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artificialqueens · 5 years

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Stake Through the Heart (Branjie)- athena2

So this is based on an amazing prompt from @writworm42: “If anyone is looking for a prompt of late, a branjie fic where Brooke is an Extremely Serious vampire hunter who hears legends about Vanessa and turns out Vanessa is an ennui-filled, sarcastic, chaotic good vampire (a la what we do in the shadows) who is Not At All afraid of Brooke would be complete and total poetry xx.” I hope this is at least somewhat what you imagined, and I hope you like it!

Brooke first heard about Vanjie when she was 12.

A year after her parents were killed and she went to live with her grandmother.

A year after she was drafted into a war she had been groomed for her entire life, a war she quickly became an honored soldier in.

“The Mateo clan is one of the oldest, most dangerous clans of vampires in the world,” her grandmother had explained early in her training. “Some say they go back to the 1400’s.”

“Vanjie is one of the most feared. She’s the last of the line. She’s been a vampire less than a century, but she’s killed more than those three times her age. Four hunters have been killed by her in the last year alone. None have ever managed to kill her.”

Brooke shifts in the shrubs, eyes narrowing as a figure approaches.

The brunette is yapping on the phone, parading through the cemetery like she’s at a party. Doritos fall out of a bag as she walks, a trail of fake nacho cheese breadcrumbs. Her wavy brown hair flows behind her, shining in the moonlight.

Hand on her crossbow, Brooke stands, ignoring her screaming muscles, sore from 15 years of hunting.

Gotcha, she thinks.

—

It’s not the first time their paths have crossed, though neither of those times went according to plan.

The very first time, none of Brooke’s careful training could prepare her for finally seeing Vanjie. It was probably some sort of vampire charm, but Brooke couldn’t take her eyes off Vanjie and her smooth skin, mesmerized by her big brown eyes. By the time Brooke recovered her mind enough to take out her stake, Vanjie had already disappeared without so much as flashing her fangs.

She’d taken on Vanjie with junior hunter Plastique last winter, Brooke barely escaping with her life after Plastique knocked herself out with her own crossbow, but not before it misfired and an arrow lodged in Brooke’s chest, dangerously close to her heart.

The pain must have made her hallucinate, because she thinks she remembers Vanjie putting Hello Kitty Band-Aids over a scrape on her arm, then vanishing right as an ambulance Brooke didn’t call for arrived.

It was probably just a hallucination.

Though she never was able to explain the Band-Aids.

The arrow wound took months to heal and the scar tissue still twinges when she moves wrong.

She went back to working alone after that. She should have known it was dumb to take someone under her wing; she’s better on her own, has been since she was a kid. She threw herself into extra training, extra research. She won’t fail again.

Third times the charm, and all that nonsense.

—

“I know you in them woods, Blondie. Want some Doritos?” Vanjie’s voice sounds like a gangster from the movies.

Brooke stills, heart thudding painfully. A vampire had never been able to pick out her hiding place. Vanjie was as good as the legends said.

“Come on out,” Vanjie continues. “I don’t bite. Well, not on the first date, anyway.”

Brooke tightens her grip on the crossbow and moves silently out to the gravestones.

“You here to kill me? You could at least buy me dinner first. Seriously. Minimum wage is shit. A bitch is broke.” Vanjie stands with her hips cocked and inspects her crimson nail polish.

Brooke doesn’t say a word. She inches closer, her finger on the release. She should have already pulled it. Why hasn’t she? And why aren’t Vanjie’s fangs out?

“Am I supposed to be scared of you?” Vanjie demands. “You pretty impressive, I’ll give you that. But you can only be so scary when you smell like lavender. Are you, like, 90?”

Well, the lavender body wash was supposed to be calming, not that it’s working considering the way Vanjie is making her blood pressure skyrocket right now.

Vanjie sighs. “Look, if you’re gonna kill me, can we go to my apartment first? I should be allowed a last meal.”

This is against the rules. This is wrong. But this is the closest she’s ever been. She can feel it in her blood. Brooke shrugs. “Lead the way.”

—

Brooke was always a good student, bringing home A’s as soon as she was old enough to get letter grades. She didn’t go into her hunting career unprepared.

She started at 18, the earliest they would let her, though she’d been training and studying for 6 years. By then, she was too late to avenge her parents: the two heads of the Mateo line died mysteriously when she was 16, no hunter taking the credit for it.

But Brooke still worked. Within months, she was a top hunter, killing vampires that had been around for centuries. Each one was just practice, an appetizer before the feast.

Last year, after months of studying the Mateos, she set her sights on Vanjie.

She knows Vanessa Isabella “Vanjie” Mateo was born October 1930, the youngest of the Mateo line. She had been turned in the summer of 1958, when she was 27. She’d bounced around Puerto Rico and the United States, currently residing in Toronto.

Brooke’s heard the legends, the stories of horrible vampires and the brave hunters that fought them in her ear since she was a child tucked into bed with stuffed animals. Vanjie’s were always the most gruesome stories, the ones that made her stay up all night fearfully clutching her stuffed rabbit as Brooke vowed to become the thing that vampires feared.

According to legend, her kill count is in the thousands.

According to legend, she ate the hearts of those she’d killed when blood wasn’t enough.

According to legend, no hunter to engage in combat with her has ever walked away alive.

—

Brooke’s hands sweat. She’s not following the rules. She’s certain no hunter has ever been to a vampire’s home. But it’ll be worth when she gets revenge for her parents. When she kills the most dangerous vampire in recent history. When she becomes the brave hunter in the stories parents tell their kids.

“You mind if I change first? I always say my job is gonna be the death of me, but I’d rather not die in this thing.”

The blue polyester polo is ugly, though Brooke thinks it looks unreasonably good on Vanjie.

“Okay.”

Brooke takes in the messy kitchen with its checkerboard floor. Takeout containers are piled in the sink. None of the chairs match; one is a rocking chair, one is shaped like a giant hand, and one has ornate trim and red velvet lining. A goldfish swims in a soda bottle filled with water, while mysterious green liquid bubbles(?) in a fishbowl. The refrigerator has stickers reading “Meme Wall”, and is hidden beneath cut-out pictures of people and quotes even Brooke admits she can relate to. Strings of Pokémon cards serve as a pantry door, a lava lamp glows purple on the table, pink streamers hang from the ceiling light, just brushing the floor. Brooke forces her eyes down on the floor before her head explodes.

Something doesn’t add up. Where was the creepy dungeon stuff Vanjie had in the legends? This place looks like a bunch of stoned college kids decorated it. And why was Vanjie being nice to her? She can’t let her guard down. This is probably all a ruse; how Vanjie lures hunters in before she kills them.

She is still standing, bow slung over her back, stake in its thigh holster, when Vanessa comes back in black leggings and a sleeveless shirt made of flowy red silk.

“Stay a while, Blondie. Sit down and relax. You always so tense? Let me loosen those shoulders for ya.” Hands unclasp her bow and nudge her into a chair before clamping down on her shoulders and massaging out the aches.

“I don’t–I’m not–my shoulders are none of your business!” She splutters, wriggling her shoulders until the hands leave, refusing to acknowledge how nice they felt. She stays in the chair, the velvet one, which smells like Sour Patch Kids mixed with wet dog. “I’m here to kill you, if you haven’t noticed!”

“So do it. I’ll even give you an open shot.” Vanessa pulls aside her shirt, exposing the smooth skin over her not-beating heart, and Brooke forgets how to breathe. Vanjie definitely has some sort of charm power.

She makes no move for her stake.

“That’s what I thought.” She covers her skin, breaking the spell.

“I will. Eventually,” Brooke promises. “I want answers first.”

“You want coffee?”

“No. It makes me jittery.”

“Good, ‘cause I don’t have any.” Vanjie reaches for a bright orange Frisbee, dumping in cereal and milk before crumbling chocolate Pop-Tarts and Fritos over the top.

Where was the blood of her enemies? The hearts she ate for dinner? Brooke thinks she’d rather watch Vanjie eat a heart than this monstrosity. “Who the hell puts that in cereal? And why are you eating out of a Frisbee?”

Vanjie drops into the rocking chair across from Brooke before speaking.

“Don’t judge me. I work retail and I deserve this. One, it makes Cocoa Puffs more chocolatey, and chocolate’s my main reason to live. Or well, to not die. Plus you get salty-sweetness. And two, A’Keria’s slacking off on the dishes.” She slurps up milk. “Why’s it matter? Who says cereal has to be eaten in a bowl? You know the shit I’ve seen? The earth is dying, bees are dying, who gives a flying fuck what I eat out of? You do. I bet you eat Raisin Bran with bananas.”

“Strawberries, actually.”

“So little soldier girl can tell a joke.” Vanjie grins.

Brooke has to hold her own smile back. She’s here to kill this bitch. She’s never broken procedure like this, ever, and she has to remind herself she’s only going along with Vanjie’s nonsense because she’ll do whatever it takes to kill her.

“So, why?” Vanjie asks abruptly.

“Why what?” Brooke sighs. She wishes this bitch would shut up already so she can kill her, because the more Vanjie talks, the farther away Brooke’s stake feels.

“Why do you hunt? Gotta be a reason,” Vanjie challenges with a smirk.

“My parents and grandparents were hunters.”

“Ah, family tradition. Hear that one a lot.” She crunches on a Frito.

“Your parents killed mine.” Shit. She had a strategy. She had plans, she had notes. She wasn’t supposed to blurt that out yet.

“Well, shit.”

“That’s all you have to say?” Brooke’s out of her chair before she knows it, stake pressing against Vanjie’s chest. “My parents died! I…I was only 11!”

Vanjie wraps her hand around Brooke’s wrist, her skin tingling. “I’m sorry. Can you give me a minute to explain? I know you’re all noble and stuff. Please hear me out.”

Brooke sighs and settles back in her chair, holding the stake tightly.

“I’m sorry about your parents. I really am. That must have been hard. You were just a kid.” Vanjie’s voice is impossibly soft and Brooke finds her grip loosening. “But you need to know, I was never part of their whole murder thing. My parents…they cut ties with me decades ago. I wasn’t what they wanted. I like girls, first of all. And I wouldn’t kill. I only drink animal blood. I’ve never killed anyone.” She takes a breath. “Well, except for them.”

“What?” She drops the stake. This could all be a lie, and Vanjie could kill her any second, but she believes her.

“Yeah. They said I could get back into their graces if I found myself a male companion or killed a newborn baby to prove my loyalty. You know, just basic things you do for your parents to like you,” she mutters acidly. “I just fucking had it. So I killed them.”

“Holy shit.” Vanjie’s voice is deadly calm and serious, eyes dark, and Brooke knows she’s telling the truth.

“Yeah.”

“But-but the legends about you! You killed more hunters than anyone! You’re one of the most feared vampires in history!” She shakes her head frantically. How could this all be going so wrong?

“My parents made that shit up,” Vanjie shrugs. “Couldn’t have people know their daughter was a disappointment. It wasn’t like anyone was gonna fact-check ‘em.”

“I don’t think you’re a disappointment,” Brooke says quietly.

Vanjie bites her lip and smiles sadly. She pulls her shirt open again. “So, we gonna get this over with?”

“Do you, like, want to die?” Brooke asks, making no move to hurt Vanjie, her mind still buzzing.

“I mean, I’m not exactly having a good time in this hellhole.”

“Maybe you should talk to someone.”

“That’s your advice? A fucking therapist?”

“Sorry. My grandparents made me go to one. After, you know.”

Vanjie nods. After a few seconds of silence she stands up and leans in, placing her hand on Brooke’s shoulder. “Did you heal up okay? After your little friend got excited and shot you? Too bad I didn’t have enough Band-Aids to cover all of you.”

“You-” Her eyes go wide. It wasn’t a hallucination.

“Yeah, I remember that night. Not everyday someone knocks themselves out with their own weapon. Couldn’t forget those eyes of yours, either.”

Vanjie’s hand slips underneath Brooke’s black T-shirt, fingers ghosting over the raised skin where the arrow pierced her. Brooke looks up at the exact second Vanjie looks down and then their lips meet.

Vanjie’s lips are surprisingly soft and strong, pressing Brooke firmly into the chair. Vanjie’s hands roam all over Brooke’s chest and Brooke hesitantly lifts hers up to Vanjie’s back. There is no heartbeat pulsing beneath her fingers but Vanjie’s body feels infinitely alive as Brooke’s hands move to tangle in her hair.

They break apart after what feels like years and Brooke tries to remember how to breathe.

“That was pretty impressive, Blondie.”

“Brooke. Not Blondie.”

“Vanessa. Not Vanjie.”

They both look at each other awkwardly. “So I guess that means you’re not gonna kill me?” Vanessa asks in a small voice.

“No. I’m not.” She gathers her bow and slips her stake inside its holster.

“Leaving so soon?”

“Yeah. I-I should go.”

Vanessa nods. She gives Brooke a quick hug, hand steady over Brooke’s jacket pocket. Over her heart.

“Mind the streamers on your way out. It’s some jellyfish costume Yvie’s trying to make.”

Brooke feels something inside her jacket pocket once she gets home. She pulls out a tiny piece of paper with a phone number on it.

She falls asleep with the paper clenched in her hand.

—

The next day she dials the numbers that are unfamiliar to her but that she hopes become second nature.

“Vanessa? How about that dinner?”

#rpdr fanfiction #brooke lynn hytes #vanessa vanjie mateo #branjie #lesbian au #vampire au #angst #athena2 #tw mild mention of homophobia #tw implied depression #concrit welcome #submission

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alarawriting · 5 years

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Inktober #8: Frail

This was delayed a day because it’s longer than any of the others. Relates to my WIP “No Drama”, aka “Q is an investigative journalist researching whether God is a corrupt politician of his people”.

So the first thing I need to explain before I tell you about meeting Heph is his name.

Humans call me John Deer (it’s a joke. Their name for a man who has no name is John Doe, but a doe is a female deer. I don’t technically have one of their genders, strictly speaking, and if you go by the body I’m in, it’s not female, so I thought I’d go by John Deer. Turns out the joke’s on me; add a silent e to the name and it’s a company that makes tractors. Go figure.) However, as I hope would be obvious, that’s not my real name. The Aleph don’t have physical bodies and aren’t made of matter and the pure information we are made of doesn’t translate to syllables you or anything that makes sound can pronounce. If I were to translate my name, it would be impossibly long to convey in words; an Aleph’s name is, essentially, a hash function of our personality, the defining nature of our being. I’m not going to stand here and recite my entire personality to you, or anyone else’s entire personality, either, and don’t expect any other Aleph to do so.

So when we walk among pre-eschatonic species, we generally go by the names of gods in their language, or animals of symbolic value (which on most planets, for many groups on that planet, are indistinguishable from gods), or Virtue Names like “Patience” (that one is definitely not mine). And then, when we speak to one another with our meat mouths because we’re in meat bodies, we use those names, the use-names specific for that planet, that culture, that language. On Earth, in English-speaking languages (as well as a significant number of the other ones), I’m known to other Aleph as Fox, Ferret or Weasel, depending on their current opinion of me. My opponent goes by the Lion, or the Ape. But Heph doesn’t use animal names; for the past several hundred years, when he walked on this planet, he called himself Hephaestus. The Greek God of engineering, smithing and invention – technology, in other words – who also happened to be crippled. I think it would be hard to find a myth better suited to be Heph’s use-name.

You see, Heph was born damaged. (We aren’t “born” like you’re born, messy screaming infants coming out of a parent’s orifices. A seed is woven by an entire team of Aleph who’ve chosen to procreate and gotten permission to do so, and then that seed grows fractally. So we are a little less random than spinning the Wheel of Sperm and Ova like you guys do… but not much less random.) By the time he was grown enough that anyone was able to notice the damage, it was too late to correct him without making major changes to his essence, and most Aleph would have to be dying before they’d consent to that (if then. Personally I’d rather die.) It’s hard to explain what the problem is to a non-Aleph, so I need to draw an analogy. In essence… his bandwidth is too low. He cannot quickly upload anything to the Host, and he doesn’t have the storage capacity for the energy we draw down to do our reality-altering things. Where the rest of us are gods, Heph is barely a guardian spirit.

Back when we were both living in the Host most of the time, I am… ashamed to admit that I overlooked Heph, the way almost all the Aleph do. He can’t join with one of us – well, he can, but it’s shallow because of his low bandwidth. Not to be crude about it but it’s as if one of your males was trying to make love to a woman with the vaginal depth of a tea saucer. It… doesn’t do a lot for most Aleph. He can’t participate in most of the things we do because he can’t store enough energy to do it. So he isolates himself from us, and we let him do it because we’re all kind of at a loss as to how you include a guy who can’t do 90% of what you take for granted.

Heph, however, is very smart. All Aleph are by human standards, but Heph is by our standards. So he found a way around the problem.

When I met him on Earth, I was dying in a gutter. I’d been sentenced to a decade of being locked down to a single mortal body, and since I’d been on Earth when they grabbed me and put me on trial, it was Earth they sent me back to. Specifically, Victorian England. Naked, and with no money. Or antibodies. I ended up in a workhouse, where as you can imagine I did fantastically well since I’ve always been so eager to do pointless busywork and follow orders. The main punishment for disobedience was not being fed, followed by being held in a cell for a day and then given clothes that were supposed to shame you. I had no sense of shame, but I got a lot less food than the body I was in needed, and I was surrounded by people who were not in the best health. When I couldn’t work anymore and I was delirious with fever, they threw me out to be picked up with the rest of the refuse, assuming I’d be dead by morning.

Heph was on Earth too. He tracked me down, using technology he’d created. That’s Heph’s thing. He creates technology to compensate for his weaknesses. We have safeguards against anyone or anything but a recognized member of the Host drawing on power, so his tech can’t do all the shiny things a full-powered Aleph can, but we have plenty of access protocols to reach the database of knowledge. So he was able to find me. No Aleph was supposed to render me aid, but Heph was not afraid of pulling the cripple card to get away with doing anything he’d been forbidden to do that he nonetheless decided was the right thing to do. He may be one of the smartest of us, but most Aleph treat him as if he’s not particularly bright, just because he can’t output his thoughts as fast as the rest of us, or fork himself and multi-process. And he made sure not to give me any aid that only an Aleph would be capable of. He fed me bread mold, a powerful antibiotic – you know it as penicillin – that humans happened to not have discovered yet, and pumped sugar, water and saline solution directly into my veins with a sterile glass tube ending in a needle, which humans would later refer to as an IV once they’d invented it. It was all with materials that could be found on Earth, that humans could have discovered (and in fact did, later on.)

I didn’t know my sentence was for a decade. Nobody had told me there was a time limit. I thought they’d left me on Earth to die. Heph restored meaning to my life. The Host as a whole may have abandoned me, but one specific Aleph still cared, and went well out of his way to take care of me. Heph’s not known for being a fluffy, love and compassion kind of guy; he’s cold, aloof, introverted, with difficulty outputting his emotions in a format most Aleph can read, and his shallow bandwidth means that if an Aleph tried to probe him directly, it would cause him a lot of pain. Which, since we are a compassionate species, meant no one was allowed to probe him without his permission. Which he never gave.

In those days, Heph had been tall and broad-shouldered, still going with the whole blacksmith motif. He was never ripped like a bodybuilder, but his upper body had some substantial muscle to it. He’d affected black curly hair and bronze skin like the Greeks he’d named himself for. And he’d worn thick spectacles and walked with a cane. I’m not sure whether he does it on purpose or whether it’s a subconscious compulsion, but every body Heph creates for himself in matter has damage to mobility and damage to perception, representing what he suffers in his true form. I tend to think Heph identifies so strongly with being disabled, he can’t imagine having a form that isn’t.

Ten years before I’d even learned the sentence was finite. Heph had known, but hadn’t been allowed to tell me – and while obviously he thought he could get away with saving my life and being my companion and showing me how to survive as a human, equally obviously he didn’t want to disobey the Host in the matter of telling me my sentence. Their logic was that it was hardly an aspect of being mortal to know for a fact that if you just survive long enough you’ll get your immortality back. The truth was, of course, the Lion had had the judges in his pocket. We hated each other even then; that’s why I started investigating him. He had them do it to be pointlessly cruel, and they came up with a rationalization to the rest of the Host. Well, in those ten years, Heph became my best friend. Raven and Cat and Monkey, my other close friends, hadn’t come to visit. Even Isis, who treated me like I was her little brother and used to watch out for me when we were millions of years younger, left me there. Heph was the only Aleph willing to risk the displeasure of the Host to be my friend.

So as soon as I came back to Earth, I looked him up, of course.

I’m kind of in the same boat he’s always been in; I have my powers, but the moment I draw down energy to do anything major, or even upload any complex hand-rolled query, my memories upload to the Host. And I’m absolutely sure that the Lion is going to honor the law and not seek to obtain illicit access to privacy-locked memories. Yup. Positive. So the moment I use my powers, my enemy gets to see exactly what I’ve been thinking and planning up to that point. Which means I can’t use my powers for anything short of “my physical body has just been killed and I need to upload or I’ll actually die.” But locating a fellow Aleph is such a common query, we have a wizard for it, which can be triggered without uploading – and while my privacy lock keeps that particular simple query from finding me, Heph’s never felt the need to hide.

But I gotta admit I was kind of shocked when I saw his new body.

He recognized me, of course. “Fox. Come on in.”

Heph was living in a farmhouse that he’d converted to his brand of tech wonderland, probably because he wanted to have enough land between him and his human neighbors that no one called the cops for strange noises or mysterious lights. I stepped over several gadgets of unknown function, following Heph to the kitchen. “You still drink tea?” he asked me.

“Uh, yeah, what have you got?”

“Oolong, chai, green with ginger, peach chamomile, Earl Grey, and hibiscus.”

“Gimme the chai.” The last time we’d met, chai had been something you’d only get if you were actually in India.

I made my way to his kitchen table, which was covered with papers and had what looked like two laptops sitting on it. I happened to know they were laptops the way desktop computers are abacuses, but humans probably wouldn’t have been easily able to tell the difference, unless they knew the Unix operating system well enough to know that Heph was not running a variant of it. Heph pushed the papers out of the way on one of the chairs, giving me a clear spot to sit down, as he remote-activated a teakettle with his mind.

“What brings you back to Earth?” he asked.

“Before we get into that, I need to address the elephant in the room, Heph.”

“No one here goes by Elephant.”

If I hadn’t known Heph as well as I did, I might not have guessed he was telling a joke; he was completely deadpan. “Yeah yeah. What have you done to your use-form?”

Like I said, the last time I’d seen Heph, he’d been built, matching the crippled blacksmith stereotype. Now… he was still tall. That was about the only point of resemblance. He’d gone for a pasty white, skinny form with long blond hair in a ponytail, thick glasses with a tint to them so I couldn’t really see his eyes well, and his body looked like it would blow away in a strong wind. There was a visible brace on his left leg, and he dragged it very slightly when he walked. Heph had always made his use-forms disabled, but there’s disabled and then there’s “looks completely helpless.”

“This is the new look for the 21st century technologist,” Heph said.

“It looks like the consumption chic that was going around in Byron’s day. Do you eat? At all?”

“Sure. Chips, pizza, burgers. All of the fatty, unhealthy stuff that modern technology gurus poison themselves with when they’re crunching on a project, which is all the time.”

“Great, so you’re not just incredibly skinny, you also probably have a dozen vitamin deficiencies. Heph. You gotta keep that body running! With your upload time—”

“Thanks, I’m aware of my upload time. And I’m pretty sure you didn’t drop in on me just to tell me I’m too thin.”

“I’m worried about you. You look like one high fever could do you in.”

“They’ve invented a lot more antibiotics than they had around when you got sick. Listen, Fox, I get that you’re worried, but I’m not trapped like you were. If something goes wrong with this body because it’s too fragile to survive, which is highly unlikely anyway, I’ll have enough time to upload. I’ve got plenty of equipment to scan it for health.” He got to his feet with some difficulty and limped over toward the singing teakettle.

“What was wrong with the old one?”

“Firstly, too many photographs got taken of it. I had to fake my death so I didn’t have uncomfortable questions about why I looked exactly like my great-grandfather.”

“Maybe you should have thought of that before posing for photographs right after they were invented.”

“It’s not the Victoriana I was concerned with, it was more the World War II era stuff. And secondly, it’s the aesthetic. Today people don’t think of blacksmiths when they think of technology. They think of autistic white men with bad vision.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Did you actually give yourself autism or is that just a metaphor?”

“Look the definitions up, I am actually the closest thing to autistic the Aleph have ever produced.” He came over to the table with my tea. I didn’t try to help him or intercept him. Quite aside from the fact that he’d find it insulting, he had so much junk on the floor that his knowledge of what to step over and when made him more mobile than I’d be. “But stop trying to sidetrack me. What are you doing on Earth?”

If another Aleph had asked that question, there might have been all kinds of subtext in there. Are you in exile again? Have you gone native after spending ten years as a mortal here? Don’t you have anything better to do? From Heph, it more or less meant exactly what he’d asked. “Can’t tell you unless you’ve run a backup,” I said, taking a sip of the tea.

Heph rolled his eyes. “You’re so dramatic,” he said. “Look at this.” He got up again and dodged some more junk on the floor, making his way toward what the people who’d built this place probably thought of as a family room or maybe sitting room. I followed, feeling like a drunk guy in a china shop. My personal aesthetic has never been tiny, delicate motions, so getting anywhere across Heph’s floor without breaking his stuff was like a minefield, except with fewer actual explosions, I hoped.

It was a metal box. “Very impressive,” I said. “I especially like the craft in the solder lines.”

“Don’t be an ass. Here.” He unlatched a latch I hadn’t recognized and lifted the lid. Inside was a crystalline array of the kind the Aleph used to use before we shifted to encoding our data in neutron stars. “Local backup device.”

I tried not to look impressed. Of course Heph had a local backup device. I was kicking myself for not assuming he’d have created such a thing. “Does it work?”

“I changed my use-form. How do you think I did that without it being a major pain in the rear?”

That was a good point. Heph’s bandwidth was low enough that it would take him a couple of days to upload to the Host. Changing bodies would have involved creating a new form, uploading out of it, and then downloading into the new one… which was a problem if it took you two days to upload or download, because your physical body might very well die on you or suffer brain damage while you were imperfectly socketed in it. I felt a lot better about Heph’s frailty now. “How long does it take to transfer to that?”

“I’m running delta backups every time I sleep, so if the body were to die unexpectedly, I’d only need to transfer at most a day’s worth of memories and experiences. Probably 20 minutes at a maximum. Also, if it wasn’t obvious to you, I’m not doing regular backups to the Host and I can tag data to keep it out of the upload when I do, and there’s no way any other Aleph is getting into my local backup server. It’s not even connected to the Host except when I run uploads from it.”

Okay. His memories weren’t accessible to the Lion either. That meant it was safe to tell him the details of what I was up to. I made my way back to the table with my teacup. “So, this is going to be a long story…”

#inktober 2019 #no drama

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mandelene · 6 years

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Tag Game

Answer 15 questions and tag 15 mutuals

Thank you to @feyna-v for tagging me!

1. Are you named after someone? No, my mom picked my name just because she liked it and it was American/English and not Polish (she didn’t want to give me a Polish name). My dad agreed to it. (My name is not Mandelene, btw).

2. When was the last time you cried? While reading the ending of Small Country by Gael Faye a few days ago.

3. Do you have kids? Nope, not yet, haha, but I hope to have kids someday if I can. Two or three but no more than three :) Idk how to explain it, but at some point within the past two years, I started feeling more...maternal toward kids, if that’s the right word for it. I just see kids on the bus and think, huh, yeah, I could have one of those, I think I might like that, God knows why.

4. Do you use sarcasm a lot? Oh, boy. Yes. It’s not as obvious when I’m online, but ask my mother or my close friends and they will confirm that 90% of my daily life is spent being sarcastic. My life is just one big sarcastic meme.

5. What’s the first thing you notice about people? How they present themselves -- whether they’re smiling or frowning, standing up straight or slouching, etc. For men, I immediately notice how tall they are because I’m a tall woman so tall men are absolutely heavenly to look at. Any man that’s like 6′2 ft or taller and in their mid to late twenties makes my heart flutter instinctively. (This is how I know I’m definitely straight, bahahaha).

6. What’s your eye color?

Hazel. I joke that I must be adopted because my parents and sister have green eyes, but my great-grandmother had hazel eyes so I guess my parents are my parents.

7. Scary movie or happy ending? Happy ending for sure. Scary movies rarely have a storyline that I find interesting tbh.

8. Any special talents? I’ve been told I bake a fantastic coffee cake. I can recite the alphabet backwards, and I know some first-aid, but those are skills and not really talents.

9. Where were you born? I’m a Brooklyn baby. :D Brooklyn, NY.

10. What are your hobbies? Writing, reading, occasional video-making, playing with my cat, indoor cycler, casual gamer, novice yoga pupil.

11. Have you any pets? Of course. Most of you know my baby already:

Macchiato!

12. What sports do you play/have you played?

Oh, here we go. Brace yourselves for a tangent.

I was the sickly asthmatic kid who was too busy coughing up a lung to play sports, and I’m only half-joking. I played soccer a lot as a kid with my friends, but I was never on a team because my asthma was too severe and out of control for that. I’ve talked about this many times before, but I spent a good chunk of my childhood in the doctor’s office. I missed a lot of school. I got poked and prodded. I cried often about how much I hated being sick. I would be out playing with my friends and have an asthma attack in front of them and feel embarrassed. I would start wheezing and ignore it because I didn’t want everyone to make a big deal out of it. Don’t ever ignore your asthma, please. That never ends well. Sports were something I feared for years.

Midway through high school, my relationship with sports changed completely. I started seeing them as a method to improve my asthma rather than worsen it. My pulmonologist got my asthma under better control by coming up with a treatment regiment that he made sure I stuck to by lecturing my teenaged self at great length and wrote notes to my gym teachers at the start of every marking period. I slowly started regaining my confidence. My doctor made it clear that he was not excusing me from gym completely -- I had to exercise to the best of my ability without making myself sick, and if I kept getting attacks, it was back to the drawing board. If I couldn’t manage to exercise normally, then, in his view, my asthma was impeding my life too much and my medicine wasn’t working for me, which was totally true.

One of my high school gym teachers, Mr. B, was notorious for being the hardest P.E. teacher in the school. I was terrified of him. Whenever he made us run laps, I would pause when I started feeling unwell, rest for a minute, and then continue. He never said a word to me about it even though he was known for scolding students for stopping. Oddly enough, it took me a while to realize this, but he was always subtlely looking out for me. He always asked me if I had my inhaler with me at the start of class. Although I was often dead last in everything he made us do, he pretended not to notice and never commented on it. I never cheated him. If he said to do 30 laps, I would do 30 laps, even if I had to pause three times in between. Everyone else would have already moved on to other exercises while I was still doing my laps, lol, but I don’t think I ever had to reach for my inhaler. At the end of the term, he pulled me aside and told me, “I know you always tried your best, and I admire that.” He gave me an A. He was the only gym teacher I had who didn’t accuse me of making excuses or being lazy. Many previous teachers had convinced me I wasn’t trying hard enough, so I would push myself, and then I promptly proceeded to have attacks, be frustrated with myself, and end up in tears in the locker room. I needed Mr. B in my life to restore my faith in gym.

Nowadays I indoor cycle 3-4 times a week for 45 minutes to an hour to strengthen my lungs. Once a week, I have my “long tour” which is when I cycle for an hour and thirty minutes. After cycling, I lift weights for another 15-20 minutes. If I have a cold or any other upper respiratory infection, I stop all exercise until I’m well, and I hold myself to this. I have a better idea of my limits and what sports are best for me. I love swimming, but unfortunately, I don’t have a good indoor swimming pool around me, so it’s not something I can do regularly. Running/Track is still something I really struggle with, but brisk walking or hiking is fine. Last year, I was really into dance classes with my friend. Cycling is super kind to my lungs but leaves me exhausted in a good way, so that’s why it’s my favorite form of exercise. I’m sure if I did it outside though, I’d have asthma attacks. I’m generally okay with all sports/exercise as long as it doesn’t involve long stretches of running with few breaks in between, and I don’t do it outside when it’s cold. I won’t die from a light jog unless it’s the middle of January and there’s a meter of snow on the ground. You can invite me to play volleyball/basketball/tennis/whatever, and I promise I’ll be fine, haha.

I’ve also tried getting into yoga recently by following some YouTube instructors, but cycling is what I do most regularly and have stuck to. I take frequent exercise very seriously now, and I make it a priority.

13. How tall are you?

5′10 ft, so 177.8 cm. Super tall, I know. You should see my legs in yoga pants ;)

14. Favorite subject in school? In elementary school, I enjoyed English classes the most. In high school, AP comparative government in my senior year was my favorite because I love international politics. Then, there came a point in my life when I stopped liking English classes and started despising them (around my second year of university). College English consists of reading novels (which is a good start) and then writing unnecessarily long papers analyzing the novel, but if the professor doesn’t like your interpretation or analysis, they’ll deduct points. They’re not the classes you want to take if you want to actually learn how to be a better writer. They just teach you how to pander to the professor and not how to think for yourself. It’s annoying. Journalism classes get right down to the technical parts of writing and tear your sentences apart. I feel like I gain more from those classes than ones in which I have to write a ten-page essay on the symbolism of a key.

15. Dream job? A few years ago, I would have said “reporter for the New York Times,” and while that would be incredible, I have multiple dream jobs now.

I would still love to work at a media outlet. I’d want to either work at the international desk as a writer/reporter or work on digital content like podcasts or short documentaries. However, I can also picture myself working at an NGO or at a think tank. I might also be interested in doing something in government someday--anything that has a direct impact on getting involved in a community. Global politics and writing are my two biggest passions, so if I end up doing work in either of those areas, I’ll be happy.

Ideally, I can continue writing fiction on the side and publish it someday, but that’s still a dream I have to work my way up to.

I don’t want to leave anybody out, so if you’re reading this and you want to answer it, consider yourself tagged by me! :)

#tag game

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totalkpoptrash · 7 years

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92 truths tag meme

Rules: Write 92 truths about yourself then tag 25 people

Thank you @literally-just-yoongi-trash for the tag (not sure if anyone else tagged me in it, I’m not going back any farther than the last month hahaha)

LAST…

[1] drink: black coffee

[2] phone call: My husband

[3] text message: My supervisor/best friend Kelly

[4] song you listened to: BTS - Save Me

[5] time you cried: Uhhh last night I got a little emotional over Born Singer while I was watching that live performance, you know that one where they stand on the rotating platform yeah I cry every time ok bye.

HAVE YOU EVER…

[6] dated someone twice: Yeah but it was like, 6th grade so not really.

[7] been cheated on: yuuuuup

[8] kissed someone and regretted it: Yeah when I was drunk XD

[9] lost someone special: Too many this last year and a half, if I’m being honest. 4 and counting.

[10] been depressed: Have you met me?

[11] gotten drunk and thrown up: Only once and I don’t actually remember the puking part.

LIST 3 FAVOURITE COLORS:

[12] green

[13] black

[14] bright af pink

IN THE LAST YEAR HAVE YOU…

[15] made new friends: Tons, that’s what happens when you move across the country and have to meet all new people again :/ (But I love my friends no joke, especially all of you guys)

[16] fallen out of love: No. I think love evolves for me as I get older and my relationship has definitely changed a lot over this year due to everything that has happened to us, but not in a bad way. I’m very lucky to have a relationship that has grown and changed with me ever since I was young and I hope it continues to be that for both of us.

[17] laughed until you cried: So many times!

[18] found out someone was talking about you: Yeah a lot :/

[19] met someone who changed you: Oh absolutely. That’s what human interaction is all about man

[20] found out who your true friends are: Yep

[21] kissed someone on your facebook list: I mean yeah XD

GENERAL…

[22] how many of your facebook friends do you know in real life: I’d say 80-90%

[23] do you have any pets: Yes, a dog, his name is Obi Kenobi

[24] do you want to change your name: Not really, I like it now more than I did when I was younger

[25] what did you do for your last birthday: Uh..... I WENT TO THE FUCKIN WINGS TOUR IN NEWARK WITH THE COOLEST PEOPLE AND HAD THE BEST TIME EVER AND ALSO LOST MY VOICE FOR A WEEK which was really embarrassing when I got to see my dad for the first time in like 18 years 2 days later.... and I could barely talk....

[26] what time did you wake up: about 12:30 PM

[27] what were you doing at midnight last night: Just settling in after getting home from work.

[28] name something you cannot wait for: J Hope’s mix tape. I have a feeling this boy is gonna drop fire on us.

[29] when was the last time you saw your mother: Almost 2 years ago :/

[30] what is one thing you wish you could change about your life: I wish I still worked at my old store with the staff there, but could bring my new friends/coworkers that I love with me. I really hate the management team where I’m at now, they are lazy and rude.

[31] what are you listening to right now: No music but I should change that.

[32] have you ever talked to a person named tom: I have an uncle named Tom so yes XD

[33] something that is getting on your nerves: I think I’m getting ANOTHER cold :/

[34] most visited website: .........Do I have to say it???

[35] elementary: My dear Watson? (Central Elementary School, Snohomish WA)

[36] high school: Cheney High School, Cheney WA

[37] college: I went to college but the government shut down in America screwed my financial aid application so I didn’t go back for my last 2 classes because in the mean time I ended up getting a promotion to a job that I really loved and it was full time and my classes wouldn’t have worked out around my schedule. Ugh if I’d known then that I was gonna have to give it up and move here because my husband’s dad was dying.... I would have taken online classes or done night school or somethiiiiing.

[38] hair color: Naturally brown, currently pink AF

[39] long or short hair: SHORTTTTT

[40] do you have a crush on someone: Too many someone’s and they’re all kpop idols

[41] what do you like about yourself: I like my hair and I think my ears are cute :3

[42] piercings: each ear, 3 times

[43]blood type: When I ask my mom she says ‘the common one’

[44] nickname: Missa, Cabbage, Boo Boo, Missile, Scooter, Sissy, MEMU,Mel, Melrose, too many others.

[45] relationship status: Married for almost 9 years. but I’m a hoe for Jimin (and all of BTS let’s be real)

[46] zodiac sign: Pisces

[47] pronouns: She/her

[48] fav tv show: Probably Parks and Rec and Scrubs

[49] tattoos: I have 4 and I’ve been itching for more lately.

[50] right or left hand: Right

FIRST…

[51] surgery: I had a really bad infection from tripping in an outhouse when I was a toddler and landing on a piece of wood or a nail or something right in the juncture of my thigh to my groin. They had to pack it full of gauze and change it out several times. I don’t remember much of it but I think that was the earliest? If not then it was probably the stitches on my lip when I tripped and landed face first on a metal toy chest and my teeth went through my lip.

[52] piercing: ears

[53] best friend: My first best friend was my cousin Elizabeth who was a couple months younger than me

[54] sport: I played basketball in second grade if you can call it that XD

[55] vacation: Uhhh ‘To the property’ as we called it, which was really just us going across the state to the place where my parents were building a vacation cabin up in the mountains.

[56] pair of trainers: I have no clue but I did have a pair of bad ass Goosebumps sandals that glowed in the dark at one point.

RIGHT NOW…

[57] eating: nothing

[58] drinking: black coffee

[59] i’m about to: go get something else to drink at the gas station

[60] listening to: nothing still XD

[61] waiting for: uh..... me to get tired?

[62] want: money to deal with all of my stresses XD

[63] get married: I already did?

[64] career: Ugh. Again. Want to go back to my old store. I was on the management track there, supervising, running 4 departments, managing 17 vendors, and so much happier.

WHICH IS BETTER…

[65] hugs or kisses: hugs

[66] lips or eyes: depends on the person

[67] shorter or taller: I prefer taller in both usually

[68] older or younger: I used to swear I’d never be interested in younger guys... then I married one.... and then I found kpop.... Honestly I don’t care, I like both.

[70] nice arms or nice stomach: arms I think. I really like shoulders.

[71] sensitive or loud: both?

[72] hook up or relationship: depends on the person XD

[73] troublemaker or hesitant: depends on the situation? I’m kinda both

HAVE YOU EVER…

[74] kissed a stranger? Probably

[75] drank hard liquor? yep

[76] lost glasses/contact lenses? never had either

[77] turned someone down: Yea a few times

[78] sex on first date? Uh... I mean.... I wouldn’t call it a date... >.>

[79] broken someone’s heart? According to him, yes.

[80] had your own heart broken? Of course.

[81] been arrested? not yet

[82] cried when someone died? Too much lately

[83] fallen for a friend? off and on in my life. I love very openly and freely

DO YOU BELIEVE IN…

[84] yourself? In some respects

[85] miracles? I believe in the universe, is that the same?

[86] love at first sight? I believe in ‘infatuation at first sight’

[87] Santa Claus? The man. The Myth. The Legend.

[88] kiss on the first date? I mean I would if I was feelin it.

[89] angels? Not in the specific sense of the word, but something.

OTHER…

[90] current best friend’s name: Kelly for people I know in real life, and too many to name of my online/kpop friends. you know who you guys are and you literally keep me alive so thanks. I love you.

[91] eye color: Brown

[92] favorite movie: Labyrinth. Uhhh I tag the usual suspects, but I won’t list them, I know you’ll all see them and this is from like a month ago so XDDDD

#me #personal #not kpop #tag games #tags

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democratsunited-blog · 6 years

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If Bill Clinton had never been president, Democrats would be better off today

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=5675

If Bill Clinton had never been president, Democrats would be better off today

AS FLEETWOOD MAC took the stage in January 1993, awkwardness hung in the air. It was, after all, the full band’s first performance since an acrimonious breakup many years earlier. When the familiar chords of “Don’t Stop” filled the stadium, Lindsey Buckingham managed to ape his acrobatic guitar playing from the ’70s. His voice, however, refused to come out of early retirement. Stevie Nicks wore an unfortunate Mad Hatter cap and a confused, bug-eyed expression that hinted at some kind of hostage situation.

Yet as soon as a band member called out, “Sir, would you join us, please?” everything began to feel right. The youthful president-elect, Bill Clinton, looking dashing in his tux, glided onto the stage for a gala on the eve of his inauguration, joined by his wife and daughter, and then Al and Tipper Gore.

Clinton smoothly tapped a tambourine as he sang “don’t stop thinking about tomorrow,” the hopeful refrain that the Man from Hope had selected as his campaign theme. Watching him light up the place, two observations were unavoidable. First, history was being made. The 46-year-old president-elect — the first boomer to win the White House — was taking the baton from an old-fashioned elder who had been born during Calvin Coolidge’s presidency. Second, not only couldn’t Al Gore dance to the beat, but he seemed to have trouble even clapping to it.

The next evening, departing from the presidential tradition of simply making an appearance at each inaugural ball, Clinton projected vitality all night long, soaking up the energy from a dozen different celebrations held in his honor. Whether playing the saxophone with Clarence Clemons, swaying to the music with Michael Jackson, or cracking jokes with Jimmy Buffett, Clinton never seemed to want to leave.

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The day’s top stories delivered every morning.

At the “youth inaugural ball,” he bit his lip to signal a serious note and told the young crowd, “You and your generation are a lot of what this election was all about, and I hope you felt like you won today.” As thousands of elated Gen Xers roared their approval, he continued. “I hope that this day will always be something you want to tell your children and grandchildren about, something you’ll always be proud of.”

Related Links

The backstory on this alternate version of presidential history

Imagining a Bill Clinton loss to George H. W. Bush in ‘92 reveals where Democratic party ideology went off the rails.

A quarter-century later, I challenge you to find a beaming Gen Xer who reminisces to her kids about that magical day when she helped usher in the Clinton years. (I mean besides Chelsea — and who knows if even she is doing much beaming these days.)

In the #MeToo era, it has become a common lament for progressive Democrats to wish Bill Clinton would just go away, especially after his latest round of tone-deaf, remorseless comments about “that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” One reason: As long as his ghost of sexual misbehavior hovers in the air, it undercuts Democrats’ ability to call out similar malfeasance by other powerful men, most notably the current president.

In reality, that lament is far too narrow. Sexual misbehavior represents just one of the many ghosts from the Clinton years that continue to haunt the Democratic Party.

Here’s a provocative alternate reality that, with the benefit of time, is just starting to come into focus: All those joyful Democrats who tearfully celebrated the generation-shifting results of the 1992 election would likely be better off today if Bill Clinton had lost and George H. W. Bush had been reelected.

In erasing Bill Clinton’s victory, I am not suggesting we also erase his ’92 campaign, or adopt a George Bailey “better off if I’d never been born” scenario from It’s a Wonderful Life.

Clinton is an enormously important figure in the history of the modern Democratic Party. By pushing his “Third Way” moderate-reform agenda on issues like welfare and crime, he proved the Democrats could once again be viable competitors in postindustrial presidential politics. He stopped the bleeding and may have helped spare them from a Whig-like demise into nothing-but-a-congressional party, and then nothing at all.

Just how far into the wilderness of presidential politics had the Democrats drifted by the time Clinton made his run? Consider this simple arithmetic: Count all the electoral votes that the Democratic nominees for president received in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988, add them all up, and you’d still be 80 votes shy of the 270 it takes to win a single election. The Democrats’ only win in the nearly three decades between 1964 and 1992 was Jimmy Carter’s improbable victory in 1976, an asterisk made possible by a powerful post-Watergate backlash. When Carter ran for reelection four years later, the sitting president garnered a whopping 49 electoral votes.

No, the Democrats wouldn’t be better off today if Clinton had never run — just if he’d never won.

BEFORE WE GET TO WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN, let’s review what actually was. We’ll start with a pop quiz for Democrats: Name the three most important domestic achievements of the Clinton administration.

Chances are you’ll say a booming economy — the byproduct of responsible financial stewardship that converted record budget deficits into healthy surpluses. If you lean centrist or buy into pollster sabermetrics, you might mention welfare reform, which finally neutered the devastating if cynical tactic Republicans had used to paint their Democratic opponents as defenders of lazy “welfare queens.” Or maybe you’ll cite the assault weapons ban of 1994, a high-water mark for gun control that no pol of that persuasion has managed to come close to since, despite the numbing frequency of mass shootings.

Follow-up question: Which achievements from the Clinton years still hold up today?

Do you need more time?

I tried this exercise with several presidential historians and public policy pros, and the most common answer turned out to be “very little.”

PEP MONTSERRAT for the boston globe

If you’re a policy wonk with a good memory, you might mention the expansion of the earned income tax credit or CHIP, the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Those are both worthy achievements, but hardly the kind of legacy granite that would get you anywhere near Rushmore.

As for all that hard-fought budgetary discipline that produced a booming economy and an across-the-board rise in real wages, all of that got swept away like confetti the morning after an election party. Not long after Clinton unpacked his things in Chappaqua, his successor was presiding over a sputtering economy, increased poverty, and yawning deficits.

Much of the blame for that financial recklessness, of course, rests with George W. Bush. But the fickle nature and uncertain authorship of boom times explain why historians generally don’t focus much on the economy when calculating their presidential rankings. What’s more, the ease and speed with which the gains from the ’90s were erased helped expose profound miscalculations that Clinton made in economic and social policy.

Take welfare reform. Clinton is now roundly criticized by progressive Democrats for having pushed an overhaul of the welfare system purely for reasons of political expedience. In fact, that characterization is close to dead wrong.

Going back to the early 1980s, Clinton as a young governor was showing his determination to fix the abundant problems in a welfare system creaking with age, inefficiency, and perverse incentives. His Third Way/New Democrat approach made him attractive to voters nationally not just because it was smart politics, but also because it was sound public policy. And he knew he had a winning issue. He repeated his promise to “end welfare as we know it” so often on the campaign trail that aides began using the shorthand of EWAWKI.

Where the pure political expedience kicked in with Clinton was his decision during his 1996 reelection campaign to jettison all his years of seriousness in trying to find a fair, workable welfare reform plan. After vetoing two unserious, mostly punitive Republican welfare bills, Clinton signed one that was only marginally less bad. How bad? Three of the smartest social-policy minds in his administration resigned in protest.

One of them was Peter Edelman, who served as an assistant secretary in the Department of Health and Human Services. (He had been close with Hillary Rodham for decades, having introduced her in 1969 to his wife, Children’s Defense Fund founder Marian Wright Edelman, who became one of her best friends.)

Today, Edelman tells me he knew the president he went to work for was not a fellow liberal. But even if the train chugged along more slowly than he might have liked, he always assumed it would move in the correct direction. Not so. When Clinton signed the Republican welfare bill in 1996, Edelman says, “I was shocked. It was an unspeakable blow to millions of utterly powerless people.”

As for Clinton’s justification that he risked losing reelection if he didn’t sign it, Edelman calls that “pure bull — just rationalizing.” He points to a meeting when Clinton polled his top advisers. Even the most centrist or politically savvy voices in the room — Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, chief of staff Leon Panetta, and senior adviser George Stephanopoulos — sided with the liberals in encouraging him to veto it, confident that it would not cost him a second term. Only domestic adviser Bruce Reed and Commerce Secretary Mickey Kantor recommended that he sign it.

The damage, Edelman says, was masked by the rising tide of the late-’90s boom, which lifted all boats and led to record-low poverty rates. But when the economy turned bad, it became clear that the welfare law Clinton had signed effectively dismantled the safety net for millions of vulnerable people. That helped pave the way for today’s near-record-high income inequality.

The assault weapons ban produced a different kind of failure. Clinton deserves lots of credit for getting this sensible legislation passed. Still, it was packaged with an overall crime bill that, we now know, did far more damage than good. It significantly accelerated the growth of the prison-industrial complex, and its “truth in sentencing” components greatly increased both the amount of time criminals spent in prison and the racial disparities within our justice system. Across Clinton’s eight years in office, the number of people imprisoned in this country grew by nearly 60 percent.

That’s why it was so easy for Bernie Sanders to score points with progressives in the 2016 campaign by blaming Hillary Clinton for the fallout from her husband’s crime policies, which she supported. In fairness, though, crime was an incredibly hot-button issue with voters in the early 1990s. Fears about carjacking and crack dens, fanned by the emergence of 24-hour cable news, were prominent in people’s minds. Democrats who wanted to stay in office could not be seen as soft on crime. Remember that the darling of the left, Mario Cuomo, added more prison beds as New York governor than all of his predecessors had combined. Also remember that the list of congressmen who voted in favor of Clinton’s 1994 crime bill included a certain Vermont socialist with a Brooklyn accent.

And how about that assault weapons ban? To squeak it through Congress, the Clinton team accepted a compromise letting the ban expire after 10 years. Clinton’s legislative affairs director Patrick Griffin says in his oral history that the price Democrats paid for it could not have been steeper. He argues that the National Rifle Association’s rage over the ban was the biggest factor in propelling Newt Gingrich’s “Republican Revolution” takeover of Congress that same year, which thwarted Clinton’s entire agenda.

The Clinton years offer plentiful examples of noble goals married with clumsy execution producing devastating consequences. Health care reform blew up badly enough to render it a crime scene that no one dared go near for another decade and a half. The president who attempted to keep his promise to young, progressive supporters by allowing gays in the military ended up signing the retrograde Defense of Marriage Act.

The Republican wave in ’94, framed around Gingrich’s “Contract with America,” sapped much of the policy ambition out of Clinton. Overnight, his focus shifted from persuasion to survival.

For Gingrich, the Republican Revolution was part of a grand plan he began scripting four years earlier. That’s when, as the House minority whip, he had infuriated President George H.W. Bush and the entire Republican leadership by reneging at the last minute on his support for the 1990 bipartisan budget agreement. The budget deal, which required Bush to raise taxes and break his “read my lips” campaign pledge, turned out to be the critical scaffolding on which Clinton’s deficit-reduction plans were built. But it also turned out to be the start to a ferocious revolt within the Republican Party.

“You can draw a direct line from Gingrich’s decision to break with Bush in 1990 to the Contract with America,” says historian and Bush 41 biographer Timothy Naftali. And that line continues long after 1994. The anti-elite, starve-the-beast Gingrich Republicans, he says, paved the way for the drain-the-swamp Tea Party crowd.

And Gingrich clearly had loftier ambitions than simply being elected House speaker in 1994 and upending Clinton’s presidency. As Bush budget director Richard Darman had predicted two years before that, “Newt is on a path for himself to be president of the United States.”

Associated press/file photos

Although Clinton argued he needed to sign welfare reform to avoid losing reelection, his savviest aides argued otherwise, including, from left, Robert Rubin, Leon Panetta, and George Stephanopoulos.

LISTEN TO TODAY’S CRITIQUES from the leaders of the left, Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders. Sure, they bash Donald Trump and George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. But if you trace their indictment back to its roots, you’ll see they’re really talking about Clinton.

When they complain about how “billionaire bankers” from Wall Street hijacked Washington, “rigging the system” against the little guys, they’re largely referring to the decisions made by Clinton and his most influential economic adviser, Robert Rubin, as well as Rubin’s deputy and successor, Larry Summers.

As with so many of Clinton’s instincts, his shift on economic policy came from a sensible place. After decades of relying on the New Deal/Great Society playbook rather than working to craft a plan better suited to a changing economy, Democrats had developed a reputation for being reflexively antibusiness and pro-bureaucracy. Clinton and others in the centrist Democratic Leadership Council argued that Democrats had to do a better job of listening to business interests.

Again, it’s important to remember that the ’90s were a different time. How different? Millennial progressives, you might want to sit down for this one: Elizabeth Warren was, until 1996, a registered Republican.

Instead of listening to Main Street, however, Clinton ended up embracing the corporatist ideology of Wall Street, whose evangelists arrived overflowing with both confidence and campaign cash.

The Clinton economic approach began with deficit reduction. He hadn’t paid much attention to that issue during the ’92 presidential campaign until Ross Perot hopped into the race, built his entire third-party campaign around it, and improbably garnered 19 percent of the vote. So Clinton began zooming in on the deficit almost from the moment he entered the Oval Office, presumably right after he finished reading that inimitably classy letter of support that outgoing President Bush had left for him.

Leon Panetta, who headed up the Office of Management and Budget for Clinton before becoming his chief of staff, recalls how committed the new president was to doing fiscal discipline the right way. “I can remember almost a day after the inaugural that we sat down with him in the Roosevelt Room and began walking through the budget, line item by line item,” Panetta tells me, pointing out how rare it was for a president to get that granular. That, he says, was Clinton’s great gift — possessing the policy mind of a Jimmy Carter and the communications skills of a Ronald Reagan.

Yet fiscal discipline was only one component of the Clinton economic policy that came to be known as “Rubinomics.” It also featured financial deregulation and pro-corporate trade policy, all set against a largely unquestioning embrace of globalization. Remember that it was during the Clinton administration that derivatives were deregulated, NAFTA was approved, the Glass-Steagall Act separating investment and commercial banks was repealed, and China, despite its record of rampant rules violations and human rights abuse, was welcomed into the World Trade Organization. In championing NAFTA, Clinton assured displaced blue-collar workers they would get a real safety net of job retraining and additional support so they could successfully transition to the new economy. Even though Republicans roundly blocked that kind of spending, that didn’t stop Clinton from pursuing additional trade deals.

It was an agenda that could have been gift wrapped for Goldman Sachs, where the well-liked Rubin served as cochairman before joining the Clinton team, and Citigroup, which he joined immediately after leaving the administration.

“Clinton presided over a huge amount of financial deregulation, which set in motion the extreme speculation that ultimately led to the financial collapse in 2008,” Robert Kuttner, cofounder of the progressive journal The American Prospect, tells me. “It led to a worsening of income inequality and also made the Democratic Party more captive to Wall Street.”

Kuttner, who wrote a prescient profile of Rubin a year before the financial meltdown, says the upshot is that today, “Democrats have less and less credibility with ordinary Americans on pocketbook issues.” (Panetta concedes, “A lot of people dropped the ball, not just in the Clinton administration.”)

What the Democrats ceded was the ability to distinguish themselves as the party not beholden to powerful Wall Street interests. That’s why a New York billionaire like Trump could in 2016 make such light work of painting Hillary Clinton as a tool of Goldman Sachs, even though he would go on to stack his Cabinet with Goldman Sachs executives and billionaire financiers.

AP/File

Clinton’s sexual misbehavior with Monica Lewinsky is just one of the many ghosts still hovering from his presidency.

Of course, Bill Clinton’s biggest unforced error was his affair with 22-year-old intern Monica Lewinsky. Infidelity by Clinton was not surprising, given all the drama prior to the New Hampshire primary in 1992 about “bimbo eruptions” — the term coined by Clinton deputy campaign chair Betsey Wright to describe the fusillade of rumors about extramarital affairs. People who voted for Clinton knew the sins of this Southern governor involved a lot more than just lust in his heart.

Russell Riley, the head of the Presidential Oral History Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, says Clinton’s aides were so determined to avoid scandal that they had protocols in place to prevent the president from being alone with women. (Maybe that’s where Mike Pence got the idea for his never-alone-with-a-lady-besides-my-wife rule.) How did the system fall apart with Lewinsky? The government shutdown in November 1995 cleared the White House of everyone except senior leaders and lowly interns, and that left Clinton unchaperoned.

Despite Clinton’s past, his aides were nonetheless shocked by his recklessness. Panetta worked with Democratic and Republican presidents from Carter to Barack Obama. “I never saw someone who loved being president more than Bill Clinton,” he says. “I never in million years thought he’d risk it all like he did.”

The Republican House impeached Clinton, led by Gingrich, whose moral outrage was undiluted by the fact that he was cheating on his second wife and had reportedly pressed his first wife, who had been diagnosed with cancer, about a divorce while she lay in a hospital bed recovering from surgery. After the impeachment push turned out to be a giant overreach, Clinton not only survived but saw his approval ratings rise.

Yet the collateral damage for the Democrats was massive, and enduring.

Before the Lewinsky scandal, Fox News was a distant third in prime-time cable news. Because of it, the conservative channel’s ratings grew a staggering 400 percent. In his book, The Loudest Voice in the Room, Gabriel Sherman writes that during the scandal, Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity “were reborn as cultural bulwarks against a growing number of contemptible influences: Bill Clinton’s libido, the media, environmentalists, gay activists.” He quotes a former executive for the network saying, “When Bill [O’Reilly] started wagging his finger at the president and raising his voice, that was the genesis of the modern Fox News.”

If Clinton didn’t pay for his transgressions — and continues to resist owning up to them — others around him sure did. Aside from Lewinsky, the biggest victim of the scandal had to be his handpicked successor, Al Gore.

AND NOW, AN ALTERNATE VERSION OF HISTORY . . .

PEP MONTSERRAT for the boston globe

Let’s get the disclosures out of the way. Yes, I understand you can’t go back and change the past. Even if we could, we’d never be able to predict with confidence how events would have unfolded. As Quantum Leap taught us, just the attempt to alter the past can introduce all manner of unintended consequences.

If your mind won’t let you get past the limitations of this counterfactual imagining of a Clinton loss to Bush in ’92, I won’t protest if you stop reading now. For everyone else, please buckle up and remember to keep your hands inside the car at all times as you hop on this alternate-political-reality ride. It begins in 1997 as George H. W. Bush completes what would have been his second term in office . . .

George H.W. Bush sat down at his desk in the Oval Office on the last morning of his presidency and began writing a letter to his successor. Right thing to do. “When I walked into this office just now, I felt the same sense of wonder and respect that I felt all those years ago,” he began. “You will be our President when you read this note. I wish you well. I wish your family well. Your success is now our country’s success. I am rooting hard for you. Good Luck — George.”

He dated it January 20, 1997. He addressed it, naturally, to his successor, Bill Bradley.

[Or maybe it was Al Gore. Or Jay Rockefeller, George Mitchell, Ann Richards, Paul Wellstone, John Kerry, or Howard Dean. Or maybe even, at long last, Hamlet on the Hudson himself, Mario Cuomo. It might even have been a Democrat with an unfamiliar name. This is, after all, the imagined part of our alternative version of history. The point is: Bush, after two terms, would have been handing off the presidency to a Democrat who was not Bill Clinton.]

As Bush reflected on his tenure, the word he kept coming back to was “exhaustion.” The 41st president was 72, and, after two terms as president and two terms as Reagan’s vice president, he was more than ready to leave Washington for good. Time to relax with Bar and the dogs in Houston and especially in Kennebunkport.

Bush was being sincere in wishing his Democratic successor well. He was a proud Republican, had been all his life. But first and foremost, he was an American. Why wouldn’t he root for the president? The American president?

And if he was being completely honest with himself, Bush shed no tears for the Republican nominee who had just lost the 1996 election, Newt Gingrich. Never trusted that guy — too slippery. That’s why Bush had been so crushed when Gingrich cruised past both Dan Quayle and Bob Dole in the primaries to get the ’96 Republican nomination.

Bush’s mind flashed back to that meeting in the White House during his first term, the one when Gingrich had agreed to stand with him in support of the 1990 bipartisan budget deal. United front. Good of the country and all that. But when they started walking out to the Rose Garden for the press conference, Bush asked an aide, “Where’s Gingrich?” Turned out, the guy had headed up to Capitol Hill. CNN even caught his betrayal on camera as he walked away. Then Gingrich had wasted no time in bad-mouthing the deal. Could tell even back then how thirsty for power that fella was, how he wouldn’t stop until he was president.

Bush wasn’t crazy about the budget deal, of course. Knew the critics were going to savage him for breaking his “read my lips” campaign promise. But if he was prepared to take it on the chin for violating his Dirty Harry pledge, why shouldn’t some guy who’d been House minority whip for only one year? Bush also knew if they didn’t tackle the deficits, none of the economic prosperity that the country had begun to enjoy during his second term would have been possible. Sometimes, even Republicans had to raise taxes. For crying out loud, even Reagan knew that.

Bush had heard all about Gingrich’s blame game trying to explain away his loss in ’96. So like him to point fingers instead of taking responsibility for his mistakes. Be a man. Instead, Gingrich had been peddling some cock-and-bull revisionist story to anyone who would listen about how the Republicans would have been better off if Clinton had actually beaten Bush. Imagine that, a Republican leader talking with regret about a Republican president winning reelection!

Bush knew Gingrich had been a history professor before entering politics, so people took him seriously when he talked about historical patterns. How new presidents tend to get clobbered in midterm elections. How, if Clinton had actually beaten Bush in ’92, the timing would have been perfect two years later for some kind of fierce backlash. How it would have produced a Republican wave across the country in ’94. Not just enough to win back the Senate, mind you, but enough to finally break the Democrats’ hold on the House. Gingrich was telling people now that, instead of being stuck in the minority, he would have become speaker and been able to reshape national politics. Dream on, Newt.

AP/File

If Bush had beaten Clinton in 1992, his second term would likely have been a long intraparty battle with the ambitious Newt Gingrich. Instead, Clinton became Gingrich’s chief target.

The fella now insists all the philandering that got Clinton into so much trouble during the campaign would have resurfaced if the Arkansas governor had actually managed to win in ’92. Would’ve doomed his presidency. To Bush, that seemed like to a whole lot of nonsense.

Bush never shied away from tough politics. He was proud of his record as an honorable and principled guy while in office, even if he knew he was sometimes less so when vying for it. Campaigns weren’t for the faint of heart.

That’s why he looked the other way in 1988 while Lee Atwater did his thing and some PAC ran that Willie Horton ad savaging Mike Dukakis. A decent man, Dukakis was. Still is. If you want to Monday-morning-quarterback it, Dukakis probably didn’t deserve all that Horton business. But he probably shouldn’t have been running for president, either.

Even if you campaign aggressively, though, Bush knew there had to be limits. Had to keep it about policy, not personal lives. That’s why, during the ’92 race, he had no interest in turning Clinton’s womanizing into a campaign issue.

Besides, where does Gingrich get off talking publicly about bimbo eruptions and all that? Back in 1980, after he argued with his first wife about the terms of their divorce while she was in the hospital, didn’t he tell his aide that the poor lady battling cancer wasn’t “young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the president”? Disgraceful. And he was already angling for the White House when he’d been in Congress for just two years!

The only excuse for Gingrich’s loss that seemed legitimate to Bush was that Ross Perot probably had cost him the ’96 election by running as a third-party candidate. Back in ’92, Bush had feared that Perot might screw up his own reelection bid if the Texas billionaire jumped into that race, but he had stayed on the sidelines. And Bush had the same worry four years before that, when that blowhard Trump kept running his mouth about how he was going to run for president as an independent in ’88. Buying full-page ads in the papers, campaigning in New Hampshire, and whatnot. Good thing that turned out to be just empty talk. Like so much with Trump.

Bush had to admit that his first term felt a whole lot more fulfilling than his second one. Amazingly, managing the end of the Cold War and the international coalition that forced Saddam out of Kuwait had turned out to be less soul-sapping than trying to negotiate, over and over, with the obstinate right wing of his own party.

How many times had he sat Gingrich down on that cream-colored sofa over there and tried explaining it all to that son of a so-and-so? How, if a Republican president couldn’t count on his own party to get things done, he’d have no choice but to make deals with Dick Gephardt and George Mitchell. How, if Gingrich couldn’t get past his purity tests over taxes and insisted on carrying out a civil war within their party, he’d ensure that a Democrat — and not Gingrich—would be the next occupant of the White House.

“I don’t doubt that you’re a smart cookie,” Bush would tell him. “But the American people want to see Washington get things done. Not going to twiddle my thumbs for the next four years while you say no to everything.”

Clinton may have lost in ’92, but because he had turned it into such a close race, after a generation of blowouts for the Democrats, his party realized the Arkansas governor had been on to something after all. It dawned on them that if they found someone like Clinton — maybe a little less centrist so the liberals wouldn’t get so worked up, and with a much more normal personal life — they’d have a real shot the next cycle.

Bush figured that’s why, after years of stalling, Democratic leaders had finally been willing to tackle welfare reform during his second term. Gingrich should have welcomed the opportunity, given how long he’d been talking about the broken system. But Gingrich refused to support any reform that didn’t slash funding. Didn’t take a Rhodes Scholar to figure out that would be a nonstarter with a Democratic Congress. So Bush had cut a deal with Mitchell and Gephardt that gave millions of poor mothers the kind of training and support they needed to move from welfare to work. What kind of person wouldn’t support that?

In pivoting away from Gingrich and toward bipartisan deals, Bush had been replicating some of his biggest successes from his first term. Take the Americans With Disabilities Act. Let the old cranks at the diner whine about all the money being wasted on ramps, or all the best parking spaces now being off-limits. Just thinking about how that one law improved the lives of millions of disabled Americans — including lots of wounded veterans, this nation’s true heroes — made Bush smile. And every time he sat out on his patio in Kennebunkport and took in the clean, salty air while watching the Atlantic waves crash into Walker’s Point, he was reminded of how precious this planet is. And how proud he was of his work to help keep it that way by signing the Clean Air Amendments back in 1990.

Having to deal with a Democratic Senate meant that when Bush had the chance to name two more justices to the Supreme Court in his second term, he had no shot of getting another lightning rod like Clarence Thomas through. Mitchell and Joe Biden assured him that if he chose another moderate like his first appointment, David Souter, the nominee would sail through. A lot of Republicans had grumbled that Souter was some kind of “stealth” nominee, a closet liberal. Bush was surprised Souter turned out to be so moderate, especially since he’d been championed by Bush’s conservative chief of staff, John Sununu. Still, Souter seemed like a decent, smart, sensible fella. Reminded Bush of his own father, a rock-ribbed New England Republican who was star quality in everything he did. A couple more Souters on the court wouldn’t be so bad. Especially since Bush knew he’d never have to run for reelection again and be forced to listen to those self-important bores at the Federalist Society chewing him out.

The only times Bush secretly wished he had lost to Clinton in ’92 were when that pest Lawrence Walsh held yet another press conference or announced yet another indictment in his endless Iran-Contra probe. No doubt that whole investigation would have withered on the vine if Bush had not been reelected. Instead, Bush’s win breathed new life into Walsh, who could be as single-minded as Millie was when biting into her chew toy. Bush had considered pardoning Caspar Weinberger, his pal from the Reagan administration, at the end of his first term, but knew the Democrats would accuse him of obstruction of justice. So he waited until the end of his second term.

Bush glanced at his watch. It was getting late. He sealed the letter for his successor and left it on the center of the desk blotter. As he stood up and admired for one last time the luminist landscapes hanging on the Oval Office walls, his son walked in.

“Dad, it’s almost time,” George W. Bush said.

“All set,” Bush replied. He wondered what would be next for his son. George W. had cycled through so many assignments in the White House during his father’s two terms, never quite finding the right fit. He’d begun talking about maybe running for governor of Texas in ’98, but that didn’t seem very likely.

Bush prized his son’s loyalty. Nothing more important than loyalty. But being a successful politician took a lot more than that. Bush thought back to his first term, when his son had volunteered to play the enforcer role for his father. Bush went along with it, even giving his son the thankless assignment of being the one to tell Sununu he had to resign. And yet Sununu had emerged from that meeting with W. convinced he still had the job. Some enforcer W. was. Just thinking about that incident again now, Bush felt a smile forming at the corner of his mouth.

As he exited the Oval Office for the last time, Bush knew there was no chance George W. would ever get a turn behind that desk.

But there was always Jeb.

Neil Swidey is a Globe Magazine staff writer. E-mail him at [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter @neilswidey.

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imjustmejca1971 · 6 years

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I was (or am?) a racist- a blog about privilege

I figured it was time to call out a bit of the privilege in my life and to be honest with some of the ignorance I've had toward others and been on the receiving end of. I’m hoping by doing so it will allow all of us to see things (even for a moment) from another point of view.

I was born in the early 1970's to a loving family. We moved to small town in southeast Kansas when I was six. There were rumors that there was a sign that said "N***, don't let the sun go down on your ass here" in front of the city limits, but it must’ve been taken down before we moved there as I don’t recall ever seeing it.

As I remember, there were two African American families, in addition to one Latino and one Native American family, when I started school. As a young child, I didn't see anyone different because of what color their skin was. I was an introverted kid, so making connections was difficult. I would've been happy to hang out with anyone.

As I started to get a little older, I would listen more to the things adults would say in restaurants, sometimes the neighborhood or other public areas. I would hear things about "dark" parts of town in larger cities that were “dangerous” to go into. I would hear how it wasn't natural for people to be with someone outside their race. I would hear how people would take advantage of "the system," even if I didn't know what "the system" was. I heard stories of gang members that hung out in malls. I was always looking under cars in parking lots so my tendons wouldn't be cut.

When we moved to a larger city (for Kansas anyway), I saw many more people different than me. After all the stories I had heard, I was on guard a bit more. I didn't feel as safe or as protected as I did living in a small town.

When I was in my junior year of high school, there were a lot of rumors of the "gangs" infiltrating our school. I didn't think a lot of it, as I had never seen it. One day, I was leaving school when someone from behind me grabbed my ankles, which caused me to go head first into the pavement. I don't remember a lot of what happened after that, but I recall a circle of people intervening. I heard later I was "lucky," as the next thing that traditionally happened was for gang members to kick the person in the face until they were unrecognizable. I didn't see that kid again after that, but I was a little more scared from that point forward.

In my first job outside of high school, I met a girl who was smart, beautiful and very sweet. She had an amazing smile and we formed a friendly and somewhat flirty connection. She also happened to be black. I thought about asking her out (this is pre-out of the closet Chris), but I wasn't sure if I was supposed to or how she or other people would react to it. She left the job within a few months and I never saw her again. I still remember her smile.

A couple of years later, I was with a friend who wanted to stop to get beer at a liquor store. We were in my car, which was a red convertible. My friend went in the store (I was under 21) and I stayed in the car. While I was waiting, three guys came up to the car and one got in the passenger seat. I was frightened, but I tried to act like they were just playing around. The guy in my seat asked me for $5. I told him I didn't have any cash (I didn't). He responded he knew that I did because a "rich white boy" like me must've had cash. He wasn't overtly threatening, but more like jokingly serious. I again tried to play it off and he seemed to be ready to get out of my car. At that point, my friend came out and saw the two guys outside the car and one sitting with me. He got angry and yelled "what the hell is going on?" Any joking at that point went out the window. The guy got out and started getting in my friend's face (who was twice the guy's size). My friend was able to get into the car and I started backing out. They wanted us to get out of the car and started beating on it. One had a bat and started hitting the trunk and then knocked the side view mirror off my car. We sped away. I avoided "that part of town" from that point forward.

I moved to Kansas City in 1994. I recall being told there were "bad areas" not to go into. The neighborhood I lived in was only a few blocks from one of "those" streets. When I drove home, I would sometimes lock my doors at stoplights when I saw someone nearby.

On one of my soaps in the early 90s, a character I really loved started dating someone of a different race. It felt odd to me. It was the first time I had seen it. The relationship didn't last long (they rarely do in soaps) and the show didn't have anyone of different races dating again for quite some time.

Working for a global telecommunications company in the mid to late 90's, as well as developing a more diverse group of friends, I began to learn how much of what I thought I knew were actually stereotypes. I realized the negative things that had I had experienced above were about the PERSON, not the race. I took classes and even began to teach them on diversity. I began to feel a kinship with other minorities, because I knew what it was like to have people judge me just for being who I was.

That same soap had another character I loved start an interracial relationship years later. This time, it didn’t seem odd at all. It wasn’t any different than any other relationship.

Looking back, I truly hope that my ignorance was never known by others. I hope no one saw the fear in my eyes or heard the locking of my doors. I hope the thoughts I had on the inside were never acted upon on the outside. Do those thoughts still pop up from time to time? Yes. Do I always recognize those thoughts are wrong and never act on them? Yes.

So, why am I sharing this now?

I am very aware I've led a life of privilege. I am a man. I am white. While I am gay, I can "pass" for straight, despite that no one should have to. I've never been turned down for a loan, employment or housing because of my skin color or any other reason so many wrongly are. I have, however, been listening for over 40 years to comments about “fags,” “faggots,” “girly-men,” and other slurs. I’ve heard how gay men can’t possibly be real men. That gay people can’t truly love. That we deserve to die from AIDS or be beaten if we flirt with someone not interested, or literally go to Hell for our behaviors. All of these things were said (and still are) without any regard for their impact. These things, over time, can shape how you look at people, relationships and the world.

Race is a difficult thing for many to talk about. I hear so many say, "I just don't look at people that way" or "I'm color-blind." Many may say that, many may believe that, but it's not always true. We don’t want to believe that about others, let alone ourselves.

Remember the African American girl in the bikini in Texas that was thrown to the ground by a white police officer a few years back? Would the reaction have been different if it was a black police officer throwing a white girl to the ground?

How about all of the unarmed people of color that have been killed when white people under the same or worse circumstances have had every courtesy, every benefit of the doubt given to them?

What about Trayvon Martin? If he had been white, walking through the “wrong” neighborhood and a black man had killed him, would the reaction have been different? If he were white wearing a hoodie through the same neighborhood he was killed in, would that have made a difference? When it's a person of color versus a white man, we always seem to give the white person the benefit of the doubt and the person of color the opposite..or worse.

Think about the end of the book (or movie) “A Time to Kill.” The lawyer (spoiler alert) won the case because he had the jury envision the crime of a little girl being beaten and raped and nearly hung by a tree..but with the change that the girl was white instead of black.

Stephon Clark. Alton Sterling. If you’re not familiar with those names, look them up online. Their stories are horrific and there are so many, many more that don’t make the news for more than a blip.

Our first thought seems to be "they” must have done something wrong. Would we feel the same way if it were police officers of color killing unarmed white dudes? We say we should always obey the law and show respect. Yet time and time again, some in law enforcement act differently toward people of color because they know they can get away with it or don’t see what they are doing is wrong.

Let me be clear. I believe that the majority of police officers are NOT corrupt and provide a tremendous service to the public. They are underpaid and underappreciated. That belief, however, doesn't mean there aren't issues with some. And ignoring those issues has happened for decades and continues to this day. It doesn't have to be one or the other. I can support the police and know most do everything they can to serve and protect, while still recognizing the issues with others.

Racism has been a part of our lives all of our lives. Have things gotten better? Yes. Do we live in a post-racial society? NO.

The challenge is no one wants to admit anything about systemic racism. We know it's bad, we know it's wrong, but it's ingrained in us to think a certain way..and we don't want to admit or even recognize when we do.

Look at all the reaction to the confederate flag/statue removals last year. We're so concerned about "heritage," but not the reality of what those images stand for or why they were put in place during the civil rights era. We know what we BELIEVE, but that's not necessarily what's TRUE. There’s also a bit of hypocrisy- we’re just fine with people bulldozing Native American sacred grounds to lay a pipeline or a build a new building, but we’re not if we feel it’s “our” history that’s being messed with.

We see people roll their eyes or negate what happened in Charlottesville last year. People can't possibly believe what happened in World War II could EVER happen again, because we know better now. Those of us that are minorities know differently. It can always happen again..and mainly when otherwise good people look a different way.

Why is it when a terrorist act is caused by "radical Islam" it's one thing, but when it's a white "Christian," it's another? Why is it when ISIS kills people, the entire Muslim religion is blamed, but when the Westboro Baptist Church (or "alt-right") does horrifying things we are just supposed to know they don't represent all of Christianity?

People react to discrimination in different ways. Some take it in a quiet silence. Some want to educate. Some get angry and express that anger. Some want to build bridges.

I hear people say, "This is America. If you don't like it, leave." My first response to that is usually quite expletive ridden. This my America, too. I love my country. I love the dream I've always believed it can be. That doesn't mean I blindly follow any one person of any party. That doesn't mean I don't recognize we've done HORRIBLE things to people throughout our history.

Silence at times can be deafening. We’re told we have to remember that not everyone posts on FB. Not everyone comments. Many don't like being "political." That in and of itself, however, is privilege. Many of us are "political" because the same rights that others take for granted are ones we have fought and bled for. We learn to accept the racist, homophobic, transphobic and misogynist things we see online because that's always been a part of life. "That's just talk," or "I'm not going to agree with everything someone says."

So..what's the solution? It's not an easy one. First, we have to admit that we're not perfect. Those of us with privilege tend to live in a bubble of it and have no comprehension of being outside of it. We tend to only want to reinforce our vision of the world.

We desperately want normalcy..a belief that the world is a good place and that all bad times will pass, so we ignore all we can or at minimum limit access to the contrary.

Second, we should listen to others' experiences and try to understand, even if we don't agree. There’s a significant difference between ignorance and HATE. Ignorance can be overcome through education, love and understanding. Hate needs to be contained. We’re not going to know which is in a person’s heart until we listen.

Third, if someone grows and changes their viewpoint, they should be welcomed, not shunned for the time they were wrong.

Hopefully we can all start to stop marginalizing each other. Perhaps we can start understanding more of what we have in common while also being able to embrace differences that don't hurt ourselves or others.

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ongames · 8 years

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He Treated The Very First Ebola Cases 40 Years Ago. Then He Watched The World Forget.

This article is part of HuffPost’s Project Zero campaign, a yearlong series on neglected tropical diseases and efforts to fight them.

KINSHASA, Congo ― In early 2014, few people worried that the Ebola virus, which is up to 90 percent fatal, would pose a global threat. So the World Health Organization sent shockwaves around the world when it announced that Ebola was spreading out of control in West Africa.

Before the epidemic was over two years later, it had killed thousands of people. They died in terrifying and painful ways, often passing the disease on to family members before and even after death. Doctors and aid workers died, people who should have been able to stay safe while offering care.

But not everyone who is exposed to the Ebola virus, which spreads through contact with blood or other bodily fluids, falls ill. Such is the case of Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum, who in 1976 became the first scientist to come into contact with Ebola and survive.

The Congolese virologist, now 74, placed himself square in the path of the disease as he worked in harrowing and hazardous conditions to identify what was killing some of its earliest victims.

“I am like Johnnie Walker,” he quipped, referencing the well-known Scotch whisky slogan, “Born 1820 ― Still going strong.” Muyembe giggled as he strode around his office imitating the brand’s iconic “Striding Man.”

It’s a joke in service of a very serious message from a doctor who has spent years battling the worst viruses. Don’t make the same mistake, he warns, that the world made with Ebola when it first arose. Don’t ignore the threat because it seems far away.

Muyembe, who now leads the Democratic Republic of Congo’s National Institute for Biomedical Research, had been home from studying in Europe just a few years when he received a phone call in 1976 that would change his life forever.

“The minister of health rang and said, ‘There’s a mysterious disease that’s killing people at the Catholic mission in Yambuku in Equateur province. I’m going to send you there to find out the cause.’ I was the country’s only virologist,” Muyembe recalled.

The mission hospital was more than 600 miles northeast of the capital city of Kinshasa, deep in thick forest. Muyembe set off overland in a jeep with a military colonel who was also an epidemiologist. It was “a real adventure,” he said. All they were told was that there was a suspected outbreak of yellow or typhoid fever.

But when they arrived in Yambuku, the hospital was deserted. They went to sleep at the mission and woke to a very different scene.

Three nurses and one woman had died at home overnight, and the hospital was now full of patients ― some pushed there on bicycles, many feverish ― after word had gone round that doctors had arrived from Kinshasa.

Muyembe examined and drew blood from the sick and dissected the dead to take tissue samples ― all with bare hands. Later, he would shudder at the thought of how much contact he’d had with feverish patients, many of whom didn’t stop bleeding after he withdrew the needle or scalpel.

“The blood would pour out all day. My hands were covered in blood. I didn’t have gloves,” he said.

Muyembe thinks that what saved him from death that day, and the many others when he handled infected samples with no protection, was his speedy request for soap and water. But luck must have played a role too.

The blood would pour out all day. My hands were covered in blood. I didn’t have gloves. Dr. Jean-Jacques Muyembe-Tamfum

When a nun fell ill ― with fever and red marks on her body ― Muyembe and his colleague told the mother superior that they wanted to take the samples they’d collected and the sick nun back to Kinshasa. The nun initially refused to go ― she didn’t want the community to think she was running away ― but she relented after Muyembe insisted. Another sister accompanied her on the journey to Kinshasa, so they were a group of four squeezing together in various planes and cars.

“I was always next to her,” Muyembe remembered, still looking relieved decades later at the thought of his close brush with death.

The samples from Yambuku, including the nun’s, were sent from Kinshasa to a lab in Belgium, where scientists initially thought they showed the Marburg virus, which causes another hemorrhagic fever found in Congo and neighboring Uganda.

Meanwhile, when the nun, her traveling companion and a nurse who had treated her in Kinshasa all died from the same sickness, and the epidemiologist who had gone with him to Yambuku developed a fever, Muyembe panicked. He quarantined himself in the garage at his home so as not to infect his wife and children. He couldn’t stop thinking about the test tubes full of blood samples that he had brought home briefly after returning from Yambuku.

“It was terrible because the assistant medic who had come with me sent me a message saying, ‘Ah, I am sick,’ and then poof! He was dead. The nun we brought with us had died and had contaminated another nun and a nurse. I was very afraid,” Muyembe said.

He finally got a call from Belgium that the virus wasn’t Marburg but a previously unknown hemorrhagic fever. Researchers later named it Ebola, for the river that runs through Yambuku. It was after this call ― and the death of his fellow scientist ― that Muyembe destroyed the lab samples, terrified of further contamination.

Nearly 40 years later, when Ebola hit West Africa, Muyembe was surprised by the lack of research into the virus and the poorly coordinated global and local response.

“It really was chaos,” he said. “People thought it was just something that affected East and Central Africa, so they hadn’t even studied it and weren’t prepared.”

Muyembe had worked on research into a possible vaccine nearly two decades earlier, but it was only when Ebola briefly touched Europe and the United States in 2014 that he finally saw scientists start to take this killer seriously.

During Congo’s third Ebola outbreak in 1995, the experienced virologist had transfused blood from people who had recovered from Ebola to a group of patients infected with the virus. Of the eight patients who received the transfusions, seven survived ― a result that Muyembe quickly passed on to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the U.S.

“We kept saying, ‘Antibodies do protect.’ But for 20 years, this virus, and its treatment, was neglected,” he said. In late 2016, an experimental vaccine – developed principally in response to fears of Ebola being used as a bioterrorism agent – was shown to provide 100 percent protection against the virus. It arrived too late for the 11,000 people who died in the 2014 outbreak.

More recently, Muyembe has watched scientists scramble to stop the Zika virus once it began affecting wealthier countries. The virus is named for a forest in Uganda, where it was first found in 1947.

“Because it was an African disease, we neglected it. But with climate change and modern transport, the insects will travel to Brazil, to Europe,” he said.

There are other diseases that could devastate whole cities, countries or regions of the world, Muyembe warns.

I wish I could say that onchocerciasis would make everyone in the world blind, because then we’d have a vaccine. Dr. Muyembe

So-called neglected tropical diseases affect over 1 billion people worldwide, mainly in poor parts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. Some of these diseases ― echinococcosis, dengue and Chagas, for example ― have already infected people in the U.S. in small numbers. But they attract very little attention in Western media and garner limited research funding.

“I wish I could say that onchocerciasis would make everyone in the world blind, because then we’d have a vaccine,” said Muyembe of a disease otherwise known as river blindness, which threatens up to 14 million people in Congo.

“We call them neglected diseases because they come from underdeveloped countries,” he said. “But these neglected diseases can become a threat to developed countries. With travel and everything we have now, the world has become a village.”

Our world needs better research and monitoring aimed at African countries, Muyembe warned, because that’s where many diseases start. And if they’re allowed to develop, “they will be like Ebola, which came from Central Africa, went to West Africa and then suddenly was threatening the U.S. and Europe.”

Muyembe is also determined to raise up the next generation of Congolese researchers to continue his legacy. “We must train the young people,” he said, slapping two young researchers on the back. Like him, they earned their Ph.D.s in Europe and then returned home to help.

Despite cheating one of the world’s most deadly diseases and plenty of other rare illnesses since, he too plans to keep fighting. “The most important thing in dealing with a lot of these diseases is washing your hands,” he said with a fatalistic shrug.

What frightens the doctor more than staring death in the face is retiring and dying of boredom.

“I must continue working,” Muyembe said, straightening his white coat and rushing off to his next appointment at the lab.

This series is supported, in part, by funding from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. All content is editorially independent, with no influence or input from the foundation.

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