ithinkitsdanny

[ithinkitsdanny]

29 MARCH 2020

COVID THOUGHTS

Who would have thought we would live in such interesting times? Every day goes by, and what was strange yesterday seems like normal today. Remember when the worst threat to our sanity was the thought of Sarah Palin as our Vice President? 

I never once thought that I would live in days that would line the pages of future textbooks (or whatever it is we’ll be using to teach history to students in the future). I grew up in a boring suburb of tuCsoN, aRIzONa, and part of me thought that I would never leave that place, and nothing would happen, and that was life. But that was not the case. Things are always happening, and things just seem to keep getting stranger in certain ways. 

Most people my age remember waking up one day and getting ready for school, or maybe you were at school, and seeing on the news that two towers in New York had fallen over. We watched as our country decided to invade a country most of us didn’t know existed (don’t judge, I was only in second grade, and the only other places I knew about were from watching the 2000 Sydney olympics with my family the summer before). We watched as our president and congress decided it was necessary for us to invade another country that many of us knew nothing about. We saw friends go off to fight, and sometimes just die in the desert, for something that made very little sense to us. 

Michael Jackson died one day. A man accused of molesting children. Yet people mourned his loss. 

One day, in high school, my friends and I were planning to go to the mall and just hangout in the air conditioning, like high school and middle school kids. But on the radios, the TVs, the cell phones, came news that a young man, living only ten minutes from my house and pictured right next to my oldest brother in his yearbook, had shot up a grocery store where a local beloved congresswoman was holding a rally. Six people were killed. A federal judge died that day, Gabby Giffords, our representative, was shot, and a six year old girl was killed. They held the funeral at the church my mom would drag us to every Sunday. But nothing changed. People kept their guns and decided they were more important than the lives of the children and neighbors around them. To make things worse, a radical christian group, one that is still active today and that just recently visited Maui, came to protest the little girl’s funeral and even claimed that their god wanted her dead. 

Nothing changed. Hate speech is protected by the first amendment and people will die for it, and people will let a thousand children’s lives perish before anyone can “take our guns.”

There was some hope though. Our president was black. His middle name was even Hussein. There were people in office fighting for LGBTQIA+ rights and leaders states were slowly legalizing weed and gay marriage. We had a hispanic WOMAN put in the supreme court. There were plans to fight climate change (though they were weak). But there were still shootings popping up around the country and kids in the middle east were still being bombed daily. We’re still there, still bombing too. But for eight year, there was progress, and a lot of it. 

Then 2015 came. Who the fuck did we piss off upstairs to give us 2015? A reality TV show host started his presidential bid by calling mexican immigrants criminals, thugs, and rapists. And for the first time in my life I realized that I wasn’t white (my mom is white, my dad mexican heritage from Sonora and Northern New Mexico). I remember talking to my dad, and he even said to me that in his fifty-five years of life that he never had once thought that his last name or the color of his skin could have an effect on the way people saw him. People supported this man. 

I can understand why though, and it is totally ignorant for liberals or other left-leaning people like myself to not look into what made this orange man so popular. He was different. Democrats failed to improve the lives of working class peoples. Identity politics were taking the place of actual progress and stances, and Hillary was a person with a very scary past.

Trump won, and all the sudden Nazis were, like, back. People openly identifying as Neo-Nazis and white supremecists were all the sudden marching in the streets. A person was killed because a neo-nazi thought it would be okay to hit a protester with her car. But these people are protected by the first amendment and hate-speech is not a crime (though murdering someone with your car most definitely is in fact a crime). Counter protesters were out in the streets being harrassed, and some people were, like, totally fine with this guy being in office. 

Basically, a lot of weird shit has happened. To recap anything I missed:

     - Black kids are being shot by cops and the cops are getting off free sometimes even when there is video evidence that show their wrongdoing 

     -Republicans stole a supreme court judge from Barrack Obama, and then appointed a known rapist to the highest court in the country, and paid no attention to what this might mean for their daughters, sisters, and mothers

     -There was a financial collapse (how did I forget to mention this?) and people were forced out onto the streets while houses sat empty

     -England left the European Union

     -Somehow, people living on Native American reservations still don’t have electricity and most of us are just fine with that

     -Refugee children are being held in cages in America and sleeping on floors

     -And uhh, coral reefs are dying off, plastic is killing animals in our oceans, and human-made climate change is real. 

I am not saying this is anyone’s fault. Everyone is to blame for issues taking place. People my age buy cheap clothing from sweatshops and then throw it away a month after having it. I know tons of people that are my generation that do not recycle anything, and plenty that won’t even take the five minutes necessary to register to vote. My vehicle only gets 17 miles a gallon and I eat SO MUCH FOOD THAT IS SO BAD FOR THE ENVIRONMENT. So, we all suck in a way. 

But here we are now, in the year 2020, a number that sounds made up. It feels like the times we are in are totally made up. We are not allowed out of our houses. There is a deadly virus that is spreading across the world, and people are literally dying all over. At least twenty people I know are on unemployment at the moment, the gyms are closed, and it doesn’t seem likely that I will see my students again this year. 

But people seem united in a way. People are calling each other. Cousins are setting up Zoom meetings with family members from all over the world so that we can see each other. Aunties are sewing face masks for hospital workers to use. Restaurants are giving free food to laid-off service industry employees. People are singing to one another from their balconies. Waters around busy port cities are clean enough for animals to return. Air over China has cleared up. Cities and towns are doing whatever they can to keep small businesses afloat in these hard times. Co-workers are calling each other to check in. And for the first time in my life, it actually feels like people really love each other. This virus, though it sucks, has made our world look the closest it has ever looked to an actual real live Coca-cola commercial (you know the ones on TV where all the people are singing and dancing and holding hands just because someone popped open a can of diabetic sugar water). The world is paused.

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In a way, it feels nice. 

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This situation sucks, but we are doing what we need to do: we are S L O W I N G D O W N. I am bored in my home, and I am sure most of us are, but I don’t know if I have ever seen people so united. I don’t know if I ever will again see this.

But for this moment in time which none of us will forget, we are showing each other the our best sides. We are showing what it means to really be human. 

We will get through this. This will make us all stronger. You will not give up on me. I will not give up on you. We will not give up. 

We are together. 

Thank you for reading and I hope you take some time to call your family members, your friends, your coworkers, and you neighbors today. 

Danny

Also, abolish ICE and eat the rich. 

[ithinkitsdanny]

Let’s Race.

“I’m gonna say it, thank god we’re white, right?”

That was a line (or it was something similar at least) muttered by a dude I know at a party here on the Island. I wasn’t there. I would have been offended had I heard it (though different people of different skin tones all have different opinions on whether or not I am white). I’m sure others at the party at least told this person that it’s not right to say something like that.

Another discussion at a bar, that went on for an hour, had a few of us arguing with someone about how racism didn’t exist because more black people were getting scholarships than white people, and that since Asian men on average made more than white men in America, there was no wage gap. Just to clarify, black people are definitely not getting more scholarships to schools; caucasians still recieve about 70% of scholarships in the country (1).  

I didn’t think a whole lot about race while growing up. I grew up in a whiter suburb of Tucson, an otherwise diverse city. Most of my friends were white, or at least mixed race like myself. I never really thought about race a whole lot. My mom was white, so I considered myself white and I usually denied myself the fact that I was Mexican. There was even a point where I marked my race as “white” while in high school, and I wanted to go my my mom’s name, Millstone, rather than my somewhat hispanic sounding name: Lopez. I didn’t speak spanish, we watched the Office and 30 Rock, and covered blink-182 songs with my best friend in our short-lived garageband. As far as I was concerned, I was white, and I thought everyone else basically saw me as white.

In Flagstaff, I felt a lot more comfortable, and much more confident in myself, and I loved the fact that I was hispanic. It still really didn’t mean anything to me though, because Flagstaff was pretty diverse still, and I never really thought being hispanic could affect me (I still didn’t speak spanish and I still jammed to “What’s My Age Again”).

2015 and 2016 came around and the rise of Trumpism and this (somewhat) hidden racism found in our country sprouted about after waiting like seeds in soil for someone to come along and give out some much needed water. “I never once thought that being Hispanic could affect me or affect the way people perceive me, not once in my life. But now, with this election going on, I’m actually scared and it’s at the front of my mind.” My dad said this to me, and I could not put have put it into words any better. Was my tan skin affecting me and the way people treated me? In Arizona most people thought I was Italian, so it couldn’t have.

It wasn’t until moving to Oregon where I really saw what people experienced outside of the heavily hispanic influenced southwest. Oregon, if you didn’t know, was not always welcoming to people of color. From 1844 to 1926, the state had laws in place to prevent black or mulatto people from settling within the state’s borders (2). That’s something that is still felt there. While the coastal cities are oozing with white liberalism, love, and signs preaching the importance of black lives and tolerance for each other, the mountains and east (besides Bend) featured plenty of confederate flags and arguments about what the Civil War actually meant. Even in Eugene and Portland, families of color have found it hard to find jobs or housing.

I would walk around, and I would constantly be greeted with excitement from other hispanics in the area.

“Hablas espanol?”

“No, lo siento. Hablo poco espanol.”

And a frown would pop up. Though they would still be so happy to see that another hispanic had moved into the neighborhood.

I had never been greeted with that much excitement before in my life for looking hispanic. No one in Arizona is asking you if you’re hispanic because, well we’re everywhere. We are teachers, doctors, nurses, crossing guards, lawyers, politicians, the list goes on. I didn’t see that in Oregon. Plenty of my friends were hispanic and working in fire, or another section of the forest service, but outside of that, I rarely saw any hispanics. I learned later on that some families will actually leave the Northwest to the Southwest or California because they want their hispanic children to grow up seeing other hispanics in professional positions. Who would have thought that in such a liberal place, you would find such feelings of indifference and anxiety.

Now, after moving from one of the whitest to one of the most diverse states, race is still on the front of my mind. My classrooms probably have only four anglo students. Not one of my students, or coworkers, or anyone I’ve met here (besides maybe the two mentioned at the start of this blog) have voiced any support for Trump. White people say that they feel racism against them here, which makes no sense to me. Some people think that it’s unfair that there are locals here that do not want hoales (a term for off-islanders or whites) to live in the last few Hawaiian only villages, and many don’t understand that locals do not want off-islanders here (myself included) because we are nothing more that colonizers and gentrifiers. Land prices keep going up as people from the mainland buy houses, flip them, and sell them for profit. Locals’ children are leaving for cheaper places like California (lol) to live and find jobs, and white dudes with dreadlocks litter the streets of Paia.

I was born into a great family. I was lucky to grow up with privilege, love, and support from mothers, neighbors, brothers, aunts, fathers, friends, uncles, and cousins. I am hispanic, though I do admit I am probably one of the “whitest” hispanics you’ll ever meet (“nobody likes you when you’re twenty-threeeee”). Not a lot of people are so lucky. Other friends of mine have a much more difficult time due to the color of their skin. I get confused because I don’t know where I fit in sometimes. Am I white, or am I brown? A lot of times it’s based on the people I am around. But either way it is fucked up that we can look at someone different simply because they are brown or white or black or pacific islander.

This was just my experience with race. Nothing too crazy has happened to me to my face other than white kids calling me “beaner” and “wetback” in Montana and Alaska. I don’t know what goes on behind my back, and I don’t know if other people look at me a certain way because my last name is Lopez. It’s not something I thought about a lot while I was growing up, but since 2015 it has been something that defines me. My thoughts and prayers go out to the families that have lost brothers or sisters to unrightful shootings from people because they were black. But thoughts and prayers are meaningless. How do you help stop this? Do you acknowledge it with a small blog that only half a dozen family members will read? Do you go out and treat everyone different? Do you retreat to where you fit in? (in this case I guess I’m italian). I have no idea. How do you move forward? And does anyone else I know have any similar experiences with race and relations? This has all been from just my own personal experiences, so I would love to hear thoughts, ideas, and stories from others. So please share if you can!

Thanks.

1-https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=134623124

2-https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/06/07/when-portland-banned-blacks-oregons-shameful-history-as-an-all-white-state/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.bc176a3a2c33

[ithinkitsdanny]

No Waves

The world sucks at the moment. Asylum seekers are currently being shot at by US border patrol officers, children in Yemen are starving, far-right populist leaders - fueled by hatred, racism, and extreme nationalism - are winning elections from Eastern Europe all the way down to Latin America, and the headline, “No Way to Prevent this,’ Says Only Nation Where this Regularly Happens,” is constantly posted by The Onion after each mass shooting takes place within our borders.

The world is on fire.

Love is not dead, it never will be, but hatred grows like the glow of hundreds of tiki torches that surround the statues of glorified losers from the Confederate era with every anti-Semitic attack and lynching that takes place around America.

The first draft of this blog post asked questions that centered on individuality and the pursuit of growth in oneself. “Are you what you want to be?” and “is this the life you’ve been waiting for?” were the original drivers of that dry and deleted blog post. I don’t think those questions matter at the moment. There is no room for the “Individual” and the search for self-worth at this pivotal time in our world’s history.

I battled the question of the importance of individuality while working with the US Forest Service in the Pacific Northwest. Being a Forestry Aid (a glorified title for firefighter) was a dream job for every adventure seeking, ADHD riddled, granola-ass, college graduate that always wanted to break away from white-collared “nine-to-five” jobs that are so easily available after college. While there were many reasons I didn’t return for a second season of firefighting, the question of “is this what I am supposed to do?” kept popping up in my head.

I have a degree in teaching science at the secondary level. Five years, thousands of dollars, countless nights writing papers about pedagogy and rocks, and the unconditional love and support of dozens of family members, a patient significant-other and her wonderful family, and friends, went into acquiring that degree. Was I wasting my time in the Forest Service, while there were thousands of students in Arizona and other states that did not have fully staffed schools?

The answer is a hard no.

I was not wasting time in the Forest Service, I was learning and gaining experience that is needed to become a better and more well-rounded person. I loved that job, and I don’t think I had every been happier while trying to meet car and credit-card payments, but this was not the career for me (all of my love and respect to those people that I met while working in the Middle Fork District because we desperately need good fire fighters right now).

My time with the Forest Service was my first dip into the “real world” after college, and I would never trade that for anything, but my taking of that job was to fulfill a narcissistic need for adventure, freedom, and a sort of rebellion against what my family expected of me after completing college. I may consider doing a season again if I miss it enough, but once the season was done, it was time I realized that I was needed elsewhere, and that was in the classroom for the time being.

We need so much right now as a country. Fighting fire made me happy, but there is more to life than just doing what makes the individual happy. We are all brothers and sisters on this planet (I don’t care how hippy-dippy that sounds). Fighting to reward ourselves with just doing what makes ourselves happy is a selfishness that is not seen anywhere else in nature (this is definitely a generalization to strengthen my argument, but if you are aware of any animals that are living life based on a system of exchanging capital for goods and services then please let me know). We have the ability to think beyond ourselves and ask questions that challenge existentialism. Happiness, just like capital gain, should not be what drives the individual to rise out of bed and work every morning. The question shouldn’t be, “what makes me happy??” maybe it should be “how am I making a better tomorrow, today?” because in reality the only thing we can really leave behind to generations that succeed us is tomorrow.

So, back to my main topic, how do we defeat hood-adorning, holocaust-denying, torch-wielding, lynch mobs of pussy-grabbers from tearing our world apart? It is with love - and not the kind of love where you go out and justify your bourgeois lifestyle by giving a homeless family an unthawed turkey on thanksgiving, or by simply hugging your friends and students and fellow subway patrons (although some people honestly do just need a good hug from someone every now and then), it is by giving yourself to others. It is by giving your time. Time to inform other people of the events taking place in the world and by convincing them to mobilize and actually vote on issues that will affect them. It is by marching in the streets on your only days off and showing women that you do care about their rights that members of our government are trying to take from them. It is by showing that there are more people that care about the migrant than there are people that want them to “go home.” It is by showing that you actually give a fuck about the person next to you.

You can’t just put up a sign in your white Oregonian neighborhood that reads “I love my Muslim neighbor.” You have to fight for that person to actually feel like she can rely on you and call you a neighbor. You can’t just tweet #metoo, you have to stop whatever it is you are doing to make female coworkers feel welcome where you work, and you need to stand with those women and fight back against the patriarchy that has allowed women to have to deal with ass-slapping and unsolicited glances from male coworkers (not to mention the criminal pay difference between men and women). Tell the man yelling at the Hispanic family to “go to hell” because they were speaking Spanish, and stand with them until that man disengages or until the proper authorities show up. Show nazis that free speech should not be confused with swastikas and fight with students that don’t want anti-Semites like Milo Yiannopoulos spewing hate speech on their campus.

Push yourself to do better for others, work jobs that benefit society and your neighbors, fight against hatred, teach, be a nurse, get a degree in law and fight for civil rights, vote for others and not for your pocketbook, and don’t come to a middle ground with family members and friends that support toadstools like our president, tell them they are wrong, show them love, but beat them by campaigning with the person that will fight against hatred.

A revolution is needed in this world, and it starts with letting go of the notion that you and your needs and your desires matter more than the person sitting across from you.

How do you feel you can contribute to spreading love in this day? What are you doing today to improve tomorrow for others?

There are only three months left until I leave for Panama (although, I am still waiting on medical clearance). This is an extremely stressful and exciting time for me, and I do appreciate all the love and support I have from the people around me, keep it coming. Thank you for taking time out of your day for reading.

[ithinkitsdanny]

Sept. 30, 2018

My final cavity fillings were done this week (one thousand dollars later, not including the four hundred my family helped me with, what the heck insurance??). I received my first chicken pox shot (another one hundred and fifty dollars! Does insurance even do anything??), and I’m on my way to finishing up my medical requirements to be cleared into the Peace Corps. My anxiety about the PC is overwhelming. Every day is a day closer to having to leave this place and start on a new adventure. I am so worried that I may be making the wrong choice. I am absolutely in love with Maui; I have never felt this kind of contention in my life. This place is unreal, the people are beautiful, and the island is just an amazing place that I wish my friends and family could experience. But Peace Corps has been my dream for awhile; it will be stressful, and it is going to be the hardest two years of my life, but I am going to be so happy that I did it when I am older. It is an experience that only so many people get to do, and I am so lucky that I have been offered a position with the Corps.

Yet, I am still so worried about so many things that I didn’t think I was going to be concerned about. I am so afraid that I am going to do a terrible job. I am scared my back pain will get worse and that I will have to leave early, I am worried about being so far away from everyone and feeling isolated and alone, I am afraid of leaving the people here because I have grown close to them.  This is a fear I haven’t felt since I left for college.

It is just another step up from what I did when I left for college right? Like, when I was leaving for college I was scared because I was leaving my home, my friends, my family, and everything I knew, for a place that was so foreign to me. Flagstaff was literally just a four hour drive from my home, but it felt like a new world that I was not ready for. Now, I am preparing to leave my home in Hawaii, for a country that I know little about. I don’t speak the language, I know little about the culture, I have never even left this country, besides one family vacation to Baja California, which I don’t think really counts as leaving the country. I am literally doing what I did in August of 2012, but now it’s to another country, to work a job I know nothing about. I am beyond anxious. I am scared out of my mind. This is not what I was expecting to feel at all, especially this so far out! That four hour drive to my dorm room seems so small now.

There are still four months until I leave, but those weeks are going to frikkin’ fly by, and before I know it I will be on a plane to a country that is beyond foreign to me. I don’t even know what my motivation for doing the peace corps is anymore!

Maybe that is what I should do. I should list out what is my motivation for going now. I am not trying to get out of Arizona anymore. That was one major motivator. Moving to Hawaii has satisfied that desire. I want to do something new: Moving to Hawaii and teaching has satisfied that craving, but teaching here could only be fun and new for so long, and I can always come back and teach here again afterwards. So there is new motivation: It will be new, I will learn a lot from it, I will experience things very few people ever get to experience, I may be able to inspire others to do more in their life too. I need to remember that, what I am doing is inspirational to others to do more in their life. I want people to do what they love in life. There is so much that everyone can do with their life if they just push themselves. I am listening to Logic (a rap artist for my readers that are not up on current music) and he is literally saying the exact thing that I am typing: put your [airplane O2] mask on and do it, then help other people out. I am going to help others out by doing something inspirational. If I can get this stuff done, if I can get my degree, if I can work in Oregon as a firefighter, if I can move to Hawaii to teach children about science, and if I can go into the Peace Corps to help people in far off villages, then other people can do it too. If other people can do it, then the world will be a better place. If the world is a better place, then more people will do more.

There is motivation. Make the world a better place. Save the world. Let’s save the world.

Next, I need to figure out what I will do with my life afterwards. Teach again in Hawaii for a couple years, get my master’s degree in education from University of Hawaii, or maybe study somewhere in another country (New Zealand has interested me ever since a friend of mine showed me a folk/reggae artist from their), continue to teach for a couple of years in some weird place (Alaska? Kauai? Patagonia? Marshall Islands?), work on my Ph.D. and teach at a university, inspire young people to become teachers, eventually earn tenure, run for public office and spread socialist ideas to help poor people break free from their economic chains of poverty, make the world a better place. I’ll be found by a woman somewhere along the way and she won’t get annoyed with me and we’ll probably have family somewhere between all of that. Continue to make the world a better place.

Maybe none of that happens. Maybe I just end up staying in my air conditioned classroom and teach 8th grade science for the rest of my life here on Maui. Even then, I am helping students that have hard lives, and I am making the world a better place. That is all that really matters right?

I’ll just focus on what is in front of me right now.

Danny