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education about sexual paranoia in academia. The subject of the article had been a new ban on sex or relationships between students and professors at the university. Kipnis also criticized what she described as obsessive discussion among female students about traumas and sensitivity. She described it as a fallback to traditional behavioral patterns--the vulnerable woman, the helpless victim and the man as the perpetrator.

But the supposedly defenseless female students struck back--first on Facebook and later in the form of a protest. Two students then lodged a complaint against Kipnis for alleged sexual misconduct, arguing that Kipnis’ essay had a “chilling effect” on female students who wanted to file sexual harassment complaints. Kipnis had to hire a lawyer and the charges were dropped after a 72-day investigation. In a later article, she described the proceedings as an absurd drama reminiscent of a Kafka novel.

Roger Copeland spent a long time contemplating where these vulnerabilities and sensitivities might have come from. “The relationship my students have with the world is constantly mediated. They only have access to it through their iPhone screens and through the social networks they have joined. What we would call the virtual is the real for them.”

It’s only when they are in the lecture halls, when someone like Copeland is speaking to them, that this filtered reality is suddenly suspended. This suspension can evoke a defensive reaction in those who are only used to receiving select news from a politically correct world in which everything has been furnished with warning labels and freed of any microaggressions. Internet activist Eli Pariser calls the serving of information to users using algorithms that predict what they think the reader will want to see the “filter bubble.”

Socio-cultural advancement has become something of a fetish for many students--and many have lost sight of everything else in the process.

Professor Marc Blecher, who teaches political science at Oberlin and enjoys lecturing on Marxism, had warned at a meeting one month prior to the election, likewise at the Slow Train Café, that the millennial students of today’s generation may talk a lot about social transformation, but they have lost sight of one truly decisive issue: class.

With their focus on skin color, gender and sexual orientation and the microaggressions associated with them, he argued, students were overlooking what Trump was able to recognize: Most people in the United States aren’t unhappy or angry because of their gender, their personal pronoun or the lack of a trigger warning in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” (due to misogyny). They’re angry because they aren’t able to pay their rents, and they have the feeling that nobody cares--that the liberal-progressive public is more concerned about whether the bathrooms used by transsexuals should be those of their biological or perceived gender. Shouldn’t the discussion be about the fight for wealth redistribution rather than definitions and identities?

Sidestepping such issues often underscores just how helpless many of these students have become, Blecher says. Still, he doesn’t want to create any misunderstandings. “They are not spoiled sons and daughters. Oberlin’s brand is social progressivism. The school wants to admit students from financially weaker families, students from Hispanic or African-American families, some are kids from the streets. Some have spent the last five years trying to get in and then their guidance counselor at high school gets them into a place like Oberlin. They were the most promising students we could find. And you know what? They arrive here and it is hell for them!”

Academic expectations are high, which he says makes the students feel like they don’t belong here--and, in a way, they don’t. “At its core, Oberlin is a highly exclusive place that wants to be inclusive. It’s an unavoidable contradiction. So some lash out.” And how do they do that? They look for a discourse, for a language. What they find is language like “microaggressions,” “safe space” and “intersectionality,” meaning the traits that some minorities have in common. “Their frustration keeps growing to the point that they start attacking the food in the cafeteria!”

The interesting thing, says Blecher, is that the students’ feelings of outrage are correct--they are just misplaced. “What’s really keeping them down are class dynamics and racial segregation. But we don’t talk about that.”

In places where microaggressions lurk and trigger warnings become necessary, certain things can simply no longer be discussed. The children of the 1968 student protest generation took for granted the freedoms that their parents fought to obtain, holding them to be self-evident. The grandchildren of the 1968 generation now want to retract some of those freedoms. Free speech--once the highest achievement the leftist student generation had fought for--is now largely and paradoxically being invoked by populists and the right-wing.

When Donald Trump calls Mexicans who cross the borders rapists, when he cracks jokes about women, and when, at gatherings in his honor, people lift their arms in Hitler greetings and fans of his top adviser Steve Bannon tweet “Sieg Heil”--that all falls under “freedom of speech.”

The roles have been completely reversed. Whereas today’s leftist student movement is willing to sacrifice the freedom of speech--fought for by their political predecessors--on the altar of trigger warnings and “safe spaces,” this right is now being defended by the very same right-wing whose political antecedents sought to prevent it back in the day.

This new right can be seen every day on Fox News. The cable network interprets freedom of speech to mean the right to insult. And that freedom of expression also provides a license to spread untruths. That’s also a problem with Trump’s new America: One part of the population is growing increasingly sensitive and no longer wants to read “Antigone,” while the other is growing increasingly brazen, calling Mexicans rapists and seeing all Muslims as terrorists. In Donald Trump, they will soon have a president who emboldens them.

Their narrative holds that they would love to say what is actually on their minds, but the “social justice warriors,” the guardians of political correctness, led by the “liberal media,” won’t let them. They too feel they are victims--at least they act like it, complaining that you can’t say anything in this country anymore. Indeed, they feel much as the leftist students did in the early 1960s. The only difference being that there really were things that you couldn’t say back then.

On the day after the vote, Oberlin College held a symposium called, “Making Sense of the 2016 Election.” A few days later, 2,400 students, staff and former employees called for Oberlin to be made a “Sanctuary Campus,” a kind of “safe space” for the illegal immigrants that the incoming Trump administration has said it wants to deport.

A few days after that, news of the vote breakdown in Oberlin came in: 4,575 votes for Hillary Clinton against 412 for Donald Trump. They now want to find those Trump voters. And confront them.

[chsamuseum]

‘Chinatown Gangs’ and Ethnic Studies: One Teacher’s Inside Look

It was 1967 in San Francisco Chinatown. After an ordinary day of work, local schoolteacher Benjamin Tong and his friend George Woo went to Portofino Cafe, a charming European cafe formerly located at 150 Waverly Place. The two friends were regulars there, part of a crowd of teachers, magazine photographers, medical paraprofessionals, musicians, writers, construction workers, cab drivers, and occasional homeless teenage lost souls. 

While enjoying their coffee, they overheard a group of foreign-born, monolingual Chinatown street kids -- many of whom were jobless school dropouts or had been kicked out of the house -- plotting to burn down the “gweilo street parade” in retaliation for a white carnival worker supposedly running off with one of their Chinese girlfriends. The youth were referring to an annual white-run street carnival that occupied Chinatown’s streets and Portsmouth Square during the Chinese Lunar New Year. This packed event directly interrupted Chinatown business and the community’s holiday celebrations. Despite numerous complaints, however, the City did not address Chinatown residents’ concerns.

Deeply concerned about such a reckless and life-threatening plot, Tong and Woo spoke up. 

“Look, you guys live here in Chinatown. If you set fire to the carnival, the flames will surely engulf your homes!” George said.

Their reply was emphatic: “We don’t care, man! Burn them down! There’s no kind of future for us Tong Sahn Doys, anyway! Can’t relate to school. No jobs. All we get is grief around the clock from uptight parents and cops!”

Tong Sahn Doys means “boys of the Tang mountains” in Taishanese, referring to the medieval Tang Dynasty (618 to 906 AD) that was considered a golden age.

Tong, Woo, and other adults at the cafe managed to convince the youth to not follow through on their plan. What continued to trouble them, however, was the disconnect the youth felt from their community. They were frustrated, neglected by adults and left with no purpose or direction in life. 

Hoping to improve these boys’ situations, Ben and George drafted written proposals in Chinese and English for bilingual education, job training programs, family counseling, and other social services to present to local public schools, social service agencies, church organizations, and family associations. Yet despite beginning a good deal of dialogue, which included heated testimonials from Tong Sahn Doys, nothing stuck. None of the agencies and organizations followed up with concrete, viable commitments for improving the youth’s lives. Instead, their failure to support those in need deepened the rupture in the already fragile relationship between the restless youth and the community members trying to help them. Eventually, many of these disillusioned youth turned to “pulling jobs” for criminal organizations to make a living. They were soon branded the “Chinatown Gangs” by the news media.

In the wake of the failed intervention, the community members who had tried to turn the situation around drew the following conclusion: “We’ve lost this generation. We have failed these youngsters. Their fate is dark now. They’re running out of control, turning on each other as well as ‘the establishment.’” 

But not all hope was lost. One evening at the Portofino Cafe, a lightbulb suddenly went off in the heads of Tong and other demoralized individuals who wanted to help the youth. Inspired by the education reformations that African American student activists demanded at San Francisco State College, they wanted to do the same for Asian American students: create a curriculum that examines the history, stories, and nuances of the Asian American community. They hoped that an education which teaches youth about their identity will help them discover a path and purpose as a minority in America.

In the late 1960s, the Black Student Union of San Francisco State College (now San Francisco State University) began advocating for better access to educational opportunities, as well as for the creation of a Black Studies program in response to the exclusion of nonwhite communities’ experiences from university curricula. But progress on these demands for a more representative education was slow, and the students’ frustration grew. Finally, during the 1968-1969 academic year, what started as a small protest group grew into a multi-ethnic coalition as other minority student organizations representing Latin American, Mexican American, and Asian American students joined in to support the movement. This multi-ethnic coalition became known as the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF).

Police attack and arrest protestors at SFSC. (PC: Shaping San Francisco Digital Archive). 

Eventually, TWLF began to boycott the university. For five months between November 1968 to March 1969, protestors formed a column of student and faculty protesters that continuously marched around the entire college, making it so that the few students who attended class had to weave through an impenetrable crowd. Tong was among the leaders who represented the Asian American interests. He spent many hours gathering students and faculty to support their efforts. As a participant in this long march, Tong himself wore through three pairs of shoes. Many of these protests were violently broken up by the police. Nevertheless, students persisted, and a similar movement even took place at UC Berkeley.

Eventually, the universities could no longer handle the situation. After negotiating with the leaders of San Francisco State College’s TWLF, they provided the funding and classroom space for the creation of the College of Ethnic Studies, the first of its kind in the entire United States. Similarly, UC Berkeley established the Department of Ethnic Studies. Students could now take classes in American Indian Studies, Asian American Studies, Africana Studies, and Latino/a Studies. 

Tong became one of the original faculty in Asian American Studies, helping to build the curriculum from scratch. The department aimed to teach Asian Americans and other students interested in Asian American topics about their history, unique American influenced identity, portrayal in media, and generational cultural differences among many other concepts. In other words, it was a place for students to understand the history of and engage with their cultural identity in America, asking questions such as “What does it mean to be Asian in America?” and “How does my Asian identity affect my experience in America?”.

The inaugural SFSU Asian American Studies Faculty. Tong is at the center of the first row. (PC: SFSU Asian American Studies). 

Fast forward half a century to today. These classes that examine the impacts of race, particularly those of systemic racism, on people’s lives in America are as important as ever. Learning about not just one’s own racial group, but other racial and ethnic groups’ experiences will enable them to feel empathetic towards each other's triumphs, hardships, and everything in between. Compassion for and willingness to help one another will allow all communities to grow and not leave people behind, as the neglected Chinatown youth were. We must remember how it was the collective action of many minority groups, each of which faced their own unique challenges, that enabled them to all create positive change together. Benjamin Tong pictured the changes he wanted to see in his community -- empathetic, educated, and passionate Asian Americans -- and pursued his vision until it was achieved.

Written by CHSA Intern Tanson Chan. Tanson is a freshman studying business and humanities at Foothill College. The many captivating stories he heard from his elders -- everything from living in San Francisco's Chinatown to serving in the US Navy in WWII and their fight for civil rights -- haveinspired his interest in Chinese American history and wanting to preserve the legacy of its community to continue inspiring future generations.

[notesfromthepen]

Prison Tales; The Ballad Of Juan Jose Garcia

During my tenure as a convict I've crossed paths with countless characters, any one of which you could drop into a packed stadium and be confident that their exceptionality amongst the crowd would stand unrivaled. And although prisons are fertile fields, there have been just a few individuals I've felt compelled to write about. And even then, it's only been superficial scribblings. 

My bunkie, Juan Jose Garcia, whose name should belong to a grizzled Mexican ranch hand not a pudgy white kid from Grand Rapids, has forced my hand. His behavior will no longer allow me to shirk my moral responsibility to document his existence for the sake of human psychology, sociology, education, and genetic mapping...as well as writers of comedy, satire, and tragedy. And makers of human leashes, helmets, and adjusters of IQ. 

I was really struggling on what to call him, both for anonymity as well as convenience. His government name is so poetically appropriate when taken into context. Juan Jose Garcia, is a doughy teenager, who alleges to have Puerto Rican and Mexican DNA stacked somewhere in the rungs of his double helix, but short of him volunteering this information, or checking his prison ID, you'd never guess at his Latino heritage. His nickname is Guerro, which is Spanish for white boy; a language he doesn't speak. It's not like he's Aryan white. He looks more like one of his parents could be part Italian, or Greek maybe. He looks "American white." If that's such a thing. But he definitely doesn't look like what our culturally prejudice ideas of what a Juan "should" look like. But that's not what has me wondering about what to call him here. It's all nicknames in here, no one goes by their government names. So I figure I'll just call him whichever name feels right in the moment; Juan, Guerro, dummy, but mostly I'll call him bunkie, which is what I actually call him anyway. And though he's no longer a teenager (he turned 20 a few days ago) I will most likely continue to refer to him as such. A decision I stand by; partly because he was a 19 when I met him, but mostly because, in a way, he always will be.

In full disclosure this is a proclamation/insult my very own sister frequently hurls in my direction. "Forever seventeen," as she puts it. I'd feel compelled to argue with her on the subject if she didn't have the advantage of being right. This immaturity is the common ground on which me & my bunkie meet. It's our love language. And it is the ONLY quality we have in common.

I want to make clear that I love the kid. In the way an older brother loves a pain-in-the-ass younger brother. He's got a great heart and sweet nature, rivaled only by his devastatingly prolific quality as a complete and utter airhead. Unfortunately, like many inmates, the environment and circumstance he grew up in actively sought to kill his softer nature at every turn (and apparently, a majority of his working braincells.) But nature is a stubborn bitch and will always find a way.

As frustrating as it can be at times, I'm glad he's my bunkie. And I'm trying my damnedest to get him together before he is inevitably sent to another joint, unit, or cube, where the likelihood of a relatively patient and understanding, slightly asshole-ish bunkie he respects, is practically nil.

He calls me his dad. A moniker I insistently rebuke, to no avail. He's also stubborn; quite possibly a side effect of the airy environment cultivated between his ears; and he's highly susceptible to peer pressure. Which is why—I like to tell myself—I use shame in my attempt to curb his behavior. He turned 20 this month. With the excuse of being a teenager, all-but gone, I've really tried to focus my guidance, hoping he will absorb something before we part ways. Again, to no avail.

What follows are simply a few tales of what it looks like to raise a teenager, that's not yours, behind bars. Care has been taken to make as little alteration to the actual events as possible, while still protecting the guilty an innocent alike. So without further adieu:

Raising Juan Garcia; The Taffy Hustle

My bunkie came to prison a few months ago. A full-fledged fish. Though it is his first prison bid, he's not completely unfamiliar with institutional life. Much of his adolescence was spent in group homes and juvenile detention centers. Though you wouldn't know by watching him stumble through this experience.

Tall Rob stopped at my window. Which isn't a window as much as it is just the space between the foot of my bunk bed and my locker where they but up against the chest-high divider wall that separates the eight-man cube and the hallway.

The imposing figure that so frequently darkens this prison window is Tall Rob, a 6'6 ex hitman/fixer for the Russian mob. Supposedly, other than Tall Rob, there's only one other inmate at this prison serving a life sentence, without the possibility of parole, after copping out (pleading guilty) to a 1st degree murder charge. Not taking a 1st degree murder beef to trial is like being all in on a pot of Hold 'Em and folding before you see the river. You've got nothing to lose by playing the hand out. The other guy is a serial killer, who copped out because they already had him on a bunch of other murders. What's another life sentence when you're already doing three. Tall Rob, on the other hand, copped out because he's a standup guy. Dragging his case to trial would mean a lengthy investigation. And I don't know what you know about the Russian mob, but they don't really like investigations. So he copped out to quash the investigation and is serving a natural life sentence. 

So Tall Rob's at my window when he notices my bunkie, covered in flop sweat, attempting to cut, separate, and wrap his 1st batch of prison taffy. Tall Rob asks, "Where are your gloves?"

With the excitement of a puppy that just saw something new, my bunkie says, "I asked the CO. He wouldn't give me any."

Any convict knows that latex gloves are for officers, and officers only. And, though not always enforced, gloves are unquestionably labeled illegal contraband when possessed by an inmate. But you must remember—I must remember, daily—that my bunkie isn't just ANY inmate.

"You asked the cops?…" I ask, between sips of morning coffee.

"Yeah, they wouldn't give me any."

I glance to Tall Rob. My eyebrows say, "You see what I gotta deal with?"

Fighting off a grin, Rob commences to inform my bunkie that not only will the cops not give him gloves, they could write him a ticket just for having them. He goes on to explain what, I assumed, was basic inmate knowledge of the importance of wearing gloves; how it’s mainly to show potential customers that your particular brand of prison taffy was crafted with at least some thought of personal hygiene.

While my bunkie was nodding along to the lecture, I dug out the pair of contraband-blue gloves I keep stashed in my footlocker and dropped them in his lap.

Rob headed back down the rock towards his cube, convinced his point was made.

One small step to my right and I retreat into the sanctuary of my bunk. Not so convinced. I pull the makeshift curtain, a shirt hanging from my bunkie's bed, closed, and wait for the caffeine to kick in. Robin Meade delivered the news.

My bunkie, I assume, continued whatever it was he was previously doing.

Ten...fifteen, minutes later, with instant coffee coursing through my bloodstream, I'm reasonably awake.

Open curtain.

Standing up puts me chest level with my bunkie's bed. A once clear Tupperware bowl, the one I gave him as a loaner two months ago when he first got here, is resting on his bunk covered in pink & purple splotches of taffy like some Jackson Pollack-inspired line of prison Tupperware. In the midst of the sugary melee, welded to the borrowed bowl, are the contraband-blue gloves I just gave him.

My bunkie was at the table, still wrestling the taffy with his bare hands, as if he'd never left.

With the timing of a shitty three-camera sitcom, Tall Rob stops at the window.

He's looks at the bowl, smothered in gloves, smothered in taffy.

He looks at my bunkie.

He looks at me.

I ask my bunkie about the gloves. He tells me the hot taffy stuck to 'em when he was pouring the bowl onto a flattened out chip bag. He tells me he couldn't get them off.

"Why were you wearing the gloves?!…" I ask, "You don't need..." I rub my eyes with the palms of my hands. The rest of the sentence comes out as a whisper, "...gloves when your pouring the taffy out." Approaching normal volume, maybe slightly louder, I tell him, "You need the gloves for when you're actually HANDLING THE TAFFY!"

Blank stare.

My frustration with the exchange is directly proportional to Tall Rob's joy at being there to witness it.

At hearing Rob's laughter my bunkie gets up and walks over, right up next to me, so he can see Rob at the window. So he can start performing. "It was hot as shit," he says, poking the taffy-covered gloves. "They're still good," he assures us. He runs his sticky fingers through his hair.

He's been growing his hair out since he came to prison. It's 1970s Elvis length. Somehow he has accomplished the seemingly impossible feat of producing a bountiful, never-ending, source of dandruff, while still having, otherwise, greasy locks. When you're on a bottom bunk, gravity is your enemy, hair is a weapon. Many altercations, leading to very real consequences, have started with falling hair. Bunkie's big dream is to get it braided. I don't know what he's waiting for; its been long enough for weeks. (I've since learned he's waiting until it's long enough to have two long braids, one on each side, hanging down past his shoulders before he gets it braided. Meaning another year of growth at least.)

Tall Rob tells him he needs to cut his hair.

I second the proposal.

"No way," he says, "I'm growing it out." This time he runs both hands through his hair. He looks at his palms before wiping them on his shirt.

"You should cut it," I say.

"Why?"

"It's greasy. And you're always touching it. And now you're handling food."

"I washed it yesterday."

“OK?..."

"With what?" asks Rob.

"With water. Tomorrow I'm using soap." He said it as if he was revealing a plan of sheer brilliance.

"Water?!" I'm approaching the edge, "You mean, you got it wet! You didn't WASH your hair, you got it WET!"

Tall Rob's eyes go wide.

"And TOMORROW..." I'm talking to Rob at this point, "he's going to wash it, not with shampoo," I grab one of the tiny state-issued bars of green soap from the top of my locker, "but this! “ HAND soap! And what does that have to do with not cutting your hair?!"

"Nothing. You said it was greasy."

"It is!" I say, "And to prove me wrong, you say you got it wet yesterday?" 

Everyone's laughing but me.

My indignation is equal parts performance and genuine frustration.

—Just now, as I am writing this, a C.O. leaned in the window and says, "Do you know where Garcia is?" My back is to her and I'm distracted. I assume she's talking to someone else. "Do you know where Garcia is?" I look over my shoulder. She's talking to me. "They need him to pick up his store bag.

Store day is once every two weeks and it’s an EVENT. It's payday. They go cube by cube calling inmates to go stand in line to pick up their commissary. If you miss it, because you're in class or at a healthcare appointment they'll send your bag back to the warehouse. If your lucky you'll get it a few days later, otherwise they'll send it back to the company and refund your money. That means another two weeks without food or hygiene. NO ONE misses store day.

"They're about to leave," she says, "if you know where he is you should get him."

Store day isn't something that you can sleep through or can pass by unnoticed. Especially when people owe you money. Especially if YOU owe people money.

Even more especially, when you owe your bunkie money. All of which apply to my bunkie's investment in not missing store day. 

I take the tablet with me, trying to finish that last sentence, as I look for this kid. I'm wondering where he could be. What emergency could account for his absence? Is he at class? Maybe his dumb ass is in the shower or passed out in a locker or dead on the back forty. None of which would be worthy excuses for missing store. I'm headed to the bathroom first. The day room is on the way, but I decide it'd be a waste of time to check there. There's no way he could be in the day room and not know it's time for our side to get store. Remembering who it is I'm looking for, I glance in the day room window on my way to the bathroom. And I'll be damned! There he is, in the first fucking row, laughing obnoxiously at a scene from Hell Boy. I thought it was Fast and the Furious, but he later corrected me as I was chastising him.

Hell Boy!!!

He made it there just as they were packing his bag up to take to the warehouse.

He reacted like he reacts to everything: Slightly oblivious, completely careless.

This is the shit I have to deal with. Everyday, two, three, times a day he gives me something that out does the last thing I figured I'd tell you about. His buffoonery rears its head so often that I get interrupted writing about previous buffoonery with current buffoonery!—

OK, back to the Taffy.

He finished separating, cutting, twisting, and wrapping the individual pieces of taffy courting mini disasters every step of the way. I did my best to talk him through the difficulties. Taffy was my hustle when I first came to the joint. I wanted him to succeed. He spent five hours doing what should've taken forty-five minutes, but eventually he got it bagged up and on the market.

I later found out that he had an investor that bankrolled his little endeavor. It wasn't his money he was gambling with. Which means he has less to lose, but it also means he's beholden to somebody. There is more pressure on his profit.

As I write this I can hear him in the cube kitty-corner from us, explaining the mathematics of his endeavor to his benefactor.

It's been about a week since his product hit the market and I get the feeling this will be his first and last venture into the confection game. It requires more than a couple hits of commitment. But who knows? Last night he told me, after paying to have pockets sewn into his pants, hands tucked deep into his newest obsession, that he was going to start investing in, "a ton of property." Whatever that means.

The timing of this piece seems like fate. Today is store day. Which is payday in the joint. That means he'll be collecting his taffy debts. I started writing this, unsure of my conclusion, and now an ending reveals itself.

My bunkie just plopped down in the chair next to my bed, the one he uses to get up and down from his bunk. He has a pen and a yellow legal pad. A debt sheet.

"Are you still writing?" he asks. It's a rhetorical question. He knows I'm still writing. It means he wants to talk to me but knows by now not to interrupt me when I'm doing something; a hard fought lesson, but a lesson learned nonetheless. Progress.

"Yes, I'm still writing," I say, "but I'm writing about you, so I can talk and still consider it work." I put down the tablet. "What's up?"

He looks at the legal pad, "I'd have to sell twenty-one pieces to make back the 7 dollars (the price of the materials)."

"How many did you sell?" 

"Eighteen," he says. The realization, that all his work was for less than nothing, dawns on him. He doodles something on the paper. "I don't think I like selling taffy bunkie." Defeat.

Now I feel like shit.

Like most kids his age, he's a blind optimist. And REALITY is—well, reality doesn't exactly follow suit. A quality he refuses to acknowledge.

He's a young dummy; It's his job to be all pie-in-the-sky about getting rich selling taffy. And It's my job to bring him back to earth, to tell him there are already three people in here who sell taffy, that there's only so much money in the candy market and most of it's cornered, to let him know that taffy doesn't sit well, so if he doesn't sell it fast he'll be sitting on a product with depreciating value. All of which I said.

Still, I don't want to see his spirit completely crushed. There's no fun telling someone you like, "I told you so." Especially when you actually told them so.

A beat later, before I can think of something to say to resuscitate his spirits, he looks up with a smile and says, "I guess I'll just stick to selling drugs." He chuckles at his comment, and heads out, onto the next adventure. He's only half joking. And just like that it's over. He's completely washed his hands, emotionally, of the entire situation. Any stress, wiped away in an instant.

Chipped, cracked, or caked in shit, his glass is always full, even when it's empty.

Part of my frustration with the shit he does, the shit he says, is out of some begrudging envy for how carelessly he moves through life. Setting fires as he goes. The best and worst thing about being a shark is the ten minute memory.

The gloves, the taffy, the hair, none of them are exceptional events in the life of Juan Garcia but I had to pick something to write about, something to give you a little glimpse into life with my bunkie.

As I'm finishing this up, I hear him across the hall trying to give the remaining taffy back to his benefactor, the smushed, stale, falling-out-of-the-wrapper taffy. He's out. Investors be damned.

Oh, to be a shark.

[friend-clarity]

The Present American Revolution

Victor Davis Hanson, November 13, 2018 

Destroying the Constitution and seeking state-mandated equality of result

The 1960s saw efforts to create a new progressive nation by swarming democratic and republican institutions. The sheer force of a left-wing cultural revolution would supposedly transform a nation, in everything from jeans, long hair, and pot to rock music and sexual “liberation.” It was eventually diffused by popular weariness with the extremism and violence of the radical revolutionaries, and the establishment’s agreements to end the Vietnam War, give 18-year-olds the right to vote, phase out the draft, expand civil rights to include reparatory action, legalize abortion, radicalize the university, and vastly increase the administrative state to wage a war on poverty, a war on pollution, and a war on inequality.

Our present revolution is more multifaceted. It is a war on the very Constitution of the United States that has not yet brought the Left its Holy Grail: a state-mandated equality of result overseen by an omnipotent and omniscient elite.

The revolution of 1776 sought to turn a colony of Great Britain into a new independent republic based on constitutionally protected freedom. It succeeded with the creation of the United States.

The failed revolution of 1861, by a slave-owning South declaring its independence from the Union, sought to bifurcate the country, More than 600,000 dead later, slavery was abolished, a Confederacy was in in ruins, and the South was forced back into the United States largely on the conditions and terms of the victorious North.

The 1960s saw efforts to create a new progressive nation by swarming democratic and republican institutions. The sheer force of a left-wing cultural revolution would supposedly transform a nation, in everything from jeans, long hair, and pot to rock music and sexual “liberation.” It was eventually diffused by popular weariness with the extremism and violence of the radical revolutionaries, and the establishment’s agreements to end the Vietnam War, give 18-year-olds the right to vote, phase out the draft, expand civil rights to include reparatory action, legalize abortion, radicalize the university, and vastly increase the administrative state to wage a war on poverty, a war on pollution, and a war on inequality.

Our present revolution is more multifaceted. It is a war on the very Constitution of the United States that has not yet brought the Left its Holy Grail: a state-mandated equality of result overseen by an omnipotent and omniscient elite. The problem for today’s leftists is that they are not fighting Bourbon France, a reactionary Europe of 1848, or Czarist Russia, but an affluent, culturally uninhibited, and wildly free United States, where never in the history of civilization has a people attained such affluence and leisure.

Poverty is not existential as it once was, given high technology and government redistribution. The grievance is not that America is destitute (indeed, obesity not famine is our national epidemic). The poorer do not lack access to material goods (everything from iPhones to high-priced sneakers is in the reach of about everyone).

IN THE NEWS: 'McConnell Rejects Vote On Bill To Protect Mueller'

Instead, the complaint is that some have far more than others, and the government, despite its $21 trillion in debt, seems unable to guaranteed universal parity, especially when the people seem unexcited about joining “taking a knee” protests or “swarming the homes” of counter-revolutionaries. In other words, millions of Americans will never join Antifa, Black Lives Matter, or Occupy Wall Street on the barricades; nor will they worry that in Texas 59 percent of white women voted for Latino Ted Cruz while 95 percent of black women voted for white male Robert O’Rourke. They apparently prefer instead to live private lives on their own terms.

Taking a drive in a Hyundai today is far more comfortable, reliable, and safe than touring in a 1970 Rolls Royce. An inner-city youth with an iPhone has more computing power and global access in his palm than did an estate owner in 1990 with a row of mainframe computers in his basement. So revolution is not so easy anymore and requires changing the very idea of the state, the law, and the ancient institutions that uphold them.

Immigration

Sovereign and secure borders do not lead to the sort of demographic upheaval that fuels progressive agendas. Measured, legal, meritocratic, and diverse immigration does not result in a vast impoverished shadow population in need of self-appointed advocacy; it enhances individual assimilation, integration, intermarriage, and Americanization.

If in the past nullification of federal laws led to the states’-rights crises involving southern states in 1828–32, 1860, or 1962, today there is apparently little worry about ignoring federal immigration statutes. We simply have allowed more than 500 municipalities, counties, and states to declare full enforcement of federal immigration law null and avoid within their jurisdictions — period.

Immigrants 1,000 miles away, intent on crashing the southern border and residing in the U.S. illegally, sue the federal government to force acceptance of their anticipated illegal entry. Again, the revolutionary idea is that progressive messaging cannot win 51 percent approval without changing the demography — and changing the demography is impossible without constitutional nullification.

Elections and Courts

Voting does not always result in the result that progressives desire. Unfortunately for the Left, more than half the country still believes America is uniquely good, blessed with a wonderful inheritance by its brave and ingenious ancestors, a beacon of freedom and security in a scary world, and constantly improving. Even a progressive media, university, Hollywood, and a progressive plutocracy, Antifa, and street theater cannot yet change that fact.

So the revolution again turns to upending the constitution and the law. In Florida, local violations of state election laws seek to warp the result and elect the more progressive candidate. More fundamentally, why does a Wyoming of 600,000 souls deserve two senators, the same number as in California with its 40 million? Are not 39,400,000 California citizens deprived of their “rights” of proportional senatorial representation?

Why is there an electoral college that violates the spirt of Athenian democratic direction elections? Why is there a Second Amendment that allows “automatic” assault weapons and “nuts” with handguns?

For that matter, why is there a counterrevolutionary First Amendment that protects “hate speech” and de facto promotes right-wing racists, homophobes, nativists, xenophobes, sexists, and climate-change deniers, allowing them to propagandize and pollute the public discourse and infect campuses with right-wing rhetoric?

The courts have become revolutionary. They now routinely overturn popular referenda, presidential executive orders, and legislative statutes, mostly on the principle that better-educated, more moral and experienced judges answer to a higher, more progressive calling and know what in the long run is best for the uneducated rabble. From now on out, every Republican-nominated Supreme Court nominee will probably result in a Kavanaugh-like circus, in which protestors in the gallery, disruptive senators themselves, and mobs in the street will attempt to create so much chaos that the wearied public will cave and just wish that conservatives would not nominate such controversial constructionists.

Campuses

Today’s university is in a revolutionary spiral. The U.S. Constitution does not necessarily protect students and faculty. By that dramatic statement, I mean, free speech is all but gone. A professor who confessed opposition to affirmative action, abortion, or global warming would face ostracism and even risk physical assault and yet see his attackers all but sanctioned by a neutral or complicit administration.

Due process is nonexistent in many areas. In accusations of sexual harassment or assault, there is little left of the presumption of innocence, the right to confront and question a transparent accuser, and the appeal to be judged by a jury of one’s peers. Most of the 1960s civil-rights agenda is moribund on campus.

Racial segregation in dorms and safe spaces is unquestioned. Racial biases can result in rejected admission on the premise that there are too many of one particular race on campus — and merit-based criteria are a prejudiced construct anyway. Censorship has returned, by both banning texts and demonizing classics now deemed to need “trigger warnings.” Free assembly and expression are on life support. Speakers and guests deemed “right-wing” are shouted down, swarmed, or disinvited by a terrified Bourbon administration.

The Mob

The mob is becoming in some ways as powerful as the French rabble who cheered on the guillotine, or the adolescent crowds that spoiled affluent kids such as Bill Ayers and Jane Fonda once used as demonstration fodder. Instead, it is vast and global — and linked by instant communications on social media and the Internet, and it remains often anonymous. Post or say one wrong word, and the electronic turba comes out of the shadows, swarming to demand career-ending confessions, or offering amnesty on promises of correct reeducation. One’s entire life can be accessed in nanoseconds to root out past thought crimes and counterrevolutionary speech. Be deemed a right-wing obstructionist or activist, and everything — from one’s cell-phone number and email address to private residence and office —can become known to 7 billion.

Logging on may mean using the public airspace and thus entering the domain of a traditionally regulated public utility, but the masters of the universe at Apple, Facebook, Google, and Twitter, by the power of their trillions of dollars and loud progressive fides, are exempt from antitrust and monopoly legislation. So when the mob targets a public enemy, correct-thinking thirtysomething geeks and nerds in Menlo Park and Palo Alto gear up to shut down, censor, and recalibrate public transmitted speech and thought.

Almost everything we have seen in just the last three months — the Kavanaugh chaos, the “caravan,” the ongoing Mueller octopus, recounting election results until they are deemed “correct,” the Beto and Gillum neo-socialism craziness, the swarming of a Fox News anchor’s home, driving public officials out of restaurants, the media circus at presidential press conferences — are symptoms of revolutionary America. In this conflict, one side believes it is not only not fair but also not allowable that it lacks the necessary power to make us all equal — but equal only in the eyes of a self-anointed elite.

[braindamageforbeginners]

Vote Swamp Thing 2018

Cycle 4, Day 5

Good news, tonight marks the final night of Temodar, so only another 24-ish hours trapped in Homer Simpson’s mind (although Dad commented that I seemed to tolerate it much better this time around)(I can only pray the disease isn’t adapating as fast as I am, my ability to adapt and survive faster than my own cells is the lynchpin of this whole, ludicrous, “Don’t die a horrible death” plan). And I’m feeling much better than I was this time yesterday, so I guess that’s an improvement, although I still feel like someone took my body to Spring Break without my permission.

Anyway, today we discuss the California gubernatorial race which is - for my money - the most entertaining political race in the world (we wound up electing The Terminator at one point). I know the phrase slogan “Drain the swamp” drove the 2016 election. The problem is - from a biology/ecology stand-point - swamps are necessary, and it’s not a good idea to go in there, let alone drain them (that’s how you get alligators on your golf course). And the deeper in you go, the scarier and bigger stuff gets. Until it winds up on my ballot. BTW, I’m not alone in thinking this is simultaneously wonderful and terrifying; Ron Burgundy was in the vicinity recently trying to get people to vote (No, I am absolutely not making that up, Google “Ron Burgundy Midterms”)

As with last time, I’m just going for the low-hanging fruit, in terms of entertainment, so I might miss a few candidates (there’s actually 27 candidates for CA governor - I’m not exaggerating that at all), and I reserve the right to edit for space and coherency (I’ll try to keep all improper grammar, spelling, and punctuation intact, though). Anyway, let’s get this freakshow on the road.

Gloria La Riva - “Enough! Vote socialist! Get involved!” I realize that’s just the slogan, and I like the call-back to Marx’s “Workers of the world unite!” But I just can’t get over those excess exclamation points!

Zoltan Istvan (Setting: a chemo infusion area; a father reads to his sick son from the ballot guide) DAD: Who’s this guy who looks like the poster boy for the Hitler Youth? Zoltan It-Is- SELF: ZOLTAN ISTVAN! I’ve been keeping track of him for years! If you think that description makes him sound crazy, just do two minutes of research! Two minutes later... DAD: It says he’s a “libertarian transhumanist.” Does that mean he was born in the wrong body? SELF: That’s transgender. He’s a transhumanist. DAD: What’s -  SELF: The philosophical belief that technology should be used to enhance or improve the human condition; a stance we’ve both benefited from. DAD: You, maybe. SELF: I still have the same hip joints I was born with. I think the cyborg accusing the experimental chemo patient of - DAD: It says here he’s into sea ranching. SELF: What’s that? DAD: Farming the sea. He’s got my vote; it’s been too long since L. Ron Hubbard died.

Yvonne Girard:”....I believe justice belongs to all; from babies in the womb, families of fallen Military and First Responders, to historical wrongs not fully amended for Japanese, Jewish, Armenian, Indiginous and African Americans. No child should ever live in hunger. STOP! Don’t go to your keyboard, come on a mental journey with me, which will explain why politics in this state are so hilariously weird. Read that statement again, and now, eyes closed, tell me this candidate’s party affiliation. That’s right, Republican.

Christopher Carlson: “Teach your children calculus And keep the planet safe or feathered stones and empty bowls Will also be their fate.” Much as I love poetry and weird Native American cultural appropriation, it doesn’t make a good platform, let alone a slogan.

John H. Cox: “...On my first day in office, I’ll put an end to the Sanctuary State law that shelters illeal felons, and puts all our families at risk.” So, in a state that is - I believe - 40% Latino, he’s running on the “Get rid of brown people” platform. If elected, California will have the same retention rate as a mediocre law school. To be fair, he’s not the only one running with this campaign promise, which makes me wonder, if these clowns can’t do basic math, can I really trust them with something more complex, like a state budget?

Travis Allen: “5. Complete the state water project to provide water storage hat will preserve the Delta and supply water to California’s farms, suburbs, and cities...” I don’t agree with any of his other proposals (we need to raise taxes)(yeah, I said it), but the man said “water” in this state. That’s like in The Simpsons, when Sideshow Bob runs for mayor; “Hmm, I don't approve of his Bart-killing policy, but I *do* agree with his Selma-killing policy.“

Akinyemi Agbede: “Mission Statement - California Strong!” i have absolutely no idea what that means, but I like the decisiveness and brevity.

Michael Shellenberger: “Dear Friend,” NEXT!

Johnny Wattenburg: “Why not!” I take it all back, I’ve finally found an honest candidate worth endorsing.

Again, that’s nine people. Out of 27. I’m only surprised that William J. Lepetomane isn’t running for re-election (oh, you laugh, but it’ll happen). Also, 27 damned candidates, that’s too many. That means that it’s entirely possible (albeit unlikely) that someone could win if they just carried ~4% of the vote. Next time you think an individual doesn’t matter or your voice won’t be heard, again, we have a system where fewer than 5% of participating people might decide the future of 40 million people. It’s not going to work out that way - it looks like Cox and a guy named Gavin Newsom (who wasn’t even in my ballot guide)(GOOD JOB, GAVIN) are duking it out for not-quite 30% of the vote. Again, this seems like the basic math can’t work out if 30% of the populace decides the fate of everyone else (particularly if that 70% get their torches and pitchforks). But I digress, and I’m really tired after trying to figure out everyone’s proposed platform. So, uh, go out and vote. If you’re not happy with two choices, there’s apparently now 27, which is more entrees than most restaurants have. Just don’t vote Zoltan. Or do vote Zoltan, because there is a part of me that wants to see what a crazy sci-fi/cult leader-wannabe would do with this state.

[flauntpage]

OPINION: I Saw a Diverse and (Mostly) Well-Behaved Parade Crowd

I walked at least eight miles on Thursday.

My wife went down to the parkway around 7 a.m. and my dad and I got on the EL at Girard Avenue around 8:15 a.m., headed to City Hall.

We had some trouble, ironically, crossing Broad Street, so we had to get back on the Market-Frankford line and walk down from 30th Street Station.

Not totally ideal.

For some reason, the subway concourse was blocked when we tried to get through, though other people, like Russ, had no issues moving underground to the other side of City Hall. And sections of Broad that were opened earlier (like Locust Street) were completely blocked off by 9 a.m., so whatever.

Anyhow, because of that “roundabout” trip throughout Philly, I feel like I got a good, long look at what I thought was an incredibly diverse turnout.

If I had to guess, I’d say 50% of the crowd was white, 40% was black, and the other 10% was anybody and everybody who lives in Philly. I saw a decent number of Hispanic and Latino families, and some Asian families, too. Women were well-represented (40% maybe?) and I saw lot of children, too, who seemed to be doing okay in the large crowds. The area I walked was Locust up to 17th and the Parkway, on both sides of the route.

After the motorcade passed by CB headquarters at the Ritz, I saw a black guy taking pictures with his group and a makeshift Lombardi trophy. A random white guy walked by to look at the faux trophy and the first guy, Lamar, grabbed him and told him to get into this photo:

I walked over to Lamar and asked if he’d share some thoughts on the parade experience.

“It was Shangri-La,” he said. “It was a utopia of Eagles green everywhere. We waited all these years, my whole life. I’m 34. It was beautiful, everybody getting along, everybody in unison. There’s nothing bad I can say about it.”

Lamar described the crowd as cool, and wild, but in a “fun way.”

“They were behaving themselves. It was all fun stuff, like a ‘fun’ wild, not a ‘destructive’ wild, because there were kids around. It wasn’t any of the negativity that the national media wants to give us. It was just Philly. We’ve got another level of fun. You have to be from Philly to understand it.”

A pair of guys across the street, Andrew and Sean, flew in Thursday morning from Tampa.

“We were born up here but we moved when we were younger and we’re still diehard fans,” said Andrew, who grew up in Cherry Hill. “We flew up at 6 a.m., got in at 10:35, and came right over to the parade. It was an awesome experience. I’m 28 years old right now and my dad is 62, so he was four years old for the 1960 championship and has never seen a Super Bowl. And we haven’t obviously, so it’s the only championship I’ve seen outside of the Phillies in 2008.”

Andrew says he and Sean bumped into some other people from Jersey that they didn’t know and spent part of the parade hanging out with total strangers.

“Honestly, it wasn’t as bad as some of the things you see,” he added. “Mostly it was family fun. Most of it. I mean, there are those guys who are on top of statues, and it’s fun to see because it’s part of the experience, but everybody was pretty well behaved overall. I didn’t see any fights or anything like that. I think everybody was unified by the win.”

Torrey Smith seemed to share that opinion:

People keep asking me what was the best part about the parade…to me it was looking around and seeing people from different races, social class, and their families together…United for one reason…To celebrate the success of their football team!

— Torrey Smith (@TorreySmithWR) February 9, 2018

So when I look at that crowd I want people to experience that type of unity all the time. So when you question if athletes should just stick to sports you are dead wrong…we can help be and create the change we want to see because the people are connected to us and we are them!

— Torrey Smith (@TorreySmithWR) February 9, 2018

There was, of course, some dumb stuff that happened.

Here’s an idiot damaging city property and wasting taxpayer dollars on the future repair:

Shoutout to the guy at the parade who fell off the light pole pic.twitter.com/4Mqt6iXL6w

— Austin Vitelli (@AustinVitelli) February 8, 2018

I don’t have any context for this, but it looks like drunk dorks going after each other:

Classic City of Brotherly Love pic.twitter.com/PpS4pYeb7a

— Barstool Heartland (@barstoolhrtland) February 8, 2018

And Glen spotted a couple of morons being morons:

First trouble of the day. Two idiots start fighting for space in front of the Palm. One takes a swing at a cop. Someone will see the end of this parade from jail. pic.twitter.com/kbJs6eBcyc

— Glen Macnow (@RealGlenMacnow) February 8, 2018

And if more idiot lawbreakers were in action, they’ll hopefully be identified and tracked down, like the suburban kid who was arrested post-Super Bowl for flipping the car. His father, ironically, is named “Whitey,” which is perfect.

Otherwise, I didn’t see a ton of misbehavior. Pissing in public was probably the worst, though I only saw four port-o-jawns on the south side of City Hall. I’m not sure how it looked on the parkway. A lot of businesses closed their doors and others were just swamped with people, so the bathroom situation was highly questionable and logistically impossible to nail down. Market Street near 13th was a clusterf#@! of people trying to stay warm while waiting in line for the EL, post-parade.

And the pot smoke is expected, so whatever, should be legal by now anyway. If you’re bothered by a whiff of that in the air, might be time to recalibrate your moral compass, though I do empathize with parents who have to explain the smell to their kids.

The thing that really bothered me isn’t even specific to this parade, or white people, or black people. It’s actually a Philly problem in general, but people just throw their trash on the ground with total disregard for decency. I understand that this is a massive parade with thousands of people walking around, and the trash can situation is less than ideal, but show some pride in your city. I see garbage and dog shit and cigarette butts laying around EVERYWHERE in Philly on a normal day, so we really have to do a better job here, as Andy Reid would say.

Also, it was just people being lame in general by overdoing things. For instance, the “Fuck Tom Brady” chant was funny the first time, but not the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, or 27th time, so that got old quickly. Same with the “Nick the Dick” cheer. Some of y’all need new material.

And when people are trying to get from one place to another, don’t just shove them in the back from behind; take a look ahead to see why they’re standing still. Maybe they’re stuck also. I had to wait 15 minutes to leave the Ritz because people simply could not organize themselves in a two-way fashion. Employees had to come down to the lobby and literally tell people when to leave and when to enter, sort of like that road construction where one lane is shut down and you wait for the PennDOT dude to flip the sign to tell you when to go.

Another thing I spotted was this crew, the same jabronies who showed up at the NFL Draft with their fake Christian message:

I followed these guys for a bit and didn’t see a ton of folks harassing them. I think people were just sort of rolling their eyes instead of wasting their time engaging in the pointless back and forth. That’s different from what I saw in April, when the “Jesus or hellfire” peeps had a larger group and garnered more attention from the crowd:

This guy says you don't need the Eagles when you have Jesus Christ pic.twitter.com/fsvrjCxeGQ

— Kevin Kinkead (@Kevin_Kinkead) April 27, 2017

“The Eagles are masturbators!”

“No, not that!”

That’s about it, as far as my experience, which was five or six hours in a relatively small portion of the parade route near City Hall.

I didn’t see it all, but neither did Ernest:

Staying in my empire today while the plebeians, I mean Eagles fans, enjoy the #EaglesParade. pic.twitter.com/vILnxlJXNt

— Ernest Owens (@MrErnestOwens) February 8, 2018

Better to be a “plebe” than casting judgement from the ivory tower.

Just my opinion.

OPINION: I Saw a Diverse and (Mostly) Well-Behaved Parade Crowd published first on https://footballhighlightseurope.tumblr.com/

[mystictruth123456-blog]

And Now I'm learning Italian again

So now I'm learning Italian again. Phase two. I have got to a level I am comfortable in Spanish and now I feel that it's time for Italian. Yet that moment of starting to study a language reminds of my time in Scotland back in May of 2017, about seven months prior.... My mum and I went to stay in Scotland for two weeks with my aunt, who was originally from Yorkshire and is my mums sister. My Aunt, my Scottish uncle and cousin lived in a house right next to the ocean in a tiny, tiny village called the Isle of Whithorn in Dumfries, with a population of about 300 (as it says on Wikipedia). It was quite beautiful as well as a bit isolated. I felt more at home because I had lived briefly in California only a mile or so from the ocean. My mum had cancer that had spread through her whole body. She was doing what she could to survive. Before we were living in West Yorkshire, just outside a village called Otley at my aunt and uncle (my mum's brothers) house. The arrangement in coming to Scotland was to give my aunt a break who had been taking care of my mum for several months. My mum couldn't care for herself well. She had received chemo some months prior, had lost her beautiful blonde hair and could barely walk without becoming extremely fatigued. It may sound like I am going deeper and deeper into the past. I feel the backstory is quite important to understand the rest of the story. Anyway, My mum and I were both relieved to be in Scotland. The atmosphere Of the Otley home back in England was not pleasant. My uncle owns quite a huge business  and he would come home after work every night and drink then usually pass out on the couch watching TV. This was his routine for over twenty years or more. My aunt had been married to him this whole time, often wanting to leave but would continue to stay. She occupied herself with house tasks and taking care of the animals. Often both of them quite isolated in Their abode.  My aunt and uncle were pretty conservative. My mum and I had come from liberal as you can go Santa Cruz, California. Shit got pretty interesting. My aunt was often pretty controlling, critical of how you lived your life if it didn't conform to her values. It was her way or the highway and she would argue with you even if you said nothing back to her, repeating her point over and over again until any marbles you had left you lost. She would do this with anybody, the only trouble was seeming that my mum was looking like she was going to die and I being without any friends, isolated in a foreign country, with intense moment to moment anxiety, with a mother very ill ; it really seemed like an inappropriate time for her to be so insensitive. You often see the worse side of people when you live with them I believe.  My anxiety had got so bad that I often had to be served food to my door.  I would sometimes not eat because I wouldn't leave my room and was too paranoid and anxious to talk to anyone. It seemed like everything my aunt or uncle would say would trigger my anxiety. What felt the worse was that they knew that I felt this way but it was like it was invisible to them. I would talk about how I felt and my feelings were critized or invalidated quite often. I had barely any money of my own, without a bank account, no friends, the friends I had in America I had pushed away almost entirely, I was isolated in the country, with weather the complete opposite of California weather. I kept getting told that my mum was in good hands, and was made to feel guilty when I would talk about almost any of the difficulties of my situation, I just needed to get on with it.  Where was I to get on with it too? I was getting on with it. Getting on with it in hell it felt. I didn't want to imagine what it be like without my mum around. She had survived a seizure where I thought she was dying in my arms and I Couldn't imagine her gone. It came to many points where there seemed no hope, A few times I put a knife to my wrist, feeling it was the only exit from my suffering but I thought of my family members and all I had went through in my life up to this point and decided to keep marching forward. A doctor was even called to the house to check on me. only my mum asked how I was. I wasn't asked about this incident by anyone after. It's like it never happened. This is another reason that still to this day when anyone attempts  To invalidate how I feel I get really cross. I know of the consequences it can have. Some of these events happened after I left Scotland, some before.  To Make a long story short, my mum and I were relived to be in Scotland. I didn't really have much to do. To give myself something to focus on I would do coloured drawings, study astrology and go to the nearest town, newton stewart. About an hour bus ride from the Isle of Whithorn. The the town had a river that run through it. It was may and the sky was blue, the sun was out, it was so beautiful, I felt all my troubles melting away. I realised how lonely I felt walking around the town. I really wanted a friend to share these traveling experiences I was having. I had to be my own best friend. I stumbled upon a small bit of woods that lead down to the river, and the rocks. I cleared the stones to make a space for myself to relax. The whole time prior I was focusing on my breathe, working on being as present as I possibly could be. I dug a hole in the dirt until water showed up. I took a a bunch of pebbles and dirt and stared at them imagining all my fears, worries, guilt and shame going into them, then I placed them into the hole and covered it. I had a planner another uncle back in England had given me, and in that moment I thought of the things I wanted to work on in my life and in my future. In that planner I wrote  I wanted to learn Spanish, my motivation being that my dad spoke Spanish but never taught me and my grandmother spoke mostly Spanish and little English. I wanted to be able to finally communicate with them in their language, something I had felt quite ashamed about in the United States, being Latino and people asking me "Why don't you know Spanish, when Your half Puerto Rican.?" I thought why not now, I have nothing else better to do. I also realised that my life was still going to be challenging returning to England, So I needed to do something different to cope. I had been told about about some language exchanges in Leeds by a random friendly girl I struck up a conversation with at One of the universities there In Leeds. I put that on my back to England to do list as well. Then I put my book away and thought about enlightenment. At that moment I felt enlightened. My mind was completely empty, next to the beautiful river in the blue sky and sunshine, no thought of the future no thought of the past. At peace after much struggle. I did end up going to the language exchanges and learning Spanish to a decent speaking and comprehension level in seven months. I now live in Harrogate, England in a studio by myself. And as I begin to start up Italian, it reminded me of that decision to start up Spanish again, that day by the river in Newton Stewart and the whole story that came with it. I think I will write a part two about the future of my Spanish learning and a prologue about my Spanish journey in the past.