RAWWWRRRGH poor journalism

My school paper printed an editorial, labeled "Our View," in its most recent edition, published the 19th of October. Its title was "Don't Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Capitol Hill."

This is a fine sentiment, I suppose? I read it, of course, because I'm fascinated by editorials. It started off deeply problematic and got worse from there.

I understand that this is a school paper and that I shouldn't judge it too harshly, but the journalists writing for it are already adults and will probably soon be out in the world writing things that people will take at face value and believe because people in media are assumed to have researched things at the most basic level and understand at least partially what they are preaching against.

And yet! Whoever wrote it is... well, let's say they have a limited field of vision? After a short summary of the movement, the author writes, "The one thing that protests around the world seem to have in common is their frustration and dissatisfaction with the economic status of the majority of citizens. The problem with this is that anger toward the wealthiest in the nation will do nothing to solve the economic crisis."

Aside from being poorly written... what? Angry poor people have done quite a lot throughout history, in fact. They are called "revolutions" (sometimes modified by the adjective "bloody") and they created, um, America, to start with, and France, and really pretty much every independent country now that doesn't have a monarchy. And even those have been touched by revolutions. These are a normal part of growing up and nothing to be ashamed of. So yeah, anger toward the wealthiest will do something, it just might have to involve some beheadings too.

The author goes on to say, "If protestors really want to get to the wealthiest one percent of the nation, they should propose legislation to tax them and put that money toward fixing the country's economy." AHAHAHAHAAAAA. Really? We're just going to march up to all wealthy people and demand that they succumb to taxation, and they're going to say "Well, okay then, you've made a good point"? Really? A number of people have tried to convince extraordinarily wealthy people to allow more taxation! And you know what?

They said no.

They are allowed to do this because they extraordinarily wealthy. They own the corporations that are paying for legislators' campaigns, and presidents' campaigns, and do you really think those same politicians are going to say "Sorry, people who got me where I am today and are supplying my flights and apartments and cars, but I'm going to have to side with poor people who cannot give me anything!" No, because they are human beings. Human beings in seats of power, which kind of automatically means corruption. Did you think about this at all before writing it?

Which is why

"Protests should be held outside the offices of lawmakers, not the offices of business people. Legislators are the ones who have the power to change how the economy operates. Instead of fighting the system, Americans should use their legislators as they were intended: to be their voice."

made me laugh even harder. In a sad sarcastic way.

Yes, naive college student, legislators are intended to be the voice of the people. That is certainly how our original legislators took it (when they weren't taking money from people too, because let's face it, human nature was not better in 1776). But the people legislators listen to now is wealthy people. This is why sites like we are the 99 percent are absolutely full to the brim of people losing their homes, their educations, their livelihoods and their families.

Because no one in power cares. And Occupy Wall Street is at least trying to do something about that, even if, yeah, it probably won't work. It's a start. What are you doing for the poor, pray tell?

I know everyone has a theory about love, and why everyone is so taken up with themselves, and Kids These Days. I'd say "but here's a theory that rises above all the rest," but it is just basically regular.

For whatever reason, whether it be a culture of instant gratification or Disney movies and their princes or what have you, people have decided that if the relationship they are in right now is not headed toward marriage and happily-ever-after they're doing something wrong. Not even the person they are with, but the particular time and place and setting have to be that exactly-right headed-toward-a-diamond moment. If the person you're passionately in love with is dating someone else, it is assumed that they are going to get married (posthaste) and you will be left alone. If you have not yet found The One, it is not because you're too focused on that, it's because something is wrong with them. And so on.

I have not met anyone that, post-1935, met and married and lived happily ever after. I'm just unsure why we as a society are stuck in such a relationship rut. Here is the archetypal relationship:
1. Meet, preferably at something you can mention charmingly at your wedding reception.
2. Fall instantly in love.
3. Know that you both want to get married -- immediately. The clock's ticking!
4. Wait for the appropriate time while both parties, most typically the man, settle their concerns about married life. While waiting, worry about whether you should be waiting. Consult magazines. Talk to your friends about it at bars.
5. Get engaged. Preferably in a mind-blowingly original fashion. Preferably with diamonds.
6. Begin the year-long getting-married process. Ladies, think about dresses and engagement pictures and seating arrangements and nothing else. Men, work so that you can provide for the lucky lady, Women, What Can You Do
7. Get married. It is the best day the universe has ever had, and nothing goes wrong.
8. Enjoy a wildly expensive honeymoon.
[9. Stay fairly happy the first year, divorce within 3-6 years]

Can we please get to the point where it is okay if you're friends with someone for ever and ever and then you fall in love? Or you're on-again off-again forever? Or you never get married, and instead you have dogs, and it's not pathetic, you're doing exactly what you want to? Or you get married for the first time when you're 60? Even Harry and Sally took twelve years!

It just frustrates me so much to see people upset because their relationships aren't going as perfectly or as quickly as they'd like for them to be. Nothing's going to become perfect when you get married, or when you have children, or when you retire. Life is kind of hard. Being around people you care about is the nicest part -- when you're not spending that time worrying about when they'll propose to you.

In summary (and this is what I always say), please relax.

Ignorance vs. Just Being A Huge Asshole

There's this guy in my American Experience class - translated from college-speak, that basically means history, but with a focus on minority groups - who seems to be determined to irritate everyone. I'm not sure how else to explain what he does.

First day of class, to our pregnant professor: "You're huge! Are you having twins?"

"...Uh, no. Just one."

"Are you SURE?"

On the question of America's status as "the best country in the world ever": "Of course it is. Economically-"

Professor: "Actually, statistics show that it isn't-"

"ECONOMICALLY-"

On Anglicization: "My name is Javier, but I introduce myself as Xavier, because everyone should know I'm from America."

On Texans: "My friend said the girls in Texas are way, way more attractive. So..."

On stereotypes about men vs. women: "Guys act exactly like the guys on Friends. They don't talk about sex, and if they do it's a passing thing. And girls ARE emotional and irrational. It's pretty true-to-life."

On male teachers: "Well, it's been proven that male teachers for young children are either pedophiles or have gender confusion."

Professor: "Uh, do you mean sexual orientation?"

"I know what I mean."

And then today, we talked about women's rights and the problem of difference between the sexes, and whether equality can ever be attained. I brought up the fact that men are much less likely to express ideas or feelings typically thought of as feminine, because they will be perceived as gay. And then the professor made several good points about homophobia in a row. And then this guy - I refer to him as Pre-Law Asshole - piped up, and I looked back at one of my similarly liberal friends, who rolled his eyes at me.

(We are both restraining ourselves the entire class period, every class, from strangling PLA. Radical feminist + LGBT rights activist + extremely conservative practically ODD kid = a really volatile classroom)

And PLA launched into this three- or four-minute explanation of homophobia, which is basically that men are afraid of penetration by other men, whereas lesbians aren't threatening... or something? He used "penetration" at least ten times during his monologue. I still have no idea what he was getting at.

But then the professor responded to him, diplomatically, and then moved the conversation along to utopian/egalitarian societies, and whether equality in pay was possible. The way she said it sounded like she thought pay was equal now, and I was about to say something, and then PLA says "Except that women still get paid 75 cents to MY dollar." My friend and I both rose out of our seats a little.

It's so not worth it. PLA then went on, of course, to say that this utopian society was totally possible if only people would convince themselves that everyone was equal. Everyone that couldn't was clearly just not as evolved as he, PLA, is. He is a paragon of social equality. He is what all men should aspire to. (He then went on to advocate for men's rights, btw)

I mean, how is someone with my strength of feelings on all these issues supposed to respond to him? I can't stab him in the neck or anything, I don't think, no matter how much I want to. A debate wouldn't convince him, because he isn't that kind of person. What exactly am I supposed to say?

Please, someone tell me it's okay to stab him.

Skipping out on technology

I deactivated my facebook last night while having a panic attack, because for some reason that seemed appropriate. And now, post-panic, it actually seems like the best thing I've ever done. This may be the first time that sequence of events has ever occurred! Normally it's just like "hey, I should cut my own hair!" or something, which always ends so happily.

Top ten reasons to deactivate your facebook account:

1. Less temptation to sit in front of the computer eating chips. Why are those things connected?
2. So much less drama. I don't know how facebook cultivates such a high school attitude in groups of people, but oh, it does.
3. Time posted an unintentionally amusing article that basically says if you're on facebook a bunch, you will probably fail. Not, of course, that they're saying that: "Maybe [Facebook users] are just prone to distraction. Maybe they are just procrastinators." Either way, it's your own fault, although Mark Zuckerberg might be contributing.
4. The Hobbit comes out next year. Are you prepared? Start reading! You have approximately 16 times to go through it before you catch up with my 12-year-old self!
5. You no longer have to see friends that make you sad seeing them. You know that ex that dumped you four years ago, and those pictures showcasing how cute they are with their new SO? Nope! Out of your life! (Also are you still stalking them? Girl. No. I would never)
6. Maybe this means you'll make new fr- no. No, probably not. But, uh, maybe you'll go take a walk occasionally?
7. More time to spend online looking for a pirated copy of the Sherlock mini-series. Martin Freeman and I are getting married, and there is nothing you can say about it.
8. Less stress in general. With less stress, you are more likely to lose weight, less likely to get cancer, have better hair growth, improve your memory, help with your aches and pains and a whole bunch more. Seriously. Go google it. I'll wait.
9. You will worry less about your profile picture and what you are going to say in your status. If you have particularly witty things to say, you can say them on twitter, which is far less likely to create dramz and also has Eli Roth on it. I bet you weren't friends with Eli Roth on facebook, now were you?
10. Freckles. You don't get them from the glow of your computer.

Consider it. Vive la Revolución!

(Plus you can always go back if you miss all of those things. I don't know why you would, but I bet within a week I will totally miss those awful ex photos. Yes, hello, I am part of the whippersnappers' generation, and yes, social masochism is freaking awesome)

Things I've made:

This was/is(?) for typography class, in which we had to design something to represent a word, using Futura Bold and the word only... no representative objects. Which sucks, because my original idea was a suspension bridge made up of "suspension." Maybe I'll do that later.

This is just my logo. I like it. The end.

Nice legs, Daisy Dukes, makes a man go - no, this is unacceptable

Last Friday before leaving for home I was making the trek back to my dorm. As I got up to the door, a car drove by - a nice white Lexus. A couple of older guys were in it, and they were attractive. The driver shouted at me "I'd hit that," and winked. They drove away.

Before Thanksgiving break last semester I was making the same exact walk, and nearly the same thing happened. Except neither boy was attractive, and the driver shouted "Get out of here, grenade!" *

I liked the first one. I was crushed by the second one. Why is this?

Both are forms of harassment. Neither is intended to do anything other than provoke a reaction and make the catcaller feel powerful. But for some reason attractive dudes shouting an affirmation of my own attractiveness is acceptable?

Dodai of Jezebel recently posted an article about the globalization of Hollaback, the site where users can post incidents of groping, assault and other forms of harassment, including comments like the ones I got. A lot of the comments on the post were based on people's confusion between levels of harassment, as in "But they mean well! It was a nice comment! It's not something that needs to be reported!"

DepecheNode had the best that I saw:

It always amazes me how many people here and at other sites defend streets calls and "compliments."

In many cases, any kind of compliment is harassment, not to mention entirely pointless. As a man, I have never felt the need to yell, shout or comment anything to a woman walking down the street because, well, what's the point? She isn't going to hear what I said and think "Oh my, he's right! My ass is bangin'! Well, I'm gonna blow him right now!" I just don't get it.

But if I'm at a party or club, that's kind of the point isn't it? But that's flirting. And there's a difference between me going up to a woman and complimenting her after introducing myself and me going "shake it baby!"

As for glaring or staring...I think everyone does that to a degree, but shit, if you can't check someone out without looking like a perv you're totally doing it wrong.

Hollaback isn't going after men who politely flirt in appropriate settings (for the most part) they're going after pigs who think women are their own personal playthings.

Speaking of pigs, the most egregious case of this recently was when some random teenage kids in a truck drove by my mother - my mother - and called her a number of particularly nasty things. Now, really? If you catcall a girl your age you can explain it away. You can say you thought she was hot, or that you knew her. But this situation makes it incredibly clear what street harassment is about: power.

Guess what else is entirely about power that people explain away with discussions of attraction and the victim deserving it because of what they wore? OH THAT'S RIGHT. It's rape.

*Grenade: n. Created by Mike Sorrentino on Jersey Shore, an abomination of a television show. It means "The ugly and/or fat girl who goes out with a group of attractive, skinny girls, whom someone will have to hook up with in order to ensure his friends get laid." Yes. Really.

This is going to be a totally research-free post, so if that turns you off, uh, you should probably not be on the internet.

But okay. I've been thinking about the impact of the internet on my life. In my rhetoric and composition class we read an essay that was about the (incorrect) presumption that older people have about young people on the internet. That is, kids these days never read or write voluntarily and are criminally uninformed because of it. And the author made a good point that the internet is voluntary reading and writing, much more than people were doing before blogs and wikipedia.

So, true confessions time: when I was little, I was incredibly, insanely conservative. Not just like "I'm going to be in the College Republicans [ed.: ahahahahaha] one day" but like "Homosexuality is WRONG it says so in the BIBLE LOOK AT THIS VERSE," down to actually designing t-shirts with that Leviticus verse about the mandatory stonings on them. I was scary. And I remember going over to a (rare) liberal friend's house when I was about ten, and having this discussion. And he said, "my God wouldn't support that kind of idea. That's hatred of people because of something they can't help, for something he created himself." Of course I got incredibly angry and never spoke to him again, and it never even resonated with me at all.

And then when I was fifteen, I got a computer of my very own. Of course, in the beginning I spent all my time on Myspace and various forums and chatrooms and Lord of the Rings websites. And then for some reason I started following some blog that occasionally linked to something liberal - I don't even remember what. So I sort of was exposed inadvertently to other ideas. My friends at the time were not big fans of any other ideas that our parents didn't espouse, particularly things like "it's not nice to call people fags." And then I started reading Feministing, and my mind was freaking blown. There were other people out there that might share these same exact opinions! Some people liked equality! And then I read Full-Frontal Feminism, and then Female Chauvinist Pigs, and I think we all know how this turned out: I went from full-on right-wing conservative to slightly apathetic hippie to full-on too-liberal-for-the-Democratic-party liberal.

I certainly didn't have friends that believed any of these things. Among the people from The Woodlands, that number is still pretty small. And I have to wonder if I'd even be in Austin right now if it weren't for that influence (when I was little, the idea was more along the lines of "those liberal tea-sippers in Austin have no idea of what the common man wants, blah blah, RINO, blah blah").

On the other hand, some really scary times in my life have been directly influenced by the internet, too. I wouldn't have picked up Godless if I hadn't read about it online, which started a really angry, destructive period of atheism in which I almost lost quite a lot of friends. And odds that it would've occurred to me to try to kill myself via alcohol poisoning: not high.

I'm pretty sure those things can't be blamed on the internet as an entity, though. The opening up of my mind to new ideas, yes. Exposure to those new ideas, yes. But discernment between good ideas and bad ones is something that can't be taught with parental controls or even by good role models. This sort of thing, like it or not, has to be learned through experience. Which is something the internet can certainly give.

David Oliver Relin (co-author of Three Cups of Tea) came to speak at our campus last night. I took seven pages of notes, and even that was only an overview of what he said. What he's reporting on is so profound that one would need hours to document it -- or, of course, a full-length book.

My school's Class of 2014 (and I still cringe every time I read that) theme is "Our Global Community." And Relin captured that in his speech quite well. He said that when he graduated from college, his parents' graduation gift to him was a plane ticket to anywhere in the world. He took it and went to India, and almost immediately spent most of his money on a motorcycle. Not a good motorcycle, mind you, but a terrible one which things fell off of about every fifty miles. Consequently, he was constantly breaking down in front of people's homes. And they would come out and tie together the bits of his bike again with a bit of twine or a piece of duct tape, and then they'd invite him in for tea. And this is when he decided what he wanted to do with his life: travel, and be a journalist.

So he went back to New York to get started on his sure-to-be illustrious journalism career, but every time he pitched a story in which he would drive a motorcycle across Africa and talk to people about AIDS, he was given a story about a movie star or an athlete. His first freelance job was an article for Reader's Digest on how to refinish wood flooring. Needless to say, he was feeling a little unfulfilled. And then he went to see Grace Paley speak. She said many things, among which were "stop taking yourself so seriously," "get engaged," and his favorite, "I believe it's the duty of the writer to listen to the stories of the powerless and tell those stories to the powerful." And thus he got the push he needed to really freelance.

He started soon after the September 11th attacks, when he was beginning to get frustrated with how Muslims were being treated in the US. Muslims do not equal terrorists, he says, and their lives were routinely turned upside down by extremists too. Relin says terrorism is only the symptom, but the real disease is poverty and ignorance. And this was when he got involved with Greg Mortenson and the Central Asia Institute.

While talking about this, he got caught up in a bunny trail that I thought was one of the most important parts of his speech. He went to Vietnam to report on landmines in the early years of his journalism career. He said that there were more bombs and munitions dropped during that war than any other time in history, and because of that children are still losing limbs to those bombs. Because of the time I've spent in Croatia, where the war was so recent, I'm fairly aware of attempts to clean up the landmines. But it's unbelievable to me that thirty-five years later no one is capable of going through and cleaning up the mess we made.

In any case, he went on to say that he went to Mount Everest (and we all know I perked up immediately when I heard that, allergies or no) to do a story on Apa Sherpa and Lhakpa Gelu Sherpa, who set the records for number of times summitted (20) and speed of ascent (10 hours and 47 minutes) respectively.

While there, he ran into Dr. Geoff Tabin. Tabin attended Yale, Harvard medical school, and Oxford, climbed the last unclimbed face of Everest, was the fourth man to climb the Seven Summits, and invented bungee jumping. Oh, and basically because he was bored, he decided to cure preventable blindness.

There are about 100 million people around the world who are blind and don't have to be - the only problem is the cost. Tabin cut the cost down to $15 a patient, and the length of the surgery to six minutes. Every day, people flock to the village that he's working in that day. They come in totally blind, and the next day they leave with 20/20 vision. For $15 a person.

He said a lot more that I'll cover later, probably, but I thought that was so powerful. And I don't know why people aren't focusing on things like this, and like Mortenson's Central Asia Institute, and like preventing children from getting their limbs blown off by landmines. We get so worked up about politics and money and things that don't matter - my favorite twitter hashtag is #firstworldproblems. I know that I'm part of the problem, going to an expensive school in an expensive town wearing expensive clothes and eating organic food, but I'm trying to help. I'm donating money. I'm donating clothes. I have made some impassioned speeches. And there are so many people that aren't doing anything. And I just don't understand that.