#it's just so telling how there's no interest in and education about indigenous peoples beyond the context of colonization as part of | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fatehbaz · 3 years

Text

[Pedro Neves Marques:] You already mentioned science, but do you mind going back and talking a little bit more about the notion of “Indigenous science and sustainability”?

[Grace Dillon:] Nowadays, I think in terms of Indigenous sciences rather than science. I feel that’s the way we should think about all sciences, as plural, whether we label them Westernized, Indigenous, or whatever form they may take. Let me quote from Gregory A. Cajete, a member of the Santa Clara Pueblo Nation who has worked in the field of Native science or sciences. He asks, “What is Indigenous science?” According to him, “It is knowing how to live in a place sustainably.” [...] What I love about current Indigenous Futurisms and how they’re changing is that they aren’t constrained by this binary between Western science and Indigenous or non-Western science. One example is Nalo Hopkinson’s novel The New Moon’s Arms (2007), set in the Caribbean. There’s this scene close to the end of the book, after the characters have suffered all of this environmental and extractivist injustice, where the grandmother is passing on her traditional ways of knowledge to her grandson but, since he goes to school, they’re actually teaching each other. “Intergenerational” doesn’t imply a hierarchical, top-down elders’ passing of knowledge only. It’s more of an exchange of ideas. This is what I see going on between generations in our Indigenous communities right now. In the science fiction field, my goal is to quietly change the mission for the top-notch journals in the field that are still simply clinging to stories about advanced technology and this linear way of thinking about knowledge as mere accumulation. [...]

-------

[PNM]: In Brazil, the word that the postwar fascist regime used for clearing certain areas of the country to allow for so-called development was “pacification,” which was applied to both Native peoples and the landscape. Instead of saying that they would cut down a forested region or displace and “educate” its local Native communities, they’d call the whole process “pacification.” So that’s become an extremely loaded word in the Portuguese language. Beyond the term’s historical associations with the military fascist regime, it reinforces the colonial notion that equates Native peoples with “nature” and a violent wildness, like the threatening woods that you just mentioned. Going back to your ideas, it’s been almost a decade since your anthology Walking in the Clouds was published. And what a decade it was! We saw an intense transformation in the field of science fiction, with a wave of Indigenous, black, Asian, and many other nonwhite authors, [...] being published and offering some of the decade’s most challenging stories. [...] Do you find that multispecies entanglements and the inclusion of nonhuman beings has also grown in visibility, within and outside these stories? I’m asking this because, for instance, in Brazil, debates about the rights of nonhuman or other-than-human beings have been key to Indigenous [...] discussions for at least the past two decades. There, the debate mostly centers around plant or animal persons, and moreover the [...] question of “what is human,” from an Indigenous point of view. That is, the knowledge that terms like “animal,” “plant,” “human,” and “spirit” may mean something much broader than how modern sciences define them.

[GD:] Back in 2012, I was talking about animal persons, rock persons, phenomenological persons, plant persons, and so on, and you could sense a quiet skepticism among some people. They would see it as a form of animism, when in fact I was talking about sciences. For example, plants literally converse among each other; plants that live in toxic areas warn other plants to stay away. There are many examples of nonhuman persons in fiction about sciences. Take Thomas King’s novel The Back of the Turtle (2014), a story about a First Nation scientist who is developing chemicals for a bioengineering company that is truly extractivist and toxic, until he sees how that’s impacting the land, together with its animal and plant persons, and he is thrown into a crisis. Does he want to be a scientist? Or at least a scientist in that kind of context?

-------

[PNM:] How do you see the relation between science fictions and Native myths and mythology? While the modern mind may eventually recognize the cultural value of Indigenous myths, it refuses to see them as scientific evidence. I wouldn’t want to project a meaning onto these stories, so I say this very carefully, but although in Brazil you may not find a great presence of Indigenous science fiction, Native traditions and myths almost seem to perform science-fictionally, in how they both rupture modern categories and expectations and allow for imagination beyond colonial frameworks.

[GD:] I have a lot to say about this. The first thing I’d like to do is to eradicate the term “myth” or “mythology,” because that implies that these stories are false or that they are fictions that should be questioned. Instead, what I do -- and this is what I grew up with -- is to call them “stories.” Everything is storytelling. Indigenous sciences are embedded in stories; this is how we share our Indigenous sciences. I grew up in an [...] anarchist community that was Anishinaabe-founded, at least to some degree. So, when I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed, I could absolutely understand the whole process of community and of shunning or shaming a person as a form of power and control, but also the recognition of combining art with science, rather than understanding them as separate. Although her story is science fictional, by acknowledging the role of storytelling in this combination between art and science, Le Guin again takes the fiction out of science fiction, and works with other forms of science. Our word aadizookaanan means “ceremonial stories” or “sacred stories.” Most First Nations don’t share those sacred stories with outsiders. However, in 2012 many of the nations I belong to -- and you should know that we Nish peoples are often called the pacifist-anarchists among other Indigenous nations -- got together and decided to share not only our gikendaasowin, meaning herbal knowledge and science and how they interact with ceremonies and songs, but also our aadizookaanan. We decided that some of our sacred stories needed to be shared globally, because they were necessary right now for dealing with Mizzu-Kummik-Quae, Mother Earth. So the reason I’m interested in science fiction is that when I was little and we had firesides, sweats, and other ceremonies, we were telling stories about star peoples that came to earth in, basically, space canoes. For me, the concept of a spaceship was not unusual. And, of course, we are all star people. We are made of stardust, which is scientifically accurate. Everything is made of stardust.

-------

Grace Dillon and Pedro Neves Marques. “Taking the Fiction Out of Science Fiction: A Conversation about Indigenous Futurisms.” e-flux. September 2021.

607 notes · View notes

cafffine · 3 years

Text

Hey guys, I’ve decided to stop publishing Saltcoats for a number of reasons. I'm aware that many of you are going to initially be let down or confused, but hopefully once you’ve read through this post you’ll understand why this had to stop. I’ll try to hit all my points, but of course if you have any questions pls feel free to dm me or reply to this post.

DISCLAIMER: Ending this fic was a decision I came to by myself! No one asked me to do this, though many did help, and if you have something to add please do not bring other tumblr or ao3 users into the conversation unless they’ve explicitly said they’re ok with that. It’s a draining and heavy topic (not to me, but for those affected) and I don’t want to cause anymore unneeded distress.

Also, I’m the only author, all the problems with this story were created by me, and were biases I should have recognized and acted on much sooner. I’m very thankful to all the people that have reached out to me about the negative impacts on this fic, but it really does come down to: I wrote and published a story that was fundamentally ignorant of its setting and racist. So now I have to do my part to apologize and educate myself/take accountability.

First off, this was a flawed concept to begin with because I was trying to do a low fantasy setting with aliens in period clothes and a work of historical fiction at the same time, and those are not things you can go halfway on.

Historical fiction that centers around people of color has a long history of simply going race-blind and faking diversity by giving poc the roles of white people in Eurocentric stories and erasing their identities. (This article about Bridgerton explains the problem better than I could.) And it was something I tried to avoid by still having the Fetts written as immigrants from Aotearoa (NZ), but completely missed the execution on because I didn’t commit to full historical accuracy in all characters and aspects of the story. Meaning, I might as well have gone race-blind because you can’t pick and choose what to include, it’s just as racist.

This creates situations like the Fetts being immigrants facing real life oppression while the Organas, also people of color, are unaffected by the social climate and living as members of the British upper class. That’s not accurate to any version of history and ends up wiping clean any point I was trying to make about race and oppression. That also extends beyond the Fetts, I was not addressing how the american characters come from a country that still allows for the ownership of slaves, the British oppression of Scottish people and their culture, or even an in-depth look at real Queer communities of that era. (and more)

Given the real life historical climate in the 1850s, a multi-racial story like this one is not successful, and is racist in its ignorance of the struggles of poc, immigrants, and the intersectionality that had with class and crime.

In addition, the Fetts being written as criminals, even if it is framed as a morally correct choice*, is still playing into negative racial stereotypes that shouldn’t have been ignored.

* I should add, I don’t mean to make it sound like i’m creating excuses for myself when I give explanations for some of these choices such as “but it was framed as morally correct”, that doesn’t lessen the damage being done, it’s still racist, I guess I'm just trying to show why so many of these things went overlooked for as long as they did, and how easy it is for white/privileged people to find mental loopholes around racism when you’re not being sufficiently critical of yourself.

On another note, the Fetts being indigenous immigrants to Britain in the 1800s is not something I should have tried to tackle in fanfiction - a medium that often lacks nuance and can easily end up romanticizing or glossing over most heavy topics. This goes for period typical homophobia, addiction, and class struggles as well.

That being said! I’m not implying that any of those things should be completely ignored in fanfiction. Addiction, for example, is something very close to me that I do still want to explore in fanfic for the purposes of education and normalization, I’m not telling anyone what not to write, just checking myself. Because in a story like this where literally everything is so heavily dramatized and also applied to characters of color by me, a white person? It’s only going to end up being out of place, lacking in historical accuracy, and wholly disrespectful.

Another major problem I wanted to address is the relationship between a rich white person and a poverty stricken poc. That's a bad stereotype to begin with, but then I tried and failed to frame Obi-Wan as ignorant and biased to a point where his social status plays into the theme of class critique. But, if he’s still being written as Cody’s love interest, all his negative characteristics are ultimately going to be ignored and excused by the narrative (by me).

I’m not trying to end this conversation, I’ll always be willing to talk about this to anyone who’d want to say/hear more, but I don’t want run the point into the ground with over-explanation.

So, in conclusion, this fic had to stop and be broken down into the problem that it was. All white authors who write for the clones need to be hyper-vigilant about the fact that we are creating narratives for poc, and that our inherent racism is always in threat of being baked into in the stories we publish and spread to an audience. I was in the wrong when I wrote this story, and it should never have gone on for this long. I apologize for both my actions, and to anyone I may have hurt along the way.

This is getting posted on ao3 in the fic, and then, for now anyway, the fic is going to be deleted after a week. I’ll leave this post up and answer everyone unless it's someone trying to change my mind. Also, if I ignore an ask please send it again, tumblr might just have deleted it. I don’t want to try and bury this or run from my mistakes, I just don’t think that leaving the fic up where it can still find an audience will do anyone any good. Thank you for reading

If you're interested here's some resources I've been using to educate myself further:

What caused the New Zealand Wars? - An excerpt of the book by Vincent O'Malley of the same title. It gives a good summary of the violent colonization and oppression of Māori people and their culture by the British empire.

NZ Wars: Stories of Waitara (video) - Very educational documentary about the NZ wars and British colonialism. There are some historical recreations that get violent so pls watch with caution.

Historical American Fiction without the Racism - Tumblr post by @/writingwithcolor that talks specifically about Black people in the 1920's, but makes a good point about race and historical fiction in general. I'd recommend any post from this blog, especially their navigation page just a lot of great resources

Who Gave You the Right to Tell That Story? - An article about writing outside of your race that includes a diverse series of testimonials

History of Scottish Independence - Details the colonization of Scotland by the British empire, sort of long, can cntrl + f to "The Acts of Union" for a more direct explanation.

The best books on Racism and How to Write History - A list of well written and diverse works of historical fiction and why they are good examples of representation

I have a lot more that I can share if you're interested (x x x x) but this post is getting a bit too long.

#I proofread this a lot but I'm sure there's problems with this post too #If anyone has something they want me to change or of theres anything I said that was offensive I'd appreciaite any help fixing it #but also I'll be rereading this all night and it will likely change before I put it on ao3 #saltcoats #racism

54 notes · View notes

rapeculturerealities · 3 years

Link

Long before she decided to help others eat better by becoming a dietitian, Jessica Wilson learned that the profession was unlikely to offer much to people like her.

Growing up as a Black girl in a mostly white area of Sacramento, Calif., she was bullied for her size and subjected to unpleasant visits with dietitians, who taught portion control with the aid of unappetizing plastic models of green beans and chicken breasts.

In her dietetics program at the University of California, Davis, Ms. Wilson was the only Black student. A single day was devoted to what the curriculum called “ethnic diets.” “It was not, ‘These are interesting and awesome,’” she recalled. “It is, ‘These are why these diets are bad. Next class.’”

Mexican food was dismissed as greasy. Indian food was heavy. Ms. Wilson was taught to prescribe a bland “kale-and-quinoa” diet. When she started treating patients — including many who, like her, are people of color or identify as queer — she learned how much those identities informed their perspectives on health, and how little she’d been taught about that.

“It makes people feel so guilty for not being able to eat what Goop would recommend,” said Ms. Wilson, 38. “I was no longer able to use the tools that had been given to me in school with good conscience.”

As the coronavirus pandemic has made Americans more aware of their health and eating habits, many have turned to registered dietitians like Ms. Wilson (or to nutritionists, who are not always required to obtain a specific education or certification). Yet the advice they get can sometimes seem more tailored to some past era than to the motley, multicultural nation the United States is in 2020.

In recent years — and particularly in the last several months, amid the national discussion about race — many dietitians have begun speaking out and reimagining the practice in a more inclusive way, often without institutional support.

Today, Ms. Wilson counsels many people of color on eating a healthy diet based on the foods they grew up with and love. Hazel Ng, 48, who runs a private practice in Alhambra, Calif., has created handouts for her Chinese clients that showcase produce found in Asian grocery stores, like bitter melon and lychees

In June, Sherene Chou, 36, a dietitian with a private practice in Los Angeles, organized a group letter to the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics — the largest and most powerful organization for food and nutrition professionals — outlining steps it should take to address systemic racism in the field, including antiracism training and more support for people of color. Leaders of numerous dietetics groups lent their support, signing the letter on behalf of 70,000 practitioners and students.

Many of these dietitians say the academy’s research, programs and articles ignore non-Western cuisines, or imply that they are unhealthy. They feel the profession places too much emphasis on consuming less and not enough on understanding individual eating habits. And, they add, it perpetuates an ideal of thinness and gender normativity that can exclude different body types and identities.

“It is a good-old-girls’ club where, as a person of color, you have to do so much to be invited,” said Jessica Jones, a dietitian in Richmond, Calif., and a founder of the inclusive dietetics website Food Heaven.

In response to these criticisms, the academy said it is working hard to broaden its ranks and resources to better reflect different cultures.

“Like other professions in health care and countless other fields, nutrition and dietetics has for many years experienced underrepresentation by persons of color in its membership and leadership ranks,” it said in a statement last week. “The academy knows change will not happen overnight. Still, we are making real progress that will create permanent change in our organization, our profession and our communities.”

The group is influential in setting the United States Department of Agriculture dietary guidelines that Americans are urged to follow; its members make up half of the 20-member committee that oversees those recommendations. In a July report, the committee acknowledged that the dietary approaches it studies don’t “qualitatively address cultural variations in intake patterns,” yet said the resulting guidelines allow a “tremendous amount of flexibility” that allows them to be tailored to an individual’s cultural and taste preferences.

The recipe database on MyPlate, the agriculture department’s healthy-eating website, includes 98 dishes classified as “American,” but just 28 “Asian” recipes and nine “Middle Eastern” ones. Though it lists 122 “Latin American/Hispanic” recipes, they include dishes like a “skinny pizza” made with tortillas. The Asian recipes include “Oriental Rice” and “Oriental Sweet and Sour Vegetables.”(A spokesman for the department said that “expanding the recipe database and other MyPlate consumer resources to reflect more diversity is one of our top priorities.”)

If the options seem narrow, they may begin with the narrowness of the profession. More than 71 percent of the nation’s roughly 106,000 registered dietitians are non-Hispanic white, according to the academy’s Commission on Dietetic Registration. Nearly 84 percent are women.

Entry requirements are steep: Practitioners must earn a degree from an accredited program, complete an internship (sometimes unpaid) or a supervised learning program, and pass a registration exam with a $200 entrance fee. Starting in 2024, a graduate degree will be required to take the exam.

“This is an expensive profession, with no guarantee that you are going to have a high salary,” said Lisa Sasson, a professor in the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University. She called the new graduate-degree mandate “unconscionable” and “an even greater barrier to people of color in our profession.”

The academy said that its charitable foundation provided more than $500,000 in scholarships and grants from 2017 to 2019 “for diverse individuals within the field,” and that those funds continue to grow.

Internships are highly competitive, and some even require the intern to pay. Alice Figueroa, 33, who runs a private practice in the East Village of Manhattan, said she struggled to afford food during her internship, even as she was advising others how to eat. Evelyn Crayton, 74, who was the academy’s first Black president, said many of the people in charge of matching students with internships are white, and may be more likely to select applicants who look like them.

Funding for dietetics programs at many historically Black colleges and universities, including Fort Valley State University and Grambling State University, has been cut since the 1970s. The number of Black dietitians fell by 18 percent, to 1,107, from 1998 to 2019, according to the academy’s Accreditation Council for Education in Nutrition and Dietetics.

Even when Dr. Crayton was president of the academy, in 2015 and 2016, she felt out of step with its other leaders. “I have heard that behind my back they called me an angry Black woman, because I raised questions,” she said. Her nominations of Black dietitians for leadership roles, she added, were frequently snubbed.

Told of her comments, the academy responded, “We were not aware of this until now, and we are very saddened to hear that Evelyn was subjected to these inexcusable statements. They do not reflect the academy’s core values and we are moving swiftly to investigate this matter.”

The profession’s exclusivity goes beyond race. Kai Iguchi, 28, a dietitian working at Rogers Behavioral Health in Oconomowoc, Wis., didn’t feel comfortable coming out as nonbinary to graduate-school classmates. “When the program itself as a culture is very cisgender, thin, white and female,” they said, “it is hard to be different and succeed.”

Mx. Iguchi said what they learned at school did little to address the unique problems that transgender and nonbinary clients face — being misgendered by their dietitians and family members, or feeling discomfort with overtly feminine imagery on health materials. Adult transgender people are also at high risk of developing eating disorders, according to a 2019 study by the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Even some dietitians who teach the standard curriculum find it wanting. “I have reached my limit with my textbook,” said Maya Feller, an adjunct professor in nutrition at New York University, adding that it doesn’t take into account social factors that often explain why people of color are disproportionally affected by health issues.

She said she was also unhappy with educational resources like MyPlate, which recommends meals like salmon, brown rice and broccoli, but not the curried chana and doubles served by her mother, who grew up in Trinidad. (After her interview for this article, Ms. Feller was hired as a consultant to help make MyPlate more inclusive.)

“If I saw that plate and then looked at my doubles, I would be like, ‘Well, my food is no good.’”

Ms. Feller, 43, tries instead to promote an “ongoing and consistent education around cultural humility” — not telling patients what they can’t eat, but considering the foods they have access to, and embracing, not stigmatizing, their cultural preferences.

It rankles Ryan Bad Heart Bull, 36, a Native American dietitian who works with the Oglala Sioux Tribe in Pine Ridge, S.D., that many of his peers praise the nutritional value of traditional Indigenous ingredients like salmon and bison, without understanding how federal government policies have made it harder for Native Americans to hunt and forage on their own land. To be ignorant of this cultural and historical context, “and then to turn around and say bison meat is one of the best meats you can eat and here are the ways you can incorporate it into your diet,” he said, “it is insulting and saddening.”

In 2019, he published a guide for the American Indian Cancer Foundation to educate Native cancer survivors about the nutritional value of their traditional foods.

Diksha Gautham, 27, a nutritionist in San Francisco, tells her mostly South Asian-American clientele that a healthy diet can include palak paneer and aloo tikki. As a child, she said, she harbored a blind perception that anything that wasn’t dry chicken and broccoli, including the dal and rice her mother cooked, “was bad for me.” No nutritional database she has encountered includes Indian ingredients, so she created her own guides to healthful Indian food.

A Toronto dietitian, Nazima Qureshi, 29, has self-published “The Healthy Ramadan Guide” with her husband, Belal Hafeez, a personal trainer. It includes meal plans that adhere to fasting guidelines, with recipes like stuffed dates and za’atar roasted chicken, and exercises to give people energy going into daily prayers.

Some of Dalina Soto’s Hispanic and Asian clients in the Philadelphia area have been told by other dietitians that they can’t eat white rice. “They shut down,” she said. “Either they go way to the extreme, where they are no longer eating any of their cultural foods, or the other side is, ‘I am just not going to manage my disease.’”

“My goal is to bring them in the middle,” said Ms. Soto, 32. She’ll suggest a salad alongside their rice and beans.

Still, many of these practitioners feel frustrated as they try to nudge the dietetic establishment toward change.

The profession is governed by the academy’s board. One subsidiary organization, the Commission on Dietetic Registration, sets professional requirements and fees; another, the Accreditation Council, certifies programs. Together, these entities and their majority-white leadership act as gatekeepers, their critics argue, limiting deep-rooted change.

The academy, which has about 100,000 members, funds research and hosts the largest annual conference for dietitians, the Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo. In 2016, it announced the Second Century Initiative, an effort to expand its reach and teachings around the globe.

The academy has had a diversity and inclusion committee since 1987. But, like all the academy’s committees, it is filled by volunteers. Teresa Turner, 37, a member from 2015 until May, said the academy offers the panel few “resources or benchmarks.” “Its only purpose,” Ms. Turner said, “is to make the academy look like they are doing something.”

The academy denied those assertions, saying the committee plays an active role, recommending strategies to recruit people from underrepresented groups to join the profession, and the academy, and promote their advancement.

A group that calls itself Audit the Academy (whose members include Ms. Turner, Ms. Figueroa and Ms. Chou) said the academy research it has seen is largely conducted by white dietitians studying nondiverse populations; if they study communities of color, they often do so from a white perspective. Members also see little representation of transgender and nonbinary people.

“If we are invisible in the research,” said Sand Chang, 42, an Oakland, Calif., psychologist who specializes in the transgender health and eating disorders, “we are going to be invisible in assessment and treatment.”

The academy, however, said it “offers materials, programs and educational opportunities to help its members provide care to a diverse array of clients,” including articles about treating transgender individuals.

In June, the organization responded to pressure from disaffected members by committing to developing action plans to address inequities in the profession. It has created a new Diversity and Inclusion Advisory Group, and conducted virtual forums to hear the concerns of 126 randomly selected members.

Shannon Curtis, 30, a Houston dietitian who helped found a group called Dietitians for Change, attended one of the sessions. “Although it was empowering to know that we are not the only ones screaming about this,” she said, “it was kind of a waste of time, in my opinion, because I am not exactly confident that they will take this information and put it into an action plan they will actually act on.”

Other organizations have emerged to address the inequities in the profession, like Diversify Dietetics, founded in 2018 by Tamara Melton and Deanna Belleny. It offers resources like mentors and educational materials to help students of color pass the registration exam.

In response to criticisms that it is harder for nonwhite dietitians to succeed in the profession, the academy offered an interview with Kristen Gradney, a senior director at Our Lady of the Lake Children’s Hospital in Baton Rouge, La, and one of several registered dietitian nutritionists who speak on behalf of the academy.

Ms. Gradney, 40, said that while the academy “has really missed the mark” in preparing dietitians to deal with diverse populations, it is starting to make progress. Still, she said “true change” would probably not come from the academy, but from grass-roots initiatives like Diversify Dietetics, where she serves on the advisory board.

In 2018, Dr. Crayton, the academy’s past president, hosted a conference in Montgomery, Ala., where she lives, for World Critical Dietetics, an organization that champions a more inclusive approach to dietetics. Panels discussed the role that unconscious bias plays in education, and whether the registration exam was fair to all students.

Dr. Crayton took participants to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, in Selma, where in 1965, peaceful protesters marched for civil rights. “I could never have done that with the academy,” she said with a laugh. She said events like that could help pave a path toward sweeping change.

“I don’t know how to get to people’s hearts, but it is a heart thing,” she said. In a discipline that deals with such a deeply personal matter — one’s eating habits — “there has to be a change of heart, where people really feel empathy for groups who they are trying to include.”

#diet culture #racism #food #xenophobia #colonialism #hostility to bodily autonomy

69 notes · View notes

populus-tremuloides · 3 years

Note

Hey I noticed you linked the BLM website in a post but can you tell your followers not to donate to the organization

The donation link the website has is secure act blue and secure act blue funds democratic campaigns

So for the past 7 years all that money they collected over $1 billion probably none of that has touched the black community

Hoo boy so while I agree with the gist of this ask, there’s some misleading info here:

ActBlue is not giving BLM donations to the DNC, and this claim has been debunked multiple times by reliable sources. However, the BLM Global Network Foundation has faced questioning and controversy this year thanks to their nonprofit partnerships and a lack of transparency. I always advocate for donating as small-scale and locally as you can. I’ll put the rest of this analysis (with sources linked) under a read more, since it’s LONG (but it took me forever to put together so pls read thx ❤️).

ActBlue is an online fundraising platform that is not explicitly related to the US Democratic Party, but which only funds left-leaning and progressive candidates and organizations. It’s a tech company. It earns money by functioning as this service, so yes, your donations help fund it. Organizations and candidates pay ActBlue a 3.95% processing fee for donations, but the rest of the money donated does go to the organization or specific candidate. ActBlue is also registered as a PAC (political action committee) which is a whole can of Political Worms I don’t want to open, but that means it has to report to the Federal Election Commission/the IRS which is a positive because it results in transparency of conduit funding.

So...96.05% of the money you donate through the BLM website SHOULD go to the BLM Foundation. It does NOT go to the DNC. The person who started this rumor (from a since-deleted Facebook post which led to a viral video) is a member of a Students for Trump organization, and other conservative pundits picked up on it and posted it. It just isn’t true, and has been debunked many times.

HOWEVER there’s still a problem. It’s hard to say where the money donated to the BLM site actually goes, and that issue is directly related to tax laws and nonprofit organization status in the US. There were questions and lawsuits about this earlier this year. There is an interesting loophole in ActBlue’s policy that states that “contributions...which are not cashed or affirmatively refused will be kept by ActBlue and used generally to support its social welfare activities”. In other words, ActBlue will keep money that is not cashed by the organizations within 60 days and use it to “generally support its social welfare activities”. No, I don’t know exactly what that means--it’s probably used by ActBlue for program costs, or is reallocated to its general fund (which gives grants to nominee funds, the Flip the Senate campaign, etc) but it does mean that money doesn’t go to those organizations, even if it was donated to them, if the organizations don’t claim it. Then, in a Reddit AMA in June, a BLM Foundation organizer provided less than satisfying information about where the money they fundraise goes. It’s difficult to find that info online thanks to the way nonprofits function within American tax law.

It’s important to note here that the BLM Foundation and BLM Global Network are not necessarily associated with individual community activist organizations, protests, or the general BLM social movement. There’s plenty of discourse on this you can research on your own if you want. Google is free.

What’s important here is that the BLM Foundation operates as a nonprofit with a “parent” charity. From 2016 to this year BLM worked with Thousand Currents, which “fundraises grassroots groups led by women, youth and Indigenous Peoples”. In July they switched to a “working relationship” with TIDES, which is a “philanthropic partner and nonprofit accelerator dedicated to building a world of shared prosperity and social justice”.

I’m not going to get into my personal feelings about large scale nonprofit organizations and the oxymoron of conscious capitalism (because organizations like this are essentially venture capitalists for nonprofits imo), but personally I think the larger and more decentralized the organization (or parent organization, in this case), the less effective your donation. More on that later.

Essentially though, Thousand Currents and TIDES are organizations that focus on fundraising and infrastructure and then fund smaller grassroots groups that might not have the infrastructure or foothold to do that for themselves. This is not uncommon in the nonprofit world. I work for a nonprofit that ran though a university foundation and an established local nonprofit for ten years before we got our 501(c)(3) designation and started functioning independently. It’s not abnormal that the BLM Foundation works with an organization like that, given BLM is pretty decentralized by design and is also a fairly new organization (2013/2014).

Thousand Currents and TIDES have 501(c)(3) tax exempt status. It can be difficult for smaller and newer nonprofits (as well as nonprofits that function outside of the US but which rely on donations from the US or other countries outside of where they’re headquartered) to gain that status, so they often work under a larger organization. 501(c)(3) status means financial records have to be made public, which means anyone can access the financial records for Thousand Currents and TIDES. You can also find tax filings for the BLM Foundation, but it’s less comprehensive (the most recent I could find was Form 990 from 2017, but maybe I’m not looking in the right place). Anyone can request tax documents from 501(c)(3) nonprofits.

This is getting complicated, right? Welcome to American tax law and nonprofit organizational hierarchies functioning under late stage capitalism. i’m not trying to throw the BLM Foundation under the bus here, because honestly this is just how it goes with a lot of organizations in the US. I don’t think it means you shouldn’t support them. But it gets pretty twisted up. Maybe you made a $20 donation to BLM back in July and now you’re wondering where the hell it went. Here’s the pipeline: your donation goes through ActBlue (which takes 3.95%, or .79 cents of your donation) to TIDES, which then directs that money to BLM. They know how much money is coming to them for BLM because ActBlue differentiates fundraising campaigns--the BLM money going to Thousand Currents or TIDES is separated from the funds coming to them for, say, CLIMA or the Farm to School Network . However, Thousand Currents and TIDES probably take a cut to support their operating costs, too. I couldn’t find data on this, so this is conjecture and I’m not sure how much--this statement is just based on knowing how nonprofits and fundraising usually work.

So, the money stream from you to BLM is like this: You------> ActBlue (takes a 3.95% cut) ------> Thousand Currents or TIDES (probably takes a cut, then directs the money to)------> BLM -----> Whatever BLM uses it for. Despite that strange loophole in ActBlue’s policy, Thousand Currents appeared to be claiming the donations and directing them to BLM (as of 2018...will be interesting to see tax stats from this year since their move to TIDES after unprecedented donations).

BLM does have a huge grassroots organizing fund that began this June in response to overwhelming donations following the murder of George Floyd. The fund provides grants up to $500,000 to smaller grassroots organizations and activists, as well as educational curriculum and political platforms. Their grant campaign is supported by TIDES, which provides the infrastructure and tax-exempt funding conduit needed for such a large scale effort. I’m guessing most of the money they’re fundraising goes to that fund. A chunk definitely goes to paying employees, running their website, and funding outreach and education.

So ALL THAT BEING SAID, I would always say donate directly to bail funds, mutual aid funds, legal fee funds, and local activism organizations before donating to a larger, all-encompassing charity or organization. If you can Venmo someone you know and you know where that money goes, that’s always the best.

Venmo accounts, gofundme campaigns, cashapp accounts, paypal accounts...that’s often what smaller scale organizations and activists are using on a local level and it’s generally collected and distributed more directly. The BIPOC and COVID mutual aid funds where I live are active on Facebook and Instagram and operate based on requests for help from community members that are posted on Google documents available to the public. Here is a good example of a grassroots COVID mutual aid fund that is directing A LOT of money locally and transparently--there are similar funds and organizations like this worldwide for COVID, BLM, and beyond.

The biggest impact you can make always comes at the community level--you should do some research into figuring out what’s going on in your area. There’s almost always something nearby, even if you live in a rural area or smaller town like I do, and if there’s not, hey--you could start something! Engage in your community and put your money into that, or into other communities in need. Pay attention to stuff going around on Twitter and Instagram--a lot of community organizing is facilitated there.

I included the BLM link in the original post because the website is a good place to learn about actions around the globe, organizing basics, and has a lot of up to date news and educational materials. I advocated for donating to bail funds, mutual aid funds, water projects, and local activist organizations and I stand by that. I’m not saying you shouldn’t donate to the BLM Global Network or other larger-scale foundations, but the conduit of money to cause is usually not as direct. I still don’t think it’s a bad thing to donate to them.

But ALSO don’t spread straight-up misinformation like this ask does. ActBlue is a fundraising platform and it’s not stealing the money you send to BLM and giving it to Biden or the DNC. It’s a whole lot more complicated than that, and this is a great way to dissuade people from donating money to progressive organizations who use ActBlue because it’s an easy, accessible online fundraising platform. Funny how right-wing pundits latched onto this so quickly, huh?

Feel free to correct me or add more info. I’m white and operating within US-centric organizing circles. But PLEASE give some sources if you do have corrections or arguments and PLEASE do a google search before you spread stuff like this.

_______________________________________________________________________

TL;DR: ActBlue is a fundraising platform, it is not stealing your money and giving it to the DNC. The money you donate to BLM goes to that organization, though it is a meandering path from donation to impact. Donate to bail funds, mutual aid organizations, legal fee funds, local activism organizations, etc., over larger organizations. Invest in your own communities, and directly in black communities, and always do your research.

#us bs #BLM #mutual aid #activism #american politics #fundraising #donations #i really hope people read this i spent so long trying to write it out in a way that made sense and its so fucking long #but i rly want people to understand a) how nonprofit fundraising works because its fucked #and b) that the shit about actblue is total bs #and c) that mutual aid funds are the future #also #i hate this country #and i hate that i know this much about nonprofit tax law when fundamentally i do not believe that nonprofits are doing that much good #but that's the hellscape we live in folks #black lives matter #politics #answered asks #okay goodniGHT

39 notes · View notes

sylver-drawer · 3 years

Text

A prompt in class had made me realize something deep within me—my hate for physical books.

Now don’t get me wrong, I don’t hate books because they’re physical. I’d actually love it, but rather what I despise…

Is what is contained within those books.

Where I live, physical books you can only get when visiting libraries or book stores unless specially ordered online. Yet I am never satisfied with what is offered to me, simply because, I’m tired of it.

I am so absolutely tired of seeing the same exact things over and over again.

To give an example, my tastes aren’t that condensed nor diverse. I love thriller, I love Mystery, but what I find the most interest in, is Fantasy Romance.

And saying that should already tell you exactly what I’m talking about.

I am so tired of seeing the exact same tropes over and over again. This is a problem in all stories, physical or online, in general—however, it appears to me that published and physical books are almost always having these qualities. When searching online, I can always somehow find at least a handful of stories that is different from the others and gives at least a fraction of what I need. But in libraries? Book stores? I can’t do that, because they all follow the same pattern one way or another because those tropes are what people only ever seem to want, which is why a lot of authors who stray from those tropes aren’t as well known.

Frankly, I’m tired of everything being reused or rebranded.

I wouldn’t mind the wizards and demons, the werewolves and vampires, if ONLY they weren’t just there to be there.

Let me explain. Witches and Wizards tend to follow the same pattern. People who use magic, which is simple enough. But the problem is, is that it ends with just that. In most stories I come across, wizards are included in a very weak magic system in which they can use magic to do basically anything they want. Something fell and broke? Use magic to fix it. There’s a fire? Summon water to put it out.

It’s simple. But that repeated simplicity is what makes me tired.

There is never any depth. There is no expansion or lore that explains the nitty gritty details, nor makes it important. Magic in fantasy stories, is most commonly, cause and effect. Problem, and fix. Something bad, changed to good. Hurt, then to heal.

In fantasy, magic is simply one layer—magic people can use magic to do anything. There’s no limit, there’s no depth, there’s nothing that makes it unique. Magic in fantasy, all falls under the broad topic of just ‘magic’. Shooting fireballs, summoning a river, causing a storm to drive away your enemies, lightning bolts to fend them off—all can fall under just magic. Using this, it might be controversial to say, but Harry Potter is an extremely soft magic system. Wizards can cast magic through words, yes, but it’s exactly that. They can cast ‘magic’, and that magic is an umbrella term that essentially means, “With enough training, they can look up the words in a magic dictionary and use whatever magic they want to do anything they want”.

There is no depth. There is no extra layer, it’s simply ‘magic’.

And I’m not even done rambling. I haven’t even touched magical races in fantasy, which I’ll actually transition right into.

I am tired of race conflict in fantasy. Not because its bad, but because they’re more often than not, poorly written. Let’s take Twilight as an example.

Werewolves hate vampires. Vampires hate werewolves. Why? Because werewolves bad, and vampires bad. That’s literally it. No deeper meaning, no actual societal issues, just “ew, icky vampire/werewolf”. In fact, in twilight it doesn’t even appear they hate eachother. If Bella didn’t even exist, what would Edward and Jacob fight about? If you notice, they only use eachother’s race to appeal to Bella and put down the other rival. “Bella, you can’t love him because he’s a dirty vampire”, or, “Bella, you can’t love him because he’s a mangy wolf pup”. Setting aside the obvious racist undertones that’s never important nor addressed critically within the story, the only time dislike about the others’ race is talked about, is only ever addressed not because they hate that specific race, but as a petty remark to bad talk their love rival.

So, in theory, the two races aren’t even… against eachother. Thinking back, all the times it was vampire vs werewolf in twilight, it was all because of Bella wasn’t it. And not because of general dislike of the others’ race, but over a human girl…

I’ve trailed off from my original point, but basically, race vs race within fantasy plots aren’t actually because of the race. I think the only fantasy series I’ve seen that remotely does racial societal conflict well is Lord of the Rings. Elves hate dwarves because they’re greedy, crude, and brutish. Dwarves hate elves because they view them as selfish and always seemingly on their high horse. They stereotype one another, and when they look beyond those stereotypes is when they start bonding and actually forming friendships. They then realize that those stereotypes didn’t matter and were harmful.

That’s an example I would love to see more in fantasy in general. Make the magical races dislike and judge eachother because of their race, and then overcome it while addressing it. Don’t add in races that hate eachother when they’re all literally just the exact same. And also, make the races different! Even humans practice different cultures, and that’s what makes us diverse. In the LOTR franchise, racial bias and hate isn’t simply because, “they’re x race”. It’s because they stereotype people within that race, a stereotype that’s just an exaggerated version of qualities they all just happened to have. In Twilight, I’d argue that there isn’t anything that sets the werewolves and vampires apart other than their superhuman abilities. In LOTR, taking their races away the qualities the characters had were still eminent. Legolas was a bit proud and calm demeanor ed under pressure because he was naturally like that, as well as how he was raised as an elven prince. Gimley fights violently with an axe, and puts his whole body into his fighting style. His words also come off as rough and unfiltered, while Legolas’ voice is smoother and speech well spoken due to his background. The traits they found in eachother due to racial stereotypes still linger and remain. While yes, werewolves were heavily based off of indigenous people, there wasn’t any clear examples of them practicing it that was essential to the conflict and characters other than reminding the audience every once and a while. If Jacob were the only werewolf shown, the Jacob-Bella-Edward conflict could easily just be seen as two roleplaying white boys fighting over a girl. That’s how important their racial identities of vampire and werewolf mattered.

(And please!!! Remember lore. Generations and generations of racism impacts people who grew up with it. Some people change and break away from that stigma of unadultered hate, some can only partly break away even while educated with unconscious internal bias, and some continue to nurture themselves in it and even spread it. Not every person under one umbrella ends up the same, and that applies to characters too. Taking inspiration from real life, look at the time we live in now. Hundreds of years gone by, and while things are certainly better, the dark stains haven’t even gone away and most likely won’t even in the distant future. The past two years are proof of that.)

There’s no point in writing racial conflict in your story if there’s nothing that sets them apart from one another (I’m not saying people need a reason for real life racism because there are so many people who hate certain races just because they’re that race, but story wise, it’s easier to show what’s commonly hate due to stereotypes and stigma that people make for that race). It’s like the spider man pointing meme. How are you supposed to be antagonistic with someone who’s literally the same as you? “I guess you’re not like other spider men” coming from a spider man???

Prefacing, I’m not saying racism is good. I’m saying including race conflict for the sake of race conflict is very empty and purposeless, which is what I often find in fantasy or romance-fantasy. Racial conflict apparently doesn’t matter until the main character is directly involved, in which only then does it affect them that it’s brought up and only because it affects them. A similar example is including LGBTQ+ characters just for the sake of sexual diversity, in which—

That actually leads into my next topic.

Romance.

How many. How many published books must there be of romance that completely overrides the plot as well as the characters’ other relationships? How many stories must be made in which the fantasy aspect is completely pushed aside and no longer included in the plot because the story wants to entirely focus on the romance drama between the main character, love interest, and best friend? Or not even best friend, miscommunication in general!

How hard, is it to write a story where the couple is healthy, and love and don’t doubt eachother, who trust eachother entirely? Like really.

And! And!

The moment when romance is introduced, everything else doesn’t. seem. to. matter! At that point, it’s not even fantasy even more. It’s just a rom com, because watching the couple fight over nothing is hilarious because they’re in the middle of a war. And the other characters don’t seem to matter anymore either. I am so tired of plots being thrown away to focus on the drama between the two leads, and for once just want a fantasy boom of stories depicting healthy relationships with actually unique magic systems and logical well written conflicts.

And diversity! In Relationships! I am so tired of only ever seeing poorly written drama filled heterosexual relationships in romances. In fantasy romances. Give me my wlw wizards who explore their war torn world and have to defend the people they love with intricate, costly, magic systems.

Can we just have. A literary revolution, in which a rise of stories where characters can have relationships—non romantic relationships—with other characters. Can male and female characters finally love eachother to the ends of the world without romance. It’s so easy to write. Love is so easy to write between any gender or sex. So why does it seem to be there can only be one kind predominantly in media? In published media?

Occasionally I can find diverse stories like this on the internet, but never can I find these in libraries.

Like it’s. It’s so, so easy to write love and companionship between characters of diverse identities and cultures. Even in heterosexual fantasy romance stories, I want to be able to see relationships outside the romance being as strong as the main romance. Between the girls, between the boys, and those in between. Men can be in love with men, women in love with women, and men in love with women without needing to force their loves against eachother. A man and woman can be written to love eachother dearly without any romance ever between them, because that’s how it’s like in real life as well. So often do main characters in fantasy stories have some sort of dark past that rid them of any familial love, which in turn ruins them for the capacity of platonic love, which makes people believe the only way for them to find love is romantically. Even in children’s books, there’s always the princess abandoned or overly protected by her parents who eventually finds solace in the pressence of a dry, brooding knight or charming prince. They fall in love, and that’s the only thing that’s ever positively shown. The love between the main character and the love interest. Because to society, romance is seen as the strongest form of affection.

But, it isn’t.

People are different, and to a lot of people who do and don’t have romance in their lives, it doesn’t mean they can’t love anyone else. In society, the only love that seems to exist is romance. It’s the only thing people tend to promote, and yet, people forget what love is. It’s care, it’s worry. Love is painful and happy. It’s sometimes angry and frustrating, but sometimes its something you need. Love is stubborn, yet so easily broken. Love was never just romance, and it feels like the world forgets that.

It’s frustrating, because it feels like anything published at your local library follows the opposite pattern. Because it’s what people believe the public wants, and what the public will only ever accept. Sometimes, it’s all people only know how to write. Sometimes, its all editors and publishers will ever approve of. And sometimes, its all people ever look for. Because either they’re afraid, stigmatize and despise it, or just don’t care for it.

At some point, this had turned from a ramble about how physical books lack diversity, to how media in general lacks diversity.

I do believe that one day in the future, media will change. Literary media will change. But as of now? The majority of published and physical books haven’t diverted from that pattern, and most likely won’t for a long time. I know so many stories are beginning to change online now that the new generation has informed themselves and become interested in new ideas and topics, but as far as physical publication goes? The world won’t accept these changes, not for a long time.

6 notes · View notes

ucflibrary · 5 years

Photo

November in the United States is Native American Heritage Month, also referred to as American Indian and Alaska Native Heritage Month. It celebrates the rich history and diversity of America’s native peoples and educates the public about historical and current challenges they face. Native American Heritage Month was first declared by presidential proclamation in 1990 which urged the United States to learn more about their first nations.

Join the UCF Libraries as we celebrate diverse voices and subjects with these suggestions. Click on the Keep Reading link below to see the full list, descriptions, and catalog links for the featured Native American Heritage titles suggested by UCF Library employees. These 16 books plus many more are also on display on the 2nd (main) floor of the John C. Hitt Library next to the bank of two elevators.

An American Sunrise by Joy Harjo In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family’s lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds blessings in the abundance of her homeland and confronts the site where her people, and other indigenous families, essentially disappeared. From her memory of her mother’s death, to her beginnings in the native rights movement, to the fresh road with her beloved, Harjo’s personal life intertwines with tribal histories to create a space for renewed beginnings. Her poems sing of beauty and survival, illuminating a spirituality that connects her to her ancestors and thrums with the quiet anger of living in the ruins of injustice. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

Bird Songs Don't Lie: writings from the rez by Gordon Lee Johnson In this deeply moving collection of short stories and essays, Gordon Lee Johnson (Cupeño/Cahuilla) cements his voice not only as a wry commentator on American Indian reservation life but also as a master of fiction writing. In Johnson's stories, all of which are set on the fictional San Ignacio reservation in Southern California, we meet unforgettable characters like Plato Pena, the Stanford-bound geek who reads Kahlil Gibran during intertribal softball games; hardboiled investigator Roddy Foo; and Etta, whose motto is “early to bed, early to rise, work like hell, and advertise,” as they face down circumstances by turns ordinary and devastating. From the noir-tinged mystery of “Unholy Wine” to the gripping intensity of “Tukwut,” Johnson effortlessly switches genre, perspective, and tense, vividly evoking people and places that are fictional but profoundly true to life. Suggested by Megan Haught, Research & Information Services/Teaching & Engagement

Coming Down from Above: prophecy, resistance, and renewal in Native American religions by Lee Irwin An introduction to an important strand within the rich tapestry of Native religions, this shows the remarkable responsiveness of those beliefs to historical events. It is an unprecedented, encyclopedic sourcebook for anyone interested in the roots of Native theology. From the highly assimilated ideas of the Puget Sound Shakers to such resistance movements as that of the Shawnee Prophet, Irwin tells how the integration of non-Native beliefs with prophetic teachings gave rise to diverse ethnotheologies with unique features. He surveys the beliefs and practices of the nation to which each prophet belonged, then describes his or her life and teachings, the codification of those teachings, and the impact they had on both the community and the history of Native religions. Key hard-to-find primary texts are included in an appendix. Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

Fools Crow by Thomas E. Mails; assisted by Dallas Chief Eagle Set in Montana shortly after the Civil War, this novel tells of White Man's Dog (later known as Fools Crow so called after he killed the chief of the Crows during a raid), a young Blackfeet Indian on the verge of manhood, and his band, known as the Lone Eaters. The invasion of white society threatens to change their traditional way of life, and they must choose to fight or assimilate. Suggested by Mary Lee Gladding, Circulation

Four Souls: a novel by Louise Erdrich After taking her mother’s name, Four Souls, for strength, the strange and compelling Fleur Pillager walks from her Ojibwe reservation to the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. She is seeking restitution from and revenge on the lumber baron who has stripped her tribe’s land. But revenge is never simple, and her intentions are complicated by her dangerous compassion for the man who wronged her. Suggested by Jada Reyes, UCF Libraries Student Ambassador

House Made of Dawn by N. Scott Momaday He was a young American Indian named Abel, and he lived in two worlds. One was that of his father, wedding him to the rhythm of the seasons, the harsh beauty of the land, the ecstasy of the drug called peyote. The other was the world of the twentieth century, goading him into a compulsive cycle of sexual exploits, dissipation, and disgust. Home from a foreign war, he was a man being torn apart, a man descending into hell. Suggested by Mary Lee Gladding, Circulation

Keepers of the Morning Star: an anthology of native women's theater edited by Jaye T. Darby and Stephanie Fitzgerald This is the first major anthology of Native women's contemporary theater bringing together works from established and new playwrights. This collection, representing a rich diversity of Native communities, showcases the exciting range of Native women's theater today from the dynamic fusion of storytelling, ceremony, music and dance to the bold experimentation of poetic stream of consciousness and Native agitprop. Suggested by Rich Gause, Research & Information Services

Native Southerners: indigenous history from origins to removal by Gregory D. Smithers Long before the indigenous people of southeastern North America first encountered Europeans and Africans, they established communities with clear social and political hierarchies and rich cultural traditions. Award-winning historian Gregory D. Smithers brings this world to life in Native Southerners, a sweeping narrative of American Indian history in the Southeast from the time before European colonialism to the Trail of Tears and beyond. Suggested by Megan Haught, Research & Information Services/Teaching & Engagement

Nature Poem by Tommy Pico This work follows Teebs��a young, queer, American Indian (or NDN) poet―who can’t bring himself to write a nature poem. For the reservation-born, urban-dwelling hipster, the exercise feels stereotypical, reductive, and boring. He hates nature. He prefers city lights to the night sky. He’d slap a tree across the face. He’d rather write a mountain of hashtag punchlines about death and give head in a pizza-parlor bathroom; he’d rather write odes to Aretha Franklin and Hole. While he’s adamant―bratty, even―about his distaste for the word “natural,” over the course of the book we see him confronting the assimilationist, historical, colonial-white ideas that collude NDN people with nature. The closer his people were identified with the “natural world,” he figures, the easier it was to mow them down like the underbrush. But Teebs gradually learns how to interpret constellations through his own lens, along with human nature, sexuality, language, music, and Twitter. Even while he reckons with manifest destiny and genocide and centuries of disenfranchisement, he learns how to have faith in his own voice. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

On the Rez by Ian Frazier This is a sharp, unflinching account of the modern-day American Indian experience, especially that of the Oglala Sioux, who now live on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in the plains and badlands of the American West. Crazy Horse, perhaps the greatest Indian war leader of the 1800s, and Black Elk, the holy man whose teachings achieved worldwide renown, were Oglala; in these typically perceptive pages, Frazier seeks out their descendants on Pine Ridge―a/k/a "the rez"―which is one of the poorest places in America today. Suggested by Larry Cooperman, Research & Information Services

Shapes of Native Nonfiction by Elissa Washuta Just as a basket's purpose determines its materials, weave, and shape, so too is the purpose of the essay related to its material, weave, and shape. Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, the editors have curated an exciting collection of imaginative, world-making lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island into a well-crafted basket. Suggested by Sara Duff, Acquisitions & Collections

Surviving Genocide: native nations and the United States from the American Revolution to bleeding Kansas by Jeffrey Ostler An authoritative contribution to the history of the United States’ violent path toward building a continental empire, this ambitious and well-researched book deepens our understanding of the seizure of Indigenous lands, including the use of treaties to create the appearance of Native consent to dispossession. Ostler also documents the resilience of Native people, showing how they survived genocide by creating alliances, defending their towns, and rebuilding their communities. Suggested by Megan Haught, Research & Information Services/Teaching & Engagement

The Man to Send Rain Clouds: contemporary stories by American Indians edited by Kenneth Rosen Over a two-year period, Kenneth Rosen traveled from town to town, pueblo to pueblo, to uncover the stories contained in this volume. All reveal the preoccupations of contemporary American Indians. Not surprisingly, many of the stories are infused with the bitterness of a people and a culture long repressed. Several deal with violence and the effort to escape from the pervasive, and so often destructive, white influence and system. In most, the enduring strength of the Indian past is very much in evidence, evoked as a kind of counterpoint to the repression and aimlessness that have marked, and still mark today, the lives of so many American Indians. Suggested by Rich Gause, Research & Information Services

The Marrow Thieves by Cherie Dimaline

Humanity has nearly destroyed its world through global warming, but now an even greater evil lurks. The indigenous people of North America are being hunted and harvested for their bone marrow, which carries the key to recovering something the rest of the population has lost: the ability to dream. In this dark world, Frenchie and his companions struggle to survive as they make their way up north to the old lands. For now, survival means staying hidden … but what they don’t know is that one of them holds the secret to defeating the marrow thieves.

Suggested by Mary Lee Gladding, Circulation

Thunder in the Mountains: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War by Daniel J. Sharfstein Recreating the Nez Perce War through the voices of its survivors, Daniel J. Sharfstein’s visionary history of the West casts Howard’s turn away from civil rights alongside the nation’s rejection of racial equality and embrace of empire. The conflict becomes a pivotal struggle over who gets to claim the American dream: a battle of ideas about the meaning of freedom and equality, the mechanics of American power, and the limits of what the government can and should do for its people. The war that Howard and Joseph fought is one that Americans continue to fight today. Suggested by Sandy Avila, Research & Information Services

Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson With his single mother in jail, Sequoyah, a fifteen-year-old Cherokee boy, is placed in foster care with the Troutt family. Literally and figuratively scarred by his mother’s years of substance abuse, Sequoyah keeps mostly to himself, living with his emotions pressed deep below the surface. At least until he meets seventeen-year-old Rosemary, a troubled artist who also lives with the family. Sequoyah and Rosemary bond over their shared Native American background and tumultuous paths through the foster care system, but as Sequoyah’s feelings toward Rosemary deepen, the precariousness of their lives and the scars of their pasts threaten to undo them both. Suggested by Rich Gause, Research & Information Services

#featured bookshelf #ucflibrary #native americans #native american heritage month #booklr #reading #tbr

623 notes · View notes

mbti-notes · 4 years

Note

Hi mbti-notes, I hope you're doing well. I am an INFP young black American and the past few weeks have been such a nightmare. I obviously support the protests that have been taking place but I feel so hopeless at the same time. I've never been a fan of this country but the past few weeks have at least provided me with more clarity and conviction that there is nothing to be salvaged here. I have a friend who's also black but lives in europe and even we're at a loss for what to say to each (con't)

[con’t: other. I feel so angry and disgusted. I remember learning that as a part of anti-US propaganda during the Cold War, they’d show how black people have been treated in America and be like “this is how they treat their own people”. I’m not saying I support the USSR of course but it surprised me to hear that in the eyes of other countries, we’re as American as anyone else. It never felt that way. People can’t even protest police brutality without being faced with more police brutality. I’ve donated to bail funds, signed petitions, contacted my representatives about a piece of legislation that would help combat the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women but...I think the closest thing there is to a solution is for another Great Migration but this time, we just leave America. I feel bad saying that because obviously so many people don’t have the means to do so and it shouldn’t have to come to this but nobody wants us here. If the black panthers...]

It seems that tumblr disappeared the rest of your message, but I've read enough to detect some problematic thinking. It’s not about whether you’re “wanted”, it’s about the fact that you have a right to exist and be treated as human, equal to every other human under the law. It is beyond the scope of this blog to address politics and write political commentary. This blog primarily addresses individuals and how they cope with their circumstances. I won’t be able to understand all the experiences that you’ve had as a black American given such a short message from you. All I can do is bring to light your attitude and beliefs and how they affect your ability to cope and thrive in life.

Developmentally, irrational pessimism is always something that INFPs should be vigilant about due to Fi-Si loop and the struggle to develop Ne big-picture thinking skills. There is certainly lots of injustice in the world, but this doesn't mean that there isn't also a lot of good in the world. There are many good people out there doing good things, otherwise, you’d have nothing to donate money to. There are also a lot of decent people who understand that racism is a big problem but don’t know what to do about it. Yet your mind is only ever trained on the pain and suffering - this indicates Fi extremes. I have a longstanding habit of observing how different people respond to challenges in life. For example, I see some black Americans out there protesting, some are educating people, some are attacking people, some are sowing anarchy, some are running for office, some are giving up, some are hiding, some are writing, some are leading legislative initiatives. Black Americans as a group share the burden of racism, but each person handles it in their own way. What is your response and why?

You focus on the problems, drowning in negative feelings, and perhaps even look for evidence to reinforce the belief that everything is irredeemable (misuse of Si), which means that you lack a big picture perspective. For your own well-being, perhaps you need to make wiser decisions about how you spend your time, where you focus your energy, and with whom you associate. Otherwise, you are only ever a victim of circumstance, bending and breaking with every gust of wind. If there are things/people in your life that exacerbate your tendency to be negative, it's up to you to adjust your decision making so that you are not always surrounded by the negative. Just as you keep physically healthy by not eating crap food, you should keep mentally healthy by not feeding yourself a constant diet of emotional negativity. For example, people tend to be much more pessimistic when they spend too much time on social media or consuming political commentary that is designed to be emotionally provocative. Perhaps there are healthier ways to spend your time. Whether you followed this or that tweet is of little significance if it only ends up with you feeling miserable.

With respect to moving: There are a variety of methods to measure the health and well-being of a society, and it's natural to think about how your country stacks up against others. Different societies have their own character and excel at different things. However, it's important to remember that there is no society without problems. Some countries are better at hiding their problems than others. Europe is no paradise, as there have been long running problems with colonialist and xenophobic attitudes. American society tends to be very extraverted and media driven, so its problems are often hanging out there for all to see, which might make them seem a lot worse than they really are.

Each aspect of society, whether you think it is positive or negative, is the result of a trade-off. For example, people often respect the U.S. for its staunch commitment to free speech, which allows for marginalized voices to be heard. But the trade-off is that you may get a more noisy and toxic social environment, as all voices get elevated and amplified. The question for you, as an individual, is whether the trade-offs are worth it for the kind of life that you would like to live. With the example of free speech, I’d rather have free speech, so I’m willing to tolerate all the noise and accept it as the cost of doing business. Nobody can make these sorts of judgments for you, as you are the best person to decide what's best for you. Thus, I'm not sure what to tell you. I only remind people that the decision making process works best when you give proper consideration to EVERY side of an issue, as opposed to being myopic, extreme, or one-sided.

Right now, there is a lot of frustration and anger floating around. Being so emotional basically means being myopic, as you are hyperfocused on the things that make you sad or angry. This will blind you to everything else. When you lose sight of the positive, Ne might start to believe that the grass is greener elsewhere. There's no denying that the problem of racism against black people runs very deep in American society, all the way back to the founding of the nation on the backs of slaves. But are you denying that progress has been made?

When people use the word "progress" in relation to history, they mainly refer to how things changed for the better. I think people too often forget that progress almost always comes at a steep COST. Society doesn’t change because people miraculously get “enlightened” en mass. No. People suffer, things get mangled, blood is shed, and there is a period of intense pain and sacrifice - these details tend to get glossed over in history classes as hindsight and nostalgia take over. Creation and destruction are two sides of the same coin. Thinking that you can create something new and better without destroying what is old and obsolete is wishful thinking. To be clear, I'm not advocating destruction; I'm only saying that, in reality, you cannot escape destruction, as it is a necessary stage in the process of creation. If you are unlucky, you get to live during "interesting" times. But, viewed from a bigger perspective, it also means that you get to live during a time when you have a chance to make a difference and what you do matters. From this perspective, being alive right now is better than living during a time of being forced into accepting the status quo, is it not?

What is society other than the people comprising it? Societal problems are analogous to psychological problems in that they are deep-seated, long-running, festering, recurring, and difficult to resolve. I believe that there is a qualitative shift in attitude right now. It doesn't mean that racism will suddenly get fixed once and for all, but I've not seen such widespread attention and commitment to the problem in a long time. It actually gives me hope. I have older friends who've remarked that they suddenly feel transported back to the unrest of the 1960s. IMO, it means that another period of progress is on the horizon, but it also means that a time of intense turmoil is here. It seems that you focus on the turmoil and miss seeing the openings and opportunities for change.

Another thing that INFPs should always be vigilant about is a shaky relationship to reality and/or being unable to tackle problems in a realistic way (i.e. poor Ne and Te development). Reality contains everything, including the good and the bad, so it’s no use to try to pretend that one or the other doesn’t exist. You will always make better decisions by taking BOTH the good and the bad into consideration. Some INFPs get stuck in trying to wish away the bad, and some drown in the bad and disconnect from everything good.

Just as a child picks up a mix of psychological issues from their parents, as a member of society, your identity is forged through your relationship to your society's (problematic) history. I don't see how a "great migration" is any solution. Don’t forget that technology has made our world significantly smaller, so it’s a lot harder to distance from these problems. As long as you carry the scars of your home, no matter where you go, unresolved pain will continue to haunt you and hurt you. There is historical evidence that utopian thinking never leads to anything resembling a utopia. Utopian thinking is what people resort to when they are incapable of confronting the problems of reality. When it comes to human psychology, there is no way to wipe the slate completely clean without confronting and addressing the mistakes and sins of the past - this is what social unrest is meant to achieve. To believe that you can/should “start from scratch” is often a sign of Te grip in INFPs, as they want to violently wipe out the accumulated burdens of Si loop.

Perhaps there are benefits for you, as an individual, to move away, as you might find happiness in a different sort of life. But what happens when the advocates give up and walk off? At the societal level, good people moving away only leaves the bad actors to wreak havoc on the poor and innocent. Certainly, some individuals do move away and successfully build a better life for themselves. However, some people move away only to discover that they miss home dearly, and they end up roaming aimlessly, lonely, miserable, bitter, or disappointed. What separates the two groups? You will find a better life when you know exactly what you're looking for and you're realistic about whether the new place will meet those terms and conditions. You will NOT find a better life if you're merely running away from unhappiness, fueled by wishful thinking that the grass is greener "anywhere but here". It's up to you to be honest about what's happening with you.

#infp #si loop #te grip #politics #activism #pessimism #ask

31 notes · View notes

grandhotelabyss · 3 years

Photo

The classical reference in the headline is a persuasive gesture; they want us to know they’re not the types to complain about the loss of western tradition as they swill beer in front of a football game. As with many supposed depredations of the supposedly woke, though, there is a long, complicated, and contradictory history here. I myself am only dimly aware of the nuances, but I will put down some markers for anyone who’d like to investigate further.

The canon’s most memorable cancellation of The Odyssey comes when Dante places Ulysses in the Inferno for his questing hubris, for his desire, later celebrated by Tennyson in an era of imperial expansion, to sail beyond the sunset.

A few centuries later, and closer to what the teachers quoted above had in mind with their own Homeroclasm, William Blake comments, “The Classics! it is the Classics, and not Goths nor Monks, that desolate Europe with wars.” Blake is a universe unto himself, one whose borders I’ve only skirted, but I take him to accuse the classical tradition (with Homer at its head) of upholding the evils he deplored: violence, domination, repression, subjection. Or at least of doing so when read as a unity with a moral in mind, which Blake, unlike the teachers quoted above, advises against: “Unity and Morality are secondary considerations, and belong to Philosophy and not to poetry, to Exception and not to Rule, to Accident and not to Substance.” He also defends Northern Europe’s indigenous peoples, deprecated as warlike by Greco-Roman colonizers and their compradors, when in fact, Blake insists, the claim is pure projection.

Blake’s charge is just a prologue to the 20th century. Some writers with Blakean outlooks adopted Homer for their own subversive goals. Joyce’s Ulysses is the classic example, with its pacifist, anti-imperialist, and anti-nationalist recasting of Homer’s martial and aristocratic arête as a lower-middle-class domestic epic whose hero, for instance, slaughters his wife’s suitors only by driving them from her mind with his superior kindness and sensitivity.

Black writers, too, turned Homer to their own ends with odysseys ranging from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon to Derek Walcott’s Omeros—see Patrice Rankine’s Ulysses in Black for more on the specific African-American tradition—all of which echo Joyce in producing heroes among the oppressed even as they qualify heroism for an age that can no longer believe maritime pillagers who tell us Polyphemus is a monster and Circe a witch.

Other writers reprise Blake’s and even Dante’s censures more forthrightly. In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, Erich Auerbach famously contrasts The Odyssey unfavorably with the Hebrew Bible. Homer’s world is one of aristocratic stasis and paradoxically mystifying clarity; neither its characters nor its world are capable of psychological depth or historical change. The obscurity of Genesis, on the other hand, demands readerly attention. It hints through its very narrative opacity at depths and dynamics: its people live out dramatic upheavals.

In Dialectic of Enlightenment Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer judge The Odyssey to be the forerunner of the bourgeois novel, a proto-Robinsonade about the enlightened man’s entitlement to master nature, natives, and female humanity; they note the moment when Odysseus strings up Penelope’s maids for collaborating with the suitors (“Their feet danced a little, but not for long”).

As Dante condemns Ulysses to vindicate Christianity, so Auerbach, Adorno, and Horkheimer disparage The Odyssey as a rebuke to German paganism and in defense of Jewish traditions from Genesis to the critical theory anticipated by Spinoza, Marx, and Freud.

There’s more to say about how later writers have used Homer, how they have assailed or adapted him to suit what they saw as justice, but I hope I have in my amateurish way demonstrated briefly that Homer’s reception is a crux or fulcrum of modernity. (See also Alberto Manguel’s “biography” of The Iliad and The Odyssey.) I do not advocate reverence toward the classics—any classic, which is to say any work that circulates beyond its own time, be it The Odyssey or Beloved. I agree with J. M. Coetzee in his essay “What Is a Classic?”:

The classic defines itself by surviving. Therefore the interrogation of the classic, no matter how hostile, is part of the history of the classic, inevitable and even to be welcomed. For as long as the classic needs to be protected from attack, it can never prove itself classic.

But we have to read the classic to question it, to be aware of how its survival has shaped our world, and to deliberate the ethical and aesthetic questions such a riven tradition puts to us. We are lucky, then, that school isn’t the only place to get an education; as the poet said, “Libraries gave us power.” Still, we shouldn’t let ourselves become too cynical to lament how our institutions now wittingly or unwittingly serve the interests of a corporatist technocracy that wants not a critical, creative readership but a docile workforce and a captive audience.

#homer #dante #william blake #james joyce #ralph ellison #toni morrison #derek walcott #erich auerbach #max horkheimer #theodor adorno #literature #literary criticism #classics #literary theory #j. m. coetzee

3 notes · View notes

route22ny · 4 years

Photo

“The moral crisis of poverty amid vast wealth is inseparable from the injustice of systemic racism, ecological devastation, and our militarized war economy.” by Rev. Dr. William Barber II, March 30, 2020. (complete text below)

***

The United States is the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, yet millions of American families have had to set up crowdfunding sites to try to raise money for their loved ones’ medical bills. Millions more can buy unleaded gasoline for their car, but they can’t get unleaded water in their homes. Almost half of America’s workers—whether in Appalachia or Alabama, California or Carolina—work for less than a living wage. And as school buildings in poor communities crumble for lack of investment, America’s billionaires are paying a lower tax rate than the poorest half of households.

This moral crisis is coming to a head as the coronavirus pandemic lays bare America’s deep injustices. While the virus itself does not discriminate, it is the poor and disenfranchised who will experience the most suffering and death. They’re the ones who are least likely to have health care or paid sick leave, and the most likely to lose work hours. And though children appear less vulnerable to the virus than adults, America’s nearly forty million poor and low-income children are at serious risk of losing access to food, shelter, education, and housing in the economic fallout from the pandemic.

The underlying disease, in other words, is poverty, which was killing nearly 700 of us every day in the world’s wealthiest country, long before anyone had heard of COVID-19.

The moral crisis of poverty amid vast wealth is inseparable from the injustice of systemic racism, ecological devastation, and our militarized war economy. It is only a minority rule sustained by voter suppression and gerrymandering that subverts the will of the people. To redeem the soul of America—and survive a pandemic—we must have a moral fusion movement that cuts across race, gender, class, and cultural divides.

The United States has always been a nation at odds with its professed aspirations of equality and justice for all—from the genocide of original inhabitants to slavery to military aggression abroad. But there have been periods in our history when courageous social movements have made significant advances. We must learn from those who’ve gone before us as we strive to build a movement that can tackle today’s injustices—and help all of us survive.

In the aftermath of the Civil War, African Americans who had just escaped slavery joined with white allies to form coalitions that won control of nearly every southern legislature. These Reconstruction-era political alliances enacted new constitutions that advanced moral agendas, including, for the first time, the right to public education.

During the Great Depression, farmers, workers, veterans, and others rose up to demand bold government action to ease the pain of the economic crisis on ordinary Americans. This led to New Deal policies, programs, and public works projects that we still benefit from today, such as Social Security and basic labor protections.

Pushed by these movements, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt even called in 1944 for an economic bill of rights, declaring: “We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.”

During what I like to call the “Second Reconstruction” over the following decades, a coalition of blacks and progressive whites began dismantling the racist Jim Crow laws and won key legislative victories, including the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the Fair Housing Act.

With each period of advancement has come a formidable backlash. This is how we find ourselves today, in the year 2020, with levels of economic inequality as severe as during the original Gilded Age a century ago. Since the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby decision, Americans have had fewer voting rights protections than we did fifty-five years ago, while thanks to the earlier Citizens United ruling, corporations can invest unlimited sums of money to influence elections.

In response to fair tax reforms, the wealthy have used their economic clout to slash their IRS bills, cutting the top marginal income tax rate from more than 90 percent in the 1950s to 37 percent today. In response to the hard-fought wins of the labor movement, corporate lobbyists have rammed through one anti-worker law after another, slashing the share of U.S. workers protected by unions nearly in half, from 20.1 percent in 1983 to just 10.5 percent in 2018.

Decades after Depression-era reforms, Wall Street fought successfully to deregulate the financial system, paving the way for the 2008 financial crash that caused millions to lose their homes and livelihoods. And the ultra-rich and big corporations have also managed to dominate our campaign finance system, making it easier for them to buy off politicians who commit to rigging the rules against the poor and the environment, and to suppress voting rights, making it harder for the poor to fight back.

Our military budgets continue to rise, now grabbing more than fifty-three cents of every discretionary federal dollar to pay for wars abroad and pushing our ability to pay for health care for all, for a Green New Deal, for jobs and education, and infrastructure, further and further away.

In short, the official measure of poverty doesn’t begin to touch the depth and breadth of economic hardship in the world’s wealthiest nation, where 40 percent of us can’t afford a $400 emergency.

The wars that those military budgets fund continue to escalate. They don’t make us safer, and they’ve led to the deaths of thousands of poor people in Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, and beyond, as well as the displacement of millions of refugees, the destruction of water sources, and the contamination of the environments of whole countries.

The only ones who benefit are the millionaire CEOs of military companies, who are getting richer every year on the more than $350 billion—half the military budget—that goes directly to their corporations. In the meantime 23,000 low-ranking troops earn so little that they and their families qualify for food stamps.

Key to these rollbacks: controlling the narrative about who is poor in America and the world. It is in the interest of the greedy and the powerful to perpetuate myths of deservedness—that they deserve their wealth and power because they are smarter and work harder, while the poor deserve to be poor because they are lazy and intellectually inferior.

It’s also in their interest to perpetuate the myth that the poverty problem has largely been solved and so we needn’t worry about the rich getting richer—even while our real social safety net is full of gaping holes. This myth has been reinforced by our deeply flawed official measurements of poverty and economic hardship.

The way the U.S. government counts who is poor and who is not, frankly, is a sixty-year-old mess that doesn’t tell us what we need to know. It’s an inflation-adjusted measure of the cost of a basket of food in 1955 relative to household income, adjusted for family size—and it’s still the way we measure poverty today.

But this measure doesn’t account for the costs of housing, child care, or health care, much less twenty-first-century needs like internet access or cell phone service. It doesn’t even track the impacts of anti- poverty programs like Medicaid or the earned income tax credit, obscuring the role they play in reducing poverty.

In a report with the Institute for Policy Studies, the Poor People’s Campaign found that nearly 140 million Americans were poor or low-income—including more than a third of white people, 40 percent of Asian people, approximately 60 percent each of indigenous people and black people, and 64 percent of Latinx people. LGBTQ people are also disproportionately affected.

Further, the very condition of being poor in the United States has been criminalized through a system of racial profiling, cash bail, the myth of the Reagan-era “Welfare Queen,” arrests for things such as laying one’s head on a park bench, passing out food to unsheltered people, and extraordinary fines and fees for misdemeanors such as failing to use a turn signal, and simply walking while black or trans.

We are a nation crying out for security, equity, and justice. We need racial equity. We need good jobs. We need quality public education. We need a strong social safety net. We need health care to be understood as a human right for all of us. We need security for people living with disabilities. We need to be a nation that opens our hearts and neighborhoods to immigrants. We need safe and healthy environments where our children can thrive instead of struggling to survive.

With the coronavirus pandemic bringing our country’s equally urgent poverty crisis into stark relief, we cannot simply wait for change. It must come now.

America is an imperfect nation, but we have made important advancements against interconnected injustices in the past.

We can do it again, and we know how. Now is the time to fight for the heart and soul of this democracy.

***

Rev. Dr. William Barber II is a co-chair of the Poor People’s Campaign: A Call for Moral Revival.

Read more by Rev. Dr. William Barber II

Source: https://progressive.org/magazine/real-epidemic-poverty-barber/

Note: the title of this article, and the purpose of this post, is not meant to diminish the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic in any way.

#poverty in america #rigged economy #covid19 #rev dr william barber II

29 notes · View notes

newstfionline · 4 years

Text

Headlines

Virus numbers show normal life still far away (AP) South Africa was poised on Saturday to join the top five countries most affected by the coronavirus, while breathtaking numbers around the world were a reminder a return to normal life is still far from sight. Confirmed virus cases worldwide have topped 14 million and deaths have surpassed 600,000, according to Johns Hopkins University data, a day after the World Health Organization reported a single-day record of new infections at over 237,000. Death tolls in the United States are reaching new highs, and India’s infections are over 1 million. Iran’s president made the startling announcement that as many as 25 million Iranians could have been infected, the state-run IRNA news agency reported Saturday. Iran has seen the worst outbreak in the Middle East with more than 270,000 confirmed cases. South Africa on Saturday could join the U.S., Brazil, India and Russia as the most badly hit countries as its cases near 350,000. Current case trends show it will surpass Peru.

Millions of kids told full return to school in fall unlikely (AP) Millions more children in the U.S. learned Friday that they’re unlikely to return to classrooms full time in the fall because of the coronavirus pandemic as death tolls reached new highs. It came as many states—particularly in the Sunbelt—struggled to cope with the surge and governments worldwide tried to control fresh outbreaks. In a sign of how the virus is galloping around the globe, the World Health Organization reported nearly a quarter-million new infections in a single day. In the U.S., teams of military medics were deployed in Texas and California to help hospitals deluged by coronavirus patients. The two most populous states each reported roughly 10,000 new cases and some of their highest death counts since the pandemic began. Big numbers in Florida, Arizona and other states also are helping drive the U.S. resurgence that’s forcing states to rethink the school year.

Stress rises for unemployed as extra $600 benefit nears end (AP) A major source of income for roughly 30 million unemployed people is set to end, threatening their ability to meet rent and pay bills and potentially undercutting the fragile economic recovery. In March, Congress approved an extra $600 in weekly unemployment benefits as part of its $2 trillion relief package aimed at offsetting the impact of the coronavirus pandemic. That additional payment expires next week unless it gets renewed. For Henry Montalvo, who was furloughed from his job as a banquet server and bartender in Phoenix in mid-March, the expiration of the $600 will cut his unemployment benefits by two-thirds. He uses the money to help support his three children and pregnant girlfriend. “Now that it’s about to end, that grim and uneasy feeling is coming back and really fast,” Montalvo said. The unemployment insurance program has emerged as a crucial source of support at a time when the jobless rate is at Depression-era levels. In May, unemployment benefits made up 6% of all U.S. income, ahead of even Social Security.

Half of Oklahoma is ‘Indian country.’ What if all native treaties were upheld? (The Intercept) The U.S. Supreme Court issued a decision last week that altered the map of Oklahoma. The eastern half of the state, including much of Tulsa, is now, for legal purposes, Indian country. The Supreme Court decision was uncommon—Indigenous people have seen few victories so sweeping in the high court—but treaty violations like those that occurred in Oklahoma are not. “The rule of thumb is every treaty’s been broken,” said Matthew Fletcher, director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University. Going back to the original treaty texts would make broad swaths of the nation Native territory. That means Indigenous people would have a stronger voice on environmental enforcement, more of a say on fossil fuel infrastructure construction, be able to better control the fate of Native children removed from their parents’ home, and less likely to be tried in local courts where district attorneys are elected using racist, tough-on-crime politics. Beyond control over the land itself, the treaties lay the groundwork for obligations requiring the federal government to provide adequate resources to support health care, safety, and education—which have never been fulfilled.

Mexican cartel shows its might as president visits its heartland (Reuters) A video depicting a sprawling military-style convoy of one of Mexico’s most powerful drug cartels circulated on social networks on Friday just as President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador visited the group’s heartland. In the two-minute clip, members of the fearsome Jalisco New Generation Cartel (CJNG) stand in fatigues alongside a seemingly endless procession of armored vehicles. The video’s release coincided with Lopez Obrador’s visit to the states of Guanajuato, Jalisco and Colima, some of the cartel’s strongholds. “They are sending a clear message... that they basically rule Mexico, not Lopez Obrador,” said Mike Vigil, a former chief of international operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Panama extends suspension of international flights by a month due to coronavirus (Reuters) Panama’s civil aviation authority said on Friday it will extend a suspension of international flights by another month due to the coronavirus crisis. International flights were first suspended in March as the spread of the virus prompted authorities to impose measures to better contain it.

Richardson meets with Maduro, but fails to secure release of American prisoners (Washington Post) Former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson concluded a four-day special mission to Venezuela on Friday, succeeding in opening a direct channel with President Nicolás Maduro but failing in his immediate objective: the release of eight high-profile prisoners being held in Caracas, including seven Americans. In a telephone interview with The Washington Post—his first since leaving Caracas—Richardson, an elder statesmen of the Democratic Party and former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, said his initial optimism about securing the rapid release of at least some of the prisoners had turned to disappointment after catching Maduro “on a bad day.” The trip nevertheless amounted to the most significant diplomatic effort in Caracas by an American since Washington severed ties with Maduro and shuttered the U.S. Embassy there early last year. Though officially a private humanitarian mission, the trip was “coordinated” with the U.S. government, Richardson said.

EU tells US: Stop threatening our companies with sanctions (AP) The European Union is warning the Trump administration to hold off threatening trade sanctions against EU companies involved in the completion of new German-Russian and Turkish-Russian natural gas pipelines and instead discuss differences as allies. This week, the Trump administration warned companies involved in the projects they will be subject to U.S. penalties unless they halt their work. The move has further increased tension in already fraught U.S.-European ties. “I am deeply concerned at the growing use of sanctions, or the threat of sanctions, by the United States against European companies and interests,” EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell said in a statement, adding similar attempts had already been made in cases involving Iran, Cuba and the International Criminal Court. “Where policy differences exist, the European Union is always open to dialogue. But this cannot take place against the threat of sanctions,” Borrell said. “European policies should be determined here in Europe, not by third countries.”

Greece’s great declutter at battle coastline (AP) Greece is commemorating one of the greatest naval battles in ancient history this year at Salamis, the claw-shaped island skirting the mainland near Athens. It’s where the invading Persian navy suffered a heavy defeat 2,500 years ago, their large vessels unable to properly maneuver in the narrow seaways. Salamis, now known as Salamina, has become an extended suburb of the capital, a blue-collar retirement and summer home spot. It still looks out over a fleet of sunken and partially sunken vessels. Heavily rusted cargo ships and tugboats, battered sailboats and fishing trawlers are scattered and abandoned between Salamina and Greece’s largest industrial zone with oil refineries, shipyards and a massive Chinese-owned container port. With the main commemoration events just months away, Greece is in a race to declutter the coastline and has already salvaged dozens of ships, which are dragged to shore, cut up and transported to scrapyards in central Greece.

Mass protests rock Russian Far East city again (AP) Tens of thousands of people in the Russian Far East city of Khabarovsk took to the streets on Saturday, protesting the arrest of the region’s governor on charges of involvement in multiple murders. Local media estimated the rally in the city 6100 kilometres (3800 miles) east of Moscow attracted from 15,000 to 50,000 people. The protests against the arrest of Furgal have taken place every day this week, with hundreds of people rallying in the city center every day, and reflected widespread anger over the arrest of the popular governor and a simmering discontent with the Kremlin’s policies. Furgal, a member of the nationalist Liberal Democratic Party, was elected governor in 2018. His unexpected victory in the gubernatorial election reflected growing public frustration with President Vladimir Putin’s policies and marked a painful setback for the main Kremlin party, United Russia.

China says it’s not trying to replace US, won’t be bullied (AP) China isn’t seeking to confront or replace the United States as the world’s top technological power, but will fight back against “malicious slander” and attacks from Washington, a foreign ministry spokesperson said Friday, responding to a litany of recent accusations from the Trump administration. Hua Chunying said China’s chief concern is improving the livelihoods of its citizens and maintaining global peace and stability, despite what critics say is an increasingly aggressive foreign policy that looks to expand Chinese influence in the military, technology, economic and other spheres. Her comments came in response to a speech Thursday by U.S. Attorney General William Barr in which he cautioned American business leaders against promoting policies favorable to Beijing. He asserted that China at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic had not only dominated the market for protective gear, exposing American dependence on Beijing, but had also hoarded supplies and blocked producers from exporting them to countries in need. Barr also accused hackers linked to the Chinese government of targeting American universities and businesses to steal research related to coronavirus vaccine development, leveling the allegation against Beijing hours after Western agencies made similar claims against Russia. “The People’s Republic of China is now engaged in an economic blitzkrieg—an aggressive, orchestrated, whole-of-government (indeed, whole-of-society) campaign to seize the commanding heights of the global economy and to surpass the United States as the world’s preeminent technological superpower,” Barr said.

Major Beirut medical centre lays off hundreds as crisis bites (Reuters) Zawqan Abdelkhalek, a nurse at the American University of Beirut’s (AUB) medical centre since 2012, was laid off on Friday along with hundreds of colleagues as even hospitals buckle under the weight of Lebanon’s economic collapse. “I have a baby daughter, I need to get her food and water and pay for her vaccines,” the 29-year-old said. A currency crash means his pension in Lebanese pounds is now worth just around $500, he said. He blamed the ruling elite for daily power cuts, skyrocketing prices and pushing the country to the brink. Local media and employees said the AUB, one of the country’s oldest universities and a regional medical hub, laid off more than 500 workers. At least 220,000 jobs in the private sector were shed between October and February, a survey by research firm InfoPro showed, with the figures only expected to get worse.

#headlines #news

2 notes · View notes

memorylang · 4 years

Text

Fathers’ Day, Familiarity and Faith | #38 | June 2020

If my COVID-19 experiences were a Netflix Original Series, I feel someone could title it, "The Groundskeeper."

Synopsis: Returned Peace Corps Volunteer from Mongolia, now back in Nevada, learns a thing or two about hedge trimming and much more about life living.

The inspirational hit series stars award-winning memoirist Daniel Lindbergh Lang, director and editor. “Please support the official release.”

Quirky thoughts keep me sane. More on these later, of course.

The U.S. celebrated Father’s Day 2020 on June 21, so I commemorate it with reflections from being my father’s son.

The adventures follow both my Mothers’ Day reflections (#36) and Easter in America stories (#35). I focus now on continued COVID-19 adventures in yard work, sorting and reminiscing.

Chronologically, we pick up from my stateside Week 11 (May 15-21), when my sisters came home from their unis’ spring semesters. With them as collaborators, I continued sorting our family’s memorabilia. After a few weeks’ interlude 'round Memorial Day, big changes occurred Weeks 14 through 16 (June 5-25) through Fathers’ Day.

I also consider Pentecost and the Spirit. Easter 2020 ended Sunday, May 31, so we’re in a fruitful new time. In fact, I write here results from the smattering of routines I shared before.

Lastly, to clarify, many assume my dad’s Asian. But that’s untrue. He’s Austrian-American. That’s where I get my “Lang” surname. Ethnically, I’m about half Austrian. Culturally, too, Dad’s family influenced me far more than Mom’s when I grew up. My mom was ethnically full Chinese, hence that half.

Now back to Dad!

Father’s Perspective on My Boyhood

During my 2020 time home since Peace Corps’ evacuation, Dad often prods me to take on projects he sees around the yard. So, I do yard work. I don’t like desert heat, so I usually work the daily tasks an hour or two at dawn, sometimes dusk. Picture three months this way.

But Dad would tend to demand a certain perfection on many projects, expecting me out there working when there’s work to do. I’d rather let nature do as it pleases. Peace Corps experiences taught me decorated yards generally feel overrated. When I’m older, I feel I’d much rather have my family frequent parks to get our yard fix. Nonetheless, yard work lets me chat with God, who reminds me empathize.

It is difficult to say, "I serve the Father," if I do not serve my father.

With this in mind, I consider the patient progress of waiting while working often.

Dad grew up in rural America’s Midwest from the mid-20th century. Dad’s parents and community were largely Austrian-American Catholics. Dad’s grandfather immigrated with Dad’s great-grandfather because land in Austria was scarce, late-19th century, yet plentiful in Kansas. My dad grew up on a farm as a third-generation Austrian-American. He funded his higher ed. through U.S. military service and numerous side jobs, including those in teaching and sales.

Through Dad, I’m a fourth-generation Austrian-American—though, only second-generation Chinese-American, through Mom. I wasn’t quite on a farm, having grown up between Midwestern suburbs and an urban West. Still, Dad regularly tasked siblings and I with yard work.

An Energetic Kid, Ages 4-7

Now this gets interesting!

This mid-May 2020, my younger sister and I unearthed Christmas letters our parents (mostly Dad) had written to Dad’s siblings—my uncles and aunts—since before 2000. Turns out, our mom kept hard copies in the bins beside her desk. From these, Sister and I read pretty enjoyable pieces about our child selves.

Here I share Dad’s tales from grade school me in Indiana (used with permission):

2001: "Daniel is 4 years old now and is looking forward to kindergarten. He likes outdoor activities and he is quite strong for his age. He can do a lot of sit ups and push ups already. He likes to walk with [his mom] at the airport, which is nearby."

2002: "Daniel is five years old. He is in kindergarten. He is [...] very competitive. He is in the same school as [his older brother] and is rapidly learning to read now. He is good at math, and he studies very hard."

2003: "Daniel is six years old. He is very competitive and naughty. He always keeps track of the books he reads and comes home to tell us how many books he has finished. His goal is to reach 100 books this year. He is over 90 already. Well, he likes to pester [his brother a lot]. He thinks that is fun. [...]"

2004: "Daniel is seven. He is goal oriented and a 'do'er. He is good at making all kinds of crafts. He is our family's talented teacher. He taught [his younger sister] how to read before she went to kindergarten. He also gives homework assignments to the others, except [his older brother]. He always pesters [his brother] as usual."

God graced me with energy as a kid.

I noticed three themes. For one, I seemed to follow Dad’s lead in filling my time productively. He served in the U.S. Army National Guard and emphasized self-discipline. As a civilian family practitioner, too, he advocated for daily exercises, such as sit-ups, push-ups and walking. I seemed to follow suit.

On the other hand, I was a kiddo with an older brother, and I didn’t mind expending plenty spare energy to bother him. Thankfully I stopped pestering when I grew up with enough self-awareness to know good people don’t intentionally troll. Uni helped.

Curiously, I noticed the letters seemed to note many of my interests resembling Mom’s. Arts, reading and studying seemed more like Mom’s interests than Dad’s, yet I hadn’t realized my similarities to Mom back then. Of course, Dad values education, too.

Studious Beyond Belief, Ages 13-19

As I went through elementary school, Dad’s military service included deployments overseas to Afghanistan (2005) and Iraq (2007). In 2008, our family moved from southern Indiana to North Las Vegas, Nev., where I started middle school. Since my younger sister and I hadn’t found letters from Dad’s years deployed with the others letter, we figured Mom wrote them. By 2009’s end, Dad retired as a lieutenant colonel. But he continued work elsewhere, including in a dozen nations to indigenous peoples of the Americas.

Here were Christmas letters from my adolescence on. Coincidentally, I noticed the first couple we found both came from my last years at respective schools.

2010: “Danny, 13, is finishing at [...] a magnet [middle] school associated with math, science and technology. He [earned last year] a 4.0 [grade-point] average. He received a letter this past week from a magnet high school stating that he was the type of student they were looking for. [I, Dad, think Danny] is also in the National Junior Honor Society [service group]. [...] Danny continues to have to be at the school bus stop at 5:50 in the morning.”

2014: “Danny is the ultimate study robot, with his inhuman ability to study for hours on end in place of sleep, or other usual activities for high schoolers. He attended NV Boys State this past June, and he has risen to the rank of Division News Editor within [Kiwanis] Key Club--a HS service group. Danny and [his younger sister] also attended Key Club activities in CA in Nov. [...] As this is his senior year [...], he should be starting to apply for colleges now, but [...] he has not applied to Yale, which is causing his mother to feel that she is a ‘failure’ if none of her kids get accepted at this prestigious school--it’s used by Chinese mothers as a guilt trip for their kids! [...] He also received an AP with Honors award [from his magnet high school]. He presently is in the ‘top 10’ students in his class ranking. But if he doesn’t get his applications in, then there is always UNLV [Las Vegas]!”

2016: “Daniel is now a sophomore at UNR (Reno) in the Honors Program, and is an honors ambassador. He says he has 1 major in journalism with 3 minors at the present time, and he works at the library when time permits. He also completed an internship in publishing during the summer session, when he stayed in Reno and frugally survived during the summer by ‘couch surfing’ at several different locations. Several of us attended his confirmation at Easter in Reno. He also [...] presented at a few [conferences]. Additionally, he is involved in [the Kiwanis] Circle K service group on campus, as well as the Knights of Columbus, and he sings in the choir at the local Newman Center. Based on his Facebook postings, he seems to be enjoying college immensely. [...]”

I definitely loved service groups—and still do, if Peace Corps counts!

Seeing these letters in 2020, I feel amused how Dad wrote of my later academic interests with distance. Dad’s 2002 line about 5-year-old me, “[Daniel] studies very hard,” escalated exponentially, noticeable by his 2014 line about 17-year-old me, “Danny is the ultimate study robot, with his inhuman ability to study for hours on end in place of sleep.” I figure my peers were similar, though…

I feel amused, too, how Dad included Mom’s wanting me to pursue STEM careers. Chinese often expect this of their kids. In some sense, I’m glad Dad let me escape the Asian tendency and Mom’s ideal to have me pursue a Bachelor of Science. Back then, I contended a bachelor’s from the professional School of Journalism would still make me hireable.

Sure enough, Peace Corps hired!

Besides, I felt vindicated later when I learned my minors in English literature, Chinese studies and communication studies resembled my late mother’s fields of English literature and international relations... She clearly benefited from Liberal Arts. More on these in previous reflections, though. :)

Back From Mongolia

Snap back to March 2020, when I just returned to America after our COVID-19 evacuation from Mongolia.

I was really into “Frozen II,” the cathartic film easing me back into the States. My first week back felt very different from those after. Because “Some Things Never Change,” I discerned to do “The Next Right Thing.” Waking to various “Frozen II” numbers of looping in my brain, days began with such thoughts.

My first days, I often compared experiences to Mom’s when she raised my siblings and me. Despite being at home, I was alone. Dad worked away, plus siblings had school and work. (This preceded American schools canceling or moving online.) So, I felt confused what to do.

I discerned I could tidy the house, serve where others couldn’t. Whether dishes to wash or rooms to clean, I addressed what I saw. I imagined Mom felt this way when my siblings and I attended school and Dad worked.

I also considered my living father matters as much as my late mother. So, honoring Dad honors her, too.

Dad always had yard projects he wanted me doing. I had to weed so much when I first returned.

I felt insights, at least. I considered, weeds are eternal. Weeds will always grow on spiritual life. Weeds attempt to choke our crops’ life. We must uproot our weeds and prune dead areas to fortify new and better parts of being. The physical and spiritual are one. … Yet, weeds still annoy me.

Noticeably, my labors seemed to confuse many in my family. They seemed mostly to recall the 2015 me who’d choose studying over chores any day. But I guess most hadn’t factored I’ve experienced plenty in my years away from home, especially during my months living alone cooking for myself in Mongolia. House tasks are necessary parts of life.

Besides, I’d already been doing these tasks others seemed disinterested in, even back at Christmas 2019, when I sorted Mom’s books, and later during post-evacuation Week 9 (May 1-7), packing up Mom’s desk after three years gathering dust. I felt frustrated others seemed slow to accept I’ve changed since Peace Corps. I pray for grace.

The New Journey

June 6, 2020—just days after Pentecost and coincidentally one month to my 23rd birthday—marked one huge occasion.

Dad remarried!

I felt excited.

I also noticed a curious parallel in threes. For, on my family history adventures, I discovered something about Dad’s parents. In 1987, his mother's spouse passed away; on the third year, she married again, in 1990. 30 years later, my dad’s spouse passed away in 2017; on the third year, he married again, in 2020. Coincidences comfort me at times.

That day, I’d also finished revisions to submit my thesis to a different journal for publication. I’d tried before with one in June 2019 and February 2020, but unfortunately my work hadn’t fit within their scope. Still, the editor believed that I could publish it in the right place!

College Town Return

That Week 14 (June 5-11), Dad also purchased a house in Reno, Nev., where my kind stepmom may move, too. Dad requested aid moving things in Reno. My younger sister and youngest brother both opted out, so I went instead. I prefer Reno’s weather, anyway.

In Reno again, I felt parallels to past years.

Helping my youngest sister and her friend move from a condo and house to the new place, I recalled the many who helped me move between Reno homes during my undergrad. Honestly, I felt weird to think of my dad relocating to Reno, especially since I hadn’t known the area he chose existed during my years studying in town.

Mongolia returned to mind, too, while I lugged belongings in and out of the condo, up and down stairs. Hard to believe that that was three months ago when Peace Corps evacuated us. Exactly three months before, March 9, 2020, was my first Monday in Nevada again.

Writing of Mongolia, I also recalled every bellhop who's hauled my 23 kg (50 lbs.) luggage up stairs in Asia. God bless them.

On the bright side, with helping the sister and friend move, Dad said I got stronger. That felt good. When he asked how many push-ups I could do, I said 50—my new personal record met just days before. When I started working out the month and a half prior, I could only do half that.

Thanks to the lifting and yard work tasking me in Reno, I paused my fitness routines. I realized, I’ve enough strength and endurance for what I’d want to do. So now, having met the goals, I still work out, just less concerned about gains.

Tests of Faith

Back to that ‘groundskeeping.’

With Reno versus Vegas, I prefer hedges to palm trees. Hedges are more fun and less merciless. They leave my body less bloody than palm trees, too. Reno’s weather also keeps cooler.

As you’d expect, yard work leaves plenty time to reflect, chat with God. In earlier days these chats opened with lamentations about the heat and constant tasks. But God graces peace.

Ultimately, Dad’s tasks need someone to do them. He’s busy working full-time out-of-town, and siblings still have activities they must or would rather do. So I volunteer.

On the other side, Dad at times says he’ll compensate me once the bills are paid. There always seem bills to me, though. Since it’s been three months now, I try to think of this like the Kingdom. Whether or not I see rewards, I try to persevere. I must trust the Father to provide in time, no matter the wait. It’s a spiritual exercise.

Pa says he’s glad I’m financially stable, too—My scholarships, grants and work study graduated me debt-free. Those seem good, I guess.

So, spiritually exercising while laboring, I consider parables of workers in the field and masters. Christ spoke of such. Parables about fields and wages seem more nuanced after feeling comparable questions.

I think, too, to re-education labor camps sometimes. During China’s Cultural Revolution, my mom’s parents—both teachers—were sent to those. So, my ‘toiling’ in Dad’s backyards are surely nothing compared to what my grandparents involuntarily endured. I can bear my ‘shackles.’

These bring me to privilege.

At the day’s end, I have places to stay, food to eat and stable internet. Many Americans and people worldwide face greater turmoil than these, perhaps including you, my reader. So, I try acknowledging my ‘hardships’ hardly compare. I try to focus prayers for the needier. Faith helps me through.

On a happy note, I just reached the Diamond League on Duolingo! So, life could definitely be worse...

The Climb

One day during Week 15 (June 12-18), after Dad came home at dusk from work, he asked me to get out the ladder to climb the backyard tree. I thought that was wistful thinking!

Well, I had the time and realized he wanted me to climb after all. The tree had a fallen limb he wanted me to saw off, since I weigh less than him. I insisted I’d only climb with him around.

Well, he came around.

I ascended and sawed four limbs! Before the climb, we thought I only had to address a single one. But as I climbed for it, I found more. Thankfully, these were thin limbs. Dad gave some advice from below, handed me our hand saw then left me while he took care of other tasks around the yard. I climbed higher, wedged my feet in semi-stable positions and got to work.

Atop, the wind blew, so the tree rocked. I clung high in a swaying tree. Good Lord.

But I felt amazed, handling my saw even with my off-hand. I’d cling with one arm and saw with the other. When branches got stuck, I had to grab them, push and jerk them away from other sections to send them down. Dad had me call out, “Timber!” With the final branch out, I let the saw fall.

Success felt like redemption from that random tree I climbed the first culture-shocked day I returned to Vegas from Mongolia. This time I’d such control. My safety depended on it! Plus, I only grazed the back of my hand, as opposed to gashing my palm like the last time I left a tree. Less bleeding is better.

By the end, my arms and legs trembled, not from worry but from muscle fatigue. Still, I felt empowered. Throughout my childhood, I could never climb a tree. Now I passed the physical I hadn’t expected a month and a half prior.

All told, my climb took just half an hour.

Staying the Course

In a week and a half, I turn 23! So I’ll be one (1) 23-year-old, hehe. Look forward to new reflections on how I’ve grown and changed.

As an extension of my paternal family history projects, I started writing memorable quotes from Dad. My siblings and I wound up adapting these and more into our Fathers’ Day 2020 gift! Dad enjoyed our “Book of the Father” we printed.

Meanwhile, America begins to slightly reopen amid COVID-19 conditions, and the post-solstice summer’s begun. So, I encourage us to, whenever possible, still #StayHome more than usual, wear our face masks, maintain physical distance and of course wash our hands. We’ll get through this.

And I hear some are struggling with loneliness, too—If you need someone to talk to, you can always count on me. It’s among the most challenging feelings, given we humans are social beings staying physically apart. Writing, phoning and video calls help me, at least. Feel free to reach out. I keep you and loved ones in my prayers.

Best wishes, and till we chat again.

You can read more from me here at DanielLang.me :)

#Peace Corps #Mongolia #memoir #story #Catholic #God #memoryLang #USA #moving #Las Vegas #Pentecost #faith #Reno #Coronavirus #COVID-19 #hope #summer #StayHome #WithMe #Fathers Day

2 notes · View notes

rebelwheelssoapbox · 5 years

Text

Pride Month Means Politicians Are All Rah Rah Rainbow, But Do They Support All Of The LGBTQ+ Community?

By RebelWheels NYC The following article is not an attempt to drag, shame or throw shade at people, but rather is an attempt at education and a call for solidarity.

[image description: Cast photo from the Queer Eye. photo shows five different gay men who have various appearances and looks, but are all very stylish. ] With perhaps the exception of Queer Eye & RuPaul’s Drag Race (which not everyone has access to), if one were to go by LGBTQ+ representation in the mainstream media, one might get the impression that LGBTQ+ often equals very glam/stylish, white, able bodied, cisgender, middle and/or upper class. However, the truth is like many identities, queer people exist within every community.

[image description: Cast photo from the RuPaul Drag Race. Photo shows a wide variety of drag queens looking pretty damn fabulous and colorful] I am a proudly queer, disabled woman, (among other identities) and therefore I don't just face queerphobia, but also deal with sexism and ableism. Sometimes I experience these things all at once. Sometimes I even face ableism within queer spaces and sometimes queerphobia in the disability community. Related: Ableism? What the hell is Ableism?

[image description: a graphic with a white background and black “typewriter” font text. It reads, ”Ableism is… (a form of) discrimination.The false idea that disabled people are by default, inferior. When in truth, disability is just another way for a mind and/or body to be.”] So often when we hear about oppressed groups of people, it's often presented in this very isolated fashion (or what is often referred to as single issue). Here is Group A , they face Discrimination A and that's it. However, the truth is, unless you are white, straight, cisgender , male, upper class, able bodied, etc., life is rarely that simple. You can be queer and disabled. You can be queer and poor. You can be queer and a person of color, queer and Muslim, queer and an immigrant and/or refugee, queer and indigenous, etc etc etc. In fact, at the end of the day, a person can be all of these things.

And I mention this, not to simply partially list the possible combinations of marginalized identities, but to point out that when we talk about the importance of supporting and giving love to the LGBTQ+ community, we must acknowledge that many LGBTQ+ people aren't just dealing with LGBTQ+-phobia (which is hard enough on it's own.) That if you say you support the queer community, then we must support all of the community, and that means having solidarity for the varying experiences of all queer people.

[image description: Black and white photo of Audre Lorde, a black and queer activist. To the right of the photo, is a black background with white text : “There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issues lives.” Audre Lorde.] Related: Ted Talk by Kimberlé Crenshaw who is credited for coining the term intersectionality. (TW: various forms of oppression, including racism and police violence, including footage of literal violence towards the end of the presentation) I am writing this article during Pride Month, where companies galore are fishing for those beloved pride dollars, as they remake their logos in the colors of the rainbow flag. Some people in the community applaud this action and are happy to give them their money, while some of us in the community are asking, what have you done for our community other than make your logo more colorful in the month of June?

After all, solidarity is more than just slapping on a rainbow.

[image description: Rectangle rainbow graphic, with red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple. On top is the following text “Rah rah rainbow!”] Meanwhile, in comes the wave of politicians, who too, are all rah rah rainbow on their social media, but do they really support our community, or are they just in it for the good PR, or perhaps running for re-election? And if they say they do support our community, even if they are LGBTQ+ themselves, we must ask: do they support all of the community? It's great if they are against LGBTQ+ phobia and the consequences of, but as we discussed earlier in this article, in order to support all of the community, solidarity must go beyond that. In order to support all of the community, we must acknowledge how many forms of oppression intersect. So, what does that look like? Well, there are many issues that I could include here, but in the interest of keeping this article at a reasonable length, I'll just name the following three examples.

1.) Are they working to end the cash bail system, which predominately impacts women and mostly poor women of color. A system that keeps people in jail, sometimes for months, many who haven't even been convicted of a crime, but can't afford the bail money to get out? It's Pride month. Do the rah rah rainbow politicians also support the end of this classist and racist system, that keeps many people, including many in the LGBTQ+ community in jail? Related: VIDEO: Moms Behind Bars: How Cash Bail Is Keeping Women In Jail | AJ+ Related: Southerners on New Ground (SONG), a Southern queer liberation group, has been raising money to help bail Black mamas out of jail for Mother’s Day.

[image description: screenshot from a video from Mic, showing two transwomen of color, walking down the street in a city environment] 2.) Do they support the ban of an archaic law, often referred to as #WalkingWhileTrans, which unjustly gives the police legal permission to harass (and in many cases, racially profile) transwomen just for being out in a public space, under the “loitering for the purpose of prostitution” law. They don’t even need proof. A transwoman could just be walking home from going dancing with her friends in a cute little dress, she stops to talk to someone and if a cop thinks she might be a prostitute, regardless if she is or not, he can arrest her. Related: Transwomen and activist, TS Candii tells her story of when she was harassed by the pollice TW: transphobia, police brutality and assault Related: Civil Rights Groups Call Out ‘Archaic’ N.Y. Loitering Law For Targeting Trans People 3.) Meanwhile, similar to how LGBTQ+ people exist within every marginalized community, so do disabled people. And since this is pride month (though solidarity should of course not be a 30 day event), we must also ask do these politicians support efforts like the DIA or Disability Integration Act which would make it so that states could not force disabled people (and thus queer disabled people, queer disabled people of color etc) against their will, trapping them into institutions and nursing homes? Related: Disabled Activists as part of ADAPT occupies 19 House offices to pass the Disability Integration Act (HR.555) Because if they don’t support issues like these (and many more), then they are not allies to all of the LGBTQ+ community, in which case, are they really allies? In this case, in many ways, even if they are against LGBTQ+ phobia, but stop there, the social media post of rainbows, and maybe even waving and marching in their local pride parade, can not be fully authentic. The powers that be go to great lengths to pit oppressed communities against each other and because social media has a short attention span when it comes to trending topics, and there is just so much injustice going on in the world, it can be difficult (at best) to get that spotlight to shine on the oppression that you face and/or care about. But in the end, if we say we support the LGBTQ+ community, if we say we are against oppression of LGBTQ+ people, then we must not leave a single LGBTQ+ person behind.

________________________________________________________________ This article was partially inspired by a tweet (social media post) by Bruce Darling, a queer and disabled activist from ADAPT, who said the following in response to some rah rah rainbow politicians: “Seriously, if you HONOR Stonewall, and civil rights, STOP STONEWALLING the Disability Integration Act! #HR555 Disabled Americans should not be locked away in institutions because you refuse to take action on a bill… Support #DIAtoday! “ which got me thinking about the importance of intersectional or complete LGBTQ+ solidarity or the lack of.”

#pride #pride month #gay pride #LGBTQ+ pride #LGBT pride #queer pride #queer #queer and disabled #intersectionality #queer intersectionality #disability integration act #cash bail #walking while trans #bruce darling #queer eye #rupaul #politicians

1 note · View note

karolinadariaflora-blog · 6 years

Photo

On this winter night, sitting by the fireplace, I feel like sharing some more thoughts, cause I’ll be gone for a while, and had never been good at answering questions I get on here or at any digital contact whatsoever… Anyways, it’s been some time, cause already in 2013, after having met Bianca Casady, cross-disciplinary artist of music duo CocoRosie, I gave an extensive interview that, along with my photos, was published in the second issue of the magazine Girls Against God, that she created in partnership with artist Anne Sherwood-Pundyk. If I was to answer these questions now, 4 years later, many of them would have been answered differently, some using less, other more words. But even after all the time that had passed since, these words will still put some landmarks in the landscapes I portray and invite you to travel through with me. Thank you everyone for joining me on this journey, with love,

’’The second issue of GAG—a pocket book of practical magic—investigates and celebrates spiritual healing, instinctually tying together the earth and women’s bodies. Through essays, fiction, poetry, interviews and spells GAG Issue 2 delves into the roots of occult earth wisdom passed through generations of women against persecution and patriarchy. A boldly feminist exploration and multi-generational endeavour, GAG deploys the arts to illuminate the oppressive, obsolete nature of traditional, male-defined religions and other patriarchal institutions—“We must resist and reinvent,” Casady declares.’’

GAG kicked off at the 9th Annual New York Art Book Fair in 2014. You can still get a copy of it here

Who are the people in your photographs?

Karolina: These are different aspects of the feminine energy, taking form and telling stories. They are archetypes, and each figure bears a lot of symbolism for the viewer to decipher. Even if I portray a man, he represents a more intuitive, heart-centered, feminine part of himself. These personas understand the language of the birds, can see the eighth color of the light spectrum, they lived through snake bites, and they all well remember their star origins. Very often these photographs are my auto-portraits in a way. Each silhouette walking away, seen from behind, represents my nomadic urge to follow the setting sun, to always be free, to always stay on that self-rememebering journey.

The figures in the photographs seem to all belong to the same utopian world. They look like members of some imaginary nature tribe. Can you tell us something about these figures and the landscape they move in?

K.: They are Healers, Shamans, Cosmic Dancers, Weavers of Magical Realities, Wise Men, High Priests and Priestesses, Keepers of Divine Knowledge, Goddesses. They are all Free Spirits and they all live here. It is the reality where you can manifest your dreams instantly, with no fear, where looking inside the dark, spiralling vortex expands the consciousness. I let my spirit travel on its waves and it takes me to the center of the Galaxy. I know I cannot take anyone with me, it’s a solitary journey, it leads to the heart, but I can bring back some things here, and so I do. The most amazing things happen when I meet souls who have been where I’ve been too, or when I explore universes that are the core of their hearts. When we find each other, the recognition on a soul level is immediate. I feel thats’s why people share their worlds through art — when they find members of their star families, everything falls into place.

Is there some ritual or folklore you think our materialistic and secular culture is missing?

K.: Yes, there are two. One of them is opening all indigenous sacred ceremonies. Connecting your heart with the heart of Mother Earth and Father Sky is one of the most beautiful and important meditations. When the love it creates fills you, a very unique vibration enters into your spirit. Then you can feel the immense love for yourself, remember who you really are, and finally enter your heart. No meditation and no ritual can be performed properly without first establishing that connection. It’s called the Unity Breath. Just by practicing it, the most unthinkable miracles have happened in my life — images from my heart became real in no time. Another thing would be if more people became aware of the real potential of the sexual energy they carry (that Egyptian Tantra speaks about, for example.) It’s been long forgotten, neglected by the churches that did not want people to use it. It is based on the electro-magnetic charges feminine and masculine energies possess (not genders.) Feminine energy is magnetic and masculine energy is electrical. The exchange happens on the atomic level, creating a frequency that opens consciousness to higher realms. Everything can be brought into existence from that connection, but the base of it has to be love, always.

Is there a division between art and life for you?

K.: For me there is no such a separation, and I just can not live in any other manner. But actually, my life contains more beauty and magic than any creation of mine will ever bear. Before I started documenting these things that happen to me, I’ve been making stuff and living like this for years, not calling myself an artist, it’s just a record of my life. It is up to the viewer to determine what is art. Nature and all that’s beyond it in the universe is the pure, real art that no art gallery, theater or museum will ever be able to host because our own, unique experience makes it the most special art for us. Maybe only music gets close to the mystery of it all.

How did you feel about making a show in an independent art space, can you tell us something about that experience?

K.: I never thought of making an art show, I just enjoy the creation process, grounding me in the present moment. What happens with it all afterwards does not interest me much, but because I was invited to make a show that would be followed by a week of my crystal healing sessions, I prepared a good healing space to perform it in. I thought that was a good idea. It was marvellous to meet so many beings in the heart center, and see their light and beauty during that week. The event itself was a four hour lecture on all these dimensions I communicate with, which was more typical for a traditional show.

Can you tell us something about your process? What inspires you? Do you speak to angels? Do they influence your creations?

K.: Usually I just feel like there are some things that are suspended somewhere there, waiting for someone to tune in and bring them to manifestation, so I am more a channel for things to take form through me than a creator. I know it could have been anyone, but it happened to me. Of course I get very inspired by the indigenous nations of different cultures, tribes who follow and respect the rhythms of the cosmos. Though the most profound inspiration are the moments of unity with all existence that bring me to an experience of eternity and purest love that I believe is the essence of each atom. I don’t have verbal contact with angels, but I see them as light orbs of different colors of light spectrum and beyond, and there certainly is a communication with worlds within, without, above and below. Spirits of nature, fauna and flora, minerals and these angelic entities show me around, explaining how things work. That is a communication based on a deep trust — listening that is hearing, looking that is seeing and feeling that is knowing.

Did you go to school? How did you educate yourself?

K.: I think that more useful for me was unschooling. I received a very strict, Polish education that kills individuality. After that I needed to erase from my head a lot of harmful data, but along the way I taught myself about everything just by observation of this reality and realities beyond the visible, sense-perceptible world. For example, all my knowledge about mathematics, astrophysics, or any new language I learn is just a download, without much of the learning process. And I have no idea about how to use sewing machines, weaving techniques, cameras, computers, mathematical formulas, grammar of languages I speak. I just get it and do it.

What’s your relationship to possessions and how does this express itself in things you create?

K.: I don’t normally feel attachment to my belongings or things I have created. The Universe knows about it, so my possessions often get consumed by different elements, or just disappear or reappear in the most bizarre circumstances. I often leave things behind or give them away. It’s good feeling to free yourself from objects; it gives more space for your self. Actually, just recently I worked in the forest for many hours, weaving on the looms I made on the flat tree trunks that were cut down. I left all my weavings there for them to experience the cycle of the seasons, growth and death, and just to be. It cheered up the forest too.

What personal dreams do you have for the future?

K.: I don’t know much about the future, I only want to stay happy and live from my heart, no matter the circumstances. I could be of better service to others. But maybe I will learn the language of some exotic birds and plants and fill my life with more of dance and music, rather than with this meticulous handwork, which taught me about the dimension of time.

Are you a witch?

K.: I use healing plants, communicate with animals, and have always had some cats. I’ve seen my thoughts manifest in front of me. I have healed myself from some serious stuff as a kid, heal others when I’m allowed. I have expanded vision, I follow the moon cycles. I live the magic, I make magic, I am magic.

#all is magic #:)

41 notes · View notes

currentclimate · 6 years

Text

Start A Revolution, in Response To Permafrost Thaw

“Permafrost Thaw Looks Alien: What You Need to Know” Via Climate State, March 16, 2018 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FCoo8MA4eI8)

For context, a few short years ago, the melting of the permafrost was seen by scientists as a harbinger of doom, as a marker of abrupt and potentially catastrophic (for humans and the biosphere) climate change.

It’s happening.

This is a major positive feedback that is well underway, with the potential (according to the video, Dr. Charles Miller, NASA JPL), of compounding anthropogenic carbon release by up to 30%.

This is dire news.

Abrupt climate change is underway. We are living through a climate change emergency, right now, before our eyes. We are witnessing a failure of human culture on a critical scale. More than half of Russians believe climate change is a good thing that will improve their lives through economic benefits from a warming climate, as well as the personal benefit of warmer winters. China continues to build coal-fired power plants while at the same time investing heavily in renewables.

Can you say double-speak?

Can you say thought-crime?

Can you say crimes against humanity, against current and future generations, and against the entire biosphere? Yes, all you sunny-siders, the earth will be fine, even with climate change, but every living thing on this planet will suffer, and many will go extinct . . . many have already gone extinct, because of climate change.

Crimes against humanity are codified by the UN in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal court, Article 7, which states: For the purpose of this statute, ‘crime against humanity’ means any of the following acts when committed as part of a widespread or systematic attack directed against any civilian population, with knowledge of the attack. Scientists have known, for more than 100 years, of the impacts of increasing carbon concentrations in the atmosphere, and we have had a running record of CO2 levels taken from a peak in Mauna Loa, Hawaii, since 1958. Michael Mann is now famous for creating the “hockey stick” diagram showing the unprecedented rise in carbon concentrations in the atmosphere. This is not new information. Exxon/Mobile, and other fossil fuel companies, spent vast sums of money researching climate change, and by the 1980’s, even among scientists for the fossil fuel industry, the markers of climate change were clear. This attack on humanity has been both knowing and widespread.

In contrast to genocide, crimes against humanity do not need to target a specific group, the whole of the population of the planet will suffice to meet this definition. Moreover, to be convicted of crimes against humanity, specific intent is not necessary, so, even if Exxon/Mobile knew, or the Bush or Clinton or Obama administrations knew about climate change, a specific intent to harm vast numbers of people is not necessary for guilt. A general knowledge of potential deleterious impacts is enough, so, maybe we can’t blame Clinton for climate change inaction, because even though we knew about climate change during his administration, the coming impacts were not yet clear.

The impacts are clear and present now. There is danger. People are dying, property damaged, and the biosphere compromised because of climate change. This has been clear since at least the Obama administration. I am not partisan. There is plenty of blame to go around and the blame does not center on a single administration or ideology.

It’s not just China or Russia that are the bad guys. Canada continues to develop and invest in tar sands. The US has exited the Paris Accord and rolled back Obama-era regulations on coal.

It’s the whole world, outside of a few indigenous groups who are sounding the alarms. These groups can imagine a different world, without capitalism, consumerism; living in a real democracy. These groups are not bent at the knee to the Economy, to Corporations, to growth and expansion of all markets, regardless of the negative human costs, and, sadly, to self-interest. These indigenous groups can imagine the ways of life, the radical changes to human society, valuing, and functioning, that would have to occur in order to make even a half-assed attempt at effectively combating climate change.

The rest of the world can’t. The rest of the world buries its head in the sand, choosing instead to look the other way, to stay sunny-sided, or stand steady in the faith that fate offers.

Human culture has failed. Human culture has agreed to value comfort, self-interest, denial, and untruth, instead of the requisite virtues for a functioning and sustainable civilization. There is not a person on this planet that is not aware the climate is not changing. They may deny it, to their dying breath, but they know it’s there, because all you have to do is step outside your front door to see it.

We need a revolution. An immediate revolution. To save this planet. This is no joke. This is not hyperbole. This is not partisan. This is not open to interpretation. We need to start by respecting intelligence, education, and experience.

We are not all equal, in terms of experience, education, or intelligence. We are equal under the law. We are equal in the eyes of God, if you believe that sort of thing. Because you are smart, or educated and experienced, does not mean you are better than a street-sweeper, but it does mean, when it comes to things that matter, that you know about and the street-sweeper doesn’t, that you are given credence. For certain, there are things the street-sweeper knows about through experience or education that you do not, and you should offer the street-sweeper the same level of respect and listen.

Science and scientists have been telling us for years, decades, more than a century, that putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere will change the climate. Your Uncle Joe, and your representatives in congress, your news media, your president and his cabinet, all these people all over the world have said to themselves -- I know better . . . climate change is not real.

We can argue about the reasons. We can talk about human nature. We can discuss intellectual history. We will surely need to introduce religion, anthropology, sociology, psychology, mythology, and much more, to get at the heart of the reasons. It doesn’t really matter why, it just matters that it's happened, and, now, with abrupt climate change, what the consequences will be and how we will respond.

We need a revolution, but that’s not what is happening. Tribalism is happening. Anger, skepticism, cynicism, they are happening. Brutality is happening. These are all natural human responses to stress. They are not surprising. We need a revolution to change this, to change these horrible values, and to push us all beyond denialism into concrete and immediate action.

A revolution.

What better reason to start a revolution than your own family, kin, offspring, and to protect the potential for future generations (this is NOT a given -- “future generations” -- do you understand this?!?! -- the earth has undergone 5 mass extinctions in the past; never at this speed, in case you were about to suggest what’s happening around us is natural)?

If you need to, think about the polar bears, and the penguins, the Pacific Redwood forests, the salmon and trout in your own streams, which will disappear completely in a much warmer world. If you need to, think of red tides, toxic algae blooms the size of three states. Think of desertification. Think of storms the size of continents.

Think whatever you need to get your ass off the couch and into the streets with a sign in your hand, or into your congressperson's office or e-mail or phone. Get your son or daughter or father or brother, sister and uncle and aunt, and tell them we have a climate change emergency and there is no time to waste.

We are witnessing crimes against humanity, against you and me. I know, it’s not about you and me, it’s about all of us, present and future, and it’s about all the living things on this planet. We can’t do it individually; I cannot combat climate change on my own. We need systems and structures of power, government, institutions and infrastructure, to support a project of this kind.

It’s not your fault you don’t own an electric car. It’s not your fault, you don’t believe me. It’s not your fault, you don’t know anything about climate change, and how dire it already is. It’s not your fault because the systems and structures of power, the institutions we depend upon to protect and guard the public good, the world over, have failed each and every one of us. We can’t know everything through personal experience and investigation. There is not time for a single person to do this, which is why we have governments and institutions to keep a watchful eye out for all of us, and warn us when necessary, let us know what should be on our radar and what we should learn and pay attention to.

It’s not your fault you don’t know.

Once you know, if you do not act, then it is your fault. You are culpable. You must look your children and grandchildren in the eyes. Once you know, you must act, and now you know what you must do, and that is . . . start a revolution.

This is no joke. This is not hyperbole. I am not a radical. I’d much rather sit on my couch. I’d much rather follow my own self-interest. This is no longer possible, because the environment for which each of us depends for our personal freedom is threatened. Seriously threatened. People are already dying. There is already a mass refugee crisis, and just like the unprecedented wildfires in the West, nobody mentions climate change in connections with these massive tragedies.

But we all know it’s there. Not a single one of us needs to wait to be told. We know. It’s there.

It’s doesn’t take much to change the world. Think about Rosa Parks. Think about that single act of civil disobedience. Think about the moral outrage that inspired Rosa Parks.

Now, think about climate change, think about yourself, and think about starting a revolution. That’s what we need, because a miracle is not going to fix this.

“A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation . . . .” Vladimir Lenin, a guy who knew a thing or two about revolutions.

Now go to it.

#climate change #we need a revolution #2018

4 notes · View notes