If I could begin to express the level of despair I felt watching this video…I would… but I don’t think my heart could take it.
When you have connections…real connections, to all parts of the globe you die a little when you witness hurt blasted (or ignored) on TV…It’s impossible to watch people crying and distraught in the street after something like this when you know that could just as easily be your family or friends…but our world is cut off from theirs, isn’t it?
We are soft as an effect of our 1st world comforts and equally as hard as a result of the incessant onslaught of images like these… We think: “that’s so sad” and then promptly change to something uplifting to lighten the mood. It never crosses our mind that Rome fell. Things in our country are not perfect. We aren’t far behind.
Syria used to be a beautiful vacation spot,
home to a major seed bank, beautiful historical ruins, and a crucial part of the fertile crescent a.k.a the cradle of all known civilization;
now it (like so many others before it) doesn’t hold a candle to a shadow of it’s former self.
My adopted Uncle was born and raised near the Doctors Without Boarders hospital that was bombed this week. He used to go back frequently to visit family. He was well to do. He had a few homes there.
Nowadays, my Uncle is no longer well to do. He’s a lot grayer all of his homes there are destroyed and he can’t go back anymore or it’s likely he won’t return. I remember when he’d complain about Assad occasionally but the economy was stable then so I don’t recall it being a daily thing.
“It started with the drought” he’d say… (global warming seems to be a reoccurring precursor to a lot of these issues but, I digress) once food prices increased so did overall tensions and the kettle began to boil…
Our mixing pot here is boiling, but we’re too busy calling the kettle black to notice we’re on the tipping point too.
This election is about more than defeating Trump or a woman satisfying her insatiable ego by becoming president. This is it. This is a defining moment for us, our fork in the road where our choices are immediate destruction(Ted Cruz/Trump), cruise control at 65 on our current pathway to destruction (Hilary), or Bernie… who just wants us to spend with our true interests in mind, tax with our true interests in mind, and view the world with an emphatic heart.
I can’t compromise, because I see my future in the eyes of refugees dying on the streets of their own city. I can’t in good faith vote for Hilary knowing her track record of violence and disdain for black and brown people. She has and will continue to propagate the type violence I just witnessed and I can’t be party to that. Being poor not privileged is what propels my decision not to support Hillary because my vote is my voice and I can’t allow any outside pressure to silence me.
Hubris doesn’t allow us to see just how badly our tight rope is fraying as we walk it. We continue our jeering and crusading, nose turned up to those already fallen.
But
as oceans rise, water get scares and dirty, education becomes a privilege as opposed to right, and inflation devalues our already maxed out 50 hour work week; we’ll eventually have to come to grips with the fact that chickens really do come home to roost. Our insensitivity and deeds done aboard won’t be readily forgotten by those who we’ve wronged in the name of “Democracy”.
I’ll leave you with only final thought…
Imagine if you will the frothy head of a beer, toppling over the rim in excess with mad abandon as if the spout will never run dry, suppressing the bubbling brown body of the beverage which suffocates below the foam… Eventually the bartender cuts flow and either tips the glass or runs across it with a blade cutting the head off and settling the liquid. Who are you in this analogy, the liquid or the foam?
I am an HBCU Dean’s List grad. I am a Black Single Mother of a 4-year-old daughter. I am a proud member of the LGBT community, and I have been eking out an existence working 10-12 hours days for $12 an hour in one of the most discriminatory industries (Hollywood) in the world. You assume that because I won’t blindly vote for Hillary I must be naive to the discrimination of the business world or the social structure of this country in general; this position is not only disparaging, but sexist, and ageist all bundled up nicely in a tight fist that I’m tired of being assaulted with.
I’m proud the woman before me have paved a pathway for us, but didn’t they do so in order for me to have the freedom to vote about the issues and the candidates’ political and social anatomy not their physical anatomy? Making young educated women out to be people pleasing and inexperienced shows a level of callus that is scary and truly disheartening. The woman of the baby boomer age were once idealist…what happened to that belly burning fire that was emboldened by opposition and in search of true progressive change? Why settle for just any woman when there is more at stake here than ovaries in the oval office? We have a Supreme Court justice nom on the line, we have oil pipelines from Canada pending, we have a trade deal that could dismantle what little democratic power we have left over corporations, and we have a privatized prison system that threatens to sue if we don’t continue to fuel them with free labor. I and thousands of other women graduated from college as the economy fell apart; we faced even more abysmal job prospects than we would have had we been met solely with the sexism already expected in the workplace.
I am not some starry-eyed child who doesn’t know what’s good for me. I am the product of my history, culture, and environment. I am the niece of two Uncles jailed by Clinton’s 94’ Crime Bill. I am a bi-sexual woman who is puzzled that the same woman who supported her husband in signing DOMA, the HIV travel ban, as well as overseeing the doubling of LGBT discharges from the military in his tenure, can act as if that never happened or claim to have magically “evolved” dismissing my and countless other peoples pain. Hillary didn’t fully support same sex marriage until 2013…yes…2013! She flew in the face of change and only joined our ranks as the prevailing winds of pew polling blew. She’s never stood true as a weather vane for equal human rights for all…only the humans who benefit her public image.
Bottom line: I don’t trust her. I don’t trust Hillary to do right by me or any of the issues I care about. If I were a man the very women who bash me would respect my right as an American to vote for the person, male or female whom I’m most ideologically aligned with. However, I am not a man…and these women… my sisters claim “there is a special place in Hell” for me and that I only support Bernie because his camp is where all the boys are. The legacy I want to leave my daughter isn’t one of forced affiliation or entitlement; it’s one of progressive ethics so I’ll stand tall in my opposition. If Bernie wins on a platform of revolutionary change I can take comfort in the fact that regardless of which side they played ALL women will benefit both directly and indirectly from that.
I do hope that a woman will inhabit the white house one day soon, but that isn’t my ONLY hope… I pray that by the time my child is of college age she won’t have to tackle the issues I have had to. I hope she won’t have to decide between living a life and paying back student loans. Yes, sexism is very real but so is the need to reduce income inequality, corporate welfare, and the cost of health care. I have aspirations for myself and my daughter that are bigger than the shadow cast by Hillary and when I look into my child’s eyes and my own in the mirror, I know there are better female candidates out there, but we as women need to recognize them… let’s not squander our “1st woman” card on a layup.
Saqqara, in Egypt, is the oldest stone complex ever built by humans—and within it sits the oldest pyramid in Egypt. It’s a piece of irreplaceable history that’s been crumbling for 4,600 years. But according to one local report, it’s currently being destroyed by the company hired to “restore” it.
In fact, the company hired by Egypt’s Ministry of Antiquities may have even committed a crime in its restoration. According to the Egypt Independent, preservation laws require that any new construction be less than 5 percent of the preserved structure. Instead, the company—which has reportedly never worked on a preservation project before!—constructed a number of new walls and structures that exceed the limit.
Now, that might not be such a huge deal. Buildings can be torn down. But according to activists speaking in the story, the new construction is actually contributing to the collapse of the pyramid, which is considered the oldest cut stone structure in the world.
You see, back in 1992, a major earthquake hit the region, and it nearly destroyed the pyramid. It sent “tons” of stone, broken free from the structure, down into the base, and created a “dome-shaped” void at its top, in the words of archaeologist Peter James, who says it was “liable to collapse at any time.”
At the time, James’ company installed an ingenious temporary balloon-style support called WaterWall. “The internally-reinforced PVC product can be inflated with air and then filled with water,” writes James. “It was this product that was used to support the inverted dome of stone.” The system worked well, and over time, restoration specialists planned to install steel rods to strengthen the pyramid permanently.
But funding ran out. And kept running out, it seems, as sociopolitical upheaval wracked Egypt. The company that was hired to take up the job has reportedly never restored an ancient structure before—in fact, it’s never completed a successful project at all. Speaking to Al-Masry Al-Youm and translated by the Egypt Independent, one advocate said the company is actually responsible for a collapse of one section of the structure already.
It’s a sad, and unfortunately very common throughout history, occurrence. But hopefully a structure that survived the past 4,600 years of history can weather this particular storm, too. [Egypt Independent; Co.Design]
The video you are about watch may be disturbing to some, but not for the reasons you assume.
I was deeply disturbed by the description of events detailed in the video below. More so, I probably would have been skeptical of these details had there not been multiple witnesses(two of which were Police officers).
Now do you understand my distress? For the longest I have been trying to explain that although race plays a role when it comes to discriminatory policing, it isn’t the only factor:
✔ Socioeconomic
✔ Law Enforcement: demographics, moral, training, leadership accountability
✔ Municipal Leadership Demographics
all play major roles as well.The identities of the 4 officers (the three who just passed by and the one writing the ticket) that were not suspended have not been released; however, the identity of the only suspended officer has. Senior Corporal Les Richards, initially asked the victim what was going on and then upon finding out, allegedly fled the scene. He is a 26 year old veteran of the force, and he is BLACK. He shared color, culture, and history with the victim but clearly there was no inbreed sympathy for a citizen in dire need of assistance.
We can’t blame this police disservice on the catch all culprit of racism. I’m starting to think the only way to fix things is transparency and the fear of being caught in the wrong. I am now, more than ever, on board with the idea of every cop being outfitted with a streaming on-body camera. It’s a proven fact that mirrors in stores limit thefts because possible thieves can see themselves and become either too paranoid, embarrassed, or ashamed to commit the act. If both Police and criminals understood that their every move was being watched, and if officers were given performance reviews based on actual video of their interaction with the people they should be serving, crime and rights abuses would both drop. If instead of militarizing the local P.D. we armed them with mediation training, we might actually create less bitter and biased law enforcers and more of a trusting relationship between the cops and those who care to improve their neighborhood.
The world is an ever evolving place technologically, but people haven’t really changed over the millennia. We have better weapons but still haven’t figured out how to relate to each other universally or how to treat each other the way we would chose to be treated.
Let’s just stop, drop the guns, and evolve… Either that or leave the following generations a far worse world than we inherited.
Lost Below The Fold 