#stay and become involved at worst or complicit at best | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

dcforts · 3 years

Text

[something more]

ao3.

Dean never wants to go to hunter gatherings.

First, because they don't exactly have the best track record when it comes to meeting other hunters, and second, because whenever they go there's always people looking at them like they’re freaks. He knows they tell all sorts of stories about them and some are hard, ugly truths that Dean would rather stop thinking about for the rest of his life.

But he's got a text from Carol while he was about to get in the car after wrapping up a case, and Sam asked who it was, so it had become a Thing to discuss.

And Dean’s main argument was “Why would we go?”, but Sam’s was “Why not?”, which was objectively stronger. And it got worse because from the backseat Jack kept interjecting with, “Go where?” and, “Who are these people?” until Sam paid attention to him and explained that hunters meet up sometimes to “get a drink, exchange stories”, and that had made him light up like a Christmas tree because Jack loved stories and the idea of expanding his pool of knowledge on hunting and creatures appealed to him greatly.

So the fact that Dean had tried to point out that, “This is stupid. We are hunters, not a book club,” had sorted no effect whatsoever. No, instead, Jack had said, “That sounds nice. We should go,” and when Dean had met Cas’ eyes in the rear view mirror, all he had offered was a shrug.

Typical.

It’s not that Dean wants to be a hermit or something, but he always feels like he needs to be wary of who’s gonna be at these sorts of things because some may treat them like Hollywood stars, but some may want to shoot them on sight. Anyone could come up to them and call them out for starting the end of the world, letting monsters out of Hell and Purgatory, cosmic beings out of their cages, getting their family killed, destroying their lives.

And there’s also this: are they really ready for Jack’s debut in society? Sam thinks they are. He thinks it’s a great opportunity to show that the community doesn’t have anything to worry about. He’s with them now and he’s not going anywhere so they should get used to that. Cas says he’ll be there to intervene in case things go south and Dean’s mind flashes with Carol’s house burning to the ground after Cas’ has gone all mama swan on the hunters. He meets Sam’s eyes briefly and it looks like he had the exact same images playing in front of his eyes, “I’m sure it won’t be necessary," he adds quickly.

So Sam wanted to go and Jack wanted to go and Cas didn’t seem to be able to say no to the kid even if he tried, so Dean had to bite his cheek and wake up early the next morning to drive across the state.

At least it’s a nice day, at least it stopped raining and the sun is breaking in from the clouds; the chilly air that comes in from the window that Cas is in the habit of keeping rolled all the way down brings in the pleasant smell of wet leaves.

Dean feels his knees bumping on the back of his seat from time to time and looks at him in the rear view mirror and Cas sometimes catches his eyes and sometimes he doesn’t.

At least they are spending time together. It’s rare for Cas to stay around after a hunt these days. He doesn’t need the down time they require, or so he says. He gets bored in the bunker, starts climbing the walls the second the door closes behind them. He gets restless, and then there’s Heaven and always bigger things to deal with, and Dean imagines that that beats staying behind to play foosball with him and Jack.

Going on hunts with Cas is always fun, but it’s also a run against time and there’s death and guns and fear involved, even when it’s an easy-peasy salt-and-burn. And it’s the four of them crammed in a motel room, so they don’t get much time to be alone. And Dean likes when they are all together, but likes it more when Sam and Jack disappear in the maze of the bunker and he gets to have his best friend all for himself.

That is why Dean had been pleased when Cas had expressed his intention of staying with them for a couple more days. In that moment Dean had been busy keeping his lunch in his stomach - he’d just found the shredded skin of a shapeshifter in a freaking kitchen drawer - but he’d heard him loud and clear all the same.

They were moving about in the victim’s house looking for clues and talking about other stuff, when Cas had said something along the lines of, “I could work on it once we go back to the bunker,” and Dean had asked, half distracted, “So you’re going back with us?” and Cas had his back turned and Dean had opened the drawer in that moment, but he'd heard him when he’d said:

“I guess.”

It was barely a whisper but it meant yes, that’s all that mattered. And it also meant, from Dean’s perspective, a really nice weekend, that included, not in order of importance: his hot dog pants, driving around with the music up, Dean’s cave and Cas.

So, yeah, if Dean was completely honest with himself – something that he generally tried to avoid – it’s not like he wanted to waste a whole day of that to go spend it with a bunch of strangers.

But it doesn’t matter now, because they’ve piled up in the Impala and driven to Carol’s.

Dean likes her. She spent half her life working at a bank, but after crossing path with a djinn she hanged her suit, moved out of the city and created a safe place for hunters, soon becoming a beacon in the community in Kansas. Her door is always open, as she said that one time they met her on a case. Dean likes her for no-nonsense ways, her honest looks and, not less importantly, her amazing sandwiches.

Carol fusses over him and Sam in the hall, scolds them for taking so long to visit when they live in the same state, then Sam makes the introductions, and it’s only his shifting a little from side to side that betrays his nervousness.

Her eyes focus on Cas and her expression speaks of wonder and surprise.

“The angel Castiel,” she calls him and he nods, “a long way from Heaven.”

“The weather here is nicer,” he says, and Dean snorts softly next to him.

Jack wins her over immediately with his wide smile and polite hand shake, “I look forward to exchanging stories,” he says and she huffs a laugh and says:

“Sure, Jack. We heard a lot about you. I bet everyone will be eager to talk to you.”

On the other side of Cas, Sam gets more fidgety; he says, “If you think uh – we don’t want any trouble.”

But she shakes her head and gestures dismissively. “Nonsense. No one will start trouble if they don't wanna see the end of my rifle. A friend of yours is a friend of mine,” she reassures him. “Plus, Eileen vouched for him.”

“Sh-she is here already?” Sam almost chokes up and all of the sudden he seems to have grown a few inches taller.

Dean understands now. He pieces together his insistence in coming to this thing, his bouncing knee throughout their journey, the way he checked his phone more or less forty-five times. He feels slightly less bad about having caved in. There are a lot of things that Dean would give up for Sam, and things that he would conjure out of thin air just for him to have, if he could. But there’s so much he can’t give him and he wants Sam to just get out and take, have and enjoy. So if he wanted to come here just to meet Eileen again, Dean’s happy to be complicit.

Sam is the first to disappear in the packed living room, with Jack following right behind, but Dean grabs Castiel’s elbow before he can take another step. He circles him to block him from the entrance and says, “Hey, stick with me, alright? Last time I was at one of these things this guy Norman talked about his knife collection for three hours.”

“But, Jack…”

“He’s with Sam, he’s gonna be fine,” says Dean, dismissing. He grins, “Come on, I’ll introduce you to some people; don’t you wanna make friends?”

Cas makes a face but doesn't say anything else. Apparently Jack is not the only one who he seems unable to refuse something to and that makes Dean feel good. He trails after him around the room as Dean stops to say hello from familiar face to familiar face.

There’s Max and Alicia, sprawled on a couch, nursing the worst hangover Dean’s seen in a long time. They say they're happy to see him, but then they eye Cas up and down and Max says something along the lines of, “Oh, I see now why you keep him hidden from us," and that prompts Dean to quickly move along.

Then they bump into this old man who claims to have been one of the patrons of the Roadhouse. Dean has no idea who he is, but he swears he remembers him from when he was a boy - of course he remembers, and hey, if he needs anything, did he know that he was retired but still kept an eye out for monster sightings, and did he hear of that one time he and Bill Harvelle -

Dean tries to nod and smile appropriately for the whole time and when they finally manage to escape him, Cas leads him to an empty corner where they can take refuge.

"I didn't think there would be this many people," Cas says, surveying the room clearly looking for Jack.

Dean elbows him and points at where the kid is talking animatedly to two young hunters he's never seen, "What is he even talking about?"

"Our last case."

"Wh-? Oh, right, I always forget you have the superhearing," then he has a thought and adds, "Hey, you gonna tell me if you hear someone talking shit about me, right?"

Cas' eyebrows raise in thinly veiled amusement and that's all the answer Dean needs, "What? Who?" he asks, outraged.

But Cas doesn't have time to answer before they get interrupted and soon surrounded by hunters Dean's seen on the road, worked with, heard about. Some share their epic tales of escapes from impossible dangers, some are curious and some are brave and blunt and they ask Cas questions and address him without fear and Cas is polite and just a tiny bit awkward.

It gets a little chilly when this guy with too many beers in starts bragging about how he knows all about angels' weaks spots. Cas' face stays as stony as it gets for the whole time but then he says “I suggest you check your sources,” with a deep voice that runs a shiver down Dean’s spine, and he’s not even the one who’s directing his intense gaze at.

There are so many different people that Cas doesn't stick out like a sore thumb, and Dean finds himself thinking that if they were just two regular hunters in a crowd and nothing more, perhaps some things would be easier.

He almost sighs of relief when he eyes Eileen on the other side of the room and steers Cas towards her.

"I can't believe I still haven't had a single beer," he mutters as they elbow their way through the crowd. Sam hovers around her with a timid smile plastered on his face that doesn’t seem to take any breaks.

Dean hugs her and tries not to follow Cas’ movement with the corner of his eyes when he senses him stepping away from his side.

Eileen calls his attention back. She makes fun of him saying, “Sam told me you didn’t want to come. Getting too old to leave the house?”

“Very funny,” Dean says.

“Next time we can organize something at the bunker. There’s so much space," she says, smirking.

Dean thinks 'Yeah, no way' and says, “Yeah, no way,” and she laughs.

“But you,” Dean adds, “you can come stay with us. Anytime. For as long as you want. We would love to have you. Me, Sam,” he says wiggling his eyebrows in a way that has his brother close his eyes in embarrassment, “you’re always welcome.”

“Thank you,” she signs, blushing a little, “I’ll try to come by.”

Dean is glad to know that. She has opened a door in Sam’s life that he probably thought closed forever and Dean will always be grateful to her for that. Also, she is a badass and totally out of his brother’s dorky league.

Cas comes standing by his side again and Dean feels a gentle touch on the small of his back. It's intimate and unexpected so he steps away immediatly almost on instict and Cas' drops his hand. He meets his gaze and they frown at each other for a second. Cas seems about to say something, but then goes back to sporting his usual face, “I think I saw Claire. I’m going to find her.”

So Dean, with that spot on his lower back still tingling, follows him out of the room and into another where there’s only a few scattered hunters and Jack, happily squeezed on a couch with his new friends, his mouth hanging open as he hears a story from this guy named Ronnie that Dean knows for a fact only talks shit. The kid seems to be having fun though, he waves at them as move along.

They find Claire in the empty white kitchen, and catch her right when she’s about to open herself a beer. Her eyes widen in panic but she doesn’t manage to hide the bottle behind her back fast enough.

“Hey guys,” she says with a nervous laugh, “didn’t know you were going to be here.”

Dean stretches out a hand without a word and she drops the act, sighs and hands it over. Before she can say anything else, Cas steps between them, "Claire, it's nice to see you," he says and she lets him squeeze her into a hug.

Pressed against his shoulder, Dean sees her face change expression, her body slightly relax in his arms. She pats him on the back and says: “Good to see you too, Cas.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Just passing through,” she replies, putting on airs, “Finished up a job a few miles north. I thought I’d drop by Carol’s before moving on.”

She flips a strand of blonde hair over her shoulder and Dean scoffs.

“So you are in Kansas, and you don’t call, and you drop by Carol’s? Were you even planning on stopping by the bunker?”

She rolls her eyes at him, “I go where the job takes me, Dean. I don’t make plans.”

Dean rolls his eyes in the exact same way, “Right. Well, you know it wouldn’t kill you to stay with us for a while. We could get you a bit of training.”

She groans as if she's heard that same speech about a thousand times, but Cas cuts off whatever she was going to retort with and says, “We weren’t planning on coming either. Sam and Jack are here too.”

“Jack’s here?” she lights up. She says she's heard all sorts of things about him and she can’t wait to meet the kid and of course she’s gonna go easy on him, it’s not like she’s gonna eat him, Jesus, Dean, protective much?

Dean frowns at her but she’s already halfway out of the room. “I can be his big sister. I mean, he should have someone he can talk to. Living with you three must be – a lot.”

“Hey,” protests Dean, but she just laughs and disappears down the hallway.

Dean shakes his head and leans against one of the kitchen counters. Cas does the same against the opposite island. At the end of the narrow passage between the furniture there’s a glass door that gives into the patio and a small garden beyond it.

The door is ajar and fresh air comes in; Cas gets engrossed in watching the pattern the raindrops formed on the glass and Dean gets engrossed in watching Cas. He seems lost in thought and Dean would like to say something but doesn’t want to be annoying. Not today, not when tomorrow he could be gone.

He’ll take this quiet moment instead.

“She’ll be a bad influence on Jack,” he breaks the silence, and that gets him an amused quirk of lips, “But it really would be nice to have her around more often.”

Curiously that has Cas' take his eyes away from the glass and lay his gaze on him. He has his lips pressed in a small smile.

“What?”

“You want people you love around you.”

Dean frowns, “What about it?” he asks, and it comes out sharp and defensive.

Cas shakes his head a little, but there’s a shadow on his face that confuses him: “Nothing, I only meant -" but he doesn’t get to finish his sentence, because a group of hunters enters the kitchen talking loudly and soon Dean has his vision blocked by half a dozen bodies and he has to press himself against the cabinets to let them through, towards the garden door.

One guy in a baseball cap stops in his track as he sees Dean.

He asks with his eyes wide and stunned expression if he is Dean Winchester, the Dean Winchester and Dean is glad that the rest of the group is already out of earshot because he wasn’t in the mood for a meet and greet session. But the guy starts talking about some hunter named Troy, who he has supposedly hunted with a couple of years back. And Dean’s not in a habit of calling people liars but he's pretty sure he'd remember if he had wiped out a nest of fangs with this guy and allegedly taken down five all on his own and went and get steaks and beer afterwards.

He tries to shoot him down gently and say, “Maybe your friend had me confused with someone else,” but the guy’s face falls and tells him Troy has recently passed on the job and this was his favourite story to tell, and he would always tell it, all proud and all.

Dean pats him on a shoulder then.

“You know what, we shouldn’t ruin it for him now, should we? Troy, you say? Of course I remember him,” he says and throws in a wink. The guy beams at him and thanks him and gets a little chocked up because Troy might have been a liar but he swears he was one of the good ones.

The guy invites him to join his friends for a drink but Dean raises his half-empty bottle and says “I’m fine, thanks.”

When the guy walks away, Cas moves to lean on the counter by his side. Dean feels the familiar weight of his arm against his and he wonders if they could pick up the conversation where they left it. But Cas says:

“That was nice of you.”

Dean shrugs looking down at their shoes lined up and for some reason he thinks it’s a funny sight. If they were just two shoe wearing creatures standing side by side and nothing more, perhaps some things would be easier.

“Doesn't really change my life. And it's a good story,” he huffs a laugh, it comes out bitter, “Better than some of the true ones anyway.”

“I understand what you mean,” says Cas with a sigh and Dean extends his arm to offer him his beer, and even though Cas usually refuses, this time he takes it.

Dean does his best not to follow his hand bringing the bottle to his lips. And he does his best, later, not to wonder if the wetness touching his lips when he drinks is just beer or something else.

If they were just two drinking creatures, sharing a bottle of beer and nothing more, perhaps everything would be easier.

Soon the bottle is empty and Cas says, “I’ll get you another one,” but Dean refuses.

It’s nice there - someone's turned the music on in the other room, but here it's muffled by the walls, and the light is just right to make Cas’ eyes look like sapphires. They don’t need to move.

But then the group of hunters out in the patio erupts in laughter and Cas’ gaze shifts on them and then lingers on the glass door.

Dean feels him slipping from him once again. He sighs, “You wanna go out, check the garden?”

Cas nods and heads out and Dean can’t do anything but follow, past the hunters and the patio. They walk the perimeter of the small square of grass, wet and glistening with old rain. The sun and the clouds draw patches of light on the ground and they move from dark to light to dark again in an irregular rhythm, chasing the warmth of the sunlight and the relief of the shade. Dean feels uncomfortable in both, but there’s no middle line he can walk on.

“Sorry we dragged you here,” he finds himself saying, “You never stick around, and for once that you do, that’s what you get.”

Cas frowns slightly at him, “I stick around,” he protests.

Dean laughs, “You don’t,” he says and although he tries to reign it in with the bitterness, it stills seeps out. Cas’ gaze prompts him to explain himself, “Come on, the minute we’re done with a case you are out of here. I don’t blame you,” he quickly adds cutting off whatever Cas was opening his mouth to say. “I know you don’t like sitting around. Believe me, no one understands that more than I do.”

A long beat passes and then Cas says, “I’m sorry, I never meant to make you feel like I don’t want to spend time with you.”

Dean stops in his tracks and Cas stops with him to face him.

Dean shakes his head, “Cas, you don’t have to apologize to me. This is not about me. And I said, I get it,” he shrugs.

Cas doesn’t look at all convinced and Dean doesn’t feel at all convinced either. He knows this is not about his feelings. It’s more like a general way of how things are. It’s a truth, a fact. Sam would say the same.

Sam would. Standing here in the garden with him, Sam would tell him the very same things and wish for the very same things. He’s sure he would. He's not accusing Cas of anything. On the contrary, he’s showing him understanding.

“It’s all the same for me, I swear. I don't care,” he adds, but saying that hurts a little, for some reason he can’t quite determine, and he finds his own frown mirrored on Cas’ face.

“Alright,” he says, sounding profoundly sad and again the same shadow passes on his face.

This is all wrong. What did he do?

“Look, I don’t get what you want me to say. If you wanted to - ” he exhales, angrily, “Just - forget it, let’s go back inside,” he says but as he tries to walk away Cas stops him by his elbow.

“You could ask me.”

He looks unsure, troubled, as if he is not quite certain this is a good idea. Dean breathes out a confused, “What?” that he himself can barely hear.

Cas squares his shoulders, “To stay. You could ask me,” he sounds accusing, and he takes a step forward. His eyes are firm in Dean’s and with his elbow still in his grip, he feels like a hummingbird flapping his wings in the paw of a dragon, “You ask everybody else.”

Dean’s heart starts pounding. He tries to swallow but his mouth is too dry.

“I don’t wanna ask you, Cas,” he says, cutting, yanking his arm free of his hold, and it sounds bad, bad, bad to his ears and he can read hurt all over Cas’ face. He needs to explain himself. He takes a breath, says a lame, “I mean, if you don't -”

And then, Dean suddenly understands.

Cas thinks he doesn’t -

He thinks he doesn’t care if he’s around and doesn’t ask because he doesn’t need him.

Dean feels like his heart is about to leap out of his chest. He’s not ready for this. He’s not ready for this. He fights the need to look down. He doesn’t know why this is so hard for him. It’s just Cas. But that’s the point, isn’t it? It’s Cas. It would hurt ten times more if he were to say no. It’s nothing like with Claire, he asked her for her; it’s nothing like with Eileen, he asked her for Sam. But if he asked Cas, he would be asking for himself, wouldn’t he?

Seeing him walk away anyway would be too much then.

But maybe he wouldn’t.

Cas senses his struggle, “If you want, you can ask me,” he says, coming closer, in his eyes his timeless patience, that gaze that tells him that he is seen, he is known. Cas says: “I will say yes,” and it’s barely more than a whisper but Dean’s brain is a step away from short-circuiting anyway.

He looks away and he doesn’t recognize his own voice when he blurts out a hurried, muttered, nervous, almost angry: “Well, stay, then.”

But then a sunbeam decides to cut through the clouds in that exact moment and has Dean looking up again. The lazy sunlight of an early afternoon shines on Cas’ face. He’s not bothered by the sudden change of light, unlike Dean, who has to squint and bring a hand to his forehead.

Cas’ eyes sparkle like shimmering water when he says, “Okay.”

Dean barely remembers what happens after that. That image gets imprinted behind his eyelids and he can’t stop thinking about it.

He floats through a darts game and a dozen of Carol’s sandwiches. Then there's Jack telling an embarrassing story about him that has people folding in two with laughter, and Claire agreeing on following them back to the bunker only with the promise of destroying him at foosball.

There's Sam introducing him to this lady to work a job together on alledged arachnes activity in Winsconsin and a girl who wants him to debunk some stuff she's heard about them but she doesn't believe (he disappoints her cause they are mostly true) but most importantly, there's Cas' thigh pressed against his when he's sitting and Cas’ shoulder just an inch away when he's standing, and somehow it's different than it was before.

Most of all, he feels lighter than he's felt in ages.

Later, as he gets to his car with Sam, he says, “Hey, you know, you were right. It was a little fun,” and his brother looks at him in disbelief.

“Are you kidding me? We came here to meet new people and you spent all your time with Cas.”

Dean shrugs, embarrassed to be called out. “So what? You spent all your time with Eileen,” he says and he regrets it immediately, especially as Sam purses his lips like he’s holding back a laugh.

He nods, “I see your point,” he says diplomatically, stressing the t, before he slips into the passenger seat.

Dean doesn’t look forward in continuing the conversation, crammed in a small space with his ears burning and Sam’s gigantic enquiring eyes on him, thank you very much, so he stays out of the car, his arms crossed on the roof, frowning at himself.

He watches as Cas comes down the little pathway with Jack and Claire. In the orange light of the sunset, Jack turns to ask him something and Cas nods. Typical. At the end of the path they split and only Cas makes his way across the street.

"Jack is riding with Claire," he says as soon as he's within earshot. He sounds like he doesn't think it's a good idea and it's a little funny.

"Relax, we're gonna be right behind them."

Cas seems reassured by that, but it only lasts the time it takes for him to make his way around the car, because even before he can grab the car handle, Claire speeds past them shouting, "See you, dorks." Now he looks truly alarmed.

Dean says, "You up for a ride after we drop Sam off?” and all his worry melts away from his face. He says a soft, “Alright,” and disappears into the backseat.

So when they get to the bunker, Dean doesn't follow Claire’s car to the garage and stops up front, the engine running. Sam looks at him confused, “We’ll be here in an hour,” Dean just says, grateful for the shadows around his face.

Sam is stunned for just a second, then snorts, “Fine guys, I’ll babysit tonight, but next time you gotta ask.”

He gets out and the next moment Cas has taken his seat. He doesn't waste time to pop one of Dean's tapes in the deck as he takes the road again.

Dean rolls his window down and in the night air that ruffles his hair he can smell another storm coming. He turns the music up and meets Cas’ eyes. There’s a smile in there somewhere that mirrors his own.

And - they may not be just two individuals in a car going nowhere and nothing more, and things may not be easy, probably never will, but maybe, Dean thinks, it doesn’t really matter in the end.

#deancas #deancas ficlet #destiel fanfic #deancas fanfic #destiel #4.9k #this is about how dumb they are #'why doesn't he stay VS why doesn't he ask me to stay' kind of dumb #their usual basically #jack claire and eileen are in this #i wish we got to see more of the hunter community cooperating #in the beginning there were waaay less people - then i guess i just miss crowds #how do you do titles #spncreatorsdaily #my writing #ive been working on this for ages and im still not sure i did it right

76 notes · View notes

blackswaneuroparedux · 4 years

Text

Treat Your S(h)elf: A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945 by Ernst Jünger (2019)

Keeping a journal: The short entries are often as dry as instant tea. Writing them down is like pouring hot water over them to release their aroma.

- Ernst Jünger, A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945 (2019)

Paris is very much my home these days and so I enjoy reading about the history of this beautiful city. It is difficult to live in Paris today and conjure up much sense of the city in the early 1940s. It is indeed, as it is called throughout the world, the City of Light. But back in 1940 when France fell and Paris occupied until its liberation on 24 August 1944, it was a city in darkness. Like so much else that happened in France during World War II, the Nazi occupation of Paris was something entirely more complex and ambiguous than has generally been understood.

We tend to think of those four years as difficult but minimally destructive by comparison with the hell the Nazis wreaked elsewhere in the country. But as recent historians have shown the Nazi occupation was a terrible time for Paris, not just because the Nazis were there but because Paris itself was complicit in its own humiliation. As the historian Ronald Risbottom has shown in his compelling book, ‘When Paris went Dark’, “Even today, the French endeavour both to remember and to find ways to forget their country’s trials during World War II; their ambivalence stems from the cunning and original arrangement they devised with the Nazis, which was approved by Hitler and assented to by Philipe Petain, the recently appointed head of the Third Republic, that had ended the Battle of France in June of 1940. This treaty - known by all as the Armistice - had entangled France and the French in a web of cooperation, resistance, accommodation, and, later, of defensiveness, forgetfulness, and guilt from which they are still trying to escape.”

It is almost certainly a unique event in human history, one in which a ruthless and unscrupulous invader occupied a city known for its sophistication and liberality, declining to destroy it or even to exact physical damage on more than a minority of its citizens yet leaving it in a state of “embarrassment, self-abasement, guilt and a felt loss of masculine superiority that would mark the years of the Occupation. To this day, more than one visitor or foreigners living in Paris are struck by how sensitive Paris and Parisians remain about the role of the city and its citizens in its most humiliating moment of the twentieth century.

Indeed bringing up the subject with French friends, my French partner’s family, or even relatives (by marriage - such as a French aunt married to my Norwegian uncle or the French partners of my cousins here in France) is like walking on egg shells. It brings up too many distant ghosts for many families. Nearly every household has a story. It can be one of resistance or one of collaboration or (more likely) one of passive indifference and acceptance.

And yet I remain fascinated and intrigued partly because of historical interest and partly out of curiosity about the human condition under stress. In Britain - despite the trauma of daily bombardment from German bombers - the country was never invaded. And so whilst war brings out the best and worst in people, it was altogether a different experience to the one experienced by mainland European countries. I don’t think we British truly have understood of life was really like under occupation and the choices people are willingly or not made just to survive the war.

The history of Paris from 1940 to 1944 gives the lie to the old childhood taunt: Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me. The Germans for the most part spared Parisians sticks and stones (except, of course, Parisians who were Jewish), but the “names” they inflicted in the form of truncated freedoms, greatly reduced food and supplies, an unceasing fear of the unexpected and calamitous, and the simple fact of their inescapable, looming presence did deep damage of a different kind. It traumatised the city and its inhabitants in ways very little understood by others, especially Britain.

The carefully curated image of French resistance against the Nazis has been asked to serve critical functions in that nation’s collective memory. The manufactured myth served to postpone for a quarter of a century deeper analyses of how easily France had been beaten and how feckless had been the nation’s reaction to German authority, especially between 1940 and 1943. And yet the myth of a universal resistance was important to France’s idea of itself as a beacon for human liberty. It was also badly needed as an example of the courage one needed in the face of monstrous political ideologies.

There remained the ethical questions that would haunt France for decades: Which actions, exactly, constitute collaboration and which constitute resistance? It is still asking these questions over 70 years later. But behind such question lies a deeper and more haunting question of moral culpability that many are quick to throw responsibility - along with their own shame of inaction - onto others but not look inwards at their own guilt and passivity.

But what about the occupiers? What did they feel? Were the German Wehrmacht during the day simply tourists sitting in cafes, dining on gourmand food, buying silk stockings and the latest fashions for their wives back home and by night drinking and debauching on the cultural and seedy delights of Paris?

Moral culpability is a question that Ernst Jünger, the celebrated German author, never asks himself of his time as a German officer in Paris. But culpability is a question that looms large after reading the war journals of Ernst Jünger from 1941-1945, now published by Columbia University Press as A German Officer in Occupied Paris: The War Journals, 1941-1945. It should have been re-titled as a ‘A German writer pre-occupied by Parisian night life and his navel’.

Ernst Jünger (1895-1998) was what is sometimes called a “controversial” figure. A First World War hero who was wounded seven times, he was undoubtedly uncommonly brave. He also insisted that those who were less brave should play their part, forcing retreating soldiers to join his unit at gunpoint. His 1920 book Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern), recounting his war experiences and portraying war in a heroic light, made him famous. In the 1920s he became involved in anti-democratic right-wing groups like the paramilitary Freikorps and wrote for a number of nationalist journals. He remained aloof from the Nazis, however, and, while he boasted that he “hated democracy like the plague”, was more of a nationalist than a racist.

Jünger spent much of the Second as an officer stationed in Paris, where these war journals are an almost daily record of the views and impressions of a well-read literary figure, entomologist, and cultural critic, now available for the first time in English translation in A German Officer in Occupied Paris. Posted in white-collar positions in Paris with the German military during the 1940-1944 occupation.

Nazi Germany produced two wartime diaries of equal literary and historical significance but written from the most different perspectives conceivable: Victor Klemperer and Ernst Jünger. Victor Klemperer wrote furtively, in daily dread of transport to an extermination camp, a fate he was spared by the firebombing of Dresden. Ernst Jünger, by contrast, had what was once called a “good war.” As a bestselling German author, he drew cushy occupation duty in Paris, where he could hobnob with famous artists and writers, prowl antiquarian bookstores, and forage for the rare beetles he collected. Yet Klemperer and Jünger both found themselves anxiously sifting propaganda and hearsay to learn the truth about distant events on which their lives hung.

For English-speaking readers who do not know his work, A German Officer in Occupied Paris shows the many sides of this complex, elusive writer.

In the judicious and helpful foreword by San Francisco-based historian Elliot Neaman, who says. “Like a God in France, Jünger operated on the edge of politics in Paris, rather like a butterfly fluttering among the resistors and collaborators. He didn’t trust the generals, who had taken a personal oath to Hitler, to be able to carry out a coup.”

Jünger had visited the city prior to the war, was fluent in French, and now had the contacts and the time to become even more familiar with the French capital. During his stay in Paris he met painters such as Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso as well as literary figures including Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Jean Cocteau, all of whom figure in his Journals, which reflect a view of Paris that had become a tourism mecca during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

To Jünger, Paris was “a capital, symbol and fortress of an ancient tradition of heightened life and unifying ideas, which nations especially lack nowadays” (30 May 1941). After wandering around the Place du Tertre, near the Sacré Cœur Cathedral in the Montmartre section of Paris, he wrote: “The city has become my second spiritual home and represents more and more strongly the essence of what I love and cherish about ancient culture” (18 September 1942). At the same time, Jünger was aware of the “shafts of glaring looks” with which he was sometimes viewed by locals as he wandered in uniform through the city’s streets and byways (18 August 1942, 89, and 29 September 1943).

A German Officer in Occupied Paris is divided into four parts: the “First Paris Journal,” his writings from 1941 through October 1942; “Notes from the Caucasus,” continuing his account through February 1943; the “Second Paris Journal,” covering the period from his return to Paris through the liberation of France in the late summer of 1944; and finally the “Kirchhorst Diaries,” his account of having been placed in charge of the local militia [Volkssturm] and his reflections on the bombings and imminent defeat of Germany.

The “First Paris Journal” reflects the comings and goings of a German officer and writer happy to rediscover Paris at a time when it seemed clear that Germany had won the war and would dominate France and perhaps Europe indefinitely. Closer physically to the fighting following his transfer to the East in October 1942, Jünger devoted greater attention to the fighting and the raw nature of the German-Soviet struggle in “Notes from the Caucasus.”

By the time he returned to Paris and began his “Second Paris Journal” in February 1943, the Germans had been defeated at Stalingrad and it had become increasingly evident that a titanic struggle loomed and that the Germans might well lose the war.

The final section, the “Kirchhorst Diaries,” is set against the backdrop of the Allied invasion of Germany, accompanied by intense bombing and the destruction of German cities and homes including Jünger’s own, and the seemingly countless numbers of civilian refugees seeking shelter and food. Through it all, Jünger continues his reading, including that of the Bible, his book collecting, and visits to antiquarian booksellers when possible, and his chats with various literary figures in Paris and, at times, in Germany.

Much of the material in the Journals is introspective, with Jünger addressing his innermost thoughts and dreams. Snakes also appear with some frequency in the Journals, for example, in the entry of 13 July 1943, where during a restless night because of air raid sirens in Paris, he recalls having dreamt of dark black snakes devouring more brightly colored ones. In the Journal entry, he linked snakes back to primal forces incarnating life and death, and good and evil. This connection, he noted, was the reason people fear the sight of a snake, “almost stronger than the sight of sexual organs, with which there is also a connection” (13 July 1943). Following a conversation with the “Doctoresse,” the name that Jünger used for Sophie Ravoux, with whom he was intimate and had an affair in Paris, he described his own manner of thinking as “atomistically by osmosis and filtration of the smallest particles of thoughts.” His thought process, he explained, ran not according to principles of cause and effect but rather at the “level” of the vowels of a sentence, on the molecular level; “This explains why I know people who couldn’t help becoming my friends, even through dreams” (22 January 1944). Addressing Eros and sexual organs, Jünger added that he wished to study the connections between language and physique. Colours also had spiritual values, “Just as green and red are part of white, higher entities are polarised in intellectual couples—as is the universe into blue and red”.

Jünger’s position as an army captain gave him a panorama of the war that left no room for heroes. Violence became a grim leveller that made ideologies interchangeable. Germans on the eastern front were reading On the Marble Cliffs as a condemnation of Soviet Russia rather than of Nazi Germany. Hitler had unleashed a dehumanising force on the world, one that made Russians, Germans, the French Resistance and Allied pilots all look the same, locked in an escalating cycle of cruelty. Jünger witnessed Allied planes strafing screaming children in the streets, releasing bombs timed to explode while presents were handed out on Christmas Eve. Accounts drifted in of Parisian friends, who had once tried to transcend national boundaries with him through measured discussion in the salons, being harassed as collaborators. His summary of this second war could have been a reverse of the first: ‘Inactivity brings men together, whereas battle separates them.’

The picture of Jünger’s political views that emerges in his Journals, however, is a highly chivalric and military elitist one in which a small number of bold idealists, for lack of a better term, struggle against demos and technocracy, democracy and technicians, who are destroying the soul of an older European society. Writing while back home in Kirchhorst on 6 November 1944, following the expulsion of the Germans from France and walking around viewing the destruction wrought by the Allied bombs in Germany, he observed: “As I walked, I thought about the cursory style of contemporary thinkers, the way they pronounce judgment on ideas and symbols that people have been working on and creating for millennia. In so doing they are unaware of their own place in the universe, and of that little bit of destructive work allocated to them by the world spirit.”

He went on to criticise “the old liberals, Dadaists, and free-thinkers, as they begin to moralise at the end of a life devoted to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order.” Jünger then referred to Dostoevsky’s novel The Demons, in which the sons of Stepan Trofimovich “are encouraged to scorn anything that had formerly been considered fundamental.” Having destroyed their father, these “young conservatives,” now sensing “the new elemental power” of “the demos,” are then dragged to their deaths. In the ensuing chaos, “only the nihilist retains his fearsome power.” Jünger mentions Hindenburg, and the destruction of the conservatives by the Nazis is clearly implied (6 November 1944).

In August 1943, he described his political views as a combination of Guelph (relating to the medieval supporters of the Pope against the Holy Roman Emperor), Prussian, Gross-Deutscher (in support of a Greater Germany including Austria), European, and citizen of the world “all at once.” As he put it, “My political core is like a clock with cog wheels that work against each other.” However, he added: “Yet, when I look at the face of the clock, I could imagine a noon when all these identities coincide” (1 August 1943).

While violence raged all around, Jünger continued his secret diary, for publication after the war. This ended for him when American tanks rumbled through his village in April 1945, Jünger proclaiming that the deeper the fall, the greater the ensuing rise. Jünger survived investigation in the immediate postwar period and went on to become a grand old man of German literature, with a considerable following at home and abroad. A year before his death he was – as the phrase goes – received into the Catholic church. Having lived through a violent century he expired in his bed in his 103rd year.

The war journals is a highly nuanced, albeit self-made, picture of a human being in the middle of World War II, who is a flirtatious fascist, yet who apparently seems to care for other human beings, regardless of their so-called social strata or race. Take for example this entry dated Paris, 28 July 1942, “The unfortunate pharmacist on the corner: his wife has been deported. Such benign individuals would not think of defending themselves, except with reasons. Even when they kill themselves, they are not choosing the lot of the free who have retreated into their last bastions, rather they seek the night as frightened children seek their mothers. It is appalling how blind even young people have become to the sufferings of the vulnerable; they have simply lost any feeling for it. They have become too weak for the chivalrous life. They have even lost the simple decency that prevents us from injuring the weak. The opposite is true: they take pride in it.”

Having said that, I found some of the contents repugnant as Jünger, a devout entomologist, easily writes about finding a new insect while fires are burning all around Paris in 1943. Indeed Jünger paints himself as the detached botanist-scholar, determined to survive and help the world recover in peacetime. For him, the best way to avoid being sucked into the vortex of violence was to disconnect from emotion and group mentalities: to feel nothing and be on no one’s side, only bearing witness. A detached eye in the storm.

His journal is a hedonistic carousel, as he frequented theatres, literary salons and Left bank bookstalls along the Seine, as well as having a meeting of artistic minds with Picasso, Braque and Cocteau. It’s possible to make your way through this collection and have a grand ole time, enjoying the moments when Jünger encounters celebrities like Picasso, or when Monet’s daughter-in-law gives him the key to the gardens at Giverny for his own private tour, or when he describes another gourmet meal with the well-heeled of Parisian society: “The salad was served on silver, the ice cream on a heavy gold service that had belonged to Sarah Bernhardt.” Jünger relishes his name-dropping and his contacts with the upper crust. He sees himself as one of the Übermenschen: “In this country the superior man lives like Odysseus, taunted by worthless usurpers in his own palace.”

The author himself gets lost in the fog of mystic self regard as all artistic writers are prone to do and confesses that in an entry labeled 26 Aug 1942: “At times I have difficulty distinguishing between my conscious and unconscious existence. I mean between that part of my life that has been knit together by dreams and the other.”

To read the diary in chronological order is to realise that Jünger’s submersion in art and literature was his way of preserving his humanity while serving the machinery of a lethally violent state. One way of doing this was through a voracious program of reading, chiefly literature and history, often reading two or three books at once. One is not surprised at the German and French reading but at the abundance of English writers, whom he read in the original—Melville, Joyce, Poe, Conrad, Kipling, Thomas Wolfe, Thornton Wilder, the Brontës, ad infinitum. The range is also remarkable. Jünger pivots from the 1772 fantasy Diable amoureux to a biography of the painter Turner to Crime and Punishment. And throughout the entire diary, one finds him reading the Bible, cover to cover, which he began shortly after his posting to Paris.

Over and over again I had to remind myself this is a diary. Diaries by definition have one eye on self serving posterity.

So it’s not surprising that Jünger would tweak reality to create this image of poetic detachment. With his constant stories of indulgence in Paris, the reader might assume he had no job while he was there. In fact he was censoring letters and newspapers, a cog in the Nazi machine he so despised. He omits anything that would make him appear a villain. An ongoing extramarital affair in Paris is barely hinted at. But neither does he try to look a hero, omitting how he passed on to Jews information of upcoming deportations, buying them time to escape.

Should he have continued to enjoy his life as a flâneur for so long? He had solid proof of what was going on, debriefed as he was on the mass shootings and death camps on the eastern front. Throughout his career he had railed against inertia, lauding men of action who sacrificed themselves for a just cause. And then such a cause presented itself. Jünger’s colleagues in Paris were involved in the Stauffenberg plot of 1944, and asked for his help. He was one of the most influential conservative voices in Germany at the time, one of the few that Hitler’s followers might have taken seriously. Yet he refused to commit himself during the chaos. Instead, Jünger waited for evil to destroy itself: a fireman who fought the blaze by waiting for the building to burn down. As usual, he inhabited a grey area.

Jünger remains a problematic figure of controversy, perhaps even emblematic of the aged old question how does one respond to brutish evil? There are no easy answers. Addressing the French who collaborated with Germany during the war Robert Paxton, a well regarded historian of Vichy France wrote, “Even Frenchmen of the best intentions, faced with the harsh alternative of doing one’s job, whose risks were moral and abstract, or practicing civil disobedience, whose risks were material and immediate, went on doing the job. The same may be said of the German occupiers. Many of them were “good Germans,” men of cultivation, confident that their country’s success outweighed a few moral blemishes, dutifully fulfilling some minor blameless function in a regime whose cumulative effect was brutish.”

Was Jünger one of those they called a ‘good German’? Eating sole and duck at the famous Tour d’Argent restaurant, while gazing down at the hungry civilians in the buildings below was the choice Jünger made. In his 4 Just 1942 diary entry he wrote, “upon the grey sea of roofs at their feet, beneath which the starving eke out their living. In times like this - eating well and much - brings a feeling of power”.

We are always told to speak truth to power. Before we can speak one must think. But thinking truth to power is never enough in itself unless one acts out truth to power. Words without action is nothing. So the question one has to ask even as one reads from the detached safety of distance and time: how would one act in his shoes or indeed a Frenchman’s shoes?

More than anything, the diary raises, for me at least, the question of moral culpability. It’s impossible to tell what Jünger was really thinking, and so perhaps one tantalising aspect of these war journals is psychological more than anything else. All this stuff is swirling around his life but we hear about the harmless social fluff for the most part. For example, he notes “In Charleville, I was a witness at a military tribunal. I used the opportunity to buy books, like novels by Gide and various works by Rimbaud.” I wanted to hear about the tribunal, but alas, it vanished into Jünger’s damn book buying.

And yet if you judge Jünger by his diary entries alone then it would be very easy to find him guilty. But diaries conceal as much as they reveal. For all the criticism that Jünger has served up a self-serving exculpatory diary, the truth is that he leaves his most selfless acts unmentioned. It is known that he gave advance warning to Jews facing deportation: The writer Joseph Breitbach was one, as he subsequently confirmed, and Walter Benjamin was possibly another.

None of this, for obvious reason, could be committed to paper, nor could the names of Adolf Hitler or any of his henchmen. Instead, their appearances are marked by Jünger’s felicitous code names. Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi chief propagandist, is “Grandgoschier,” a character from Rabelais’s Gargantua and Pantagruel meaning “Big Throat.” SS Chief Heinrich Himmler is “Schinderhannes,” the name of a notorious German highwayman but also a pun on horse knacker. And Hermann Goering is simply “Head Forester,” citing the most fatuous of his many official titles.

Jünger thought a great deal about the mystic and symbolic power of sounds, and he reserved his most apposite pseudonym for Hitler, “Kniébolo,” a name that is at once menacing and absurd. It suggests a kneeling demon (Diabolos), a leitmotif of the diary as Jünger became ever more convinced of Hitler’s essentially Satanic character- in the literal biblical sense.

So grey areas get more grey when we either try to step back and be detached to render a verdict on Jünger or if we step into his shoes to get inside his head. This is the limitation of a secret and coded diary, no matter how scrupulously written and how fascinating they are to read. Diaries are written for oneself or an imagined other; they play on the satisfactions of monologue. Letters are shaped by the contingencies of distance and time between writer and recipient; they become over time scattered in various places and must be "collected" to form a single body of writing.

Diaries are shaped by moments of inspiration but also by habit; they are woven together by a single voice and usually are contained between covers. Diarists play with the tension between concealing and revealing, between "telling all" and speaking obliquely or keeping silent. Like letter writing, diarists inscribe the risks and pleasures of expression and trust. The diary is an uncertain genre uneasily balanced between literary and historic writing. The diary belongs to the woman where history and literature overlap. So it’s easy to conclude that we will always have ambiguity and tension between these two polar opposites.

After 1945, Jünger again withdrew into private life, but continued to publish. Seclusion encouraged attention. His reputation grew. Scholarly editions appeared. In three last decades, doubters aside, he enjoyed growing recognition, travelled the world, deepened his knowledge of nature and voiced concern about human damage to the planet. Jünger poured out books late into his nineties. By then he had swept Germany’s top literary prizes and been visited in his Swabian retreat by the statesmen of Europe, including Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand.

Jünger’s experience of life did little to dent his loathing of liberalism and democracy. On a country walk along a bomb-pitted road near his home late in 1944, Jünger indulges a moment of conservative relish, telling himself that it is liberals who are to blame for all that has befallen. How wonderful it is, he writes sarcastically, “to watch the drama of the old liberals, Dadaists and freethinkers, as they begin to moralise at the end of a life devoted completely to the destruction of the old guard and the undermining of order”. “Blame the liberals!” was the reactionary’s charge at birth (there is a profound difference between true conservatism and the extreme reactionary). It hobbled the Weimar Republic and bedevils politics today. Politically, he had learnt nothing. Today Western Europe society is eating itself inwards through the corrosive influence of the woke-ness of cultural Marxism and the conservative now finds himself/herself in the sweetly ironic position of defending the tenets of true liberalism.

For English-speaking readers who do not know his work, A German Officer in Occupied Paris shows the many sides of this complex, elusive writer. These diaries are invaluable about the man and his times. Jünger is nowadays probably less read than read about. So these war journals are to be welcomed and to be read with great interest.

For some these journal entries alone will still provide material to debate the moral choices made - and evaded - by Jünger. To critics, Jünger participated too much and judged too little. To defenders, he was indeed on the hard right, but no fascist and, besides, his prose was what mattered, not his politics. Not to pity Jünger’s personal travails would be defective. Not to respond to his prose would be deaf. But all of us can ponder Jean Cocteau’s final verdict, who liked Jünger and considered him a friend but whose aloofness troubled him: “Some people had dirty hands, some had clean hands, but Jünger had no hands.” Jünger may have washed his hands of his time in Paris but the hand of history forever tapping on his shoulder is less forgiving.

68 notes · View notes

perihelionicarus · 4 years

Text

Alright, it’s long story time. I read a whole bunch of accounts of ex-cops yesterday, and they were all TOO similar to how my experience in cadets went. I think (I hope) I can shed some light from the inside about how easily corruption happens in a space like that. While you read, think about how similarly the police system works.

If you have no idea what cadets is, think of it like a junior military (ages 12-19). You get discipline training and drill training and classes about how the military works, but there’s no obligation to go into the military after. A lot of people do, though. A lot of them also go on to become cops. I was in cadets because you could get your pilot’s license without having to pay for it.

The way a cadet squadron is organized is you have commissioned officers (COs), who are actual military members and sort of oversee the whole thing. Then reporting to them are non-commissioned officers (NCOs), who are the kids, usually in their older teens, who pass a bunch of tests and stuff and achieve the rank of sergeant. At this point you become one of the “leaders” and are in charge of cadets, who are divided into sections and aim to work their way up to NCO.

Our squadron was famously pretty hard-ass about the NCO/cadet dividing line. Once you were a NCO, the other NCOs and the COs would make you delete your friends off Facebook who were cadets, and you had the “privilege” (eyeroll) of learning the NCOs’ first names. The phrase I heard a lot was “don’t fraternize with cadets”.

My friend who I went to high school with was promoted to sergeant before me, and had to delete me off Facebook. She pulled me aside at school, though, and warned me not to become an NCO. I asked why. She wouldn’t tell me at first, but after a while she confessed there was “initiation”, yeah, a fucking hazing process and the other NCOs would treat her like garbage if they found out she told me. I later found out they didn’t like her anyway, because she had spoken out and fought back during the hazing. Also because she told one of the other guys not to smoke weed while she was in the car.

I went ahead anyway, because I wanted my pilot’s license and the higher your rank the better your chances of getting on the course. I got promoted to sergeant at 17 at the same time as two other cadets.

I honestly can’t remember too much of initiation, because I’ve long since stuck it in a trauma box in my mind. I remember it involving tying our belts around our eyes, being shoved around, forced to say things, dance, and it ended with us being herded into a car and brought to someone’s house (at which point it was over). You have to realize though that I went into it fully prepared for it because my friend had warned me. I can’t imagine how scary it was for the other two who were with me.

After that, we learned their first names. They suddenly treated us like their best friends. The worst part? It worked. We were part of the inner circle.

We were then privy to the email chains. It was so long ago I don’t remember specifics, but it got pretty fucking racist, sexist, and any other -ist you can think of. We weren’t all white or straight, not everyone outright made racist statements, and it never got n-word bad, but it was still awful and we were all complicit in that the rest of us never called it out. And if you made fun of your own groups? Your respect level shot up. (I might even still have those emails, since I rarely clear my inbox).

We also basically had a no-narc policy where if one of us did something wrong--gave a kid contradictory orders, didn’t back down if we incorrectly scolded them about uniform etiquette, singled out and humiliated someone--the rest of us would not report it to the COs. But the number one no-narc policy was about initiation.

We had another initiation in the dead of winter, when three new sergeants were promoted. Their initiation was similar to mine, but they were also forced to strip down to their t-shirts while it snowed outside. One of the boys (he was only 14!!) got fed up, ran out, and called his mom to take him home. Another boy finished initiation, but was crying. For the coming days and weeks, we treated these two like less-than, ignored them in meetings, and generally treated them like shit, until they got fed up with it and reported the whole initiation thing to the COs.

I say ‘we’ throughout this whole thing because even though only 3-4 of us (out of 15-20 of us) were the perpetrators, the rest of us were fully complicit in our silence. We knew it was wrong but still allowed for it to happen. A lot of us were “good people” and treated the two boys, not to mention other cadets, just fine. We allowed ourselves as a whole to become a corrupt body because of “one or two bad apples”. Sound familiar?

Our punishment for initiation was a stern talking-to, a couple people (the ‘most guilty’, I guess) getting demotions, our parents being called, and being told to stop excluding the two boys who had reported it to them. That’s all. We were all still NCOs, and still in charge of a whole bunch of kids. My mom, notoriously strict, didn’t even give a shit. She was proud of me for not being a weakling for once. Really, staying silent was the weakest possible thing I could have done. The strongest people among us were the boys who reported it despite the threat of being ostracized by their peers.

I aged out of cadets shortly after, so I don’t know if initiation happens anymore. It stopped for a while as the COs kept a scrutinizing eye on us. But before I had even been promoted, initiation had happened for years, so it may well have started up again. That’s a lot of corruption that went unpunished. We were told that to be an NCO is to be a leader, and that integrity was to do the right thing even when no one was looking. We passed these sayings among ourselves, all believing we were the paragons of doing right. Nothing could be further from the truth.

There is a really sinister high you get from being liked by a group of people that hates everyone else. It’s something I’ve been incredibly wary of ever since. In cadets you are given camaraderie within the NCO body, and power over other cadets. Recipe for disaster.

My point here is that I am 100% sure this is what happens with police. I don’t know if they do hazings, but I would not be surprised in the least. No matter how “good” they are, they power inevitably trip. They lose sight of what they’re supposed to be doing. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and ableism all run rampant. Their bonds with each other overshadow their supposed “sworn duty”. Every single cop is complicit in this; complicit in their actions and ESPECIALLY their lack thereof. All the ones who want to and do speak out are immediately ostracized. They’re organized by fear and not much else. There is no such thing as a good cop, just as there was no such thing as a good NCO. And it is no coincidence the sheer number of NCOs who later go on to the military or the police.

It’s been almost 10 years, but to this day I’m ashamed of the way I acted. I’ve told this to maybe one or two people in my life. I’m sharing the story now because now is the time to see how easily “a few bad apples” can fuck up a whole organization. Google some of the memoirs of ex-cops, and you’ll see just how similar this is and just how easily that happens. So let me reiterate: power corrupts. There is no such thing as a good cop.

#long post #very long post #someone let me know if i'm swerving way out of my lane here but cops are garbage and i need yall to know why #I know I'm preaching to the choir but I've seen some members of the 'some cops are good' crowd on here and mmm nah #I was on the 'some cops are good' side until a few days ago when I started reading and remembered just how easily cadets fucked me up #not that im like naturally a good person but i certainly never had bad intentions and yet. here we are #sh*t percy says

22 notes · View notes

karl-jenkins · 5 years

Text

Things I love about: Jordan Bamford as Scorpius Malfoy

Jordan is the first cover Scorpius for London cast 3 and I’ve been lucky enough to see him seven times. He has become my favourite Scorpius and brought so many delightful touches and facets to Scorpius that have made me love him as a character even more. The keywords that come to mind when I think of Jordan as Scorpius are: endearing, excitable, sweet and brave.

- From the moment Albus meets Scorpius on the train, you love him instantly. His voice is soft and sweet, he is socially awkward in the most endearing way. He shakes Albus’ hand a bit too enthusiastically for a little too long, you can definitely see that he hasn’t been around children his own age very much and desperately wants to make friends. When he says he’d rather be a Malfoy than “the son of the Dark Lord” he growls and holds his hands like claws. He is just so likeable and the definition of “adorkable”.

- During the flying class scene he is utterly delighted when his broomstick rises until he notices Albus’ is still on the ground. He forgets his own triumph immediately and moves to Albus’ side to reassure him and tell him not to listen to the teasing from the other kids. Right from the start he is a loyal, supportive friend.

- The scene in which he tells Albus that Astoria’s illness has got “the worst it could possibly get” is heartbreaking. He is so quiet and subdued, and his voice breaks as he wipes away tears, he can’t even look at Albus until he asks him to come to the funeral. He blurts this out as if worried that Albus will say no. Joe works perfectly with him in this scene, his Albus is so sincere and supportive and desperately wants to do anything that will help his friend.

- On the Hogwarts Express when Albus asks about the Triwizard tournament, he’s so excited to be able to share his knowledge. When called a geek he gasps and gushes “I thank you” as if it’s the best compliment he’s ever received. When Albus wants to climb up onto the train roof, he tries to stop him by sitting down on the trunks to block his way up. Once Albus pulls him away and climbs up, he is so frustrated that he stamps his feet and shakes his fists as if he can’t quite believe what Albus is getting them into, but he still knows he will follow because he’s his best friend, however frustrating, and he won’t let him do it alone.

- When the trolley witch spikes extend, Jordan shuffles right back into Albus’ lap in fear. Joe wraps his arms around him, Jordan holds his hands in front of his chest and they cling onto each other for dear life. This is one of the many times we see that Scorpius’ instinct when he is sad or scared is to go to Albus for comfort and physical reassurance.

- In St. Oswald’s, Scorpius is so out of his comfort zone. He doesn’t quite know where to look, everything makes him jump. Once again, he goes to Albus for reassurance, holding onto his arm and staying as close to his side as possible. When Amos takes his wand out, he says “come on mate” with his arms fully wrapped around Albus as he tries to drag him away, out of danger.

- When Albus and Delphi are practicing Expelliarmus, he looks so sad and conflicted as he watches on from the background. He likes to see Albus looking happy but he’s also feeling a little jealous and left out. After Delphi kisses Albus and then turns to leave, he fumbles with his Durmstrang robes, dropping them and having to quickly catch them and bundle them back up in his arms. As Delphi comes near, he offers her his cheek as if expecting a kiss too which she obviously ignores. He is so awkward around her and gets flustered and you can’t help but feel a little embarrassed for him. But, it really makes you feel for him and love him all the more.

- He’s so funny in the dragon task scene. He speaks to Albus and gestures with his hands as if he’s trying to plan what he will say. This turns out to be “Krum, Krum, you’re the one!” when Krum’s name is announced as Durmstrang Champion.

- His library scene is so intense. He’s usually so sweet and softly spoken that the sudden rush of anger is such a shock and has given me goosebumps every time. When he’d say “so Sad” he would get this hard, sarcastic edge to his voice and sounded completely different to his usual self. He would get right up in Albus’ face, to the point that sometimes Joe would back away from him fearfully. When he talked about Astoria still being dead in this new alternate reality I’ve seen him do it a couple of different ways – either so sad that his voice breaks or so angry that he can’t contain himself. I’ve seen him slam his hand down on the table and throw the time turner bag down onto it in his frustration. After he’s got everything off his chest, he clutches his hands over his face and just cries which I read as him being overwhelmed by his mixed feelings of anger, sadness and relief that his pent-up frustration has finally been aired. Also, as he usually goes to Albus for physical reassurance, but he can’t do that when it’s Albus that has caused him pain, he ends up clinging onto himself like he doesn’t know what to do with himself.

- In Myrtle’s bathroom, he is so proud of himself for the “engorgimpressed” line. When Myrtle leans close to him to say that she likes brave boys, he leans so far back in surprise that it looks like he might fall back out of the sink.

- After he emerges from the lake and the dementors appear, his instinct is to cover his mouth. He’s just found himself in a completely different world to the one he expected; his best friend doesn’t exist, the darkest wizard in history is alive and he’s all alone and yet he keeps his head enough to cover his mouth when he sees a Dementor. For me, this self-preservation instinct is so very Slytherin and gives a good insight into how well he’ll be able to blend in and survive in this world.

- In the dark AU with Draco in the Head of Magical Law Enforcement office what struck me was that he is so brave. After his initial shock to find his dad there and that his dad insists on being called sir, he becomes furious that his dad might be involved in killing muggles. He gets right up close to Draco, shouting and pointing in his face, incredibly brave considering this is not his Draco and this world could hold serious consequences for him. I’ve always found the fact that Scorpius only does the full Voldemort and Valour for Draco meaningful, but I’ve seen Jordan do it very slowly, full of significance which made that moment even more memorable for me by really highlighting the fact that that’s the only time he does it properly. On Sunday (12th May 2019), after leaving Draco’s office, he clutched his hands over his face and burst into tears, like he did after the library argument with Albus. Again, he doesn’t know what to do with all his conflicting feelings and Albus isn’t there to support and help him.

- When he arrives in the library, he is frantic and desperate, feverishly searching for answers so that he can try to find out why this version of events came to be and how he can try to fix it. Scorpius is so sweet and endearing, it’s almost impossible to imagine him as the Scorpion King. Seeing Craig cower away from him is especially jarring when you’re so enchanted by this sweet boy.

- When he asks Snape if he’s undercover now, he realises what he’s said and claps his hands over his mouth as if he wishes he could force the words back in. Snape feels like the answer to his problems and for a second he’s so excited that he gets a bit carried away and thinks before he speaks before remembering what a dangerous situation he’s in.

- His lake scene is so funny that he’s got applause every time I’ve seen it. His voice becomes screechy with excitement, he loses all his composure in his pure delight. When he sees Harry, he screams, high pitched and unable to contain his excitement and relief to see him again. When he sees Draco and says, “and Dad,” he suddenly becomes much more composed – he seems slightly embarrassed, aware that he’s made a scene and Malfoys are not supposed to make a scene. But the way he says “my dad” is so sweet and meaningful; he’s so relieved to be back with the dad he knows and loves rather than the Head of Magical Law Enforcement who is complicit in such atrocities.

- The scene in the dormitory is so funny. When he tries to wake Albus up, he leans out of his bed and nearly falls, having to put a hand out to catch himself. He is utterly giddy in this scene, so delighted to be back with his best friend, everything right with the world once again. For the “time to make time turning a thing of the past” line, he grabs Albus by the arm and pulls him over and delivers the line with their arms linked.

- In the owlery, when Albus says it felt important to send an owl, Jordan mouthed “why?”. Another little moment of Scorpius’ jealousy; he’s got his best friend back and he wants him all to himself.

- On the Quidditch Pitch, he is just so brave, strong and resilient. He stands steadfast despite being tortured. When Delphi pulls them over to turn time back to the maze task, he can’t stop looking at Craig’s body in disbelief.

- The maze is another scene in which he is just so brave. He’s already been tortured, knows she’ll do it again, that she would eventually kill him. But he won’t give up, his voice is hard and determined when he tells her they can defy her. For the Crucio while he’s on the ground, he does a sort of shoulder stand and throws his legs up in the air. He looks a bit like a ragdoll being thrown around and I don’t know how he does it, but it is very effective.

- In Godric’s Hollow, he is so excited to see Bathilda that he actually yells “SQUEAK!” in this squeaky excited voice. He’s giddy with pure nerdy delight and it’s absolutely adorable.

- The hug with Draco in Godric’s Hollow is so heart-warming. Jordan’s Scorpius throws himself into Draco’s arms with such enthusiasm that both feet leave the ground and there is a chorus of “aww”s from the audience, sometimes even cheering and applause. It is a beautiful moment, one that is clearly so important to them both. After the hug, Draco keeps a hand on Scorpius’ shoulder, now they are back together, he doesn’t want to lose him again and wants to be able to feel his presence and believe that he really is there. Jordan holds onto his arm and cuddles in against Draco’s shoulder. It is a beautiful thing to witness between them and gives me so much hope for the future of their relationship.

- On their final staircase scene, Scorpius is once again giddy with excitement, his squeaky screech of excitement coming out once again. He really thinks that Rose’s “Scorpion King” is a triumph and sinks contentedly back onto the stairs, fists raised in celebration. When Albus sits down on the stairs, Jordan sits on the next step down and Joe would rest his head on Jordan’s shoulder then Jordan would rest his head on top of Joe’s. It is such a sweet moment. When he leaves to go to Quidditch, he walks most of the way turning back to look at Albus, who stands on the stairs watching him leaves. Their eyes are locked until the last second, when Scorpius waves and finally turns away to leave. It felt like the perfect way to say goodbye to Scorpius.

Jordan has been an asset to the London company and a truly spectacular Scorpius. He is my favourite Scorpius and I will miss him greatly, but I am so grateful to have had seven shows in which to experience his sweet, soft, excitable, brave, funny, geeky and so damn lovable interpretation of Scorpius. His chemistry was Joe was perfect, they portrayed a Scorbus friendship that felt balanced and natural, they were jokey and tactile with each other and their friendship felt so real and like it had so much potential to blossom into more. It was truly a treat to watch them together.

#things i love about #jordan bamford #scorpius malfoy #thoughts and observations #ccsquad #understudy love club #first cover #cast 3 #cursed child london #i've been so nervous about posting this one #i just want to do him justice #there's probably more things that i've forgotten #sorry this is so long

29 notes · View notes

wsmith215 · 4 years

Text

Policing Can Take a Lesson from Health Care

The grief is indescribable. George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and other unarmed Black Americans dying at the hands of police is unacceptable. It is happening repeatedly, and we are fed up.

I will be forever haunted by the images of a police officer’s knee being used, not in protest, but to asphyxiate a fellow American. While I had to watch parts of it on mute to keep from hearing the calls of Mr. Floyd asking for water, begging for his deceased mother and pleading for his life over and over again, I keep thinking of the details of how he died—how his carotid arteries were compressed, leaving it impossible for his brain to get oxygen; how the vagal, or relaxation, centers in his neck were overstimulated by the pressure, likely slowing or stopping his heart; how his trachea, as rigid and firm as it is, may have also been collapsing from all the external pressure; and how pinning him down kept him from expanding his chest cavity to take in enough air and compensate for his already oxygen-deprived organs.

For days, I avoided watching the entire video, but reminded myself that this was not an experience Floyd asked for or deserved. As much as I wanted to protect my mental health, it paled in comparison to the horror of being killed slowly and unjustly. After watching the video, and seeing that the officers knew that they were being videotaped, I realized that what the public sees as solely an accountability tool may in fact be a stage for some police officers to amplify and assert to the world who is in charge

What we attempt to sweep under the rug as isolated instances, bad apples that should not spoil the bunch, is increasingly becoming a pattern. The bunch is unmistakably being spoiled, and the American public is watching. We are watching for the true acknowledgement of ills in policing by the police themselves, for the recognition that all parties involved, including those setting the stage for murder, those ignoring or mocking the cries of screaming bystanders and those using a person’s past or current misfortune as justification for murder, are all complicit.

It is incredibly tough to be yelled at, assaulted and chastised while being a public servant. I am an emergency medicine physician, and I have had bodily fluids thrown at me, been assaulted by patients and been accused of withholding resources and care. I recognize the stark differences between the natural hazards I am responsible for trying to fix and the human-to-human hazard that police respond to. My job does not require me to interface with a potentially armed public. Nonetheless, the decisions we make every day, in either circumstance, can result in life or death. Even on my worst day, I could only hope that those who have also made the pledge to “Do No Harm” would not let me get away with hurting anyone. To be responsible for a life is to be held accountable for life. To be a teammate to another public servant means encouraging the best behavior possible.

So, if our police force says these murderers among them are bad actors, how do we better screen for them before they are hired? How do we remove and punish them for egregious acts against weaponless Americans? How do we best account for and address implicit and explicit bias and Chauvin-ism in policing?

Health care may be able to provide a model for improvement. Health care in America is far from perfect and needs its own serious introspection. To be a physician or nurse in the U.S. and not recognize that mistrust, bias and inefficiency in medicine is real would be willful ignorance. Nevertheless, our health care system recognizes that even the best and brightest trained and most well-intentioned among us are imperfect people functioning in an imperfect system. Our job requires a constant mental exercise of risk versus benefit, checking bias, examining power dynamics and staying current on the best practices for patients.

In risk management, analysis and prevention, an accident causation model called the Swiss cheese model, proposed by James Reason, author of Human Error, is used to help avoid unacceptable events in an organization. It is a model commonly used in health care as well as in aviation and engineering. Each component of an organization is considered a slice of cheese. If there are any deficiencies in the slices of your organization, you will have a hole in that slice, hence Swiss cheese.

If a hole, or an area of failed or absent defenses in several slices of an agency line up, it can create a continuous hole, thereby resulting in an adverse outcome. Factors that contribute to failure of a system or a bad outcome result from problems in organizational structure, supervision, preconditions and unsafe individual acts. For example, a hospital purchases an electronic health record that does not record allergies upon patient arrival. The supervising physician unknowingly orders a medication that a patient is allergic to. The pharmacist is not prompted to check for allergies prior to filling and delivering the medication. The nurse then administers the medication to which the patient is severely allergic; the patient is then unable to breath and dies.

The layers of cheese are aligning quite strikingly in American policing.

While we work to address the systemic issues of inequality and racism, as well as campaign finance reform, voter turnout and suppression—bearing in mind how such electoral conditions contribute to the employment of local officials such as district attorneys, prosecutors, sheriffs and medical examiners—I want to offer 10 solutions to support effective and unbiased maintenance of public safety in our communities.

1. Third party external review of deaths under police custody. There should be an external, nonpartisan body that reviews every death under police custody for police departments nationwide. This would allow for an impartial assessment of pattern and practice in the review of deaths in custody and would be made of a panel of law enforcement leadership, legal officials and civilian participants. Cases that may present potential conflict of interest would be escalated to the state governor or federal Department of Justice. An unbiased, third-party medical examiner should also be selected to conduct autopsies in these cases as local medical examiners are often appointed officials with political relationships that could pose conflicts of interest.

2. Anonymous reporting with no retribution. Police should be encouraged to securely report activities of misconduct without the concern of punishment from police stations or colleagues. To facilitate this safely, I recommend reporting through an anonymous external reporting system or hotline.

3. Internal reviews for quality and safety. All police departments should be required to engage in routine quality audits of their activities for continued improvement of policing practices. Quality audits would include reports from the anonymous reporting system, as well as frequent review and audit of police reports, dash and body camera footage, radio exchanges with both peer and community review. This would also encourage preferential use of alternative nonlethal agents when a citizen is posing a possible nonlethal threat to the officers. A system for remediation, probation and termination should be enforced for officers with repeated offenses and not meeting requirements of their corrective action plan. Special attention will also be paid to precincts with disproportionate disciplinary action of officers based on their race or gender.

4. Evaluation for racism and socioeconomic bias in the recruitment and hiring process. Screening through entry questionnaires, interviews and scenario-based evaluation with mental health professionals and character assessments via diverse job references should be conducted with all entering police officers. Longitudinal training in implicit bias and systemic inequality would also be required.

5. Routine psychological evaluation and mental health care for all police officers. Repeated trauma of frontline professionals, particularly those at risk of physical harm and death, should be acknowledged. Those at higher risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, including officers with backgrounds in wartime conflict and high-risk adverse childhood experiences such as significant bullying, violence, physical or sexual abuse, should be identified and supported. Partnerships with mental health professionals, consistent participation in activities promoting mental health and wellness, and routine sabbatical opportunities and respite from policing activities may also prove useful.

6. Training, in-service and continued policing education. In addition to routine training and in-service activities, police officers should be required to complete a set amount of continuing education units (CEUs) annually or at minimum every two years. This would include conflict resolution and basic first aid as well as cultural competency training involving members of the community that addresses the unique needs of the communities they serve.

7. Unarmed public safety teams. These teams can function as enhancements of or alternatives to armed police officers particularly for patrolling and nonviolent 911 calls. This public safety option would include locally recruited public safety workers trained in de-escalation and mental health emergencies.

8. Enhancing education and entry requirements. Journalist Sara Llana, in an article titled “Why Police Don’t Pull Guns in Many Countries,” describes a police training process in Germany wherein “rigorous education standards help to widen an officer’s vision when stress narrows it.” Currently, in the U.S., police training lasts on average 19 weeks. This may or may not include a field experience and probation period. In addition to academy training, local governments would require, at minimum, bachelor’s level liberal arts education focused on courses such as ethics, communication, history, psychology, domestic and international relations, foreign language and ethnic studies.

9. Performance review–based compensation. Compensation of officers would be increased based on fulfillment of the above requirements with incentives for strong peer, community and performance reviews, and avoidance of adverse events.

10. External review for accreditation. By fulfilling the above requirements, a police department would be accredited by a third party for continued operation, potential increases in budget or fines if requirements are not fulfilled.

When an apple is rotten and a slice of cheese riddled with holes, a typically delectable combination, is now difficult to eat. I hope these points can contribute to the dialogue and provide potential action items for change. Our nation should never have to witness an unnecessary, gruesome death at the hands of police. As a fellow public servant, we are the people that the public calls upon in times of distress, fear and concern. We are layers of protection and should function as such. We should prioritize trust and comfort over fear and terror and call out our colleagues who prioritize the latter.

Source link

The post Policing Can Take a Lesson from Health Care appeared first on The Bleak Report.

from WordPress https://bleakreport.com/policing-can-take-a-lesson-from-health-care/

#Health Report

0 notes

newstfionline · 7 years

Text

Demand for wives in China endangers women who live on its borders

The Economist, Nov 4th 2017

BEIJING AND LAO CAI--Huong was only 15 when she went out to meet a friend in Lao Cai, a city in northern Vietnam on the Chinese border. She thought she would be gone a few hours, but it was three years before she managed to return home. Her friend had brought with her two acquaintances--young men with motorcycles. They squired the girls around town and took them to a karaoke bar, where their drinks were spiked.

When the girls grew drowsy they were hoisted back onto the bikes, each sandwiched between two male riders. They were driven into the hills and across the Chinese border to a remote house in the countryside. There they were told they would be sold. The girls screamed and cried but were subdued by two men, one of them wielding a stick. The traffickers told Huong that by crossing the border she had sullied her reputation, but that if she behaved well they would find her a Chinese husband. After marrying she might find a way home, they said. If she refused she would stay stranded in the hills.

Huong--a pseudonym, to protect her identity--is now 20 years old. She lives in a large bungalow in Lao Cai, which she shares with a dozen women aged between 15 and 24. They are all survivors of trafficking networks that smuggle girls across the Vietnam-China border, sometimes to be sold as prostitutes but more often as brides. Their house, with its enormous teddy bears and fleet of fuchsia-pink bicycles, is a shelter run by Pacific Links Foundation, an American charity, which helps victims finish their education and cope with their trauma.

Around the world some 15m people are living in marriages into which they were forced, including some who were abducted, according to a recent study by the International Labour Organisation, a UN body, and human-rights groups. In China the trafficking of women is particularly acute, in part because a preference for sons has left the country with a severely skewed sex ratio. Between 1979 and 2015 the imbalance was aggravated by a one-child-per-couple policy, which prompted many to abort females before they were born. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has estimated that by 2020 there will be 30m-40m Chinese men who will be unable to find wives in their own country.

One consequence of this is booming business for matchmakers who offer to import women from China’s poorer neighbours, particularly Laos, Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, Mongolia and North Korea. Some of these women, seeking a route out of poverty at home, freely choose a Chinese marriage and gain the necessary approvals. But along China’s borders, kidnapping is rife.

The stories told by trafficking survivors and Vietnamese officials in Lao Cai shed light on this grim trade. Each year between 100 and 150 trafficked Vietnamese women return to their country through the town’s border gate, says an official there--probably only a small proportion of the total who are lured or abducted the other way. Some of the victims’ ordeals begin when, like Huong, they are drugged or kidnapped. Others are duped into thinking they are going to a party or to meet a potential boyfriend. Sometimes members of their own families are complicit.

Diep Vuong of Pacific Links thinks victims are getting younger (in China, women have to be at least 20 to get married, but marriages to abducted foreigners are often unregistered). The spread of cheap smartphones and improvements in mobile networks are making it easier for traffickers to use social media to befriend schoolgirls in Vietnam’s hills. These criminals earn as little as $50 for each woman they bring into China, where they are often resold far inland by middlemen. Chinese police report that at their final destination Vietnamese women fetch prices of between around 60,000 and 100,000 yuan ($9,000-15,000).

Some snatched women and girls return home swiftly. A 17-year-old who lives at the bungalow with Huong says she was gone for only two days before a woman on the Chinese side of the border helped her to escape. A fellow resident, who returned from China a month ago, walks with a limp. She says she broke her leg leaping from the house in which her traffickers were holding her. Chinese police later found her lying in the street.

Huong’s story is longer. She was kept at her traffickers’ house and threatened for two months. When she finally agreed to be married she was driven for two days to a city in Anhui, a province north-west of Shanghai. She was warned not to let her new family find out that she was Vietnamese. She was to pretend to be a Chinese citizen belonging to an ethnic minority with cross-border cultural links.

The man to whom she was sold into marriage was in his early 20s. He was from a wealthy family, which had paid 90,000 yuan for her. Her husband explained that he had not really wanted to get married, but that his parents were keen. They had told him that an ethnic-minority bride would be more obedient than someone from the ethnic-Han majority. Such claims are commonly made by matchmakers. One Chinese mail-order marriage site says Vietnamese women are cheap, obedient and unlikely to run away: they are “so gentle and loving they will make you melt”.

The greatest demand for foreign wives is in the countryside, particularly among men who are poor or disabled, says Jiang Quanbao of Xi’an Jiaotong University. In rural areas not only is the sex ratio an impediment to finding a bride, so too is the migration of women to the cities in search of work and higher-status males. Impoverished villages sometimes end up with dozens of foreign wives, as word spreads of their availability.

Villagers often have sympathy for the buyers--they may even help to prevent trafficked women from fleeing. Escape is not at all simple for women without money of their own and with limited Chinese-language skills. North Koreans who contact the authorities risk being repatriated and then sent to concentration camps. That makes them particularly vulnerable to traffickers.

Once victims become mothers, their decisions about whether and how to leave China become even more difficult. So it was for Huong. She had been taken to Anhui with another Vietnamese girl who was being sold into the same district. The pair agreed that they would find a way home together. But their plan had to be postponed soon after arrival, because Huong’s friend became pregnant. By the time the baby was delivered Huong was expecting a child, too. Less than a month after she gave birth, Huong’s in-laws sent her to live and work at a textile factory nearly four hours away, leaving her baby behind. Her husband would turn up on payday to collect most of her wages--about 6,000 yuan a month. Eventually Huong concluded that the family meant to keep her estranged from her daughter. She resolved to escape back to Vietnam.

Huong scraped together enough money to travel independently. Her own parents, whom she had managed to contact a few months after reaching Anhui, helped her work out where best to present herself to the authorities. The Chinese police kept her for three months while they investigated her story, after which they arrested some of the people involved in trafficking her. Then they sent her back to Vietnam, though her baby remained in China.

In June the American government reported that China was “not making significant efforts” to tackle human trafficking. It relegated China to the ranks of countries, such as Venezuela, Turkmenistan and South Sudan, which it rates as the worst for their record in dealing with the problem. But Chinese police say they are not sitting on their hands. They report that between 2009 and the middle of last year, they “rescued several thousand women of foreign nationality” in anti-trafficking operations that involved co-operation with their counterparts in Vietnam, Myanmar and Laos. More than 1,000 people were arrested for related crimes.

In some provinces government registrars are trying to spot unwilling foreign brides by hiring staff with knowledge of regional languages. The government says that stricter policing last year in the borderlands reduced trafficking from Vietnam.

It is difficult, however, to prosecute people for buying abducted women. In 2015 the law was revised to make legal action easier. But the law says that, in cases where the woman wants to return and the buyer does not try to prevent it, punishment can be lighter or the sentence can be commuted. Cross-border operations remain hostage to China’s relations with its neighbours. Ties with Vietnam, an age-old rival, are often frosty.

Huong is now finishing high school, and hopes to study medicine. She says she “will not regret” having to leave her daughter in China. A baby would have been a burden on her family in Vietnam, and she worried that having no father would thrust the child into a legal limbo. Her in-laws were wealthy, at least, and seemed devoted to her daughter, she says. They were “good people.”

#China #Vietnam #human trafficking #abducted women #kidnapping wives

3 notes · View notes

thepippapotamus · 5 years

Text

Cardiff’s Women in Music Exhibition

In 2018 I was lucky enough to be asked to contribute to and exhibit in the brilliant Cardiff Women in Music Week, as curated by the unstoppable and Liz Hunt of The Moon in Cardiff, without whom the Cardiff music scene would be all the more poorer.

Anais Mitchell, Clwb Ifor Bach

Islet, Swn Festival

Gryff Rhys, Clwb Ifor Bach

Y Niwl, Swn Festival

Strange News From Another Star, Undertone

Joanna Gruesome, Swn Festival

Below is my accompanying essay:

Mine is a wandering road through music. There is no real start or end as I’ve been involved in all aspects of making, playing and managing. Photography and writing were always passions of mine and I studied each formally as well just having fun with them. Those, combined with a love of music, a background in opera, a musician mother, partner and friends meant some level of involvement was inevitable. A naturally organised and (ever so slightly) bossy person, I started helping my partner Joshua Caole and others with booking their shows and tours. I enjoyed the romance of packing a car up and driving around Europe on tour with Josh. There was some blagging and bullshitting at first and a very steep learning curve. I put together press packs from guides on the internet to sell these acts to venues and promoters. I started emailing and phoning people blindly and the ones who responded I built working relationships with for future acts. Booking my first tour for a US act (James Apollo) I came up against a very well-respected London promoter who both called me out on my blagging but also respected me for trying so hard to get this band the best shows I could. After a couple of successful tours, more people asked me to book for them. My biggest project to date was a tour for Christiaan Webb, Jimmy Webb’s son, which was crafted with a lot of love together with his Welsh brothers, the Musicbox studios and rehearsal rooms crew. Musicbox is the lifeblood of Cardiff music and without Mark and Bernie we’d all be lost. A big tip. Spreadsheets are a booker’s friend. Many many spreadsheets. For contacts, tour day plans, keeping track of what gear the venue will provide, what length set the band has to play… have one for everything.

As I was already going to a lot of shows, I took my camera. It was a natural progression and felt like a higher level of interaction. Some of my shots proved popular when bands or events shared them online and found their way into the press. Taking photos of bands that you know gets you to the front of the crowd and from there, once you have work to show people, it’s not hard to get press passes or interest from others who want you to shoot them. I would often work as an official photographer at a festival which is where all my Sŵn shots come from. Approaching festivals and asking to take photos for free one year can lead to a more official position the next.

Everything I’ve done, however, including more recently helping a new venue with their programming, has been sporadic due to the fact that I have increasingly severe ME. When I enjoyed runs of moderately good health some years ago I could dip my toe into different waters, just a little - I could book bands, take photos, manage tours - but all in a very limited capacity. Other photographers could shoot all day, every day. I also required huge rest periods after the smallest amounts of activity so even during my best times I could never fully be immersed in music as my health always had to come first. Sadly, as my disease has progressed and I have become far more severely affected, my involvement in the industry has understandably waned. The majority of the last 5 years have been spent in bed, in hospital or in a wheelchair so it means a lot personally that anyone has noticed my contributions to Cardiff music, especially as a person with disabilities. I often worry I disappear from memory when I’m alone in my room, able only to watch the ceiling and unable to move even to the bathroom without help. The rights of those with disabilities is therefore as important to me as gender equality and I’ve been really happy to see projects like Gig Buddies come to Cardiff. Notably, however, whilst venues and promoters are more and more prepared for disabled customers, few are ever ready for disabled people in the industry itself. Trying to make sure my artist parking for a festival was accessible on walking sticks one year was incredibly complicated and issues like these seem to confuse whomever is at the other end of the phone as it’s just not expected. This is something I have had to confront much more often than sexism. Turning up on sticks, in a wheelchair and still commanding attention, trust and respect is distressingly difficult. Whenever I can take photos or interact with music, however, I do. Tenacity is definitely crucial. It has been a while since I could physically push my way to the front of a show and take photos though so these days I’m more of an email warrior.

Photography to me is the urge to capture real moments. I sometimes think this makes me less creative than other photographers who dream up magical landscapes, but that’s just not what interests me. It’s more about documenting emotion and moments in a visually interesting way, especially with live music. For that reason I never cared much for photographing stadium shows and big festivals, despite the visual artistry involved in the production. I prefer small venues and intimacy. Photographers I admire include Lomokev who is a wonderful guy based in Brighton who first came to the fore taking photos at raves on his then very unfashionable Russian Lomo cameras as he crawled through the grass.

I’ve always been able to project a confidence (it’s totally fake) and when needed, a slight arrogance. This has got me through moments where gender could have been a barrier, I think. Especially in photography. My tutor, the unforgettable “Dr Fred(ericks)” told me if you ever worried you didn’t belong somewhere or felt under-experienced for a shoot, turn up with all the gear you have and barge on through.

The relationship between women and anyone identifying as anything but male with the music industry is obviously a troubled one. I believe I possibly take a different stance to some people, however, due to a uniquely multi-generational view. My mother (though she loathes me to tell anyone) was the real trailblazer. She was a session player at some big studios whilst she was still unmentionably young. The stories she has told me; the assaults and assumption of women as complicit sexual objects regardless of their actual involvement in the music are disgusting and have influenced my view of a lot of industry big-hitters. They are also far removed from the still deep-rooted but nowhere near as toxic sexism I’ve encountered. She went and did it all though and lived through horrible situations for the love of music. Today, I truly believe there has been progress. I think it’s sometimes important to just recognise that instead of worrying how far there is still to go. Progress has occurred not just in the role women play in music but in the way in which we engage in discourse about gender, sex and even consent. It is important to remember women have always played key roles in music and sound engineering. There are women in every great rock story who showed up, got on with it and earned respect. Music was never a no-go area for women but we had to prove ourselves to an unjust degree and put up with a lot of shit and assumptions that men don’t have to. I feel like banging the drum incessantly about inequality in music sometimes does an injustice to all those in the industry who support everyone around them and lift each other up regardless of gender. There are some great people out there and they are the only way forward. No path is impossible for women in music; Sound engineers (one particular woman in Hamburg I will never forget), musicians (Liela Moss is one of the most underrated front-people in rock), bookers, tour managers, and the Liz Hunts of the world, who appear to somehow do everything, are making sure the roads that have been forged stay open and flow with more and more talent.

The best advice any woman in music ever gave to me was from Take That’s first booking agent, a wonderfully Ab Fab-esque woman who told me to go out there and “kill them with kindness”. She meant it as an all-encompassing ethos, but I feel it is especially pertinent to women in male-dominated spheres. For example, when the worst kind of promoters think they can walk all over a female tour manager because she’s no way going to stand up for the band and fight for the fee they’re owed that night and you respond with calm but strong insistence rather than shouting or cowering away it is then that you see something really interesting start to happen and they listen.

A great feat this year was to see how female-focussed the Cambridge Folk Festival line up was, without pretence or affect. These were women who simply needed to be there because they were the best. Previously some men may have got their slots through “old boys club” mentalities but we can see this is changing and merit is winning out. It is important to not fetishise women in music, however. I’ve seen awful “Girls with guitars” tours that don’t help anyone legitimise female achievement. Those terrible “female” monikers: “female” drummer, “female” sound engineer, etc, go hand in hand with fetishisation, but, our best way to obliterate them is to go out there, do our thing and educate anyone needing it along the way - exactly what exhibitions like this aim to do. I have come up against some women who demonise men just for being in the music industry and that upsets me deeply as it’s equality we want, not a war, and not positive discrimination. Social media sometimes makes us feel like we are all competing for photos to be seen, shows to be promoted but that’s not how things work. It works best when we all support each other’s endeavours regardless of gender. Community in all things is vital. The biggest challenge facing us is getting people excited about small shows in sweaty rooms and beautiful music again as attendance has dropped and caused the closure of so many wonderful, dirty places.

#lomokev #cardiff #the moon #james apollo #music #live music #sound engineering #feminisms #feminism #touring

0 notes

revel80r · 7 years

Text

On the turning of Scyther88

I met my best friend when I was five years old. at the Akron Chinese Christian Church. On this blog, I call him Scyther88. Scyther, myself, and another guy, let’s call him ‘Mango’, have been the three musketeers for most of my childhood. We’d only see each other on sundays, and sometimes a friday, or saturday here or there, because our families all lived in different areas of Akron and we went to different schools during the week. But oh, the bliss of those sundays together with those two idiots. At church on sundays, we hung out together, we got in trouble together, bullied and picked on other smaller kids together, and all the joys of 90′s boyhood ...together. We definitely had our different personalities too. Mango was the oldest (by 8 days). He was always domineering, manipulative, and was kind of our de-facto “leader” of the little gang. Scyther was always the lancer to Mango’s alpha. He always challenged him, had more of a streak of irony and sarcasm than Mango. He was cool. And then there’s me. I was younger than both of them by about a year. I was the little 3rd fiddle. I just played loyal and loved being with these two guys... complicit in all our stupid sins as a bunch of kids.

We got really, crazy into Pokemon, and bonded over it. To this day, Scyther’s email, gamername, username on most platforms has always been “Scyther88″ or some form of it. Mango’s moved on from his “Jolteon88″ or whatever it was. I was an ‘89 baby so I’m not even cool. Now I’m just reVelstΛr. I remember I was the first to get pokemon cards. Mango and I were at some Chinese church camp, and we both got one card each, he got a machop and I got a charmander. Later, a couple weeks later, I got the old blue Pokemon card starter deck. And I became the cool boy. Mango and Scyther both got rival (and better) decks pretty soon afterwards and the 90′s head fever of pokemon collecting materialism had bitten us, and our parent’s wallets hard. We fought, we argued over rules and technicalities, (the best that 4th graders could anyway), etc. But we were buddies and knew that. Even though we didn’t go to the same schools in Akron, we’d go to each other’s birthday parties, play N64 together, etc. It was the good ol’ days. The best and worst part of it was, the Chinese church met in this very large mega-church building in Akron. Very extensive facilities. And us boys had the inside of the church fully explored and mapped out. We knew the place very well. So on sunday we knew there would be the inevitable time our parents had finished socializing and decided it was time to go home, and do other things. And so, purposefully, to milk every sweet moment of pokemon-card battling that we possibly could, we would hide in nooks, crannies, upper rooms, balconies, anywhere we could find and hide in, to hide away from our parents so we could spend more precious moments pokemon-carding away. Our parents had to send out search parties and scour the buildings for us little brats. hahaa. We’re guilty of many white hairs on one of the assistant pastors.

Reality hits hard. Mango’s family moved away to Asia at the end of 5th grade, and we would not see each other for a very long time. Scyther’s life hit a very rough patch when his dad’s brother passed away. Scyther’s father got angry and blamed Jesus for the passing of his brother. He full turned away from the faith, and forbid Scyther’s mother and Scyther from going to church anymore. I was young and not aware of such heavy things. but I did remember my two best friends no longer being at church, and I was suddenly a lone little guppy in the church youth group. The youngest, least mature, and most annoying, by many grade levels, to the rest of the church youth group.

I saw Mango once, in 8th or 9th grade when his family stopped by Akron for a visit, and the next time I saw him was in college.

Scyther and his mother would occasionally come to church over the years. Scyther’s father was vehemently against God, but Scyther’s mother was all the stronger in the faith in Jesus. And so they’d sneak to church whenever she can over the years to come. And blessings for me, my friendship with Scyther was intact and I got to have a middle school and high school life with my best friend from time to time, talking to him about video games, stupid jokes, girls, and all other kinds of bad things.

Scyther and I even went on a mission trip together in 2006 to Beijing, China.

In the fall of 2007, all three of us idiot musketeers went to the Ohio $tate University as freshman, Mango, Scyther, and my darned self.

I got in contact with Mango the weeks before commencement, and hung out with him the first day on campus. We both got involved with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship and that ended up being our primary community on campus for the next 4-5 years (or on my case, [one of my] primary communities). Scyther and Mango were no longer buddies, no longer close. Mango’s become a popular, social kid. Scyther and I are outcast, and fringe people. I was not aware of this at the time, but Scyther had a very rough middle school and high school life, being rejected and picked on by his white peers, because he is one of only two or three Asians in his entire schools. White people. Y’all messed up. Need to get help. I was not aware, that this messed up my best friend on the inside, as he has a cynical, vengeful, vindictive streak hidden that I either missed or chose to ignore. He became ambitious and focused. So that, one day he will be at the top of the heap, looking down on everyone else who was cruel and had mistreated him in the past. And Scyther will know who had one in the end. That was his plan anyway.

Scyther was driven, ambitious, and disliked people. Mango was popular, responsible, and worked around people. I was a desperate loser junkie who would give up anything to be with people or video-games.

Guess which one of us dropped out of Ohio State, heheh.

And so Scyther did not like InterVarsity after attending one time, and picked up on the community’s unfortunate clique-y tendencies. decided he was not going to put up with that bovine stool, and chose to attend a Korean church instead. Meanwhile Mango and I became career InterVarsity attenders, becoming leaders in different chapters of IV. Mango got a lot farther along than I did, in leadership and socially, and so it went on.

I am kind of sad to admit that I picked up on signs that Scyther had given up on Jesus very late. He had stopped attending his Korean church, and I simply assumed it was because of the busyness of his schedule, as I had missed many church sessions, although that may have more to do with irresponsibility, though like many college students, I liked to chalk that up to “busyness”. And being roommates with Scyther, we would have bitter arguments from time to time. One time I got so angry, I threatened to murder him, and the dorm manager had to have me stay at a friend’s place overnight that time because of the difficulties in our dorm room. After a year of college I began to realize that Scyther no longer believed or followed Jesus. I was not even aware of my own shallowness and the brokenness in my own pursuit of Jesus, but all I knew was I felt InterVarsity was doing the right thing to me, and I seemingly couldn’t do anything to convince stubborn old Scyther to come back to either InterVarsity or church.

In Scyther’s mind, he realized that being in college, he could do whatever he wanted and was no longer forced to go to church by his mother. He could make his own choices now. And so he decided to not go. And his pains from his past, cynicism and disdain for people, including Christians, took over, and he lost faith in people, community, and Christ. He admitted to himself in not believing or seeing proof of God’s existence. and became atheist.

During all of this, Scyther’s mother remained the strong, strong prayer warrior Christian she has always been. Praying every day for the salvation of her family, urgently imploring God to bring Scyther back to faith. She prayed, and prayed, and prayed.

For many years after that, we had an understanding that InterVarsity and Jesus were just me and my ‘God thing’. but Scyther saw no evidenc, proof, or need for him. There was no way to work around his buttheadedness. Plus, Scyther’s got lots of crap on me, my deepest darkest secret, etc. So it’s not like I’ve been a particularly good, effective, or pure example of a Christian to him. And that was that. There was not much of a productive conversation beyond that.

Scyther graduated from Ohio $tate, and got into grad school in a virology PhD program at Cornell University, while I got academically dismissed, and dropped into crippling depression... Mango graduated and went on to teaching or something like that. There was a drop of contact for awhile.

Over the years from 2011-2016 Scyther and I would skype and hangout online from time to time. sometimes more frequently, chatting and playing vieogames together online every night. Other times we’d go through months of hiatuses from online contact. I visited him at Cornell University in Ithaca. That was a special night as by the grace of the Lord, I got a chance to talk with Scyther about why I believed in God, why I believed in Jesus, and how experienced him. A deeper conversation than the typical StarCraft and World of WarCraft talk we had. In the end, Scyther still saw no evidence, proof, or need for God and I had to just agree to disagree... It’s good. I love him. I love this guy. He is my best friend. He was there with me through much of my shit and depression. Especially that worst period in 2013.

This year in 2016, I took a very, very long hiatus from video games and much social media. Worked through some of the toughest semesters I had at Capital University, which God has provided for me after scraping and mopping up my mistakes through sweat, blood, and tears at Columbus State Community College... And so 2016 was a banner year for me. Most excellent. I got to go on not one, but two missions trips, one to Mozambique, and one to Taiwan. and after all that crazy goodness, I was brought into church staffship, and finished college in december, finally earning that accursed, elusive piece of paper...

Meanwhile, Scyther was told to wrap up his research, do a dissertation and defense, and finish his graduate school studies. And he did so. And now we all tease him and call him Dr. Scyther. What should have been a joyful, celebratory time, became a disappointment for Scyther, as life after attaining doctorhood was no different from life before. He did not feel any redemption, release, or beams of purpose. Only the emptiness. And so, with his emotions crashing. Scyther realized the truth of life is meaningless. There is no rhyme, or reason. Why spend so much effort building, only for someone else to enjoy the fruits of his labor? What was worth it? We all die and go to the same place, and life is meaningless. He spiraled into depression and decided to kill himself. and with the many years of laboratory experience, he knew exactly what he needed to do to kill himself. He planned it out, wrote apology letters to his mother, wrote one for me, and only found that..... he could not do it. The fear is too much. He is afraid of pain, and confronted with the fact that he did not know what happens to him after he does it. And so, THANK GOD, my best friend Scyther did not kill himself. During this time I was completely unaware that my Scyther was going through so much... Lesson and word of advice... check on your friends, keep in contact with them, ever after you sign off or swear off from social media.. check on your friends. Because honestly, depression and suicidal resolve can come quite swiftly....

Scyther did not kill himself. Thank God he chickened out. One thought reached out to him, The Timothy Keller book he bought out of curiosity on a whim a while ago: “The Reason for God” It is an apologetics book laying out philosophical, experiential, theological arguments fro the experience of God. Very good. Scyther read through it.

One day, in November of 2016, after a conversation with his mother, Scyther felt truth in his mind, that maybe, just maaaybe, God really is real. And that very night he had a terrifying demonic nightmare, as if he was being dragged down to hell itself. Sleep paralysis, the sciences call it. A couple nights later he had another sleep paralysis attack, this time seeing an angry face. He looked it up online and discovered sleep paralysis. And happening so suddenly and coincidally with his openness to the existence of God, a higher being..... He called me and asked about it. Being intrigued, I opened up a little about my own demonic experiences, and assured him that the name of Jesus has power. Jesus has power. Pray, invoke the name of Jesus, and the enemy will flee in every direction from you... We talked for a little while, I mentioned being at the church I was at, and how I was going to a big conference called One Thing in Kansas City that december.

A couple days later, my cell phone broke and I had to switch phones, missing a couple texts and calls in the process; several of these texts were from Scyther, inquiring about this conference, One Thing, and whether IHOP-KC was a cult.

By the time I got in contact with him a couple days after that, Scyther had already figured out the answers to his questions himself. And he was thinking about going. When I talked to him again, Scyther simply told me, unflinchingly, that “God is real. God is totally real. Acts chapter 9. That is all I can say, man.” I really was on the verge of tears, hearing my childhood and best friend, of 22+ years say to me over the phone that God is real, after he had abandoned the Lord and lived as an atheist for about a decade.

And just last month, in December, Scyther joined me and my church going to IHOP’s One Thing conference. It was a beautiful thing to see. His heart was being opened and his character was already different. He had a passion and a zeal for the Lord that I have not seen before. It was amazing. His heart was being opened, and he was being softened to people. My best friend, who in the past hated pretty much every single human being except for his 5-6 friends and family... is now an open, sociable, empathetic heart. I cannot make this up. Jesus is sooooo good and I am so thankful. God’s even opened up Scyther’s mind to the possibilities of prophecy, healing, and miraculous prayer. Things that were strongholds to Scyther’s mind and heart were being unlocked and opened and it is a beautiful, beautiful, redemptive thing to see.

Nowadays, Scyther comes to my church in Columbus, and we are growing, Scyther is growing so, so fast, we are all growing towards the Lord, we are growing together.

I cannot be happier with life.

#Scyther88

3 notes · View notes

shaledirectory · 6 years

Text

The “Stupid Is As Stupid Does” World of Fractivism and So Much Else

James E. Smith, Ph.D. Engineering Managing Member and President of Plasma Igniter, LLC

James E. Smith explains how, we as a society, need to stand up and demand people to “stop doing stupid” if we are to grow socially and economically.

An old adage says we should “gladly suffer fools.” The opposing view is that we should “stop doing stupid.” Either way, the key concern is the direct impact that not confronting stupid or shortsighted actions has on morale and the long-term effectiveness of any decision-making/leadership process.

Whether it is managing people, business processes, visionary leadership or important innovation efforts, the need to mitigate stupid, wasteful directives, interjections and interruptions has become an essential requirement if we are to grow socially and economically.

A primary reason we as a species have been so successful is our ability to take advantage of acquired knowledge in making decisions and solving problems. These abilities also allow us to aggressively protect ourselves from the varied and changing environments we choose to live in, amidst the diverse personalities that we are expected to live and work with.

In other words, we have the ability to successfully teach, mentor, lead and manage as required to precipitate the next great something. This becomes a clear necessity in staying ahead of the problems that prior generations created in solving even earlier problems. It also seems to be a primary characteristic for any advancing technological society, where the notion of simply stepping off the progress merry-go-round in favor of “an earlier, simpler time” will lead only to frustration and a train to Emerald City.

And yet many seem to have an apparently endless willingness to allow, or at least tolerate, acts of stupidity. This is certainly not a new problem. Each generation has had to deal with the few, but noisy and persistent, actors who make life and progress just a little harder to navigate. But unlike in the past, when we may have had the luxury to argue trivial points ad nauseam with little consequence, the accelerating rate of our social and technological development means we can no longer tolerate these delays.

Consider how our society often indulges foolishness by individuals or groups acting out of ignorance or petulance. These people expect to continue getting away with their interference, obstruction, stupidity and obnoxious behavior because they think they are entitled, above reproach or simply smarter than the rest of society, or they have ensconced themselves high up in the hierarchical or governmental pecking order.

Many people who fit this description actually begin as foolish, but appeal to the mercy of their associates or subordinates, learn what is needed, and use the group’s combined skill set to move the process forward. This preferred path eventually removes the party from the “stupid group.” (Your own past experiences can judge what percentage of the population chooses this option.)

Others, however, ignore reality and micro-manage whatever capabilities, skill sets and authorities they have been given or assigned – and often request more time and resources to advance their beliefs, agendas and ignorance. Ultimately, if they fail to accomplish their goals, they find ways to blame everything and everyone around them for their failure. If they plead their case well enough, they may even be rewarded with a promotion and even greater responsibilities that they can’t or won’t handle in the future.

This latter situation is clearly too prevalent in our society at all levels of corporate America, and, of course, within the government: local, state and federal. It is also prevalent in our social programs and the very activities we subject ourselves and our children to. In many of these cases, people get fed up and walk out, while others feel compelled by societal, employment and governance rules and expectations to put up with it all.

It is clear to a growing number of us that we as a society have sat too long letting people who have perfected the art of stupid continue to add ever increasing levels of nonsense to our already busy lives, through accident, oversight, ignorance, laziness, personal gain, or just plain self-entitlement.

Letting “stupid” continue, with no relief or recourse, is affecting our home, social and work environment, our creative and innovative talents, and the governance we expect and subject ourselves to.

We shouldn’t have a problem with ignorant people who are willing to learn and to do the best they can. The problem is with those who are unwilling to learn, or to develop new skill sets but still expect to be allowed by silent assent to do as they please. Even worse are the growing numbers of people who expect to succeed by virtue of their imperious demands and loud, obnoxious, even threatening behavior.

Non-reaction on our part has perpetuated growing levels of such behavior on their part, and an increasing degree of hopelessness and complacency on the part of decent, reasonable people. That has an additional downside.

Failure to respond and act in response to stupid or bad behavior breeds greater incompetence, as equally or more incompetent people are recruited at all management and leadership levels, to ensure that “stupid” isn’t exposed or jeopardized. More importantly, we also get a lowered performance bar, reducing or even removing challenges and the need for excellence. This result makes us all stupid.

Clearly, stupid has been around since little Jimmy decided to poke the sleeping bear with a stick.

I do believe, though, that we as a population have increasingly (and incorrectly) decided that it is just plain easier to let things continue as they are. We have become a nation of people who are too busy to get involved; too indoctrinated into believing the current state of affairs was mandated on high; or too intimidated by loud, menacing street mobs to question their wisdom or asserted “will of the people.”

These will eventually become more opportunities for well-deserved Darwin Awards to weed out the worst practitioners of stupid (or worse) behavior.

I don’t believe today’s “middle America” had any real input into the present situation, though it may be complicit through its silence. But I get an uneasy feeling that what is being pontificated, decided and decreed is being listened to and accepted by too many people who are either clueless, apathetic or feeling obligated by self-imposed, job-related or socially pressured expectations to just sit there and take it.

I also believe a growing percentage of those same folks simply don’t notice or acknowledge what they read or hear about, or even witness with their own eyes. So why do we continue down this path?

I don’t have an answer. Maybe we just need a few people with the courage and presence of mind to speak out, step forward and refuse to take it anymore. It may require a groundswell from the general population to get noticed. But that is unlikely to happen without a few brave people taking a stand.

All I know is, a lot of individuals in this world are still plugged-in and aware enough to know things are not right, or not right enough.

We all see and call things wrong at times, or frequently. However, if we haven’t made a few mistakes, we probably haven’t done anything good either, or we are still in bed with the covers pulled over our heads.

Making well-reasoned decisions – and standing up to bullies, oppression and intolerance – are hallmarks of our nation’s success story. Our continued success, and even survival, depends on this continuing. It seems to me it’s time for each one of us to identify and challenge a small piece of the human foolishness around us, and work to improve the situation, by demanding that the perpetrators “Stop Doing Stupid!”

Editor’s Note: This piece summarizes, quite nicely, what we have been up against with fractivists and their trust-funder enablers at special interests foundation such as the Heinz Endowments, the Park Foundation, the Wallace family foundations, the Rockefeller foundations and, of course, the William Penn Foundation. It’s stupid is as stupid does all the way with these folks and the courage to stand up and say “the emperor has no clothes” is more important now than ever.

James E. Smith is a retired university professor of engineering and current Member Manager for Plasma Igniter, LLC.

The post The “Stupid Is As Stupid Does” World of Fractivism and So Much Else appeared first on Natural Gas Now.

https://www.shaledirectories.com/blog/the-stupid-is-as-stupid-does-world-of-fractivism-and-so-much-else/

#shalebusinessinformation #dailyinformationonshaleindustry #fracking

0 notes