The People's Car Factory

(sigh) This is a frustrating video.

There was a time in this country (as complicated as it is) when the greatest minds on earth traveled to America and became pioneers at the forefront of scientific discovery and the limits of engineering. So when I see videos like this and then read articles warning us of the brain drain of America, I become quite agitated.

I want a bullet train right now.

peace.

A Quick Thought on Immigration

So I've started waiting tables at a fairly upscale Chinese restaurant here in Philly. It's a nice place with great food and honest people running the place. There are ten employees. I only have one coworker who is not of color and only two who were born in the United States.

Of the seven that have immigrated here, there's a 22 year old kid who washes the dishes (Am I old enough to call a 22 year old a kid!?). From what he told me, he's been in the States for about a year. He's a quiet guy. He gets a bit short with people when the pace of the restaurant picks up, but I think that's because his English is limited and he has trouble expressing his thoughts. But he's got a good energy.

Tonight we were REALLY slow because of the NFC and AFC Championship games. So to kill time, the kid comes out into the dining room and brings his ESL (English as a Second Language) book and starts asking the other server and I how to say certain words. Since I spent an entire year in Toronto training as a voice and speech teacher, my first response was to put on my instructor hat and give the kid a hand. I hoped he would humor me for a few minutes to give my ego a boost.

Instead, I spent practically the rest of the night helping the kid with English speech sounds and syllable emphasis. He had tons of questions. Apparently, he wants to go to school here and it looks like he's been teaching himself English so he can get in. As I was helping him, he seemed to have make some real discoveries. We were having a great time.

I haven't taught tons of people in tons of courses. But I've taught enough to witness a worrying sense of apathy towards education. There are too many kids in this country who don't care to learn and think good grades are either overrated or a foregone conclusion. It's disheartening. But here's a kid who dove head first into a completely new world with more hunger and determination to grow and progress than most of the students I've ever instructed.

Maybe it was just tonight and he's really a slacker. But I don't think so.

No one can tell me this country can't use more people like that. If the American dream does exist (that's a whole other post) then it should be available to ANYONE who wants it.

peace.

Patriots or Tyrants?

"The tree of liberty must from time to time be refreshed with the blood of patriots and tyrants." Thomas Jefferson

Hmmm...

Shay's Rebellion was an armed social uprising in western and central Massachusetts during the last half of 1786 and spilling over into the first few months of 1787. The rebellion was born from egregious injustices enacted upon Revolutionary war veterans and meager farmhands from whom the state wrongfully confiscated personal and business-related items to pay back debts owed to European war investors. During this period, the framework of the United States' taxation and revenue code was dictated by the Articles of Confederation (the Constitution wasn't adopted until September of 1787) which was hopelessly inadequate to enforce federal law or collect the appropriate revenue to operate the country. Therefore, each state struggled to pay down its own debt accumulated during the war. Much of this debt repayment was placed on the backs of the poor.

It was in a response to Shay's Rebellion that Jefferson penned these words in a letter addressed to James Adam's son-in-law William Stephens Smith concerning the current state of affairs in Massachusetts. It's also been a favorite rallying cry for the recent activities of the Tea Party Movement during the past two years. One of the most visible events involving this phrase occurred in August 2009 when Chris Matthews on MSNBC's Hardball (I really don't like that name.) berated a gentleman named William Kostric about his decision to bring a firearm to a presidential rally.

Here it is:

However, there are critical sections in the letter that are seldom, if ever, mentioned by the people who tout this phrase as a Libertarian calling card. In these passages, Jefferson emphasizes a much more sophisticated, and more moderate (especially given the period) view of social rebellion.

[Their motives] were founded in ignorance, not wickedness. God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be...always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.

and

What country before ever existed...without rebellion? And what country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon, and pacify them.

Should people in this country preserve the "spirit of resistance?" A large part of me believes so. But there is quite a bit more to it. Firstly, it was never Jefferson's belief that ACTUAL blood should be spilled in rebellion. Remember he was politician, not a soldier and not a mercenary. And he was damned sure smart enough not to be so negligent as to incite what would only be considered as anarchy, especially in a country he worked so diligently to help create. Rather, it seems he suffered some of the same inarticulate tendencies of his modern day counterparts in his inartful usage of gun and war imagery to highlight a political concept.

Furthermore, and I feel this is most important, he stresses the importance of an informed public. Now, the Tea Party followers may feel they have nothing to worry about here.

I'm sorry, Tea Partiers. This is where you're all washed up. But it's not your fault.

The people who remain in the background, the ones who logistically and financially organize the Tea Partiers have herded these people not with facts about the challenges of government, but rather with threats, misconceptions, falsities, dubious math, and inflated conjecture. These are the strings by which the groundlings of this movement have been puppeted. And these puppet-masters will continue pulling these strings until their foot soldiers fetch the bounty for them, no matter what kinds of violent atrocities and/or acts of terrorism lay in their wake. Hence, they roll out Thomas Jefferson (Because founding fathers can't be wrong, right?) and perform contextomy with his words to aggravate the open wound of partisanship for the benefit of no one but themselves.

Snap out of it, Tea Partiers.

Yes, please question the government. But arm yourself with THE REAL AND ACTUAL FACTS, not someone else's talking points, and certainly not firearms.

"Let us hope we never become numb to what...the real blood of patriots looks like when it's spilled." Jon Stewart

peace.

Legend of N*gger Twain

What? They're taking "nigger" out of Huckleberry Finn? What's next, a remake of Dolemite without the word "honkey"?

From The Guardian UK:

A new US edition of Mark Twain's classic novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is to be published with a notable language alteration: all instances of the offensive racial term "nigger" are to be expunged.

The word occurs more than 200 times in Huckleberry Finn, first published in 1884, and its 1876 precursor, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which tell the story of the boys' adventures along the Mississippi river in the mid-19th century. In the new edition, the word will be replaced in each instance by "slave". The word "injun" will also be replaced in the text.

The new edition's Alabama-based publisher, NewSouth books, says the development is a "bold move compassionately advocated" by the book's editor, Twain scholar Dr Alan Gribben of Auburn University, Montgomery. It will have the effect, the publisher claims, of replacing "two hurtful epithets" in order to "counter the 'pre-emptive censorship' that Dr Gribben observes has caused these important works of literature to fall off curriculum lists worldwide."

More here.

Few things unnerve me nowadays. I'm actually finding it quite spooky. I frequently encounter rude, aggressive, and depressing individuals who have overwhelming and unmanageable personal challenges weighing them down. I feel empathy and compassion for them, I really do. But it's seldom that I'm really shaken by them.

This has shaken me a bit. Feels great.

In many ways, we should be exceedingly grateful that we live in a world that allows us such remarkable access to information. These types of revisionist tactics have continued to cloud, puncture, and erase our true sense of human history. Now that we have this incredible and extensive network of information sharing, perhaps the truths of who we are will always live on somewhere in the vastness of cyberspace. That doesn't mean, however, that we should ever allow these revisionists to have their way and let our technology iron out the wrinkles.

I don't know what I believe about the n-word. Even now, it's appeared in this post twice in its normal form, but somehow at the moment of writing this particular section I feel the need to make it safe. "N-word". It drives me nuts! But what I do know is that it resonants the history of Americans who fought both for and against the beliefs and complexities within. Even though the era of its inception was the most oppressive and violent episode of American history, that does not excuse us from the obligation to intimately know and understand that history. Our faults are just as important as our advantages.

This is the greatness of American debate; and let me tell you something. As a black male in America I don't think I've ever felt true patriotism or compassion for "the great experiment of democracy" or "the land of the free", except in the instances where I was either an observer or participant in healthy, difficult, productive, reasonable discussion. Considering the polarizing climate in Washington during the last 20 years or so, and trends in the public's opinion of D.C. politics, I would argue many in this country share this particular sense of "Americaness". It's the debate that makes us special; that makes this whole thing worth it.

Mark Twain, in his brilliance, was writing from a fundamentally American perspective. He threw our vitriol in our faces and amplified sounds to which we forgot or neglected to listen. AND he was doing this in 1885, a time in America where being a "nigger lover" could get a white person hung as quickly as black person.

In the final press conference scene in the 1995 film The American President, President Andrew Shepard (played by Michael Douglas) makes this declaration on the sophisticated nature of American citizenship:

You want free speech? Let's see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil, who's standing center stage and advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours.You want to claim this land as the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country can't just be a flag; the symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest. Show me that, defend that, celebrate that in your classrooms. Then, you can stand up and sing about the "land of the free."

Unless Doctor Emmett L. Brown figures something out in the next few years, we will never be able to change who we were. But maybe we can anyway. By acknowledging those parts of ourselves, collectively processing the hows and the whys, maybe we'll change who we were by bettering who we are.

I always get this way when I watch National Treasure. Damn you, Nicholas Cage.

And so without further ado, a silly youtube video compliments of my cousin Nina, and staring our old friend "nigger."

Why? Because it's funny!