Date Taken: 7/13/12
Setting: The upper school
Thoughts: Every summer, we take the students to the upper school and have Olympics. I feel it is necessary to preface the rest of this post with a fact that many people find off putting...I hate the Olympics. I find watching sports of any kind (unless a personal friend is playing) to be utterly boring and a waste of my time. So, there's that. More than that factor though, is the fact that the Olympics get hyped up in a way that feels unsettling to me.
There is a commercial for this year's Olympics that shows moms waking their various children early in the morning to take them to practices then shows them later on as their child wins a medal in the Olympics. First of all, are moms the only ones that can take care of children? Also, at what point did those small children actually consent to the long, arduous, painful road of possibly becoming an Olympic athlete? Why are we celebrating this kind of behavior. The adults that start training small children for these kinds of competitions are doing these children many a disservice. These children don't get to be children, they have to be machines whose bodies are not wholly their own, and whose disappointments play out at a national level.
I also find that the opening ceremonies and the overarching competition itself to be the most colossal waste of money, next to any and all superbowl half time shows of course. I wonder what would happen if the millions, possibly billions of dollars put into making those ceremonies and the games was actually spent trying to help people. There are kids that go to bed hungry every night, but that's boring, especially compared to fireworks and shiny costumes and elaborate choreography.
The only Olympics I like are the ones with do at Summerbridge. This year's games were the best I have been a part of. Josh and his committee planned them to perfection and everyone involved seemed to have a blast. What I love about our Olympics is that it allows our students to take a break from the heavy, adult burdens they often carry with them and run around and be kids for a little while. They get to laugh and dance and perform and play. They get to enjoy the company of peers that want to learn. They get to be excited about something larger than themselves. That's what the Olympics should be - a time to celebrate life's simple moments and joys and do so with little more than a few hula hoops, some cones, and some dodgeballs.
The pictures below are just a few of the amazing moments that happened on this day.
Date Taken: 5/26/12
Setting: Headed to Manayunk
Thoughts: Brian and I were headed to Manayunk to meet up with Veronica and go to Cass and Andrew's place for a shindig. Whilst in Market East, we came across this sticker. I am always curious to know how a sticker came to be in any particular location and how any alterations or additions occurred and under what circumstances. It appears that someone tried to remove this sticker, first by trying to remove the entire thing, then perhaps when that proved too difficult, the person took out a key and tried to scratch it off, or at least damage it enough to let everyone know how pissed off the sticker made him or her.
This sticker and the attempted destruction of it epitomizes the state of our political and economic climate right now. It seems like politicians have resorted to 5 year old logic when debating and designing policies that will affect the entire country. In this sticker, protestors are taking a peaceful jab about the system itself. There have been, like in so many peaceful demonstrations in our history (civil rights comes to mind), instances of police brutality. Occupy protestors, for the most part, are just trying to bring light to the fact that the rich keep getting richer and the poor keep getting poorer. It isn't right. It isn't in anyone's best interest to cut funding to education, to make it more difficult for lower and middle class kids to get a higher education, to destroy human life abroad, to deny people medical insurance, to allow a failing economy to cripple individuals and families, making it increasingly more difficult for them to pay off their debts (hello student loans), find shelter, eat.
Our basic human freedoms are being reduced, and we are being told that it is in our best interest to either not know about it or to accept it blindly. Mitt Romney has an elevator for his cars...in one of his mansions. Last week, I passed a homeless man asking for food and change...he was in a wheelchair...because he only has one leg. Yup, all seems right with the world. How can people with every opportunity, every advantage, every amenity and comfort tell our entire population what is right for us when it comes to reproductive freedoms and healthcare, marriage rights, religion, education?
Every day I read about or Brian tells me about another horrifying, aggressively ignorant action taking place in the political realm. It is depressing. I often stop reading or tell him I don't want to hear it. Brian tells me, and I know he is right, that this is what they want. They - those precious few who will determine if I live my entire life in debt, who will make sure I am vaginally probed if I ever decide to have an abortion, who will devalue my job as an educator by cutting funding to the one thing that can save us all. They. They want us to be uninformed. They want us to feel hopeless. They want to shame us or force us into giving up our basic human freedoms. They want us to see the yellow and orange and red of a terrorism alert meter and sign away our rights in exchange for the illusion of protection.
So when I see a sticker like this, I actually feel a little uplifted, a little hopeful. There are people out there with a sense of humor in the face of ignorance and hatred and greed. There are people who are willing to fight, especially for the things we should never have to fight for - like the right not to have the shit kicked out of you for peacefully wanting high powered executives to stop cheating us all.
The claw marks through this sticker only serve to demonstrate the idea that those in power, those in favor of an ultra conservative government that denies our rights and encourages us to hate others, resort to the same tactics over and over. They try to discredit, cover up, destroy their opposition. They resort to violence, to scare tactics, to bullying.
I am tired of a world in which these kinds of tactics are okay, a world in which I am going to have a phd and will be dangerously close to living on the streets because I have crippling student debt, expensive health insurance payments, and no job prospects. I don't know how much or what I can do to make a difference in this regard, but I do know that the first step is to get and stay informed and the second is to write about all this information, process it, and share it with others.
Date Taken: 5/23/12
Setting: McGillan's Bar
Thoughts: I started this post the other day, and now I don't really want to write about this day at all. It was a great day - I got to spend time with Brian, walk around the city, eat tacos and drink beer at an interesting bar. But, I suppose that a consequence of writing on a delay and talking about past events several days later is that sometimes, I just don't want to talk about those days anymore.
Today, I spent the entire day allowing an email to annoy me. Having access to my email on my phone is great sometimes, but most of the time it just makes me reachable at all hours in all places. I have developed a habit of checking my email as soon as I wake up, largely because I was a TA for two early morning classes this past year, and I wanted to make sure I didn't miss any messages from the professors. I hate this habit. I am going to stop it.
I didn't even read the full email this morning, I just caught the first line and was disgusted. In the scheme of things, the line I read was fairly innocuous, but it pissed me off all day. I am tired of the fact that there doesn't seem to be anything sacred about authority anymore. I'm not saying we should ever question it, but why do people assume that they somehow have a right to question every single little decision that is made. If I ever did that to my coaches, they would have looked at me and laughed and told me to lace up my shoes because I was going to be running.
Sometimes, I wish it was that simple, that I could just be stone faced all the time and say, well you won't need your stick today, just bring your running shoes. There is a pain and anguish in running sprints... full field sprints...repeated full field sprints...in the heat of a summer afternoon on the turf. It is the great equalizer. It doesn't really matter how good you are at running, it is about not breaking mentally. It is a punishment that people fear and respect at the same time. It is a tangible and instant consequence for misbehaving, for being rude, for giving up and not trying. It is a message to a player and a team that if one person gives up, then we all suffer. It is a message that we all have a role to play and we damn well better get on board with that role. It is a message that we are adults now and mommy and daddy can't step in and make everything better.
I sometimes have a coaching fantasy where the players have left all kinds of trash on the sidelines. When they come back for the next session, each piece of disgusting trash is lined up in front of them and they run a full field sprint for each piece of trash. I know that is probably an odd fantasy. I think fantasy is actually too strong of a word. What I like about this idea is that it makes every single person on the end line responsible for mess, for the disrespect they show to the staff and the school and each other when they leave their garbage on the field like spoiled brats. It is my way of breaking down the bad habits and attitudes of superiority that people so often feel and in its place, building self respect and discipline and pride.
I want to use this ideology and this method in all scenarios, not just in sports. Running is a punishment that puts people in their place and makes them better at the same time - more humble, more mentally strong. I want so badly to just say, you know what, you're being insolent and selfish, get on the line.
Perhaps even in saying all this I am being inherently hypocritical. I can feel the tone of my own words oozing with disdain and a sense of superiority. Maybe I am a hypocrite, but I am a hypocrite with the decency to have some self respect. I am tired of rolling over and letting people walk all over me, while I sit there thinking I deserve to be treated as an inferior. I forget my own cunning, my wit, my ability to manipulate language. I forget that sometimes, I get to have things that I want without having to explain myself. I forget that I do things for other people all the time, almost exclusively at the expense of my happiness or comfort. Sometimes, I can't give in, even when a situation is silly or inane. Sometimes, I want, quite simply, for people to stop being so damn useless and lazy and pretentious and start actually contributing to society. That would be nice.
When it comes to talking about sex and gender, there are a lot of people with some very specific and very angry opinions. Let me start out by saying that I think we have so many wonderful freedoms and liberties in America and that as a woman, I have had opportunities that I otherwise would not have had in another country or in another era. But let's face it, there is still subtle and overt discrimination of all kinds in this world. Women serve as the butt of many a joke. Women are still largely understood as overly emotional people whose true purposes are domestic and sexual. Turn on the TV at any given point during the day and that message is loud and clear. These messages rang true in a blog post about the gang rape of a teenage girl that Brian sent me the other day. (Sidenote, I am so thankful to have a partner that shares my political beliefs.) I got through most of the article then had to stop reading for a while after I read through the description of the rape. I thought I was either going to throw up or punch someone. The boys who raped this 16 year old girl video taped the entire rape in order to show their friends later. Here is the gist of what happened as written by author of the blog post, linked above:
•When the tape was first discovered, this was treated as a potential homicide/necrophilia case, because Jane Doe was assumed to be a corpse. Her eyes are closed the entire time and in the words of the prosecutor she is as limp as a rag doll. •She remains unconscious as she is raped-orally, vaginally, and anally by all 3 of the defendants. They laugh and dance to a misogynistic rap track as they abuse her lifeless body.
•At one point they drop her and she hits her head on the side of the couch, hard enough to momentarily stir her from unconsciousness.
•She is thrown onto a pool table and has a Snapple bottle, a can of apple juice and a lit cigarette inserted into her vagina before she is raped vaginally and anally with a pool cue.
•While she is being raped with the pool cue, one of the boys (Greg Haidl) is seen feeling her abdomen to see how far they are able to penetrate her body. He also slaps her genitals, stomach and breasts. She remains non-responsive throughout.
•While being raped with the pool cue, she urinates-causing the boys to laugh and shriek in feigned horror and disgust.
•When they are done, they clumsily dress her body (they are unable to get her bra back on) and she wakes up covered in urine, vomit, and seminal fluid in her parked car, with no memory of what happened to her.
Scott Moxley provides further detail about the rape.
Equally as disturbing as the rape itself, is the fact that this girl was blamed for the entire rape...by liberals and conservatives alike. As noted on Daily Kos:
"Then there is the elite defense team hired with Haidl's millions. The team included O.J. Simpson jury consultant Jo-Ellan Dimitrius, and an elite team of private investigators who distributed fliers all over Jane Doe's neighborhood, revealing her identity and purporting to be from her family. They went through her garbage and illegally released her medical records to members of the press. They contacted her high school classmates, disclosing her identity as a sexual assault victim. They were so successful in publicly identifying and smearing her that they inspired a vigilante. One night, after the first trial resulted in a hung jury, an unidentified man viciously attacked the girl he identified as Jane Doe, ambushing her outside her home and beating her in the head and face with a rock. Only problem-he got the wrong girl- a neighbor who looked like the picture on the flyer. When she screamed out "I'm not [Jane Doe's name]" the assault abruptly ended."
Equally as appalling is the fact that this victim was positioned as an oversexed slut who consented to the entire rape...despite the fact that she was unconscious.
Like so many comments I have heard and seen before, the comments made during this trial reflect the belief that women who act in a sexually suggestive fashion, including through style of dress, deserve to be raped. These beliefs also suggest, like the way the boys were treated during this trial, that men cannot help but have sex and in fact, should exercise force in order to get it. No one ever deserves to be raped. To rape someone is to rob that person of his or her soul, his or her humanity, his or her entire existence.
What kind of fucked up world are we living in where 1. a woman gets violently raped and 2. the perpetrators are guilt free. This situation exemplifies how stupid people can be, especially women, who say that we have reached a point of gender equality. If you believe there is equality between men and women, then you are absolutely wrong. You just are. In a world where women are treated like lifeless rag dolls, and on top of that are punished for being victimized, AND where people believe this violence was warranted or at the very least, understandable, we are all in trouble. When I read the article below, I was happy to see that at least some people in this world believe that this life is about acknowledging other human beings' existences and being civil.
There is a great couple of lines in this article that really capture the importance of allowing people to live in ways that are non traditional:
"This law is going to enable many of us to have light, to come out of the darkness, to appear," said Sen. Osvaldo Lopez of Tierra del Fuego, the only openly gay national lawmaker in Argentina. "There are many people in our country who also deserve the power to exist," Lopez said.
This quote makes it clear that we have the power to enable others to exist and exist without fear or we have the power to deny others their humanity. For me, it's a no brainer, but apparently the conservative political sphere is inclined to believe that we as a whole people, deserve less rights, less freedoms, less choices regarding our own bodies and lifestyles and just generally less of a say in the bureaucracy that dictates the way we live our daily lives.
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