#I think one thing that's lost in translation in particular is the fact that shaving his head is clearly intended to be read as like

[isan0rt]

I think one thing that really sticks with me in interpreting how Dark Road shapes Xehanort is the fact that Xehanort truly was raised to believe himself to be the only one truly strong enough to do what needs to be done to save the world. An interesting thing I think is to look at the way Xehanort’s apparent perception of Baldr changes after his world tour...but not really the crux of his feelings about Baldr, which is that I truly think he sees Baldr as pathetic, in both senses of the word.

Before the tour, Baldr evokes pathos from Xehanort. He feels sorry for him; he takes the time to leave flowers on his grave, but crucially, does not actually express regret for killing him. What he expresses is that he thinks this is the best outcome for Baldr; 

Xehanort: Baldr... Now you and your sister will always be together. You'll always have the light to share.

Killing Baldr was a mercy, from Xehanort’s perspective. Baldr wasn’t strong enough to handle the Darkness. He wasn’t strong enough to face a world of nuance alone. Not like Xehanort, who is determined to be strong enough. Who was born to be strong enough; who then decides to prove he’s strong enough by removing his armor in the space between worlds. 

Then, there is the comparison between Baldr’s dying words, and what Master of Masters and Xehanort express before and after his world tour:

??????: Let me guess... You thought your heart was strong enough to withstand the darkness in there.

??????: Human emotions are complex. For example, what you feel toward someone you love isn't always good or well-meaning. It can be a false kind of light. Which begs the question: are these messy feelings that emerge from love still light? Or are they darkness?

Baldr’s love for Hoder was a false kind of light. It was one that smothered, one that made her responsible for his well-being. Baldr can’t separate his own feelings from other people’s; his worldview is completely self-absorbed. Other people are having feelings at him; Hoder is there to spread her light at him. He can’t see beyond his own pain and his own needs, and what love he has for Hoder is really about what she can do for him; a love that isn’t good, or well-meaning, but toxic for both of them until it kills them both.

Xehanort knows this. His experience, as Master of Masters asks about, tells him this; he saw first-hand how that false love destroyed both Hoder and Baldr, and their classmates as collateral damage.

Baldr’s last words have this to say:

Baldr: Xehanort... Do you see now? There's them...and there's us. When we find the strength to pursue our goals, they condemn us, insisting that our strength comes from darkness.

Then Xehanort goes on his world tour (and it seems strongly implied that he travels to the future during this time, experiences Dream Drop Distance and Kingdom Hearts 3, and comes back with those memories erased, but changed by the experience);

Xehanort: Those who are weak, and who desire greater power, simply strip the strong of their power, and convince themselves they've earned it. That's how people become tainted by darkness. They believe what they want to believe, using hollow reasons as justification. They repeat this cycle, and their darkness grows.

??????: So you're saying the weak feel the need to justify their actions to maintain a sense of self. Can't let that slide?

Xehanort: No, it's better they be ruled by darkness. People carry delusions of having power, but it's a lie. 

Baldr is the sheep pretending to be a wolf, slaughtering their friends to build his own power through the act. Baldr no longer evokes ‘pathos;’ now, for Xehanort, he is the other definition of ‘pathetic;’ “miserably inadequate, of very low standard.” Xehanort’s opinion is now that Baldr was too weak to handle being weaker than Hoder, being weaker than his classmates, so he killed them all, and pretended that made him strong. He told himself lies about how they were feeling things at him, and how that justified what he chose to do.

Xehanort looks down on him. Xehanort will be better than him. Xehanort is truly strong, he believes; all his life, he’s been practicing control. Managing his own feelings. Keeping them separate from those of others, not allowing them to be tainted by the emotions around him. Being flawless, to be the change he was born to be. He will do what’s necessary to make sure nothing like Baldr can ever happen again, and he won’t let feelings get in the way. It’s the reason for his existence, after all.

What comes next is too important.

[aconflagrationofmyown]

Pregnancy and birth do things to a womans body so after the second or third pregnancy does Elaine ever get insecure? The stretch marks, the saggy skin in areas, I think it’s beautiful but Elvis was always peculiar on the way people looked but he may have found it more beautiful because she got those growing his children

Aha, so…this is a very valid consideration and one I intend to explore in fic form but until then, let us have a few half baked thoughts, here’s to hoping you like cookie dough. 😏

He was most definitely particular (some might say to the point of extreme vanity and oppressiveness) in regards to image, presentation and a sort of decorum, and I might add it seems to me that it fluctuated with his career. There was certainly a fastidiousness about the front he presented that I can totally relate to, actually. I think it good to keep in mind how seriously he tried to take the influence he had on the public, considering his purpose to both entertain and uplift. He expected a high standard in women, one he did not hold himself to but matched in other areas. And in many ways he represents a lost generation where dignity meant getting outta your PJs in the morning for the morale, your morale, like a soldier shaving despite living in a foxhole. So, those are perhaps the more substantive reasons for his preoccupation with image, and we certainly have a glimpse into what darkness that could turn into with the “truth” according to Pricilla. (zero shade intended, just a acknowledging a bias there)

Now, let’s see what else we know of this man and his love and loyalty to the “imperfect.” He was consistently unashamed and purposeful to love on and be seen with those who the world at large labels “disabled.” His own mother, like he himself in later life, struggled with the publicity shined on their body weight in a entirely callous era of journalism -through it all he remained devoted and proud of their love, his choice was to repeatedly have her front and center. What am I getting at here? Elvis was a nice guy cause he hung out with other people besides Barbie Dolls? Nope, rather, when he had an affection for and a reason for loyalty to someone, it didn’t matter much at all to him what the world at large said or thought of them.

So let’s imagine a world where he’s married to Elaine, a woman who was already blessed with acknowledged beauty and assets, in a era of girdles and privileged with a celebrity lifestyle, who had no desire to be a star or a model. She wanted to use her body up having kids and while they both may have been surprised at the toll at times, I think the fact that she had the luxury to just be in her skin, not trying to trim down for the next role or modeling gig would do wonders for her recovery and self esteem. It’s still brutal to be Elvis Presley’s wife, and let’s just say the late 60’s are an unkind time and the little movie star floozies keep getting younger and tinier and it’s all a bit of an ouch, but ultimately? -She is his wife, the love of his life and his rabid sentimentality does indeed translate to the marks and scars and testaments to the family they built now branded on her skin.

[bitchimlugoobrious]

I just finished reading Walden for the first time and people seem to have ~opinions~ on Thoreau, but personally, I enjoyed his imagery and even think he might’ve been pretty cool irl. Here’s some quotes I highlighted:

“[Thoreau] came early to recognize that some of his awkwardness in his social life was bound up with his own dissatisfactions, with looking for something, while all around him his fellow citizens seem to take their lives as they found them...”

“[Thoreau] was convinced that every singular existence, if it could be clearly perceived, could reveal, within itself, the whole, all that there is.”

“I should not talk so much about myself if there were anybody else whom I knew as well.”

“What old people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.”

“This is the only way, we say; but there are as many ways as there can be drawn radii from one center. All change is a miracle to contemplate; but it is a miracle which is taking place every instant.”

“We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine andTexas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”

“... to maintain one’s self on this earth is not a hardship but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely...”

“The youth may build or plant or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells me he would like to do.”

“But I would not stand between any man and his genius; and to him who does this work, which I decline, with his whole heart and soul and life, I would say, Perservere, even if the world call it doing evil, as it is most likely they will.”

“Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind.”

“His goodness must not be a partial and transitory act, but a constant superfluity, which costs him nothing and of which he is unconscious.”

“I found myself suddenly neighbor to the bird; not by having imprisoned one, but having caged myself near them.”

“Morning is when I am awake and there is a dawn in me. Moral reform is the effort to throw off sleep.”

“We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.”

“It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.”

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as a put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.”

“But if we stay at home in mind our business, who will want railroads?”

“God himself culminates in the present moment, and will never be more divine in the lapse of all the ages.”

“We meet at meals three times a day, and give each other a new taste of that old musty cheese that we are.”

“In our most trivial walks, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape…”

“Not till we are lost, in other words not to we have lost the world, do we begin to find ourselves, and realize where we are in the infinite extent of our relations.”

“Give me the poverty that enjoys true wealth.”

“If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal, - that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, and you have caused momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains and values are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if they exist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality. Perhaps the fax most astounding and most real are never communicated by man-to-man. The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.”

“There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice. Goodness is the only investment that never fails.”

“Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own...”

“... but what beside safety they got by sailing in the middle of Walden I do not know, unless they love its water for the same reason that I do.”

“A house whose inside is as open and manifest as a bird’s nest...”

“Nature puts no questions and answers none which we mortals ask. She has long ago taken her resolution.”

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”

“In spring the sun not only exerts an influence through the increase temperature of the air and earth, but its heat passes through ice a foot or more thick, and is reflected from the bottom in shallow water, and so also warms the water and melts the underside of the ice, at the same time that it is melting it more directly above, making it uneven, and causing the air bubbles which contains to extend themselves upward and downward until it is completely honeycombed, and at last disappears suddenly in a single spring rain.”

“The day is an epitome of the year. The night is the winter, the morning and evening are the spring and fall, and the noon is this summer.”

“I am affected as if in a particular sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me, - had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about.”

“The very globe continually transcends and translates itself, and becomes winged in its orbit.”

“A single gentle rain makes the grass many shades greener. So our prospects brighten on the influx of better thoughts. We should be blessed if we lived in the present always, and took advantage of every accident that befell us, like the grass which confesses the influence of the slightest dew that falls on it; and did not spend our time in atoning for the neglect of past opportunities, which we call doing our duty.”

“We can never have enough of nature. We must be refreshed by the sight of inexhaustible vigor, vast and titanic features, the seacoast with its wrecks, the wilderness with its living and its decaying trees, the thunder-cloud, and the rain which lasts three weeks and produces freshets. We need to witness our own limits transgressed, and some life pasturing freely where we never wander.”

“Compassion is a very untenable ground. It must be expeditious. Its pleadings will not bear to be stereotyped.”

The last are only from the Conclusion:

“ The universe is wider than our views of it.”

“Patriotism is a maggot in their heads.”

“ I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours. He will put some things behind, will pass an invisible boundary; new, universal, and more liberal laws will begin to establish themselves around and within him; or the old laws will be expanded, and interpreted in his favor in a more liberal sense, and he will live with the license of a higher order of beings. In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”

“Let everyone mind his own business, and endeavor to be what he was made.”

“If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away.”

“Sat what you have to say, not what you ought. Any truth is better than make-believe.”

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names.”

“Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change. Sell your clothes and keep your thoughts.”

“Humility like darkness reveals the heavenly lights.”

“Money is not required to buy one necessary of the soul.”

“Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

[livinginlandmarketing]

Barbershops and beauty salons have always been about more than the shave and a haircut, or the mani-pedi.

They’ve often been a refuge from the stresses and divisions of the outside world, a place to settle into a swivel chair and exhale. After all, you can’t really doom-scroll during a French manicure.

But just as California salons are finally reopening after a punishing pandemic lockdown, the race between President Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden is coming down to its final week — and the plastic partitions between stations aren’t the only new divide.

In many places, presidential politics have upended the special trust between hairdresser and client — just ask House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was outed for a private shampoo and blowout in a shuttered San Francisco salon in late August.

Tensions across California have become so fraught in places that hairdressers are spinning their chairs away from the mirror so clients won’t see their eyes roll. And customers have insulted their hairdressers over political preferences. Risky move around scissors.

Others have embraced the battle lines, making it clear with unmasked barbers or Black Lives Matter posters exactly where they stand on next month’s election — and who is welcome inside.

“The people who don’t want to be here filtered themselves out and it’s awesome,” said Trump supporter and Vacaville barber Juan Desmarais.

Across California, from a West Hollywood salon where hairdressers have been known to drop their scissors to join street marches to an Indian-American salon in the East Bay where pursed lips are better for business than celebrating Kamala Harris’ historic run, we check in with six establishments to ask: Is it safe anywhere these days to raise the topic of you-for-Trump-or-Biden?

Hair stylist Nicole Caudillo, 27,  will engage in political discussions with her clients especially if they share her views. For those that don’t, she politely listens and allows them to vent. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG)

West Hollywood: Shorty’s Barber Shop

Go ahead and vent

Dan O’Connor, an Australian living in West Hollywood, said in recent months he’s lost friends over politics. As he waited for a haircut on a recent sunny afternoon, O’Connor said he’d have a hard time supporting a business where the staff or customers openly talked about their love for Trump.

But Trump support is a sentiment that’s rarely heard at Shorty’s Barber Shop. The business sits a couple blocks off famed Melrose Avenue, has Black Lives Matter signs in the windows, and has been recognized for being LGBTQ friendly.

Politics isn’t off the table at Shorty’s. In fact, O’Connor’s barber, Courtney Leavitt, said he often brings up particular issues or candidates with his clients. He doesn’t try to tell them how to vote, he said, but he likes to share what he knows and to learn from all of the people who come through his chair.

Leavitt acknowledged his shop is in a liberal bubble. But the 34-year-old, who sports bright blue hair and a black sequin face mask, said the conversations have never become heated.

Stylist Nicole Caudillo said she often gets the sense that clients are afraid to talk politics with some of their family and friends for fear it will turn into an argument. So, as with other aspects of their lives, they tend to lay it all out when they’re in the salon chair. If they offer views Caudillo strongly opposes, she might gently change the subject. But for the most part, she lets them have their say.

Around both the 2016 and 2018 elections Caudillo remembers stylists at her former salon in Hollywood running out the door to join a passing Women’s March demonstration. There was frustration, she said, but also an excited energy.

That’s not the case now, the stylists say.

“I think, at this point,” Leavitt said, “we’re just hearing a lot of fatigue.”

VACAVILLE, CA – OCTOBER 19: Primo’s Barbershop owner Juan Desmarais talks during an interview while cutting a customer’s hair in Vacaville, Calif. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)

Vacaville: Primo’s Barber Shop

‘I stand my ground’

Juan Desmarais doesn’t have a Donald Trump campaign sign in front of his barbershop. But he might as well. There’s no doubt where he stands on the presidential race.

It’s not just the big U.S. Marines and American flags mounted on either side of the front door or the dozens of law enforcement patches on the walls inside or the mask requirements he ignores. Ever since he made national news defying state orders to shut down his Primo’s Barber Shop early in the coronavirus pandemic, he’s become a local celebrity.

When the state threatened to suspend his license earlier this month, dozens of locals lined Merchant Street for a “Patriots for Primo’s” rally.

“I’m a conservative hero,” he said. “I stand my ground.”

You won’t find Biden supporters in here for a $30 haircut ($20 for veterans, seniors and law enforcement). In this city an hour north of San Francisco that is home to two state prisons and surrounded by ranch lands, maskless customers getting haircuts at Primo’s have found their Trump-loving tribe.

It’s good for business.

“We’ve never been tipped out as high as we have,” Desmarais said.

On Monday morning, nearly every chair was full.

The only backlash was the threatening voice messages he received after appearing on CNN, with some callers telling Desmarais, “I hope you die.” After he appeared on Fox News’ Tucker Carlson show, he was flooded with “tons of love.”

Desmarais, 41, is a Marine veteran who fought in Iraq, a California Highway Patrol officer who broke his back in a crash before he retired on disability, and the son of a Mexican immigrant farmworker who gained citizenship after 28 years. He’s one of the 30 percent of Latino voters that support Trump, polls show, with many drawn to his tough persona and business instincts.

And nothing sets him off more than a discussion about the coronavirus lockdown.

“If I had gone out and rioted, I would have been bailed out or never even been arrested,” he said of the summer racial justice rallies. “All I want to do is make enough to provide for my family and I’m the criminal.”

Desmarais supports Trump’s border wall but also favors an immigration overhaul and amnesty plan. Mostly, though, he supports small businesses.

“Politics are about everyday life,” he said. “It’s not always about the social justice thing. At the end of the day, it’s about a haircut.”

  Little Saigon:

Kathy Tran, owner of Sinh’s Hair Salon and Nails in Westminster on washes a client’s hair. Tran she avoids talking politics with customers. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Silence speaks volumes

At Sinh’s Hair Salon & Nails, tucked away on the first floor of a shopping center in the heart of Orange County’s Little Saigon in Westminster, political talk of any kind is discouraged. Owner Kathy Tran said it’s “too controversial” these days.

Tran, who wore a blue surgical mask as she spoke through a translator, said she’s just grateful to have her eight-year-old business open again after it was shuttered for several months due to the pandemic. So Tran said she doesn’t want to risk offending those customers who have returned.

Five years ago, talking politics in Little Saigon — which boasts the largest concentration of Vietnamese immigrants in the United States — wasn’t particularly divisive. While Asian Americans overall have long leaned left at the state and federal levels, Vietnamese Americans, in Orange County in particular, voted solidly GOP for decades.

A gradual shift accelerated in 2016, as Trump ran for office. His strict immigration policies and, more recently, his preference for referencing the “kung flu” virus, have been blamed for a spike in hate incidents directed at Asian Americans. Trump also is seen as a catalyst for a community-wide rise in progressive activism that’s dividing older and younger generations.

The only political signs on the lawn in front of Tran’s shopping center promote Republican candidates. While Tran said her employees will occasionally talk politics when customers aren’t around, she declined to share her views on any candidates or issues.

Customer Sonia Valenzuela likes it that way.

The 65-year-old from Lake Forest, who drives once a week to Little Saigon for good food and to get her nails done in peace, said: “I’d rather not know.”

FREMONT, CA – OCTOBER 06: Customer Neeru Vermani of Fremont is seen in the mirror as she talks during an interview while Pamper Yourself With Karuna owner Karuna Khanna styles her hair in Fremont, Calif. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)

Fremont: Pamper Yourself with Karuna

Swaying back and forth

Karuna Khanna may have been the last undecided hairdresser in the country.

“I’m confused,” she said, just three weeks before Election Day. “I’m not much into politics, but I definitely listen.”

Even with vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris, whose mother was from India, thrilling many in the Indian-American community, “I sway back and forth,” Khanna said.

At her “Pamper Yourself with Karuna” hair salon in a Fremont strip mall, she gets an earful. First from her business partner, Meenakshi Kumar, who agrees with 72 percent of Indian-Americans who told pollsters they plan to vote for Biden, then from customers who are talking more and more about the presidential race.

“People have strong opinions in politics. I don’t want to get into that fight,” Khanna said. “It’s better to shut my mouth and listen.”

It’s one of the most important things she learned in beauty school, she said. “Never give your opinion.”

She followed that advice when Meenu Vermani, 45, a customer and personal friend, came in for a styling. Vermani, who owns a tutoring business for high schoolers, just became an American citizen and plans to cast her first ballot for … Trump.

“Trump is fighting for these extra payroll protection programs for small businesses like ours,” she said. “If I need someone to support my business, I’m going to vote Trump.”

Khanna is a Democrat and had supported President Barack Obama, but this time, she said as she took a curling iron to Vermani’s hair, “I might change my mind.”

In the last few days, however, it was Khanna’s husband, not a customer, who persuaded her, finally, to fill out her ballot for Biden. She didn’t like Trump’s bullying in the first debate anyway and she was won over by Harris’ performance a week later.

Still, Khanna’s political tolerance in the salon, along with her haircuts and highlights, seems to be paying off. According to her website, “my customers love me.”

Arianna Vizcarrondo a hairstylist at the Cuttin’ Country Salon in Norco avoids talking politics with clients. (Photo by Leonard Ortiz, Orange County Register/SCNG)

Norco: Cuttin Country Salon

‘Fed up’ in Horsetown USA

Veteran stylist Kassy Cannon at Cuttin Country Salon in Norco shook her head as she read the breaking news on her cellphone.

Under mandates from Gov. Gavin Newsom and state health authorities, salons such as hers in Riverside County would once again be forced to work outdoors — or not at all — due to the county’s rising coronavirus cases.

Branded “Horsetown USA,” Norco is less diverse and more Republican than much of Southern California. Red, white and blue lines are painted on the town’s main drag. Travel a block north or south of Cuttin Country Salon, and you’ll find several homes flying Trump flags. And at the neighboring shopping center, a booth sells pro-Trump T-shirts and purses decorated with Republican elephants.

Though Cannon knows most of her clients well and said a majority are Trump supporters, she said she’s generally tried to avoid political talk during her 27 years at the salon. She remembers a rare exception, when two customers argued about Trump during the run-up to the 2016 election only to drop it when the rest of the packed salon fell silent.

But this year is different. Cannon and a client, who declined to give her name, both said politics have become almost unavoidable while wrapped up with the virus. In their view, it’s driving locals to leave California.

“They’re done with the governor,” Cannon said, with no mask in sight. “I hear that all the time.”

Stylist Arianna Vizcarraondo, who lives in nearby Corona but has worked at Cuttin Country Salon for four years, said she was trained not to discuss politics or religion with clients. But through a Halloween-themed mask, the 25-year-old said in recent months more and more customers have been bringing politics up on their own.

The most common theme, she said, is quite simple. And for voters across California, it doesn’t necessarily apply to one side or the other: “They’re fed up.”

OAKLAND, CA – OCTOBER 07: Customer Brandon Tobler talks during an interview while getting a hair cut by HIM Barbershop owner, Jerron Robertson,  in Oakland, Calif. (Dai Sugano/Bay Area News Group)

Oakland: HIM Barber Shop

‘If everyone agrees, you’re not thinking’

From the sidewalk out front of HIM Barber Shop on Martin Luther King Jr. Way, Brandon Tobler can hear the shouting.

It’s the soothing sound of a safe haven, he said, the one place Black people can really debate politics, religion and life and “not get offended.”

Leading the discussion from behind the battleground barber chair is Jerron Robertson, the shop owner who has an opinion on just about everything and is a contrarian by nature. (He’s a Rastafarian with dreadlocks who doesn’t believe in cutting his own hair, but cuts others’ for a living.)

“Someone told me that if everyone agrees,” he said, “you’re not thinking.”

Robertson is only 42, but growing up on the streets of Oakland, he has acquired a sense of history and a deep cynicism.

Trump’s “law and order” campaign to quell the riots that accompanied Black Lives Matter protests barely fazes him.

“Nothing’s really changed. It’s just the same thing over and over. Rodney King riots, Watts riots back in the day, it’s all the same,” he said. “It’s not the president. It’s the system.”

To Tobler, though, Trump’s tough talk on protesters is oppressive. “He’s trying to keep us quiet,” said Tobler, a 31-year-old former teacher, who grew up in Atlanta and comes from a long line of Black Democrats. His support of Biden comes easily.

Besides, Tobler said, after four years of Trump and a pandemic that makes it hard for him to find a job, “I’m for change. I don’t believe in a lot of the things (Trump has) done so far and definitely don’t agree with a lot of the things he’s said.”

Robertson jumped in.

“I don’t like what Trump says, but I don’t like what a lot of people say. When I go by what he does, I don’t actually have a problem with the man. I opened my business during Trump and I was getting beat up by the police during Obama.”

Maybe it’s inevitable that voices get raised here, just to be heard over the blaring reggae music and loud buzz of the electric razors. But you can still make out Robertson’s cynicism.

“Trump isn’t going to do anything for the racist White people and Biden ain’t gonna do nothing for the poor Blacks,” said the barber, who said neither Trump or Biden deserves his vote. “They just want your vote and as soon as they get your vote, the people who donated to their campaign, that’s who they’re going to do something for.”

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-on October 25, 2020 at 03:47AM by Julia Sulek, Brooke Staggs

[mychemicalrant]

An Autism Reflection

I am going to do a write up of childhood and adult observations about why I think I might be on the spectrum. It’s a little TL;DR, sorry.

When I was a kid I had trouble understanding the concept of familial and friend love. My friends would say “I love you” and I’d always saw “ewww, you can’t love me!” in response. It took me many years to understand the concept of love applied to family and friends and more years still to decide whether I loved other people. I can now say that I love my dad and that is very obvious but I can’t say I love any other biological family members just because they are biologically related. When I got married, I met many people in my partner’s family that I can say I love on a personal level but I don’t feel “love” simply because I am now legally related to someone.

Love as a feeling doesn’t come naturally to me and it certainly didn’t come easily as a social concept. You are supposed to say “love” in social contexts even when you don’t feel it because love isn’t so much a feeling as it is a social handshake of sorts, I suppose. But I do think for many people love comes from a real place in them. When I was a kid the thought of claiming to feel an emotion I did not feel was utterly incomprehensible. If I seemed hurtful this may have been why. I didn’t attack others on purpose but if I seemed insensitive it came from the fact that I did not understand why we had to display affection when we didn’t feel it. I would always make the grandmother I didn’t see very often cry and I never knew why. I guess that’s why? I feel extremely uncomfortable opening gifts in front of others because I am afraid I will have to perform excitement and not be able to. I hate weddings and funerals because I honestly don’t give a shit about the emotional context but everyone expects you to put on a display of sadness or joy or whatever and I don’t even feel that, let alone want to display it.

One time I went to the dentist for a filling on a bottom tooth and he numbed the spot but found when he went to work on it that it wasn’t numbed. Some other part of my jaw had gotten numbed instead. This went on for two more shots until we finally got the right spot numbed and he told me I had crossed nerves. My emotions are the same way. Funerals and death barely seem to phase me (I cried for maybe 5 minutes when I found out my mom had died when I was ten) but I’ll genuinely cry over some random thing.

I often can’t identify my emotions at all, although I am working on this. As a Pagan I had explained this as having a closed heart chakra. As a personality enthusiast I had explained this as being an INTJ or an Enneagram 5 and therefore bad at emotions. But the more I studied these things the more I realized something still wasn’t getting answered. INTJs are stereotyped as being effective, successful, and driven people despite preferring introversion. That’s not...really me. But INTPs are stereotyped as being scattered and flexible and I need to have routines and obsess over increments of things such as time, money, or resources. I am very internally organized and this extends to the outer world as well. I get frustrated going off the plan or making changes or not being able to account for something because a new variable came up. But since discovering that I might be on the spectrum it actually feels like a puzzle piece snapping into place. My whole life makes sense, even (and especially) the things I have been made to feel ashamed about.

Having autism means you process and prioritize information differently, and for high functioning females this can be hard to identify at first. I made it through school okay. I didn’t have any significant learning difficulties except being extraordinarily bad at math (like, took pre-algebra four times from 7th grade to college bad) and having to do a Title 1 remedial reading course in elementary school. I didn’t have trouble focusing and I excelled at writing tasks. I had extreme struggles learning things I had no interest in but managed to get good enough grades anyway. I was easy enough to get along with and although I didn’t have any friends at school until 9th grade I made it by okay. (Most of my friends were male or tomboys and always 1-3 years younger than me.)

Dating, socializing, and friend-making were never easy for me but I didn’t think this indicated that I had a disability in these areas. I had always assumed I was just really bad at it? Like, I share no interests with other people and am genuinely not interested in other people. As a kid I was desperate to play with other kids but couldn’t bridge the social gap to ask and would only play with one close friend at a time when I did have friends. But as an adult I keep to myself pretty much. I didn’t really think this was an indicator of a disability or cognitive situation because I had just accepted it as a part of my life. My interests are intense, particular, and not always popular. My interests are also geared for the wrong demographic compared to what I am. People and socializing are utterly boring to me. I prefer solitary tasks. So on and so forth. It wasn’t until I hit post college that I started to realize I had a real problem, which will be its own post.

When I’m honest with myself, I feel mentally at the age of twelve. I fixate and obsess over things well below my age group. When I was in my twenties I figured, well, your twenties are like an extended teenage time, right? But then I hit thirty and realized this is when you need to start showing the world that you are an adult. Drink mimosas and don’t do it through a straw. Know what an IRA is and know how to climb the corporate ladder. Don’t fixate on t-shirts and small collectable objects. Don’t obsess over tiny objects in the shape of US states. Stop hyperfocusing on the color of everybody’s eyelashes. Care about babies and home ownership and marriage.

I’m learning some fascinating things about girls on the spectrum. A lot of girls with Asperger’s have issues with gender identity and feel out of place in a woman’s life or with female gender roles. Girls with autism have a special challenge in life, because female gender roles are socially dependent in a way that male roles aren’t. Boys are taught to be independent and girls are taught to form social groups. Right out of the gate girls are being trained to be social-minded, which in one sense means girls are essentially getting autism therapy right from birth, which may explain why girls with Asperger’s don’t display traits in the same way that boys do. But as girls grow up they tend to respond to the challenges of being autistic in different ways. A primary way that I’ve come to learn through my research is to cope by mimicking the behavior of those around them and giving the appearance of understanding and performing those roles.

However, I think there’s another coping mechanism, and it’s the one I’ve chose. I’ve coped by more or less shunning social expectations and finding myself in male dominated spaces like video games and anime, etc. Nerd spaces are safe for a reason because it allows us both to indulge in our love of fantasy and world-building and also to fixate on something that isn’t sexually or socially driven. If you think about it, neurotypical gender interests stem from sex and signalling that one is sexually available. For women, it’s beauty and fashion and displays of attractiveness. For men, it’s sports and cars and other things that signal masculinity and strength. But for people with autism sexual stuff can get lost in translation so I have chosen to ignore those roles and not perform them at all, much to the chagrin of my parents growing up.

I shave my head in the bathroom sink for convenience. I never wear makeup (primarily because I can’t stand the sensation of goopy shit on my skin but also because I see absolutely no point in it). My clothes are mostly practical and comfortable. I can only wear breathable fabrics so tight frilly blouse-type fabrics are torture and I have only worn them a handful of times in my life. I wore bras only when I had to and went without most of the time. I never thought about the role that sensory sensitivities played in my dressing decisions but they are 100 percent the reason behind all the decisions I make, second only now to my OCD intolerance of fabrics that drape and touch nearby objects as I pass. Anyway, I’m not pretty but I am practical and functional.

I may not have stated that I felt inundated by a sea of sensory overload until I realized why that is. One thing I have done to cope is to fixate. As a kid I fixated on seemingly little things like sequins or collectable items I wanted. When I fixate on acquiring something (food, objects, whatever) I can tune out other things like how I’m feeling uncomfortable and overwhelmed. I still do this and at 31 years old I fixate more or less on the same things I did as a kid. One thing of fascination to me is colors, especially objects that come in many colors. Christmas lights is my earliest example of this, but as an adult it could explain my love of crystals. All crystals are rocks but they come in many colors and I love this so much. As a kid I was obsessed with tiny colored boxes. As an adult I went to The Container Store and bought them in every color. I’m still. You guys. I love colors so much.

I use food as a stim mechanism. At restaurants I feel almost entirely overwhelmed by the fluctuating environment of people moving and spinning and crawling all around you, plates being shoved into and out of your face, servers touching you and reaching over you, lights and sounds and crap. But I never noticed I was feeling so anxious by this (or I just chalked it up to my OCD) until I realized that the only thing I can willfully focus on when at a restaurant is the food. When is the food coming when is the food coming when is the food coming when is the food coming food is here food is here eat eat eat quick get it over with so we can leave why is the check taking so long I’ll have another piece of bread etc. I find myself eating even when I don’t want to out of the compulsive and comforting motion of reaching back and forth to my mouth, chewing, and so on. I used to overeat as a kid out of boredom but now I hardly eat at all because I get distracted and forget. I didn’t think of myself as a stimmer, though. The kind of stimming where people know that’s what you’re doing because you are rocking or otherwise zoned out in some very obvious movement that doesn’t fit the social context. Because I wasn’t doing that, I didn’t realize that what I was actually doing was stimming. Bouncing my leg so furiously that people thought I was convulsing. Picking my skin for hours. Constantly having my hands at my mouth or picking at some fabric or fraying the paper label on a bottle. I am almost always stimming in some fashion or another but the stims are pretty subtle. I mean, everyone clicks pens, right? Drinking and eating are stims and I often have a coffee when I go out because the act of raising the straw to my mouth gives me a physical action to do that comforts and calms me. There’s a lot to say on this topic so I’ll just move on for now. My point is, for females with high functioning autism it isn’t always obvious by male autistic behavioral standards because we have learned many masking techniques or just took the hit and identified as nerdy or non-binary or asexual or some other label that we thought explained it. The more I dig, though, the more I am amazed at how much of me stems from this potential. It’s heavy, though. I have a cousin with low functioning autism (we didn’t use that word back then; you know which word we used) and to realize I might be on the same spectrum is something to sit with, for sure. But it’s also a profound relief to think that all of these things aren’t my fault. I drove my parents absolutely insane growing up and always felt so much shame for it. They blamed me for not performing socially appropriate behavior or performing at my age level socially and now, to think there might be a reason for it is profoundly liberating and heals me on such a deep level. I can feel the Maniac Magee knot of self-hatred and loathing and blame starting to untangle at last.It’s not my fault. It’s not my fault.

[diosa-loba]

Hair is a Woman’s Glory — But Why? by Deidre Havrelock

Not too long ago (2014) I had a very telling dream. The dream took place during a time in my life where I was calling out to the Spirit to tell me about Eve. In particular, I wanted to know why Eve (and women) in general have had to struggle with a lack of authority.

In my dream I was looking in the mirror admiring my hair. My hair was full and vibrant… it looked absolutely fabulous! I was filled with thankfulness over the glory of my gorgeous hair!! The verse in 1 Corinthians 11:15 never felt more true:

Judge for yourselves: is it proper for a woman to pray to God with her head unveiled? Does not nature itself teach you that if a man wears long hair, it is degrading to him, but if a woman has long hair, it is her glory? For her hair is given to her for a covering. –1 Cor. 11:13–15

Young’s Literal Translation puts it this way:

And a woman, if she have long hair, a glory it is to her, because the hair instead of a covering hath been given to her. –1 Cor. 11:15

And the Darby Bible puts it like this:

But woman, if she have long hair, it is glory to her; for the long hair is given to her in lieu of a veil. –1 Cor. 11:15

However, as I ran my fingers through my seemingly fabulous locks, I noticed the opposite was in fact true. Underneath a thin layer of seemingly thick and glorious hair, lay my bald head completely shaved!! I became furious. I was indignant. Who had done this to me?! And Why?

I immediately woke up. And as I lay there in bed, I was still mad as hell. How dare someone shave my glorious hair! I then remembered my prayer the night before regarding my question about the lost authority of Eve. I was now 1) confused and 2) excited.

I was confused because I now understood that hair and authority were linked in some weird way and I was simultaneously excited because I knew the Holy Spirit wanted to tell me about why they were linked. The rather confusing verse in 1 Corinthians 11:10 went through my mind:

Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man. For this reason a woman ought to have a symbol of authority on her head. –1 Cor. 11:9–10

I immediately ran to my Bible intending to do a study on the significance of hair and there I stumbled upon a very interesting verse that illuminated me in regards to the symbolic purpose of hair.

Before I tell you what that verse was, fast forward a bit to the release of Wonder Woman: Rise of the Warrior (2017) and take note of the movie’s all important tag line — “THE FUTURE OF JUSTICE BEGINS WITH HER.”  When this movie came out, I was thrilled. I grabbed my daughters and off we ran to the theater.

After the movie, my middle daughter (who is super intuitive) said “I really loved that movie except there was one thing I didn’t understand.”  Well, the one thing that made my daughter stop to think is included in the video clip below. It’s the part where Diana makes the decision to cross “no man’s land” — the land that no “man” has been able to cross. And the part that got my daughter wondering was the moment Diana stops to loosen her hair. My daughter was wondering if that moment was important and if it was …. why? I mean, why does Diana stop to let her long hair loose — surely, all that annoying hair is just going to fly in front of her eyes, obscuring her sight, right?

Well, thanks to my friend Bill Boyle, who wrote the book The visual Mindscape of the Screenplay I knew the image of Wonder Woman loosening her hair was not just a superficial, unimportant vain moment — it was there for a reason. It was a visual metaphor. Meaning, it carried heavy emotional significance. “But of what?” my daughter inquired.Perhaps watch the clip below before we move on to the wonder of Wonder Woman’s hair. This is the point in the movie where Diana makes the decision to step up for JUSTICE and to step out to HELP… this is the moment Wonder Woman steps into her divine PURPOSE and into her own AUTHORITY.

Notice how those loose locks are flowing and the people are following to fight! The reason this is such an emotional scene is not just because the female director planned it that way, it’s also because the moment carries with it a very important spiritual truth — a truth that is meant for women to grasp in their spirit. And that truth has to do with… you got it… hair.

When Locks Flow Loose…

Now remember that verse I was telling you about. The one that illuminated me in regards to the symbolic purpose of hair. Well, it’s found in the story of Jael.

Do you remember Jael? She’s the one who won the war for the Israelites when she drove a tent peg through Sisera’s skull. There she is to the left, busy at work in a painting by Jacopo Amigoni.

Now Jael’s story goes like this: the Judge Deborah (a woman in full authority) and her loyal general, Barak, unite and go after General Sisera and his Canaanite army. Barak completely destroys the army, but Sisera escapes. Sisera, according to Deborah (who is also a prophet), has a fate different from that of his army. Sisera’s life lies in the hands of an unassuming, rather pleasant — yet bold — woman named Jael… 

Jael came out to meet Sisera, and said to him, “Turn aside, my lord, turn aside to me; have no fear.” So he turned aside to her into the tent, and she covered him with a rug. Then he said to her, “Please give me a little water to drink; for I am thirsty.” So she opened a skin of milk and gave him a drink and covered him. He said to her, “Stand at the entrance of the tent, and if anybody comes and asks you, ‘Is anyone here?’ say, ‘No.’ ”

But Jael wife of Heber took a tent peg, and took a hammer in her hand, and went softly to him and drove the peg into his temple, until it went down into the ground—he was lying fast asleep from weariness—and he died. Then, as Barak came in pursuit of Sisera, Jael went out to meet him, and said to him, “Come, and I will show you the man whom you are seeking.” So he went into her tent; and there was Sisera lying dead, with the tent peg in his temple. So on that day God subdued King Jabin of Canaan before the Israelites. Then the hand of the Israelites bore harder and harder on King Jabin of Canaan, until they destroyed King Jabin of Canaan.

  Then Deborah and Barak son of Abinoam sang on that day, saying:

“When locks are long in Israel, when the people offer themselves willingly— bless the LORD!  –Jdg 4:18–5:2, bold added

The New Jerusalem Bible puts the verse this way…

That the warriors in Israel unbound their hair, that the people came forward with a will, bless Yahweh! –Jdg. 5:2

The New King James Version puts it this way…

“When leaders lead in Israel, When the people willingly offer themselves, Bless the LORD! –Jdg. 5:2

The Message says it this way…

When they let down their hair in Israel, they let it blow wild in the wind. The people volunteered with abandon, bless GOD!  –Jdg. 5:2

However, what each of these versions miss is that the word translated as “leaders” and “warriors” happens to be in the FEMININE (parʿâh). Ultimately, Deborah and Barak’s song is about women with flowing hair, or women in leadership:

When [the women] let down their hair in Israel, they let it blow wild in the wind. The people volunteered with abandon, bless GOD!  –Jdg 5:2

“When [female] leaders lead in Israel, When the people willingly offer themselves, Bless the LORD! –Jdg. 5:2

“When [female] locks are long in Israel, when the people offer themselves willingly— bless the LORD!  –Jdg 4:21–5:2

That the [female] warriors in Israel unbound their hair, that the people came forward with a will, bless Yahweh! –Jdg. 5:2

So there, within the story of Jael, we have the story of Wonder Woman (who, by the way, was played by Gal Gadot who just happens to be Israeli). Pretty cool, right? You probably won’t ever look at flowing hair the same way now — at least, I hope you won’t.

A Woman’s “Covering” is an Anointing

A “mantle” is a biblical covering (like a coat), usually made from hair. The covering represents authority, power, responsibility, as well as the office of a “prophet.” In other words, a person occupies the position of “prophet” because of a particular anointing. If a woman prophecies without her “covering” (say she has her head completely shaved) then she would be disgraced because the authority of that prophet has been taken from her. And why would a prophet speak unless it is with authority given to her by God?

A mantle or covering symbolically represents the Holy Spirit setting a person (or persons) apart for a particular work. John the Baptist wore a mantle made out of camel’s hair. Esau had so much red hair covering his body that he was said to have a “hairy mantel” (Gen. 25:25). Elijah, the prophet, had a powerful mantle and Joseph was envied and hated because of his beautiful long mantle:

Then Elijah took his mantle and rolled it up, and struck the water; the water was parted to the one side and to the other, until the two of them crossed on dry ground.  –2 Kings 2:8

Now Israel loved Joseph more than any other of his children, because he was the son of his old age; and he had made him a long robe with sleeves. But when his brothers saw that their father loved him more than all his brothers, they hated him, and could not speak peaceably to him.  –Gen. 37:3–4

Women have a god-given “mantle” or “covering” — the hair symbolizes this anointing that all women carry. This does not mean that women can’t cut or shave their hair. It just means that hair represents a spiritual truth. It’s as Paul explained…

We speak of these things in words not taught by human wisdom but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things to those who are spiritual. –1 Cor. 2:13

Women are anointed by God as the “helper.” Eve was created for the sake of Adam because Adam needed help from someone who, like him, also represented God on earth. Because of woman’s anointing as helper, she carries a symbol of authority — hair. If a woman was to lose her God-given authority, it is the same thing as being “shaved.”

Women are the ones who will come to the “rescue.” Women represent Eliezer (el-ezer) the “God of Help.” We are the Wonder Women of the world. We are the Deborahs. We are the Jaels — perhaps we lie hidden and unassuming, but we are prepared and willing to fight (or preach, teach, prophecy, and lead) when called upon by God.

Women in the church today are much like how I saw myself in that dream — our hair/authority only appears to be intact right now, but the truth is an enemy has shaved our hair and we are not operating at full authority/strength. But don’t worry because just as Samson once lost his hair (and his anointing) by letting his long locks become cut, woman’s power and authority is coming back.

This is why the story of Sampson ends on such an ominous note: “But the hair of his head began to grow again after it had been shaved” (Jdg. 16:22). Ultimately, Sampson’s last display of power ended up being his mightiest. And it will be the same for women.

That is the message to women today. Our authority is being restored, along with that so is woman’s purpose and power. Women have a very large role to play in regards to defeating the enemy and representing God here on earth. And despite the setback of once having our hair shaved by the enemy… our hair is growing back!

[touchpointpress]

Following the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly in the spring of 1852, threats against its author became common. Hate mail arrived daily at the Stowe’s house in Andover, Massachusetts.  One morning the mailman rang the doorbell with a small package. When Harriet Beecher Stowe opened the box, she was horrified to find a human ear sent her from the owner of a southern cotton plantation who had cut it off one of his slaves.

It was the Fugitive Slave Act that fired this professor’s wife and mother of six to write a book that shook the nation. Passed by Congress in 1850, this law empowered the federal government to prosecute any person, black or white, who aided runaway slaves. Punishment for doing so usually meant prison and a $1000 fine. It legally gave every white citizen the right to challenge any black person not in the company of a white man or woman.  Federal agents could now pursue slaves into free states and apprehend suspected fugitives, even if they had been living free for years.  Former slaves who had earned enough money to buy their freedom, as well as their children born free, were in peril of being captured and sold south.

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her blockbuster in Brunswick, Maine where the family had recently moved from Ohio. Harriet’s husband, a professor of theology and the Bible, had obtained a position at Bowdoin College, his alma mater.  She described Calvin as “rich in Greek and Hebrew, Latin and Arabic, and alas! rich in nothing else.” He also vowed not to shave his beard until every slave was free.

Harriet was glad to leave Cincinnati since she’d lost her 18-month-old son to cholera there. She credited her grief as one of the inspirations used in her novel. “It was at Samuel’s dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn from her and sold.”

It had been a long, hard trip by train and ferry to mid-coast Maine, especially traveling with children and expecting another baby soon. Now settled in the drafty house on Federal Street, Harriet was homeschooling her youngsters, as well as selling original sketches to make ends meet.

“I always felt I had no particular call to meddle in politics,” she wrote a friend, “but after the Bloodhound Bill, I feel the time has come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak.”

Harriet’s brothers, all ministers, were passionately committed to the anti-slavery cause.  “If only I could use a pen as you can, Hattie, I would write something that would make this whole nation feel what an accursed thing slavery is,” one sister-in-law urged. Stowe believed she could bring about positive political and social change using the power of her pen. And hadn’t Calvin always encouraged her gift of writing?

“This horror, this nightmare abomination! Can it be in my country? It lies like lead on my heart; it shadows my life with sorrow,” Harriet said. “I am obliged to write as one who is forced by some awful oath to disclose in court some family disgrace.  The time has come when the nation has a right to demand and the President of the United States, a right to decree their freedom.”

Stowe would later deny actually writing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, convinced she had been “an instrument of God to stop the national sin of slavery…I the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin?  No, indeed! The Lord Himself wrote it. I was but the humblest of instruments in His hand.”

Harriet had stayed on a Kentucky plantation and spoken with slaves there.  She’d interviewed fugitives who’d crossed the treacherous Ohio River and hidden in homes belonging to her family. Stowe’s character, Eliza, who fled Kentucky to the free state of Ohio on ice floes, carrying her baby, had been inspired by one runaway she met. And she’d listened to her brother’s descriptions of slave auctions he’d observed in New Orleans.

“Uncle Tom’s Cabin: or Life Among the Lowly was first published in installments between June 5, 1851 and April 1, 1852 in The National Era, an anti-slavery newspaper.  Harriet claimed each chapter was written with her “heart’s blood” and that many times she thought her “health would fail utterly.”  She was putting out sixteen to twenty pages daily.

“As long as baby sleeps with me nights, I can’t do much at anything, but I shall write this thing!” Some sections were written at the kitchen table on paper bags while “chowder bubbled on the wood stove and the baby slept by my feet in a basket.” She read sections out loud to her children. After hearing one chapter, nine-year-old Freddy burst into tears, crying “Oh Mamma, what a wicked thing slavery is!”

Harriet’s husband was napping when she wrote Uncle Tom’s death scene, which she insisted appeared to her in church as a vision during a Sunday service. She’d completed nine pages, pausing only to dip her pen, when Calvin awoke and she read it to him.  Afterward, she asked him if it would do. “Do?”  His sobs shook the bed he lay upon. “I should think it would do!” He insisted she send it to the publisher immediately without revision.

It was published in book form by John P. Jewett in March of 1852. Of the five thousand copies printed, three thousand were sold the first day. Stowe’s novel became an international phenomenon and the single best-selling book in the world at that time. It was eventually translated into fifty-eight languages from Hindu to Hungarian.  A missionary sent the Stowe family a Japanese translation.  Three hundred mothers in Boston named their baby girls “Eva” after the character in Stowe’s novel. Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner shared the book with his Southern colleagues in Congress.

Harriet had hoped her book would make enough money to buy a new dress, but to her amazement, the first royalty check amounted to as much her husband had earned in a decade. With ten thousand dollars in the first three months of sales, the Stowes were suddenly wealthy.

Stowe’s story focused readers’ attention on the evils of slavery in a way as never before.  Previously most Northerners had simply accepted slavery as economic necessity sanctioned by the Bible and a property right guaranteed by the Constitution. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” either inspired or infuriated Americans in a manner that political pamphlets, newspaper accounts, and slave narratives never had before.

John Greenleaf Whittier claimed that, “The heaviest blow which slavery has received for the last half-century has just been struck by a woman.”

Popular anti-slavery poet, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote Stowe to say, “I congratulate you most cordially upon the immense success and influence of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.  It is one of the greatest triumphs recorded in literary history, to say nothing of the higher triumph of its moral effect.”

From France, author George Sand wrote, “The book is in all hands. People devour it.  They cover it with tears.”

Frederick Douglass, the former slave and abolitionist leader, deemed it “a work of marvelous depth and power, whose effects are amazing, instantaneous, and universal.”

However, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” brought the wrath of Southern slaveholders and supporters of slave labor, down upon the author who was labeled “a meddling woman who knew nothing about slavery.” Many regarded it as so destructive to slavery it would cause slave insurrections.  Punishment was possible for possessing this “filthy negro novel.”  In some southern towns, one could be arrested and jailed for buying the book, having it on your person, or just lying around your home.

Little girls jumped rope to the chant: “Go! Go! Go! Old Harriet Beecher Stowe!  We don’t want you here in Virginny! So Go!” The Alabama Planter newspaper said in print that “the woman who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin must be either a very bad or a very fanatical person.” A Tennesse pastor called Harriet “as ugly as original sin.”  A cousin, then a Georgia resident told her that “prejudice against my name is so strong there she dares not have it appear on the outside of letters to me.”

William Lloyd Garrison endowed the book with high praise in his radical newspaper, The Liberator.  “I estimate the value of anti-slavery writing by the abuse it brings.” He told its author. “Now all the defenders of slavery have let me alone and are abusing you!”

Because pro-slavery advocates accused her of publishing “a tissue of falsehoods,” Stowe put all other writing aside to document her sources in detail. “I am now very much driven,” she explained. “I am preparing a key to unlock Uncle Tom’s Cabin…It is made up of facts which my eyes have looked upon and documents my hands have handled…  I write “The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin” with the anguish of my soul and tears and prayers, with sleepless nights and weary days.”

Playwright George Aiken adapted Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the stage. The three daily performances in New York were always sold out with actors remaining in costume from noon until midnight. By the late 1850s, versions were playing in sixteen different theater companies simultaneously across the country.  At the time, it was the most successful play ever produced in the American theater. It ran for two hundred and fifty performances in Boston, one of which Harriet attended. She was reluctant to go because her father, conservative preacher Lyman Beecher, disapproved of theater and Harriet’s husband was then Professor of Sacred Literature at Calvinistic Andover Theological Seminary.

“I’ve never been to a theater in my life,” Harriet said, “but I have such curiosity to see how my characters can go from page to stage; to see in flesh and blood the creations of my imagination.”

It was these theatricals that turned the character of Uncle Tom into a “step-‘n-fetch-it” buffoon never intended by Stowe. Her black hero became a character of ridicule. It was this image of the spineless slave that so angered African-American author, James Baldwin, a century later. Harriet’s Uncle Tom was not the meek yes-man depicted in stage adaptations. Since Stowe neglected to have her work copyrighted, she had no say over such changes nor did she ever receive any profits from the productions.

Spinoff souvenirs, posters, and publications, including sheet music, known as “Tomitudes” were for sale everywhere.  A variety of board games, dolls and nick-nacks were manufactured in multitudes.

W. E. B. Du Bois, the renown African-American scholar said, “To a frail overburdened Yankee woman with a steadfast moral purpose we Americans, both black and white, owe our gratitude for the freedom and the union that exist today in these United States.”

  You Risked Jail for Reading This Book! by Juliet Haines Mofford Following the publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly in the spring of 1852, threats against its author became common.

[killingthebuddha]

A few years ago, I purchased a little nativity scene that held a tea light inside. There it sat at a local fair trade holiday sale, a surprisingly Christian symbol on a table strewn with reindeer, snowmen, the pointy shapes of evergreen trees, and other apparently more secular reminders of the holiday season.

I hesitated. I’d long since discarded, I thought, most traditional Jesus-centered observances at Christmastime. Every December my interfaith family throws open its home to the promise of light, whether that be the light of eight candles burning, the light found in a tiny baby’s new life, or the return of light after the darkness of the solstice. We decorate our home in hues of blue and white, red and green, mixed together in a blend that nevertheless recognizes each tradition as its own, and the progressive religious tradition in which I’ve long found a home celebrates many meanings in the December season.

My hand hovered over the candle holder, with stars cut through the dome of sky to let the candle’s light out. Painted in matte colors with basic, almost childish strokes, Mary and Joseph cluster around the figure in a tiny cradle, simple houses and desert plants hovering in the background. No wise men, shepherds, or angels visit the scene, just the one small, growing family, and stars hanging in the sky above.

I brought the nativity scene home, and set it on our table.

* * *

Every year it hits me, this nostalgia, a backwards glance at Christmases past. It’s my own version of the December dilemma, the difficulty of a holiday connected to and yet separate from the specificity of one tradition. Could I do Christmas without Christ, as I’d been doing for years, letting angels, snowmen and scented evergreen stand in for all the other meanings of the season? Yes, my mind wanted to say, of course I can! After all, our modern-day Christmas originates with the merging of the Roman holiday Saturnalia as a convenient time to celebrate the birth of Jesus, later layered with northern European traditions of Father Christmas and evergreen trees.   

And yet, purchasing the little nativity scene convinced me that I had unfinished business with the religion of my youth, and that winter, I went back to the denomination I hadn’t visited in years, one that lights an Advent wreath and sings the real words to hymns like “O Come, O Come Emmanuel” and “Once in Royal David’s City,” rather than universalized alternatives set to the same tunes. I decided to give putting Christ back in Christmas a thorough church season or two of effort. Wouldn’t it be more honest to keep this reason for the season intact, if I still felt drawn to it? Didn’t it make sense to return to a place where a single symbol conveyed a world of meaning?

*  * *

                                                       When I was a child, we set our nativity scene up on a Japanese-style medicine cabinet that stood in the front hallway. When I was old enough to carefully remove the wooden figurines from the funny shredded paper packaging that kept Mary, Joseph, the wise men, and a few shepherds and angels safe from year to year, it felt like a rite of passage. I’d attained an age when I could handle delicate, sacred matters, carefully arranging Joseph and Mary around the empty wooden cradle, hanging the biggest, blue-robed angel, the one with a white “Gloria in excelsis” banner, on the old nail at the top of the rough wooden scene.

Jesus always sank during the year to the bottom of the paper shavings, and we’d put his naked little plastic self into one of the top drawers of the cabinet, one of the drawers that didn’t contain a host of unused coupon clippings or random stashes of ribbons, buttons, and other long-forgotten supplies. Come Christmas morning, my brother and I were too busy with Santa, stockings, and a plate full of once-a-year Christmas cookies to worry too much about the baby hidden in his dark, lonely manger of a deep wooden drawer. My parents watched us opening gifts, the baby Jesus equally forgotten, our parents equally sidelined by the effusive magic of the present morning.

Usually we remembered Jesus sometime in the early afternoon, after the presents had been opened, breakfast cleared away, my brother and I lost in a pile of new packages, my mom in the kitchen preparing a traditional Christmas dinner. Inevitably, someone would call out, “we forgot the baby Jesus!” and we’d all laugh, run to the manger scene, tenderly lay the naked plastic figure in his cradle, and return to our other activities.

*  * *

Nostalgia paints the world in tones of sepia and roses, offering a false picture of a past that may not keep its promises for the present. Leigh Eric Schmidt, in his now-classic book Consumer Rites (which explores the consumerist origins of our modern holiday traditions), translates the yearly December nostalgia as a concern in “modern, industrialized societies for the genuine, the handcrafted, the authentic, or the real. Modern holidays and their rituals are thought to be sadly insubstantial, ersatz, or hollow; they are never so good, genuine, joyous, or fulfilling as they used to be.”

If it seemed that my own celebration of December holidays had fallen prey to this suspicion, to the fear that my winter-themed, commercialized holiday was somehow in tension with a more “original” meaning, that complaint didn’t quite match the mood in which I bought the blue nativity scene. We kept the Maccabees in Hannukah alongside our menorah and eight days of gifts; why did I feel I had to celebrate a Christ-less Christmas? My nostalgia-fueled holiday critique bypassed the issue of commercialism and went, instead, straight to questions of religious certainty and substance.

There it was on my dining room table, that seemingly innocuous symbol. “What a cute family!” my five-year-old daughter exclaimed as soon as she saw it, asking immediately that the family face her, and not her sister, as we sat down to eat. How could I explain that this wasn’t just any family; this was Jesus and his family?

That night, we lit candles for Hannukah; we lit a tea light in the nativity scene. I stumbled through an explanation that Christmas­­­­––in addition to being a time of warmth and light and family closeness in the dark time of year, not to mention the gift-giving that was paramount in my daughters’ minds––was also the celebration of the birth of the little baby in that scene right there, and that Christians believe this baby came to save the world.

My academic explanation didn’t last long with my five-year-old; she wanted to know what her parent believed. I wanted to know, too.

In trying out my childhood church again, I wanted to touch something holy as if it could be solid and certain. If I could welcome the baby Jesus onto my dining room table, surely there was room in my heart, mind, and body for one more layer of meaning?

I stuck with my childhood church tradition until Easter, feeling the familiar rituals of crossing myself, kneeling for confession, and taking Communion. The actions settled through my body like warm hot chocolate after a long time out in the snowy cold. By Easter, though, my mind had failed to catch up. Words about the “only son of God” stuck in my throat alongside unshed tears, and I found myself thinking about my daughter’s interest in the little family at the manger. Did it have to represent just that one particular family? Couldn’t God be found in more persons than just this one? Could I not also sing, in a riff on Leonard Cohen’s song “Who by Fire,” who in a manger; who in a refugee camp; who on a dusty plain, a humble home, an antiseptic hospital? Which flickering flame of life would provide hope when it was needed most?

Symbols hold not just one meaning, but many. They convey truth not because they are unequivocal, but because they’re multivalent, metaphorical. Wax melts when touched by a candle’s flame; it softens like a heart, and shifts.

***

Nostalgia looks back to a past supposedly more whole, more perfect, more full of promise than the present moment, but Advent, as a season of the church, looks forward in hope to the coming of a better day. What an irony that we spend so much time dreaming of Christmases past and their possible perfections!

In the wrong hands, nostalgia can be dangerous. It gives a false picture of a past that never was. Jesus has never truly been the only reason for the season, any more than America once was greater than it is now. Most of our holiday nostalgia, thankfully, is no more dangerous than baby Jesus being forgotten in a coupon drawer, but nostalgia’s sticky emotional resonance can lead us away from the promises and challenges of the present into an unfounded feeling of what we might have lost. We fear we can’t live up to the past; we face depression, loneliness, and despair as we try to make the holidays shine ever more brightly.

Nostalgia’s illusion can make the holiday season more laden with difficult emotion than it needs to be. Memory creates a powerful pull in that we think we should feel a certain feeling when the holidays roll round, but when we don’t, we assume, automatically, that we’re in the wrong. We assume we’ve fallen away from how things were, a how that must have been more certain, more solid, more joyous than we knew. The truth of both Christmas past and present may be closer, in fact, to the dull ache of difference, a thought can ease our way to holidays of the future. If we can let go of the idea of one single truth or one perfect past, perhaps we can find a little bit of Christmas peace.

In Winifred Gallagher’s Working on God, a memoir of exploring faith after years of leaving church deep in her own past, she interviews an Episcopal priest who was raised in the Salvation Army. “I don’t go back to the Salvation Army,” the priest says, “but I miss it terribly. There’s this sadness about not being there, because even the soap in the bathroom smells right!” It’s possible, the priest realizes, to find spiritual maturity in knowing when one needs to move beyond one’s nostalgic memories, even the memories that smell right, or that feel so familiar deep within the body. Advent challenges cultural Christians, post-Christians, and believers alike to embrace not old nostalgic memories, but new meanings, ones that bring hope for the future.

I sometimes still return to that same church, but I no longer expect it to feel the same as it once did. To miss a tradition doesn’t make it false, but missing it also doesn’t mean it holds the corner on truth, either. Truth, at least as far as memory and tradition are concerned, shines through when something solid softens, and becomes malleable.

Light flickers out through the stars cut in the sky of the nativity scene. Is this a light that shone for just that one holy season, or is it a light that shines when we need the reminder of hope the most? This time, I do not need one answer; the way the candle dances is enough.

[lightandfellowship]

OP's tags:

#tbh one of the things I find the most compelling about Xehanort is how ruthless he is #He understands emotions and feels them from others all the time #but he does not let them control him #he's condescending and dismissive of people who do #he looks down on those who let their feelings dictate their actions #I think one thing that's lost in translation in particular is the fact that shaving his head is clearly intended to be read as like #Becoming a Buddhist monk #A symbol of dedication to putting aside his worldly attachments to bring about the end of this world #and the birth of a new balanced world #His final act before beginning his plan in earnest is to cut down Eraqus who is his final worldly attachment #Xehanort as an old man is fully above petty things like crying over his lost friends anymore #He has bigger fish to fry #and he's going to fry them.

I think one thing that really sticks with me in interpreting how Dark Road shapes Xehanort is the fact that Xehanort truly was raised to believe himself to be the only one truly strong enough to do what needs to be done to save the world. An interesting thing I think is to look at the way Xehanort’s apparent perception of Baldr changes after his world tour…but not really the crux of his feelings about Baldr, which is that I truly think he sees Baldr as pathetic, in both senses of the word.

Before the tour, Baldr evokes pathos from Xehanort. He feels sorry for him; he takes the time to leave flowers on his grave, but crucially, does not actually express regret for killing him. What he expresses is that he thinks this is the best outcome for Baldr; 

Xehanort: Baldr… Now you and your sister will always be together. You’ll always have the light to share.

Killing Baldr was a mercy, from Xehanort’s perspective. Baldr wasn’t strong enough to handle the Darkness. He wasn’t strong enough to face a world of nuance alone. Not like Xehanort, who is determined to be strong enough. Who was born to be strong enough; who then decides to prove he’s strong enough by removing his armor in the space between worlds. 

Then, there is the comparison between Baldr’s dying words, and what Master of Masters and Xehanort express before and after his world tour:

??????: Let me guess… You thought your heart was strong enough to withstand the darkness in there.

??????: Human emotions are complex. For example, what you feel toward someone you love isn’t always good or well-meaning. It can be a false kind of light. Which begs the question: are these messy feelings that emerge from love still light? Or are they darkness?

Baldr’s love for Hoder was a false kind of light. It was one that smothered, one that made her responsible for his well-being. Baldr can’t separate his own feelings from other people’s; his worldview is completely self-absorbed. Other people are having feelings at him; Hoder is there to spread her light at him. He can’t see beyond his own pain and his own needs, and what love he has for Hoder is really about what she can do for him; a love that isn’t good, or well-meaning, but toxic for both of them until it kills them both.

Xehanort knows this. His experience, as Master of Masters asks about, tells him this; he saw first-hand how that false love destroyed both Hoder and Baldr, and their classmates as collateral damage.

Baldr’s last words have this to say:

Baldr: Xehanort… Do you see now? There’s them…and there’s us. When we find the strength to pursue our goals, they condemn us, insisting that our strength comes from darkness.

Then Xehanort goes on his world tour (and it seems strongly implied that he travels to the future during this time, experiences Dream Drop Distance and Kingdom Hearts 3, and comes back with those memories erased, but changed by the experience);

Xehanort: Those who are weak, and who desire greater power, simply strip the strong of their power, and convince themselves they’ve earned it. That’s how people become tainted by darkness. They believe what they want to believe, using hollow reasons as justification. They repeat this cycle, and their darkness grows.

??????: So you’re saying the weak feel the need to justify their actions to maintain a sense of self. Can’t let that slide?

Xehanort: No, it’s better they be ruled by darkness. People carry delusions of having power, but it’s a lie. 

Baldr is the sheep pretending to be a wolf, slaughtering their friends to build his own power through the act. Baldr no longer evokes ‘pathos;’ now, for Xehanort, he is the other definition of ‘pathetic;’ “miserably inadequate, of very low standard.” Xehanort’s opinion is now that Baldr was too weak to handle being weaker than Hoder, being weaker than his classmates, so he killed them all, and pretended that made him strong. He told himself lies about how they were feeling things at him, and how that justified what he chose to do.

Xehanort looks down on him. Xehanort will be better than him. Xehanort is truly strong, he believes; all his life, he’s been practicing control. Managing his own feelings. Keeping them separate from those of others, not allowing them to be tainted by the emotions around him. Being flawless, to be the change he was born to be. He will do what’s necessary to make sure nothing like Baldr can ever happen again, and he won’t let feelings get in the way. It’s the reason for his existence, after all.

What comes next is too important.