#but i still have some hope for human resistance which has persisted throughout history

[kayechanted]

Unfortunately I think far too many people are willing to just lay down and die in the face of climate-based social collapse. We gotta drop out of society and start anew elsewhere, it’s too late to wind hearts and minds OR to really develop a militant left :/

I get miserable at the thought of how apathetic everyone is but I'm very sure once people see how destructive the system we live under is as societal collapse starts to happen due to climate change people will get radicalized. And many people already have been getting radicalized because 9 months since October 7th the uptick in Israel's barbarism has opened people's eyes and is causing a major shift in opinion of the United States.

My problem is it's genuinely such a shame this did not happen sooner. That BLM protests in 2020 should have had this effect and we should've mobilized sooner. But that would mean people would have to empathise with, and genuinely include Black people in their activism, which of course means interrogating their own antiblackness. Even now genocides in Africa get ignored because protestors hell bent on looking peaceful think they can do "one step at a time" with genocide and people's lives. Idk sorry I got derailed I still have some tiny sliver of hope that at least younger people will see and understand the only way to deal with the capitalist ruling class. But at the same time there are way too many issues people have to address in themselves and that means being open to criticism for their movements.

[tomorrow-and-tomorrows]

SNK 139.5: Towards the Final Pages with no Final Answers

The final pages of the updated ending are bold, but I think ultimately more evocative than the original preliminary ending.

Even after the intensely polarized reader reception that took issue with the lack of storytelling precision and clarity when it was most needed, SNK chose to end with a decisively ambiguous symbol. In literature, a symbol is something that clearly means something -- but with the most "literary" symbols, their meaning cannot be absolutely defined; any attempted answer as to what a symbol represents has no finality or certainty, and interpretation will remain ever open to debate. A symbol both invites and resists interpretation.

Naturally, the immediate response to the symbolic tree on the final page is to try answering the invitation to the question, "What does it mean?"

One prominent answer I've seen is that it symbolizes the continuation of the cycle of war and violence either because a) of the symbolic parallel to Ymir or b) on a more literal level, that it implies the actual potential revival of new era of Titans. A reasonable interpretation either way, but also, I think, an incomplete one.

The first reason for this is that "the endless cycle of war" was already clearly and powerful represented in the preceding panels:

The cycle of war was already continuing in the decades or centuries before the child arrived at the tree. A culminating image symbolizing the persistence or resurgence of an era of war as the final panel would thus arguably be redundant and unnecessary.

Furthermore, the chapter is entitled "Toward the Tree on That Hill." If the tree were simply a symbol of war, by implication the chapter could equally be called 'toward the endless cycle of war'. But such a relentlessly bleak and tonally flat ending sentiment would be firmly incongruous with the story's recurrent conviction in the equal cruelty and beauty of the world -- a conviction that I believe it has been faithful to all the way to its end.

The Long Defeat

But while on this topic of war, let's linger a moment on the "cruelty" side and the consequence of this wordless construction and subsequent destruction of a city -- the most bold and possibly controversial additional panels that are also my personal favourite additions.

One objection that has emerged against this brief sequence of Paradis' apparent destruction is that it renders the entire story to be "pointless". Eren's 80% Rumbling, Armin's diplomatic peace talks between the remnants of the Allied Nations and Paradis, and before that, the proposal of the 50-year plan and Zeke's euthanasia plan... everything, to the very beginning to the Survey Corps' dreams of some kind of freedom; was it all for nothing? All that striving, that hope, that final promise bestowed upon Armin: was it all a pointless story? Even more radically, is the story suggesting that Eren might as well have continued the Rumbling to 100% of the earth? Was Zeke's euthanasia plan the cruel but correct choice all along? What was the point of rejecting the 50-year plan if that had a greater chance of success at preventing this outcome?

I think Isayama suddenly pulling back to such a long-term view of history to the scale of decades or even centuries into the future calls for a reorientation in attitude towards exactly what kind of story we have been reading. Yes, if the metric is Paradis' survival, maybe it was indeed all "pointless". But that's also to say that, on the broadest scale, SNK is a story about futility, that it is a deliberate representation of the struggle to make one's actions historically meaningful.

In the long view of history, all the events, from Grisha running beyond the wall to see the airships and the first breaking of Wall Maria to Erwin's sacrifices, Paradis' discovery of the outside world, and finally to the Battle of Heaven and Earth, it would all merely be a handful of chapters in the history textbooks of the future. A future in which war and geopolitical conflict will continue even without Titans. That does not mean that all paths to the future are equal -- the 50-year plan would not have put an end to Titans, and Zeke's euthanasia plan distorts utilitarian ethics into just another form of oppression; there are better and worse decisions that lead to more and less degrees of suffering, but no decision can ever be the final one.

The additional panels remind us that in history, there never exists a singular "Final Solution". The reason there are readers who vehemently support Eren to have flattened 100% of the world, and the reason the Paradisians supported the oppressive, authoritarian, proto-fascist Jaegar Faction under Floch and even after the Rumbling, is that because they want to believe that a Final Solution to end conflict exists and will work. They resist the fundamental uncertainty and complexity of the situation, instead preferring a singular, unified, and coherent Answer to Paradis' struggle to survive. I'm reminded of the scholar Erich Auerbach's theorization of why fascism appealed to many people during periods of political and social crisis, change, and uncertainty. Writing in exile after fleeing Nazi Germany, he observed that:

"The temptation to entrust oneself to a sect which solved all problems with a single formula, whose power of suggestion imposed solidarity, and which ostracized everything which would not fit in and submit - this temptation was so great that, with many people, fascism hardly had to employ force when the time came for it to spread through the countries of old European culture." (from Mimesis p. 550)

This acutely describes the Jaegar Faction's rise to power and continued dominance in Paradis. But their promise of unity, of a single formula to wipe out the rest of the world either literally through the Rumbling, or to dominate them with military force, is a false one. Even if Eren had Rumbled 100% of the world instead of 80%, history would still go on. The external threat of the world may have been eliminated, but internal conflict and violence would still continue onward throughout the generations born on top of the blood of the rest of the world. Needless to say, out of all the options, Eren's 80% Rumbling is the very epitome of perpetuating the cycle of violence as it creates tens of thousands of war orphans like Eren once was, and it would justify employing violence for one's own self-interest to an extreme degree. For the generations to come that would valourize Eren as a hero, it would set a dangerous precedent for what degree of destruction is acceptable for self-defence -- nothing short of the attempt to flatten the entire world. It is no surprise that Paradis would meet a violent end when its founding one-party rule of the Jaegar Faction has their roots in such unapologetically bloody foundations.

Neither the 80% Rumbling nor the militaristic, ultra-nationalistic Jaegar faction that come to govern Paradis are glamourized as the "correct" solution to ensuring Paradis' future. (This can also put to rest any accusations of SNK's ending as "fascist" or "imperialist" propaganda, since the island's modern nation that they founded ends in war. All nations must fall eventually, but not all do in such blatant destruction). Importantly, neither is Armin's diplomatic mission naively idealized as that which permanently achieves world peace. No singular or unifying formula can work because reality is complicated. Entrusting oneself to seemingly simple Answers is simply insufficient, even if they are ideals of peaceful negotiation; that method may work given the right conditions, but the world will always eventually complicate its feasibility.

After all in the real world, there's the absurd irony that some in the West had called the First World War "The War to End all Wars". These days, WWI is merely one long chapter in our textbooks just a few pages away from the even longer chapter of the Second World War that is followed by all the rest of the conflicts that have followed since then even with the establishment of diplomatic organizations like the United Nations. In this sense, showing Paradis' eventual downfall is perhaps the only way to end such a series that is so concerned with history, from King Fritz's tribal expansion into empire, the rise and fall of Marleyan ascendency, and finally of the survival and apparent shattering of Paradis.

From its beginning to its end, SNK has poignantly evoked J.R.R. Tolkien's conception of history as The Long Defeat. In one character's words, "together through ages of the world we have fought the long defeat". That is to say, "no victory is complete, that evil rises again, and that even victory brings loss".

No heroes, only humans

Eren's desperate, fatalistic resignation to committing the Rumbling, along with the characters' rejection of all the rest of the earlier plans to ensure Paradis a future, are merely the actions of human beings to that began with the need to find not even necessarily a Final Answer, but at least an acceptable and feasible one for the time being. But the characterization of Eren's confusion, childishness, and regret in the final chapter is startlingly real in how it demonstrates how, all along, we have been dealing not with grand heroes, but simply people who have no answers at all. SNK has always been about failures - and often ironic failures; it has always been a story about painful and frequently futile struggle.

People make mistakes, they can be short-sighted, selfish, biased, immature, petty, and irrational, and I think the ending follows through with depicting the consequences of that.

Erwin's self-sacrifice before being able to reach the basement (and his regression to a childhood state in the moments before his death), Kenny's futile chasing after that universal compassion he had seen in Uri, Shadis never being acknowledged by history despite his final heroic action, and so on -- these stories of ironic, futile failures are still meaningful in their mere striving. Eren's ending and Paradis' demise despite Armin's endeavour to ensure them a peaceful future are entirely consistent with this.

SNK certainly follows the shounen trope in which young individuals are bestowed great power and correspondingly great responsibility, and must then reconcile the burden of possessing that greatness on which the fate of the world depends. Yet it is equally defined by its representation of the state that us normal human beings confront everyday: the struggle against the apparent powerlessness to enact any meaningful or lasting change at all. Simultaneously, this helpless state does not exempt us from the responsibility to act in whatever small capacity we are able to resist oppression, ideological extremism, and the perpetuation of violence.

Towards That Symbol

That was a rather long but vital digression about the additional "construction and destruction" pages. To return to the issue of the symbolism in the final panel, here I will turn from seemingly affirming the tree as symbolizing the cycle of violence, towards what I think is the greater complexity of what the tree might "actually" symbolize.

As I've said above, I don't believe that the final chapter title is synonymous with 'toward the endless cycle of war'. In tone, theme, and characterization, SNK has always been defined by the tension between cruelty and beauty, the will to violence and the underlying desire for peace, and the rest of the contradictory impulses that all simultaneously coexist. The end of SNK as a whole commits to a similar lack of closure, ambiguity, and interpretive openness.

So far I have rambled on about only a view of the perpetual "cruelty" of history. Where, then, is the "beauty"?

In short, the "tree = cycle of violence" interpretation is obviously based on how that this tree recalls the original tree in which the spine creature, as the source of the power of the Titans, resided. But it's worth first considering, what exactly is this creature? We seem to get our answer in the chapter that most precisely crystallizes the dual "cruelty and beauty" of the world:

The spine creature might be said to be life itself. Or more specifically, the will of life to perpetuate itself, for no reason at all but for the fleeting moments in which we feel distinctly glad to have existed in the world.

The creature at the source of the Titans, and in extension the Titans themselves, is neither inherently a positive or negative, "good" or "evil", creative or destructive force. It's both and all of those at once. As with any power, the Titans were merely a tool that was put to use to oppressive ends.

So as I now suggest that the tree at the end is symbolically a "Tree of Life", I don't at all mean "life" in the typically celebratory or optimistic sense: rather, I mean it in the ambiguous, ambivalent, uncertain, and complex sense that has been evoked throughout the above discussion of the inevitable continuation of war.

The title "Toward The Tree on That Hill" is derived from its associations with Eren and Mikasa, but more specifically of course, from Armin's affirmation of existence. However, the tree as a symbol of existential affirmation is undercut with the revelation that, despite Armin's diplomatic mediation between the Allied Nations and Paradis, the island nation never escapes war just as no nation in the history of the earth has ever fully escaped war.

The image of Armin running toward that life-affirming tree by the end becomes twisted and complicated, as the image of the anonymous child approaching the Tree of Life evokes both awe at its beauty and grandeur, and a deep dread at the foreboding of its cyclical return to Ymir's tree that signalled the beginning of a bloody era.

And I think that is precisely it: Life is not some idealized, beautiful vision that we always want to run toward; it is also ironic, complicated, and dreadful. It is ambivalent. Like a literary symbol, the meaning of life cannot be pinned down absolutely. The tree therefore becomes itself a symbol of uncertainty, of an open future that is cyclical both in its beauty and war.

As a final observation, it is surely no coincidence that, the small, black, birdlike silhouettes of the war planes destroying the city from the sky is replaced by the similarly small black silhouettes of birds in the final panel.

If the birds represent freedom from war, the irony is that the immediately surrounding land appears to be one completely empty of people save for the exploring child; it is a freedom attained only without people's presence. Yet at the same time, a child from some existing civilization has reached it; perhaps it is freedom that they have reached, perhaps it is something else that they see in the tree. What is it that they were looking for? What does the tree and its history represent for the child, and what does it mean for their future? Alternatively, does the child-in-the-forest imagery negatively recall the warning that the world is one huge forest of predator and prey that we need to protect children from entering?

Rather than providing answers, this tree embodies all of the potential questions, and all of the potential answers. These possibilities will unfold themselves into an uncertain future beyond the chapters of history that Eren, Armin, Mikasa, Zeke, Erwin, and all the rest of the characters were part of and left their mark on; and whatever future this child will witness or create, it will similarly be one of the struggle against futility, as the journey begins anew with each generation in every new era. Neither - or both - hopeful or despairing, the final image of this tree, just like life itself, contains those innumerable irresolvable tensions as it gestures towards all possibilities, both oppressive and free.

[curiouskrp]

               “WELCOMING APT 5B TENANT, KIM YANI !

INFORMATION

age –  25 pronouns – she/her  occupation –  gs25 night manager moved into treehouse – six months ago

PERSONALITY: ISFP, THE ADVENTURER

positive –

artistic / passionate, obsessive, curious, imaginative, creative - over the years there have been many adjectives used to pinpoint yani’s ferocious obsession with the aesthetic, with knowledge and beauty. from painting to literature, film to sculpting, she’s busied overeager hands with innumerable past times. a bout of interest in sewing left over enthusiastic fingertips tinged in bloodied pinpricks, a season of interest in ceramics caked her nails in clay, a mishap with glassblowing burned her trachea and she lost her voice for a month.  her home is her workspace now, awash in warm colors and soft sketched lines, photographs strung up on the walls to examine with less tired eyes later - she’ll exhaust herself otherwise, staring at her work until a hypercritical eye begins to pick apart every minute detail, every miniscule flaw. her medium of choice in the moment, and for quite some time now has been photography, both digital and film. she works mostly with still images but has embarked on some video components. she has had her art in a few minor installations and featured in gallery shows, but has never had her own exhibit or show. 

charming / the most necessary to her success as both an artist and as a human being is the fact that yani is innately charming. warm, open, and bright she has an energy that is hard to resist. this is half by design, motivated by an obsessive need to be liked, which has prompted her to cultivate a sharp sense of humor and a dry wit to match. playful, hyperbolic, and creative, she can be a blast at parties or when in a group where she is able to play off the jokes and comments of others. however, leave her to her own devices in a one on one setting and she’s much more laid back and easy-going, preferring to let others steer the conversation. she’s got an easy grace and brightness to her disposition even when she falls into the macabre or dark, tinging it with a sense of humor.

negative –

unpredictable /  yani is not the friend you call at two in the morning for help, unless you’re looking to get really trashed and/or are okay with being left on read until a bleary and misspelled “sup?” at 4am. it isn’t intentional. yani is a slave to her emotions, moods and whims taking over each step of her life as she allows circumstance to pull her rough and tumble through the narration of her story. she seems almost a slave to impulse, which she may grandiose-ly chalk up to “leaving things up to fate” but in actuality is an effort to remove agency from her own hands due to a paralyzing fear of making weighty decisions. while she finds herself empathically able to relate to and understand the needs,  fears, and motives of others, she can easily become overwhelmed with this perceived information and find herself retreating without warning, lest she fail them in some way. her presence in life is both unpredictable and routine - she’ll flit in and out like a butterfly, appearing briefly to leave a mark before she retreats away again, always acting as if no time has passed. her personal moods are just as mercurial, vacillating wildly throughout the course of the day, or even across a number of hours. quick to anger and quicker still to apologize, she’s prone to impulse and erratic behavior that can be off-putting to those who prefer someone more stable and grounded. 

fluctuating self esteem / if you’re being kind, you’ll describe yani as sensitive. a bit empathic, too easily swayed by the emotions and feedback of others. she has a distinct lack of guard up against the world, for all her fronting to appear otherwise. the jaded exterior lasts for only a moment before it’s smashed by the reality of a girl with a heart on her sleeve. she wields a biting tongue against this like a lackluster defense mechanism, as if verbally lashing out at others can counteract how easily, how readily she can be hurt by them. while yani would often rather die than verbally express her feelings, fears, concerns, or worries in any real way, they’re very easily apparent even to the untrained eye. it frustrates her, how easily other people can read her ups and downs, of which there are many. she vacillates between an obsessive egotistical pride in herself and a damaging, truly deep set self loathing that eats up her insides. in reality she has no idea what she thinks about herself, if she’s  proud or not, and pulls all of her validation (as meager as it is) from external sources. thus, her self worth is immensely predicated on the actions, thoughts, and expression of those around her, leaving her incredibly vulnerable despite a veneer of a “devil may care” attitude that, in fact, persists long after the ruse is up.

HAUNT

how many ways can yani answer the question? 

is she haunted by her own failures? by choking in the middle of the entrance exams for university, clutching her chest in a violent panic attack in the bathroom and leaving with the test unfinished, summarily ruining her chances for higher education in the country of her birth that year? is she haunted by wasting her teenage years on booze and cigarettes and skateboards? is she haunted by pining after men and women that would never want her the way she wanted them, who relegated her to her childhood past of knobby knees and awkward limbs and dirt smudged cheeks, sunburnt and freckled from the sun that crested over the mountains?  is she haunted by the death of the one man who professed to love her, by the knowledge that she’d settled for him, had never been able to return the love he so generously gave her? is she haunted by the fear that she’d squandered her one chance of love and now it was summarily too late, and he was too far and too permanently gone, and she would now be punished for her ingratitude with years of nothing? is she haunted by her own propensity to run from the inevitable, to escape to distant locations only to realize her problems were still hers whether she be in paris or london or seoul?

it’s hard to say. 

maybe, in the end, yani is haunted by herself.

HISTORY

i. birth is an uneventful affair. she isn’t a planned baby but she isn’t unwelcome either, youngest of three by enough years that her older brothers dote on her in the abstract but aren’t really fans of actually having her around. it’s sort of a theme. her mother hires a nanny and goes back to work immediately - she took time off with the boys and she’s not willing to do it again. her father is as distant as he was with the elder two, unsurprisingly.

yani grows up this way, chasing after affection and attention, calling out for the same things that were doled out to the other two so easily. she wants her brothers to play with her - dolls or tag, she’s not picky, she’ll take what she can get. they play hide and seek but she always hides, and they never seek, just let the little girl coop herself up in the closet for a half an hour, or until she dozes off. eventually she stops asking.

 ii. she grows into the hand she’s been dealt. she wears a tan like a shield, testament to hours spent outside in the sun, relentlessly scrambling over the landscape. they live on the outskirts of a little town on jeju island, and the sun and surf and sand and rocks and mountains are her company. she takes after her brothers, athletic and enthusiastic, seemingly immune to the scraping of her knees and the scabs on her elbows, bruises on her shins.

yani feels the freest on the skateboard she inherits from her brother - or, more specifically, steals from his room when his interest in girls and his worry about entrance exams takes over his free time. in this way she learns two things: she can only rely on herself, and that she must always, always take that which she desires. 

 she spends hours on it, rolling through town to the ultimate displeasure of the ahjummas who sit outside the town hall and gossip. a girl should be more demure, she should be more careful, she’s going to hurt herself or someone else, they say, but yani is past the point of craving approval now. or at least, that’s what she tells herself, disregard is a shield she equips, straps it over a soft heart, hardens herself by hoping for little and expecting even less. when you expect the world to let you down there is a freeness in being proven correct when it doesn’t surprise you by being anything but bleak.

iii. high school treats her well. there are only so many other kids in town, so it’s not like there’s enough trouble for cliques. not when they’ve all known each other from birth. there isn’t much reason to come to the little excuse for a city, unless you’re a tourist or you’ve got a burning passion for the fishing industry, and even then there are better choices in destination. she studies well enough, but yani is prone to distraction. her attention wanders and she spends plenty of time staring out of the window, as opposed to anything else. but she’s clever, and when she does apply herself she catches up just fine.

there’s a certain sadness to a decaying rural town, and the older yani gets the heavier it weighs on her, this realization that there are no opportunities here, that the only chance for a viable future any of them have exists in some ephemeral elsewhere always slightly out of reach. it’s the cycle of poverty in action - the jobs are manual labor or hardly impressive, few remain in the town, the aging population is setting the community up to collapse in on itself, but what is anyone able to do about it? so they drink or they fuck or they whine about it, anything to carry on the way they always have. from this town yani learns denial and resignation, in a bizarre blend that ought not be properly possible.

iv.

whatever chance she had of success in school goes down the drain with truancy and delinquency, with smokes stolen from the corner store and beer she convinces neighborhood oppas to buy for her with their ids. she gets what she wants and she doesn’t look back, morality a luxury she can’t afford and frankly doesn’t try too hard to squeeze in anyway. she loves boys that don’t love her back and she chases a high that never quite seems to satisfy. climbs a little bit higher, goes a little bit further, to fill herself with the seratonin and the adrenaline that seem to evade her. 

when she finds out, in the dead of night, half drunk with her best friend, who has never seen her the way she’s wanted to be seen, that his older brother - her boyfriend, her second choice, because he sees her the way her best friend refuses to look - is dead, in a car crash, her word falls apart. it crumbles. 

v.

yani deals with her tragedies and her uncertainties in the way she has been taught. she denies it even unto herself, buries herself into distractions. it gets harder, immeasurably, when her two best friends leave for the military one after the other. she submits an application, a portfolio. it’s a long shot, but she makes it. she leaves, on a plane, in a search for more ways to bury her heart. 

it’s so easy to find them in a city like paris. in drink and drugs and then maybe even in boys and girls. she finds her redemption in sex and adrenaline and in petty, stupid actions. she is a terror on two slender legs, she is weaponized femininity and a cutting tongue, she is every bit of sharp wit and killer instinct wrapped in a devastatingly pretty package. the last distraction, the most enjoyable and the most wholesome, comes in the form of an old film camera. she buys it with money she’s picked out of the pockets of men who lean to close to her in clubs, men too old to promise her the things they do, who line her pockets and give her gifts in the hope that she’ll be foolish enough now to offer her youth to those leeches, those vampiric men that wait so eagerly and desperately to drain her dry.  it’s another way to put a distance between herself and the world; observer and artist, not integral, not intertwined. she can expose the truth of the world without involving her own truth in it, betrays herself in a thousand tiny ways. 

vi.

it is so terribly easy to get what you want in a city like this. there is always someone willing to give it to you, for a price of course. yani learns to play this game, to divorce herself from her own reality, to compartmentalize. she feels like a hundred different girls. she feels like a line of glasses on a counter, each varying levels of empty. she feels like she could shatter in a moment, or sing beneath a touch, or neither, or both. 

she feels like they can sense it on her, the sins that paint her skin. she rots herself with alcohol, nicotine, prescription pills designed for someone decidedly not her. she wears herself down with long nights, early mornings, insomnia that clings to her, a weight that settles heavy, drags her down. her moods are mercurial, she tears through the people around her like a storm, intent on destruction, pausing for the briefest moments of calm before the winds pick up once more. 

she falls apart this way, bits and pieces at first, and then all at once, like a spaceship reentering orbit too quickly, she is engulfed. 

vii. 

in the end she stays there, in france, for a little longer. longer than she’d intended. money starts to run out, her feeble language skills are put to the test. it’s sheer luck that lands her a job at an art gallery, luck on top of luck that gets her through an accelerated program. in the end, she spends two and a half years in france, eventually returning to her dismal little rural town. returns with a degree from france that means very little besides “you didn’t make it into a korean school” and “you dedicated your life to creative pursuits that will provide you with nothing.”

she returns with her camera, with a few years of gallery experience, with a couple thousand dollars saved and very little in the way of confidence or strength. she has dreams she barely dares to dream, thoughts she can hardly expose herself too. with a portfolio and no direction, no idea what to do with herself, for herself. 

viii. 

by the time she gets back, one of her friends is out of the military at last, the other long gone for seoul. she spends two months in the little town before she can’t handle it anymore. has photographed every inch of the decaying rural landscape, the town left forgotten by progress, by the government, by the future. her collection on the state of the town, deemed a cutting photojournalistic insight to rural korean poverty, becomes a minor sensation and is picked up by a gallery in seoul. it’s the boost she needs to relocate, flees the town that made her, that funded her flight, to head for the city, to lose herself again. 

seoul is much the same as any other city. she wanted it to have answers that it doesn’t. she hates her apartment, a half basement decked out in mold and wrinkled vinyl flooring over the thick pipes of the ondol. she drags herself through the day to day, gets a job and does what she can to keep herself afloat. takes pictures, sells them, does what she can. it’s unfulfilling. she’s frustrated. her friends feel distant and she feels thoroughly disconnected from the world around her, floating as if on the currents of the ocean. 

viv. 

the treehouse offers a chance at a community, the selfsame thing she has done so much to avoid, so earnestly  distanced herself from - lest anyone figure out the great pretending of her life. that she’s not half the person, half the artist she wants to be. she lives a life steeped in imposter’s syndrome and unspoken words, preserving her thoughts in notebooks and photographs, fragments of time and feeling captured without explanation, left for the viewer to infer.

[greenpapayaartprojects]

Missing Negros in the Time of the Monster’s War

The text below was presented by Norberto Roldan during “Contemporary Art and Activism in the Asia Pacific — A Regional View of First Nations-Asia Intersections” presented by Hyphenated Projects and Incinerator Gallery on December 9, 2020 as part of Hyphenated Biennial (Melbourne). Other guests include Jenna Lee, Biung Ismahasan, Greg Dvorak, and Michelle Antoinette (moderator).

BACOLOD

In 1980, under Ferdinand Marcos’ Martial Law, I moved from Manila to Bacolod City, the capital of Negros Occidental.

During a very turbulent period in our country’s political history, I decided to manage a sugar farm. I never imagined myself becoming a political activist, but having been exposed to the realities of a semi-feudal system prevailing in this sugar-producing province easily turned me into one. As a reluctant “sugar planter,” I was exposed to the “hacienda” life, a capital-intensive plantation system devoted solely to sugar cultivation. Hence, by its very nature as a monocrop economy, the farming system was never designed to be self-sufficient. I have witnessed how sugar workers had been exploited through unfair labor practices.

During this period, as the island was struggling with social unrest, the political upheaval against Ferdinand Marcos was gaining momentum nationwide. The insurgency being waged by the Communist Party of the Philippines and the New People’s Army was at its peak. A revolution was unfolding in the countryside with many remote villages in Negros declared by the revolutionary movement as liberated zones. This was a particular period in our history when one was expected to take sides.

In 1983, following the assassination of opposition leader Benigno Aquino, the Concerned Artists of the Philippines (CAP) was organized in Manila and, shortly after, a chapter was formed in Bacolod. It became the umbrella organization of cultural workers and progressive artists working in theater, music, literature, and visual arts. CAP was at the forefront of protest actions in the province, leading a cultural movement not only against the Marcos dictatorship but also against a semi-feudal system that has persistently oppressed and exploited sugar workers for several generations. I became the vice chair of the CAP in Negros and that was how I became a cultural worker and an activist.

As members of a progressive organization identified with the Left, our activities were always under government scrutiny. Our task was to produce banners, murals, and literature for rallies and mass actions and we operated under constant threat of military harassment and detention. Under the dictatorship, activists, cultural workers, artists, journalists, academics, and intellectuals who were sympathetic to the plight of the poor and the oppressed were marked as enemies of the State. During the Marcos regime, thousands of these perceived enemies were either imprisoned, tortured, raped, or killed.

After the EDSA Revolution in 1986 which saw the exile of Marcos and the installation of Corazon Aquino as president of the Philippines, the CAP in Negros started to fall apart. Many artists believed in the democratic space promised by the Aquino presidency and thus decided to move towards less radical engagements. Members saw this as an opportunity to distance from CAP and to shed off a political stigma — that of being branded as mere propagandists of the Left — and pursue a practice in more legitimate institutional venues.

To keep the alliance intact with those who decided to leave CAP, I founded Black Artists of Asia (BAA) with comrades who were still committed to pursue art as a tool to bring about social change but outside the organizational influence of the national democratic movement. After putting in place a structure to hold BAA together, I then left the country for a two-year self-imposed exile and stayed in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia between 1987 and 1989.

SYDNEY

The initial activities of BAA centered on exhibitions aimed at bringing the real stories of the sugar workers in Negros to the attention of the world. Early on, BAA had sent exhibitions to Rotterdam in 1986 and to Tokyo in 1987, both facilitated by the Philippine international solidarity movement in the Netherlands and Japan. But, by far, the most ambitious project BAA has ever organized was the exhibition series “Images of the Continuing Struggle” in 1989 in Sydney. The main section of the exhibition was held at Artspace, the prints and photography section was held at Firstdraft, and some selected works were hung in La Lucha Continua (1989), a festival of progressive theater and films from third world countries, in Belvoir Street Theatre.

In the Sunday Art Section of The Sydney Morning Herald on March 4, 1989, Christopher Allen wrote:

“The Filipino work at Artspace takes us far from the international contemporary art world and into one of those cultures of our region which are at once so familiar and so foreign to us. Of all the ASEAN nations, the Philippines have had the most extreme experience of colonialism. Four centuries of Spanish and, more recently, American rule have left the country Catholic and largely English-speaking. To a visitor passing through Manila, the country seems to exist in a cultural limbo between East and West. Politically, it represents an often brave attempt to run an American-style democracy on an unstable foundation of poverty, corruption, and gangsterism. The most hopeful sign that one finds as a casual visitor is a genuinely free and energetically critical press, perhaps unique among our neighbours in the region.

The art in this exhibition is also politically critical, coming from a group of artists in the central-southern island of Negros. And this is an art determined overwhelmingly by extrinsic factors — by part it is designed to play in a political struggle…”

Christopher Allen may as well have spoken about the present when he said, “Politically, [the Philippines] represents an often brave attempt to run an American-style democracy on an unstable foundation of poverty, corruption and gangsterism.” But the “genuinely free and energetically critical press” is no longer true. Duterte and his allies in Congress shut down the biggest broadcasting network in the Philippines last September and they continue to harass and intimidate the press that are critical of the administration.

BACK TO BACOLOD

I returned to the Philippines in late 1989 and, together with BAA, set into motion the launching of the first Visayas Islands Visual Arts Exhibition and Conference, or VIVA ExCon. The first VIVA ExCon was held in Bacolod in 1990. It was an attempt to bridge the islands by linking up art communities, to provide a venue for sharing knowledge, to discuss issues affecting the region, and to consolidate the Visayan art scene. It was created to address the specific urgencies of Visayan artists and cultural workers persisting in the shadows of Manila’s cultural imperialism.

During VIVA ExCon 2018, when I took up again the role of artistic director, VIVA ExCon asserted its basic role as a platform for political discourse and actions concerning the rural areas.

Much has been said about the success of VIVA ExCon as the longest-running, artist-led biennial in the country. Its modest claim of having “bridged” the islands in the Visayas has, over the years, been repeatedly affirmed. But as an artists’ initiative, it still has a long way to go as far as its social aspirations of contributing and uplifting the lives of people in the countryside.

The rural ecology has been rapidly changing. Prospects in agriculture and aquaculture are met with daunting challenges not only in the Visayas but throughout the rest of the Philippines. Unstable policies on land conversion from agricultural to industrial zones, sketchy implementation of real land reform, damages to agricultural crops due to natural calamities, and most of all, the ongoing killings of farmers, activists, and human rights advocates and the ongoing militarization of the countrysides are just the most formidable obstacles for the rural sector to develop into peaceful and more productive communities.

After 30 years since it started in Bacolod, the real work of VIVA ExCon has barely begun.

***

The CAP in Manila has taken up its role again as a leading force in the protest movement. In the urban centers, Respond and Break the Silence Against the Killings (RESBAK) has been actively involved in resisting extrajudicial killings brought about by Duterte’s drug war, while the Artist Alliance for Genuine Land Reform and Rural Development (SAKA) has allied with and is working closely with the peasant movement in facing the challenges of rural democratization in the Philippines.

On the other hand, with the underground movement and the New People’s Army gaining strength again in the rural areas, the Philippines is back to where it was in the ‘80s, perhaps in an even worse situation.

Norberto Roldan December 10, 2020

All images except no. 10 are from Green Papaya Art Projects Archives: 1. Mural for a rally painted by CAP-Negros artists, 1986. 2. Public mural painted by Visayan artists and organized by CAP-Negros, 1987. 3. Poster for a concert organized by CAP-Negros, illustration by Charlie Co, design by Norberto Roldan, 1986. 4. Poster for a festival of people’s culture, illustration and design by Nunelucio Alvarado, 1984. 5. Poster for BAA exhibition in Japan, design by Norberto Roldan, 1987. 6. Poster for BAA exhibition in Bacolod, design by Norberto Roldan, 1988. 7. Flyer for a BAA exhibition in Artspace, Sydney, design by Norberto Roldan, 1989. 8. Flyer for a BAA exhibition in Firstdraft, Sydney, design by Norberto Roldan, 1989. 9. Poster for the first VIVA ExCon in Bacolod, design by Norberto Roldan, 1990. 10. Screenshot from the "Contemporary Art and Activism in the Asia Pacific" panel, top from left: Kirri (interpreter), Jenna Lee, and Michelle Antoinette; bottom from left: Greg Dvorak, Norberto Roldan, and Biung Ismahasan.

More info:

Contemporary Art and Activism in the Asia Pacific — A Regional View of First Nations-Asia Intersections https://fb.watch/2hq5UT75Gx/

VIVA EXCON 2020 https://www.facebook.com/vivaexcon2020

If you can: https://greenpapaya.art/donation

[to-future-self]

This is very long and unplanned

Well, hello

So, I diverge from my parents. Like most adolescents, I do, yes, disagree with my parents. I know, I know, shocker.

I find it to be very scary, really. Suddenly, those who always had the answer don't have it anymore. And, once again, the fact that there is no certainty in life slaps me in the face again and again and again. Sometimes I worry I'll never get used to it, to life. I feel as if no one really does, but I don't think this is the uplifting mantra I want to carry throughout my existence. "No one will ever understand what we are supposed to do, because we aren't supposed to do anything!" Living isn't supposed to be meaningful, not by default. But I do know that the only one who can attribute meaning to life is the individual living it.

The fact that we are all individuals is the reason there will never be true peace. No, we're too different, all of us, in so many ways. This doesn't mean we can't coexist with those differences, but I don't believe there's any plausible scenario (and by that I mean, no thought reforming BS or total human annihilation) where everyone is quiet and happy. This is one beautiful and terrifying thing about humans, we're bound to noise, never to silence.

A community, whether we like it or not, is not homogeneous. It's a bunch of individuals that are scrunched together and not mixing, no matter how hard some try. Every single one of us is just weirdly unique, with our own objectives, likes, dislikes, good and not so good facts and beliefs. We're all just existing, and we all have the right to since we all have value. To exist is, supposedly, very valuable in itself.

I'll get to the value of a human being and MY OWN VALUE as a human being eventually, don't worry. I looove rambling in tiresome texts.

But let's get to the point, at least the initial one: Should all people be allowed to exist? Or, at least, should people be able to experience freedom or is it more secure to tame it in some capacity?

Now, what do I mean about that?

My parents are not anti-racists, they also are quite careless when it comes to cute 2020 surprise, Corona, and my dad is quite unfond of concepts such as feminism. Ok, they do sound like idiots, and that worries me because they're not. And it kills me that I can't love them less for it.

I came to the conclusion that one can't end an idea. Ideas are created and exist, immortal, but not undiscussable. Therefore, racism or sexism or any bad-ism will never end, as long as there's someone out there that truly believes it, or some kind of registration, either being through manuscripts and historical papers of some sort or just through the impact the past makes in the present and future (as a 16-year-old, my conclusions are not mind-blowing, they're mostly stupid and lame and not original).

And those bad-isms exist because of the conflict we, humans, will never get rid of. Bad-isms exist because some believe that others, different from them, shouldn't exist, or are not correct, or are inferior to them for some reason. Basically, you shouldn't exist, because you're not like me. And to disagree with those is plausible, right? Everybody should have the right to exist, even if harmony is unachievable. RIght?

That's when you get movement, revolution, opposition, which is great. Not easy nor pretty, even though some think so (yes, I'm looking at you, miss ˜I-Like-Romanticising-History". Did you enjoy Hamilton?) Those people who were massively mistreated through the course of human existence are screaming, and the world starts to notice their voice. And it's just so fucking amazing, even if things aren't fixed, and most likely never will. Things are slowly getting better. Hurray!

Hurray?

Now, I'm no expert in social sciences. Actually, I'm no expert in anything, I'm sixteen. But it is bizarre to see how people have a hard time looking past their own nose. Me included, obviously, but let's talk about that later. Ok, things got better, but they're not good. It's not very difficult to find some numbers stating how many black people die every day because of cop violence, or how many women are being abused every day in any social sphere they're inserted in, or how many trans people are beaten to death every day because of their identity. And that's me not remembering many, many other examples of how things are not alright. We're not walking on sunshine. However, to those who do not really experience any of it, or care to know about it, this is very foreign. Those are people who look at the past, think "Yikes. Good thing the world is not like that anymore!", and go live their lives carelessly. They don't see anything wrong with the now, now is good, and they don't understand how there are people who are still complaining! Hello-o, you got your rights, shut up already!

That, gentleladies and gentlemen and gentlenon-binary, is my father.

And that same father feels like he has no right to be wrong, or of disagreeing with people. He's terrified of the idea of limitation of freedom, he thinks it will lead to some kind of new dictatorship, and "they" are already working on it - "They" being the masterminds behind a to-be controlled world of some sort. Therefore, according to my dad, we can't get someone arrested for thinking the most absurd or saying the most absurd, because 1. They haven't done anything tangible yet, 2. Even if they're complete and utterly disgusting, they have the right of believing and saying whatever they want.

I feel as if this is the main ideological conflict we have nowadays (I'm not sure, I don't know way too much about the world to have an opinion, but we'll go back to that too). We have people who want to diminish, control, or even exterminate others, but, if they don't effectively do anything, should they be punished? As someone who isn't affected by many of the violence in the world today, I don't know.

Because I know there's nothing I can do to stop it from happening, bad-isms are always going to be there, but we need to keep trying to make them almost nonexistent. But then, you can't convince people, or explain to them, the damages of something through violence. This type of change can't happen through force, because it won't clarify anything to those who don't know or don't care. This doesn't mean passivity, but it means effective dialogue and loads of patience and, honestly, that's really hard too. I don't think there will be many people willing to persist in a (most likely) one-sided conversation with their abusers. And that's to say that all people can be convinced, which is not the case at all! People are stubborn, especially when they're talking about something they feel deeply about, such as their moral compass or their beliefs.

I'm afraid I advocate for different types of resistance or social change because I don't know what it feels like. Because I don't understand suffering. I understand anger, sadness, and guilt, but not suffering. Not truly. And then, I must not forget that I have been raised by my parents, who believe that yes, anyone can be proven wrong, and yes, you should be able to think freely, no matter how disgusting what you think about is. And I thought I agreed with that too until the day I realized I'm terrified of judgment, and again the day of the racist episode in my school happened.

Some guys had a Whatsapp group. I have no idea what they talked about usually, but I, and the entirety of my city (and the internet, obviously), got to see bits of a terrifying conversation. They were talking about what girls they would rape, but then they got to one in particular. Since she was black, she was worth less than a piece of gum, raping her was disgusting, she would smell awful and they would prefer to sell her on the internet. You know, like a slave. LOL.

People can be inhuman sometimes. Later, I would discuss this episode with my parents. It was sort of inevitable since it was all over the news, but it made me feel awful. Because "Hell, they're kids! Stupid kids, but they didn't do anything. Everything could be racism then, you know? Who is to judge what is and isn't? What will they do next, invade our privacy? Check if we are or aren't conforming to what 'they' believe is right? People say stupid shit all the time! What will 'they' do, arrest everyone?" Holy shit, the way they diminished the situation, the way they made it about something else! I know they don't agree with the kids, but what the fuck, no empathy at all? "The girl must hear that every day, she's fine" FUCK, WHAT ABOUT THAT IS FINE??

And then, well, I realized I'm not my parents. And then I realized I still love them. A lot. And that scares me. I hope I'm not a victim of unconditional love, it makes you accept the unacceptable. But I love my parents, and it will take more than them ignoring human suffering for me to stop. Like, my dad voted (and seems to be in love with) for a guy who thinks "people like me" should be beaten as a child to "take the gay out of them", and I still love him. It is fucking terrifying.

Then, I get to one of my greatest self-doubts. Am I critical of violent methods of action because, deep down, I believe there should be no action? People should just exist? What is the best next step to coexisting? Should voices be shut by the voiceless? Are voiceless shutting anyone up? Should people care or not? If we don't care, there's eternal apathy, but if we do, there's just a great war of interest. What is right? Who determines what is right? Can people be wrong if being wrong means suffering? Am I scared of knowing things because then I'll have to acknowledge I'm really, truly horrible and have been doing everything wrong? Am I that scared of disagreeing with what I believe is true? Of what people I respect and want to like me believe is true?

Unanswered. I think. I don't know.

Hi, I'm someone highly dependent on others' opinions about me. Not so long ago, I noticed that I lie. All the time. To the point I don't remember things I said, or can't keep up with them. 'Cause I need to be liked. I need so much to be liked I don't think I have opinions I haven't borrowed from other people. I can't act by myself, I feel the need of having someone tell me what to do, what is right, what is wrong, how to live. Shit, I ruined my friendship with the only people I talked to in 5 years because I projected all my insecurities and a sense of right and wrong on them and then blamed them for it. And now, while I'm trying to stop some of my bad habits, such as lying, I am so lost. So, so lost. And I don't know if that's because I lost my sense of identity once those who told me how to be are not there anymore or because this is me. Actually me. And I hate it. I feel as if anyone I knew before now was just meeting a facade.

I don't like what I used to like anymore. I don't read, don't draw, don't write, only sing when at the verge of tears, almost never listen to music, don't dance alone at 3 A.M., don't make pancakes, can't stand my birds, haven't changed clothes in almost a month, don't seem to find the most hilarious shit funny. I'm giving cooking a try, it's been very fun when I'm alone. That's another thing: being alone sucks, but it's how I want to be 99% of the time.

I always struggled with feeling good about myself. Because the bits that I knew were entirely me never seemed appealing to most people. Sometimes I can't stand myself so much that I make myself stop thinking, fearing that someone might think my thoughts are uninteresting. I never felt so uninteresting in my life. My biggest thrill recently has been planning how to organize the notes in my binder, and I'm not even good at it. If I could, I would shut up forever, because I never know what to say. I'm terrible at it, convos. Recently, I had this breakdown because I was searching "How to talk to people" on Youtube. I never felt so pathetic, so useless… So I cried for about 3 hours.

Actually, I always feel as if I am wrong. Nothing I do is ever right. It's very fun, this constant feeling that everybody hates you and is just keeping up with your bullshit since they're too polite to just say "You suck". It's so weird that I'm constantly telling myself that if people knew the truth about me, I would be completely alone. So I'm constantly telling myself how I should just cut everyone out of my life so they don't have to waste so much on me. And it's all in my head but if I don't talk to anyone, it'll come true, but if I do talk, people will just realize how much of a piece of shit and nothing I am.

My therapist once told me that I'm not obliged to be entertaining all the time and that I can be boring, but the truth is that I don't know anything. I am very much filled with just air and, if I don't make things up, people will be just stuck there with absolutely nothing. And then leave. And it will be all my fault, as it usually is.

I think the most pathetic recent thing I've done is to become possessive of this pillow I have. I use it to feel less lonely at night, sometimes I like to pretend it is my boyfriend and just hold it real tight (not really because then "I would be crushing him"). God, I've cried so much against this pillow and slept with it so much to the point I can't sleep unless I'm hugging something. And, sometimes, when my sister lies in the bed with me, I don't let her lie on top of it. Do you know when children have those clothes they get really attached to? I feel like that. Memory Boy, if you're reading this, I'm sorry if it's creepy. But it is the truth.

By the way, I'm so sorry if I talk too much and don't give you the chance to talk. Or if I'm never talking to you. This seems contradictory, but I miss you so fucking much and I really love you. I'm really sorry I'm not present, I'm just not myself enough or interesting and I really don't want you to see me like this.

My family is not really respecting the quarantine, and they convinced me to go out with them a few times. And I hate it. So much. I become paranoid that I'm part of the problem and I'll kill someone or that people will know that I'm out and scream with me and hate me and judge me and hate me. And my fucking dad thinks everything is fine and dandy and if he goes out without a mask he won't infect anyone and if he gets infected and dies it's fine because life goes on without him and this whole thing will be over in no time he can show you the fucking numbers because only 100 people are dying per day in this state, isn't this great? People are still dying, my dad doesn't seem to care because "you do you. If there are some idiots who don't care, let them die. Why does it concern you?" as if this isn't a situation where your actions affect the people around you and as if I shouldn't care if people die and as if I shouldn't care if my own fucking father dies because "they chose to do so to themselves". Fucking amazing. Thanks, Dad, I'm so less worried now.

And, when I refuse to go out, my family blames me for being no fun at all or "having a phobia of the outside.", since I have absolutely no reason not to go, everything is fine and dandy now, shopping malls are reopening and there's no way a second wave could happen, no sir. And, when I do go out, I try to wear things I would never wear and avoid phones so there's no proof I was outside. And, when I come back, I start searching for pictures of me between those pictures taken of people outside and feeling guilty, so guilty for going because if I didn't want to go, I could have not gone. And then I'll feel terrible and hate myself and cry and want to hurt myself, even though I won't. And just feel bad for it forever because it's my fault that I went outside and I could have just stayed, why didn't I stay, now everyone will hate me so much and I'll have contributed to the death statistics in my country and people will call me out for it and hate and never talk to me again and I'll have killed someone and made their family miserable and it will be all my fucking fault as usual because I could keep my ass home.

And oh my god, I'm so great. I'm so completely fine, I have nothing to worry about and I keep creating problems when I could just shut up. Sometimes I feel as if my feelings are wrong and far too much so I try to pretend they don't exist because, well, they shouldn't. I have no real reason to feel as sad or angry as I do all the time, especially when there are people with real problems out there and I'm just shoving the fucking great life I have against their faces and pretending as if it is the worst. When, actually, I make up all my problems and I should just stop whining and just be fucking happy already because I have no reason to feel sad and angry. I just wrote down some things that are on my mind but they're so fine and not a problem at all. I just really hate being too much.

Honestly, I usually re-read my letters to correct it and make it coherent, but I won't this time. I seriously blacked out while writing this and just am not willing to revisit right now. I've been writing this for three days now and, most of it I did in a row. Spent two days in the beginning and then an entire day just vomiting words nonstop. I'm sorry if it was long.

[jonathanalumbaugh]

Weekly Digest

Dec 9, 2017, 2nd issue.

A roundup of stuff I consumed this week. Topics this week leaned heavily towards design, design thinking, with a smattering of research methods-related articles.

Read

5 Prototyping lessons from a BMX backflip

The false art of the feed has been deconstructed before (see: the excellent recent expose by The New Yorker’s Rachel Monroe that reveals the depressing reality behind the bohemian #vanlife movement), but less has been said about the deeper effects it’s had on our collective mental health. For designers and other people who work digitally, the so-called “internet effect” goes particularly deep, but just how deep, and what that might mean for our waking life is hard to tell at this point. 

10 Creative Women Reveal Their Deepest Feelings in RoAndCo’s New Romance Journal—Here’s What We Learned

Echo’s voice-activated features are great for seniors with dementia:

Instantly answers questions, like “what day is it?” or “what time is it?” — it’s a machine, so it will never get annoyed or frustrated!

Plays music and read audiobooks and the news — no need to fuss with complicated controls

Looks up information about anything — like, “what’s playing on TV tonight?”

AMAZON ECHO FOR DEMENTIA: TECHNOLOGY FOR SENIORS

[Mies Van Der Rohe,] pioneer of modernism discusses the Bauhaus as well as his own individual work, all of it interesting to anyone with an inclination toward midcentury European-American architecture and design, none of it ultimately more relevant than the final words the master speaks: "I don't want to be interesting. I want to be good."

An Oral History of the Bauhaus: Hear Rare Interviews (in English) with Walter Gropius, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe & More

Persuasion is at the core of norm creation, emergence of collective action, and solutions to ‘tragedy of the commons’ problems. In this paper, we show that the directionality of friendship ties affect the extent to which individuals can influence the behavior of each other. Moreover, we find that people are typically poor at perceiving the directionality of their friendship ties and that this can significantly limit their ability to engage in cooperative arrangements. This could lead to failures in establishing compatible norms, acting together, finding compromise solutions, and persuading others to act. We then suggest strategies to overcome this limitation by using two topological characteristics of the perceived friendship network. The findings of this paper have significant consequences for designing interventions that seek to harness social influence for collective action.

Are You Your Friends’ Friend? Poor Perception of Friendship Ties Limits the Ability to Promote Behavioral Change 

Creation knows no multitasking.

Before I Begin

For decades, policymakers have been concerned that poor people will waste free money by using it on cigarettes and alcohol. A report on the perception of stakeholders in Kenya about such programs found a “widespread belief that cash transfers would either be abused or misdirected in alcohol consumption and other non-essential forms of consumption.”

The opposite is true, according to a recently published research paper(paywall) by David Evans of the World Bank and Anna Popova of Stanford University.

Definitive data on what poor people buy when they’re just given cash

Some blame human beings’ basic optimism, if not egocentrism, for the disconnect between perceived and actual friendships. Others point to a misunderstanding of the very notion of friendship in an age when “friend” is used as a verb, and social inclusion and exclusion are as easy as a swipe or a tap on a smartphone screen. It’s a concern because the authenticity of one’s relationships has an enormous impact on one’s health and well-being...

[Ronald Sharp] recalled the many hours he spent in engrossing conversation with his friend Eudora Welty, who was known not only for her Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction but also for her capacity for friendship. Together they edited “The Norton Book of Friendship,” an anthology of works on the topic. “The notion of doing nothing but spending time in each other’s company has, in a way, become a lost art,” replaced by volleys of texts and tweets, Mr. Sharp said. “People are so eager to maximize efficiency of relationships that they have lost touch with what it is to be a friend.”

Do Your Friends Actually Like You?

Dina D. Pomeranz tweet

The next step is this: you have to commit to make a proportional investment in corrective action at every level of the analysis. So, in the example above, we'd have to take five corrective actions...

Because the most common problems keep recurring, your prevention efforts are automatically focused on the 20% of your product that needs the most help. That's also the same 20% that causes you to waste the most time. So five whys pays for itself awfully fast, and it makes life noticeably better almost right away. All you have to do is get started.

Five Whys

We started with a simple wiki page with a few bullet points of things that new engineers had tripped over recently. As we kept doing root cause analysis, the list grew. In response to Five Whys that noticed that not all new engineers were reading the list, we expanded it into a new engineer curriculum. Soon, each new engineer was assigned a mentor, and we made it part of the mentor’s job to teach the curriculum. Over time, we also made investments in making it easier to get a new engineer set up with their private sandbox, and even dealt with how to make sure they’d have a machine on their desk when they started. The net effect of all this was to make new engineers incredibly productive right away – in most cases, we’d have them deliver code to production on their very first day. We never set out to build a world-class engineering-training process. Five Whys simply helped us eliminate tons of waste by building one.

How to conduct a Five Whys root cause analysis

On social media, it is easy to mistake popularity for credibility, and that is exactly what the fakers are hoping for. To most people, a Twitter account with tens of thousands of followers is an easy-to-read indication of personal success and good reputation, a little like hundreds of good reviews on Yelp or a long line outside a restaurant.

How to become internet famous for $68

It’s important designers aren’t the only people in the product organization to feel responsible for the user experience. I’ve made it a point to work with our field team to get more employees visiting clinics, and looking into ways to make patient stories and issues known throughout the company. I love having a team of engineers who will often jump in and defend our user before I’m even aware of an issue (one developer, in particular, handled a lot of debates against requests for a particular modal, dubbed by him: “the nuclear option.” Knowing he was there to defend the user, I didn’t even need to get involved.) 

Interviews aren’t the only way to gain empathy

The Pareto principle (also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity) states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes.

Pareto Principle

"I think harm reduction is not giving up on people," said Goulão. "I think it is respecting their timings and assuming that even if someone is still using drugs, that person deserves the investment of the state in order to have a better and longer life."

Portugal’s Example: What Happened After It Decriminalized All Drugs, From Weed to Heroin

The 5 Whys Process We Use to Understand the Root of Any Problem

People are “groupish,” and we tend to form groups automatically. Some have argued that this is due in large part to humans’ tribal past and evolutionary development. Regardless of why we are this way, the descriptive truth is that this is how we are.

The Office Finale’s ‘Miraculous’ Quote — The Scientific Truth Behind It

We share stuff that ignores wider realities, selectively shares information, or is just an outright falsehood. The misinformation is so rampant that the Washington Post stopped publishing its internet fact-checking column because people didn’t seem to care if stuff was true.

The “Other Side” Is Not Dumb

Providing cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) to women in rural Pakistan who were suffering from perinatal depression has had persistent positive effects on their mental health, their parenting behaviour and their financial empowerment seven years later.

TREATING MATERNAL DEPRESSION: Evidence of the impact on mental health, parenting, financial autonomy and child development

One useful technique is to map ideas on a risk/reward space. Those that score high on both risk and reward are considered moonshots, the high potential ideas. Ideas low on both risk and reward are safe bets. Moving along ideas in the different quadrants of the risk/reward space (with the possible of exception of high risk/low reward) preserves innovation potential.

When brainstorming fails, throw an imaginary cat

Last month, the Pew Research Center released a study showing that nearly a third of those who went to graduate or professional school have “down the line” liberal views on social, economic and environmental matters, whereas this is true for just one in 10 Americans generally. An additional quarter of postgrads have mostly liberal views. These numbers reflect drastic change: While professionals have been in the Democratic column for a while, in 1994 only 7 percent of postgrads held consistently liberal political opinions.

Why Are the Highly Educated So Liberal?

A wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. The use of the term "wicked" here has come to denote resistance to resolution, rather than evil. Another definition is "a problem whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point". Moreover, because of hard interdependencies, the effort to fix one part of a wicked problem may open or create other problems.

Wicked problem

Looked at

Satire and Social Activism Come Alive in Images of Death

Watched

How small a hole can a mouse get through? Experiments.

Mies Van Der Rohe - Architecture as language

Mouse trap maze experiments

Pride and Prejudice, Antidote and Antivenom

See How Easily a Rat Can Wriggle Up Your Toilet | National Geographic

Free stuff

[hoursofreading]

“I’ve been troubled by inequality for a long time. When I majored in physics as an undergraduate, I once stared at the distribution curve for American household income that showed profound inequality, and tried to fit the data against black-body distribution or Maxwell–Boltzmann distribution. I wanted to know how such a curve came about, and whether it implied some kind of universality: something as natural as particle energy distribution functions, so natural it led to despair.

In one sense, the entire economic history of dynastic China can be understood as the history of struggles against inequality. Numerous dynasties engaged in reform measures such as land redistribution into equal tenements, enacting laws to prevent the wealthy from acquiring large estates by squeezing off small tenants, etc. But even if land ownership was relatively even at the beginning of a dynasty, waves of mergers into large estates eventually swept through the country until tax reforms by the middle of the dynasty had to accept unequal land ownership as a fact. Indeed, if the regimes had insisted on resisting the economic impetus driving such mergers, the economy of the country would have stayed at the relatively primitive stage of inefficient household farms. Throughout this process, successive Chinese governments committed many violent errors and acts of tyranny, but their intentions and goals were often positive.

If we broaden our perspective to today’s world, the problem remains unsolved. Some small countries or city-states which stand near the top of our global economic value chain have indeed mostly achieved equality, but down the value chain live many larger populations still mired in poverty.

If the chance presents itself, I want to write A History of Inequality in the future, chronicling humanity’s millennia-long war against inequality (and our repeated defeats). We still see no sign of true victory, at least not at this moment.

I may not get a chance to write such a book for a long time.

Actually, part of my job actually involves research into this question.

I’m employed by the China Development Research Foundation. I’ve been there since the day I got my PhD, more than three years ago now.

From time to time, people ask me: What sort of investment do you make?

I have to clarify this: the foundation is a nonprofit research organization that makes no investments at all. We were founded by the Development Research Center of the State Council (DNC), but our operations are independent. Most of our projects involve: research on specific topics, organizing conferences, knowledge exchange with other research institutes, public interest work, and so on.

The foundation is responsible for organizing many research conferences. Every March, an international conference called “China Development Forum” is held at Diaoyutai (the government’s guesthouse complex), and the last one was attended by both the premier and the vice premier, as well as more than eighty of the executives of the Fortune Global 500.

The foundation also has specific research projects directed at questions of policy. Some of the research is commissioned by the government, others by private companies. These projects cover economics, sociology, and management. The results of the research are generally presented as policy proposals, delivered to the commissioning party or the DNC.

Another important part of the foundation’s work involves public interest research intended to benefit children from rural, poverty-stricken parts of China.

I get emotional whenever I have to talk about this aspect of the foundation. I can’t express the depth of my admiration for my colleagues’ dedication to their task. These projects involve the most remote, poorest parts of China, and those working on them spend most of the year away from Beijing, staying in villages without modern conveniences, visiting each family one by one. Some of my colleagues kept on working even when they were pregnant, riding bumpy buses through dusty roads for hours to reach their destinations.

The foundation suggested a nutritional supplement program for children from rural, poor regions, and the program is now national policy. The foundation also built kindergartens for children in mountainous regions left behind when their parents left their ancestral villages to be migrant workers in distant cities. A poor county might contain a hundred tiny villages scattered in the mountains, and the foundation would build a kindergarten in every single village. These children might not see their parents for the whole year, and receive practically no education before they are old enough for school. We don’t necessarily know what it means to win the race of life at the starting line, but we certainly know what it looks like when children fall behind at the starting line.

Compared to the enormous population of China, the efforts of the foundation are so insignificant it is like trying to rescue a burning house with a single cup of water. But even such small efforts, maintained over years, may still make a difference.

This is why I won’t leave my job. Even if I were to win the Hugo, it won’t have much impact on my life.

I need that persistence, that sense I’m part of a worthwhile effort, with a set direction. Secretary-General Lu Mai at the foundation has already spent decades traversing the country on behalf of children from rural, poor regions, and the children’s welfare is all he thinks about. Many of my colleagues are not interested in pretty words; they’ve spent years on their projects, having seen much and accomplished much, but rarely do they talk about what they’ve done. But I can see in them the hardened strength I need. Their actions tell me that in this superficial world filled with cynical laughter and ironic detachment, there are still some who hold onto their ideals and try to make them come true. Even the most magnificent fireworks will fade after a moment, but steady strides, one step after another on solid ground, will bring hope of change.

The foundation is a small group that can touch First Space, but chooses to cheer on Third Space. We’re not many, but we’ll never give up.”

Hao Jingfang

[the-martial-law-thingy]

FULL TEXT: CJ Sereno: ‘These are times when everything that can be shaken is being shaken’

INQUIRER.net / 12:06 PM May 26, 2017

The following is the full text of Chief Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno’s commencement address before the Ateneo de Manila University, May 26, 2017.

THE ATENEAN FACING MARTIAL LAW

Thirty seven years ago, dear Loyolans, I stood in your place, about to take a place of honor and privilege as a graduate of Ateneo.

Three years later, Ninoy Aquino would be assassinated; by 1986, the dictator Marcos would flee the country. But on my graduation day in 1980, it was difficult to be certain of a future outside of martial law. I was at once optimistic and fearful. Optimistic about my career prospects as any Atenean would be, but fearful lest the long nights of martial law overshadowing our country never end.

I had actually prepared to talk with you in a more lighthearted and general manner on themes of justice, democracy and what it means to be an Atenean, but the declaration of Martial Law and the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus in Mindanao this Tuesday impressed upon me a more urgent and specific subject matter. So yesterday I discarded my prepared speech and resolved that today I would try to address the questions that must be in your minds and those of your parents. I thought it behooved me to give you a lens through which you could view present events and make decisions regarding your participation in the making of Philippine history.

Allow me to guess at the questions in your mind: Will this Martial Law declaration bring back the human rights violations and the depredations that characterized the martial law regime of 1972? Will investors leave the country? Will young people still have enough good jobs? Will our labor force be squeezed into more painful contortions of diaspora? Will our voices still be heard? The answer, my dear graduates, is “It depends.”

Our hopes for the future depend on whether the Executive Department, led by the President, the leadership and the entirety of the Armed Forces of the Philippines and the Philippine National Police, Department of Justice officials and prosecutors, the Chief Public Attorney and her public defenders will take sufficient care to abide by the Constitution and the laws even while Martial Law is in place. It depends on whether there will be abuse of the awesome powers that Martial Law gives the Armed Forces and the police.

It also depends on whether Congress and the Supreme Court will exercise their review powers appropriately over the declaration of Martial Law and the suspension of the privilege of writ of habeas corpus; and whether both houses of Congress and all courts will continue to function normally and well.

It also depends on whether certain independent constitutional bodies, namely the Ombudsman, the Commission on Human Rights, and the Commission on Audit will persist in discharging their proper functions.

Finally, it depends on whether you, my fellow Ateneans, together with the rest of the Filipino population, do your part to ensure that this declaration of Martial Law does not imperil your future.

Allow me to clarify that the powers to declare Martial Law and suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus are expressly granted President Duterte under the Constitution. When properly implemented, this should not by itself unduly burden our country. This power was granted to allow the President to resolve the situation “in case of invasion or rebellion, when the public safety requires it.” There may be questions before the Supreme Court regarding whether this can be extended to encompass situations akin to invasion or rebellion, and what circumstances constitute rebellion, but we will not venture into that for now. Suffice it to say that the Martial Law power is an immense power that can be used for good, to solve defined emergencies; but all earthly powers when abused can result in oppression.

If the Martial Law power is expressly granted the President, why are there fears expressed in some quarters regarding the declaration of President Duterte?

You must understand the history of a previous declaration of martial law, which occurred over forty years ago at the height of President Marcos’ power. Former Chief Justice Claudio Teehankee in Dizon v Eduardo described September 22, 1972 – the night Marcos announced Martial Law – as a dark evening when military authorities moved throughout the city to arrest and detain journalists and members of the opposition, upon orders of the President-turned dictator. Over the next two decades, enemies of the Marcos regime “disappeared,” were tortured or summarily executed.

The fears stoked by the terms “Martial Law” and “suspension of the writ of habeas corpus,” are therefore not surprising. But we must remember that these apprehensions were created by former President Marcos and the martial law that followed his 1972 declaration. If President Duterte and the aforementioned government authorities avoid the gross historical sins of Mister Marcos and his agents, then our country might reap the benefits of the legitimate use of the provisions on Martial Law in the 1987 Constitution.

You see, the 1987 Constitution in clear and unmistakable language rejects and absolutely prohibits the particular kind of martial law that began in our country in September of 1972. What do I mean by this? Allow me to refer to the decisions of our Supreme Court and other tribunals regarding the essential characteristics of the martial law dominating our country following its 1972 proclamation.

First, that period was characterized by widespread human rights violations in the form of murders, rape and other forms of torture, forced disappearances, arbitrary arrests and illegal detention, and forced isolation or hamletting of villages.

In the case of Mijares v. Ranada, the Supreme Court described the deep damage dealt to our institutions and the very fabric of our society as follows:

“Our martial law experience bore strange unwanted fruits, and we have yet to finish weeding out its bitter crop. While the restoration of freedom and the fundamental structures and processes of democracy have been much lauded, according to a significant number, the changes, however, have not sufficiently healed the colossal damage wrought under the oppressive conditions of the martial law period. The cries of justice for the tortured, the murdered, and the desaparecidos arouse outrage and sympathy in the hearts of the fair-minded, yet the dispensation of the appropriate relief due them cannot be extended through the same caprice or whim that characterized the ill-wind of martial rule. The damage done was not merely personal but institutional, and the proper rebuke to the iniquitous past has to involve the award of reparations due within the confines of the restored rule of law.”

Perhaps the most specific recount of the human rights atrocities during the Martial Law period beginning in 1972 can be found in a U.S. Decision, specifically that of the Hawaiian District Court in the case of In Re: Estate Of Ferdinand E. Marcos Human Rights Litigation, Celsa Hilao, et. al v. Estate Of Ferdinand E. Marcos. The case was a class action brought by victims or victims’ family members against the Estate of Marcos, seeking compensation for torture, disappearance or summary execution. The court made findings of human rights violations including numerous forms of torture such as beatings while blindfolded, rape and sexual assault, electric shock, and solitary confinement. The court noted:

“All of these forms of torture were used during “tactical interrogation,” attempting to elicit information from detainees concerning opposition to the MARCOS government. The more the detainees resisted, whether purposefully or out of lack of knowledge, the more serious the torture used.”

Second, the period of martial law that began in September of 1972 was likewise characterized by its heretofore unprecedented scale of plunder.

The case of Presidential Commission on Good Government v. Peña described the rule of Marcos as a “well-entrenched plundering regime of twenty years,” with respect to  “the ill-gotten wealth which rightfully belongs to the Republic although pillaged and plundered in the name of dummy or front companies, in several known instances carried out with the bold and mercenary, if not reckless, cooperation and assistance of members of the bar as supposed nominees.” The Supreme Court in that case “noted the magnitude of the regime’s organized pillage and the ingenuity of the plunderers and pillagers with the assistance of experts and the best legal minds in the market.” The ill-gotten assets identified so far by both the Presidential Commission on Good Governance and the Solicitor General are valued at approximately 5 billion US dollars.

Third, the martial law following the proclamation of 1972 was extremely oppressive, concentrating power only in Mister Marcos and his group. At one point, the Supreme Court, quoting Chief Justice Teehankee, characterized the time as “a return to the lese majeste when the voice of the King was the voice of God so that those touched by his absolute powers could only pray that the King acted prudently and wisely.” The dictator amassed so much power as the Commander-in-Chief, that he was able to take “absolute command of the nation and… the people could only trust that he would not fail them.”

We know what happened. Marcos failed our people. Those of us who were alive at the time bore witness to the human rights atrocities and the corruption caused by such absolute power.

Fourth, the martial law period of 1972 put the Philippines in an economic tailspin that saw us go from the second most vibrant economy in Asia to its sick man. In Marcos v. Manglapus, the Supreme Court noted that excessive foreign borrowing during the Marcos regime stagnated development and became one of the root causes of widespread poverty, leaving the economy in a precarious state. In Republic v. Sandiganbayan, the Court described the economic havoc created by the authoritarian regime in this manner:

At the time that the government of former President Marcos was driven from power, the country’s debt was over twenty-six billion US dollars; and the indications were that “illegally acquired wealth” of the deposed president alone, not counting that of his relatives and cronies, was in the aggregate amount of from five to ten billion US dollars, the bulk of it being deposited and hidden abroad.”

These are only a few excerpts from some of the many decisions of the highest court of the land that memorialize for all of history the atrocities committed during the era heralded by the 1972 declaration of martial law. They may not be the most heart-rending of accounts due to the necessary haste with which I compiled them, but I encourage you to do further reading on these and similar cases. These excerpts together with unrefuted historical accounts are a testament to our country’s resolve to never again allow ourselves to return to those dark and terrible times.

Thus the 1987 Constitution clearly says:

A state of martial law does not suspend the operation of the Constitution, nor supplant the functioning of the civil courts or legislative assemblies, nor authorize the conferment of jurisdiction on military courts and agencies over civilians where civil courts are able to function, nor automatically suspend the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus.

As we face the days following President Duterte’s declaration of martial law in Mindanao, it behooves us to ask what we can do in the present, with the time that is given to us, to ensure that the horrors of martial law that followed the 1972 declaration do not happen again.

For if being an Atenean means anything, it is that each of us — individually, and as a member of the Ateneo as an institution — bears a great deal of responsibility for the well-being of this country. And this responsibility entails leading not by possessing power for power’s sake, but by sacrificial example, by dying to ourselves and taking up our crosses daily. If power is to be granted to an Atenean, then such power must be exercised the way Christ exercised his leadership, by being a servant first, to the Father, and to His brothers and sisters.

These are times when everything that can be shaken is being shaken, when institutions are being challenged to their very foundations, and basic ideas of decency and human dignity are being violated with great impunity. These are times more than any other that will sorely test the Atenean’s capacity to distinguish right from wrong and the Atenean’s ability to act in service of what is right, and true, and good.

Do not be discouraged, for you are well-equipped for the challenges of these times. You only need to look within and around you and reflect on the Atenean principles inculcated in you over the years –

Magis, or the constant pursuit of improvement and excellence, for difficult times require extraordinary people.

AMDG! For the greater glory of God — for these are times when our faith will be tested, our paths will be dark and full of shadows, and only by surrendering all our actions to God may we continue towards the light.

One Big Fight! More than a cheer used in our basketball games, One Big Fight embodies the wholehearted passion and dedication that must fuel all our actions.

But the most fundamental Atenean value today is that of being a person for others. To be an Atenean is to serve — compassionately, selflessly, with unceasing dedication. To be an Atenean is to constantly continue the work of addressing others’ needs; to think broadly, not merely in terms of impact on one’s self, but impact on one’s community and country. To be an Atenean is to deeply and completely understand that it is in service to others that our lives take on their full meaning. To be an Atenean is to forsake a life of self-centered safety for a life of service.

To be a person for others is to commit to a just and noble cause greater than oneself.

Given the present day, when the possibility of history repeating itself looms imminent, no cause requires your commitment as much as the cause of human rights, justice, and democracy, themes you have aptly chosen.

For today, people’s fundamental human rights and freedoms, the core of our democracy, face grave and blatant threats. The culture of impunity is on the rise. People are pressured to favor the easy choice over the right choice: expediency over due process; convenient labeling over fairness; the unlawful termination of human life over rehabilitation.

You need to make a stand, dear Ateneans. And to make a stand you must act. More than merely ruminating on the idea of justice, I call on each of you to confront the common injustices of our society and seek to address them. I urge you to speak out with truth even against the overwhelming tide of popular opinion and reach out to the oppressed and disenfranchised. When you face threats to the sanctity of human rights or the stability of our democracy, give your all to protect these freedoms. Give your all to protect our nation and our people.

Stand up and give One Big Fight. As I stated in my speech to the lawyers in the Integrated Bar of the Philippines National Convention last March 23, we are not fighting a person or an establishment but a culture, a pattern that pervades our society today. It is a pattern of apathy, rage, and despair: one that began when people learned to tolerate wrong, stopped hoping, and ceased caring.

I understand that the task before you is immense, but I have no doubt you are more than up to the challenge. For you have been honed over your years in the Ateneo to fulfill your calling in extraordinary ways.

That is why I do not feel only hope when I look at you – my heart is filled with grateful gladness. Throughout the countless calamities that have struck the country, Ateneans have always been among the first to respond and help. Unstintingly and without hesitation, Ateneans have reached out, time and time again, to complete strangers — giving of themselves to people they may never even meet.

Last year, when the history of our nation was subjected to attempts at revision, you were among the first to speak up. I saw young men and women from the Ateneo spill out into the streets, furious and indignant, speaking up against this distortion of our history and reaching out to show fellow Filipinos that they were not alone. As a fellow Atenean, I understood that this passionate outpouring of righteous anger sprang from a deep understanding of what it means to be a person for others.

Know that being a person for others and standing for human rights, justice, and democracy are one and the same. To stand for human rights is to value others’ freedoms as much as you value your own. To stand for justice is to oppose any attempts to value one group’s freedoms more than those of others. To stand for democracy is to love your country and your people so fully that you will act to ensure democratic processes are followed despite great personal cost. To stand for all of these is to sacrifice yourself so that others may know freedom, safety, and all the fullness of life.

Know that you are not alone. You will not be alone. Have the courage to stand.

My prayers are with you, young Ateneans. As you face this crossroad and move on to a new chapter of your lives, may the Lord bless and keep you; may He make His face shine on you and be gracious to you; may the Lord turn His face towards you and give you peace.

Mabuhay kayo, class of 2017! Make us proud!

Source: [INQUIRER.net]

[theconservativebrief]

A California court halted Orange County’s only needle exchange program this week — a decision that illustrates the challenges these programs face despite significant evidence for their benefits.

In issuing a preliminary injunction, state Judge Joel Wohlfeil stopped the Orange County Needle Exchange Program (OCNEP) from operating.

The program planned to operate mobile needle exchanges in four cities across the county, with state approval, after the city of Santa Ana decided to shut down the exchange’s permanent location after nearly two years. But Orange County’s government, as well as the cities of Anaheim, Costa Mesa, and Orange (where the program would operate, along with Santa Ana), objected to the mobile exchanges, and filed a lawsuit earlier this year.

Orange County’s argument, like Santa Ana’s, focused on a trope often used against syringe exchanges: the threat of needle litter — the idea that exchanges let people obtain a lot of syringes that are then improperly disposed in public places, exposing the public to the risk of getting inadvertently stuck by a needle.

The court agreed that the needle litter problem in fact preceded the syringe exchange, but it indicated that the needle exchange had exacerbated the problem. That was a big reason for the court’s preliminary injunction.

The county and court’s moves highlight a persistent problem with needle exchanges: Even though they have been researched for decades, and studies have repeatedly supported the benefits of needle exchanges, the programs are often mired by public and particularly local resistance — frequently fueled by stigma and misconceptions about addiction. That’s led to the closing of several needle exchanges, from West Virginia to Indiana to California, even as America is engulfed in its deadliest drug overdose crisis in history in the opioid epidemic.

In a statement, OCNEP condemned the county’s actions and the court’s decision, arguing it will put lives at risk:

[B]y standing in the way of OCNEP providing needed services throughout Orange County, the county is choosing to ignore the lives and health of people who suffer from opioid addiction, are experiencing homelessness, or are otherwise underserved. During this unprecedented opioid epidemic, counties across the country are collaborating with their local syringe exchanges to combat the problem. Rather than following their lead, Orange County officials have chosen to shut their only syringe exchange down.

The county, for its part, has stood by its complaints about needle litter and the threats it poses. Orange County Supervisor Andrew Do told the Orange County Register, “Because people did not choose to take those risks when walking down the street in the morning or opening a book in the public library.”

For now, the county has landed a big legal victory.

There is a ton of research showing that needle exchanges work to combat the spread of infectious diseases like hepatitis C and HIV, cut down on the number of needles thrown out in public spaces, and connect more people to treatment — all without enabling more drug use. This is an exhaustive body of research, backed by independent academic researchers, the World Health Organization, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Beyond the direct benefits, advocates of needle exchanges argue that the programs can also give a much-needed sense of hope to underserved populations.

Alex Smith, a California resident, previously told me this reflected her own experience with a needle exchange in Ventura County. In 2012, Smith had a bad bacterial infection, MRSA, from reusing needles, with sores covering her face and body. She decided that she could no longer use the syringes she had been using and needed to get a clean supply. So she went to her local CVS.

“They took one look at me at CVS, and they turned me away. I felt so humiliated, disgusted. I didn’t know what to do,” Smith said. “I heard there was a mobile needle exchange in town. So I went to that. … I walked up, and there was a girl there. The first thing she did was smile at me and ask me how I was. I don’t know why that had such an impact on me. But it was the first time someone had treated me with dignity and humanity in a very, very long time.”

Smith went into treatment within weeks, and she said she hasn’t used drugs since then, recently hitting five years of recovery. She now works at a company that helps care for people with intellectual disabilities. She also recently graduated from college, and is now going to graduate school — a step, she hopes, toward helping run the company she now works for. “I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that unless I got sober,” Smith said.

She added, “It’s so much more than just needles. Being treated with dignity and humanity, the power of that is insurmountable. It can shed so much light in the darkest of somebody’s times.”

Needle exchanges aren’t the only solution to the opioid epidemic and related public health problems. But experts argue that needle exchanges are part of a broader suite of solutions, which also includes cutting back excess opioid painkiller prescriptions, expanding access to addiction treatment, and undertaking other harm reduction approaches, such as greater distribution of the opioid overdose antidote naloxone.

Despite the evidence, needle exchanges have long faced public resistance.

As a result, the US still lags far behind other developed countries when it comes to needle exchanges. Josh Katz reported at the New York Times: “According to the North American Syringe Exchange Network, 333 such programs operate across the country, up from 204 in 2013. In Australia, a country with less than a tenth as many people, there are more than 3,000.”

Some of the resistance is rooted in stigma around drug addiction. After decades of the US treating addiction as a criminal justice problem instead of a public health concern, much of the public and many policymakers still view addiction as an issue that demands a punitive response, and see those with addiction as part of the problem instead of people who need help. (A common response to just about any opioid story I write, for instance, is that people dying from drug overdoses are just part of “Darwin’s theory in action.”)

There are also more practical concerns, like the needle litter issue raised by Orange County officials.

When Santa Ana decided to shut down OCNEP’s operations in the local Civic Center, it pointed to photo evidence of needles found in the area surrounding the exchange, from needles found in books in the public library to syringes found in the streets. City officials didn’t provide data to back it up, but they told me that OCNEP made needle litter worse, and that the litter problem had gotten better after the program was shut down.

When OCNEP said it would shift to mobile exchanges in the aftermath, officials in Orange County and the four cities where the program would operate objected — arguing that the needle litter problems would explode all across the county.

OCNEP noted that needle litter preceded its existence — a point that Judge Wohlfeil, at least, agreed with. They also argued that they have taken steps, including limiting how many syringes people can obtain and conducting clean-up sweeps, to try to minimize needle litter.

In fact, OCNEP claimed that local government officials’ opposition to the program made it difficult to do more to clean-up work, arguing in a statement that its steps “would have been much more effective if we had a collaborative public health partner in the county.”

In Santa Ana, for example, OCNEP operated at the Civic Center just two hours a week, on Saturday from 1 to 3 pm local time. This meant that clients could go to the program to get a bunch of syringes for the coming week — and they wouldn’t be required to trade a needle for each one they get, since studies indicate that’s less effective for preventing the spread of infectious diseases. But clients didn’t have the exchange to dispose of their needles for the rest of the week, forcing them to find other means for disposal most of the time.

If OCNEP got more public support, and could therefore operate for a more standard five or seven days a week, there might not be as much litter. As Ricky Bluthenthal, a professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California, told me, “In an ideal world, you would have a syringe exchange program open for 40 hours a week.”

There’s evidence that needle exchanges may even reduce needle litter if they’re readily available. A 2012 study published in Drug and Alcohol Dependence compared a city with needle exchanges, San Francisco, to one without exchanges, Miami. Through visual inspections, they found 44 syringes per 1,000 census blocks in San Francisco, compared to 371 syringes per 1,000 census blocks in Miami.

Based on a survey of people who inject drugs, the researchers also concluded that those in Miami had more than 34 times the adjusted odds to improperly dispose of syringes in public than those in San Francisco.

Orange County officials, however, have so far resisted officially supporting any kind of needle exchange program. And, this week, they got the county’s only exchange shut down.

Original Source -> Needle exchanges help combat the opioid crisis. But officials keep shutting them down.

via The Conservative Brief

[investmart007]

WASHINGTON | Trump turns back to Maria, falsely says Dems inflated toll

New Post has been published on https://www.stl.news/washington-trump-turns-back-to-maria-falsely-says-dems-inflated-toll/169966/

WASHINGTON | Trump turns back to Maria, falsely says Dems inflated toll

WASHINGTON — As Hurricane Florence bore down on the U.S. Thursday, President Donald Trump angrily churned up the devastating storm of a year earlier, disputing the official death count from Hurricane Maria and falsely accusing Democrats of inflating the Puerto Rican toll to make him “look as bad as possible.”

Public health experts have estimated that nearly 3,000 perished because of the effects of Maria. But Trump, whose efforts to help the island territory recover have been persistently criticized, was having none of that. He said just six to 18 people had been reported dead when he visited two weeks after the storm and suggested that many had been added later “if a person died for any reason, like old age.”

Trump’s jarring comments, coming as the East Coast braced for a massive storm, offered fresh evidence of his resistance to criticism and his insistence on viewing large and small events through the prism of his own success or failure.

Offering up a fresh conspiracy theory, he said of the Puerto Rico count, “This was done by the Democrats in order to make me look as bad as possible when I was successfully raising Billions of Dollars to help rebuild Puerto Rico.”

Even some Republicans suggested the president had gone too far. “Casualties don’t make a person look bad,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said, breaking with the president. “So I have no reason to dispute those numbers.”

Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who talks to Trump often, said, “I don’t think it’s bad to say we could have done better in Puerto Rico.” He also said he thought Trump “sees every attack on him as sort of undercutting his legitimacy.”

Especially upset were GOP politicians in Florida, a state with a substantial Puerto Rican population.

Gov. Rick Scott, who is running for the U.S. Senate, tweeted: “I’ve been to Puerto Rico 7 times & saw devastation firsthand. The loss of any life is tragic.” A spokesman for former U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis, who won the Florida GOP primary for governor with Trump’s support, said the congressman did not agree with Trump’s tweets.

Throughout his presidency, Trump has struggled to publicly express empathy at times of national crises, sparking outrage during his post-Maria visit when he feuded with the San Juan mayor and tossed out paper towels to victims like he was shooting baskets. In recent days, Trump publicly lauded his own administration’s response to Maria — and privately groused over storm-related news coverage that he saw as overly focused on Puerto Rico, according to two Republican advisers close to the White House who weren’t authorized to speak publicly.

Puerto Rico’s governor last month raised Maria’s official death toll from 64 to 2,975 after an independent study found that the number of people who succumbed in the sweltering aftermath had been severely undercounted. Trump dismissed the findings Thursday, tweeting: “If a person died for any reason, like old age, just add them onto the list.”

In fact, there are two categories of disaster deaths. “Direct” deaths include such fatalities as drownings in a storm surge or being crushed in a wind-toppled building. “Indirect” deaths are harder to count because they can include such things as heart attacks, electrocutions from downed power lines and failure to receive dialysis because the power is out — and those kinds of fatalities can happen after a storm has ended but while an area still is struggling to restore electricity, clean water and other health and safety services. When Trump visited in October 2017, two weeks after the storm hit, the death toll at the time was indeed 16 people. The number was later raised to 64, but the government then commissioned an independent study to determine how many died due to post-storm conditions. That study — conducted by the Milken Institute School of Public Health at George Washington University — estimated 2,975 deaths.

In a statement, the institute said it would “stand by the science underlying our study.” It added that the study “was carried out with complete independence and freedom from any kind of interference.”

Dr. Carlos Santos-Burgoa — the lead researcher on the study and a well-known expert in global health, particularly Latin America — told the AP that the initial figure of 64 deaths reflected only people whose death certificates cited the storm. He said the latest figure was more accurate and stressed that every death in the six months following the storm was not attributed to the hurricane.

“We are scientists. We are public health people. We are committed to the health of the population. We try to reach the truth, and we try to understand what is damaging the people in order to prevent disease,” he said.

Maria hit last year as Trump was feeling positive about the handling of massive hurricanes in Florida and Texas and hoping to use those efforts to stem a tide of negative press. But the slow federal response in Maria dimmed that hope. Still, Trump was unwilling to admit that more needed to be done by the federal government.

Puerto Rico’s government is run by the New Progressive party, a pro-statehood, Puerto Rico-only party. Gov. Ricardo Rossello told CBS New York on Thursday that he was a Democrat but stressed that the government sought the study and said it “tried to make this process a completely independent process.”

State and local officials are responsible for establishing death tolls, not the federal government. After the total was revised Aug. 28, White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders issued a statement in which she did not actively dispute the revised figure.

She said at the time that back-to-back hurricanes last year prompted “the largest domestic disaster response mission in history.” She noted that some 12,000 personnel were sent to Puerto Rico for response and recovery efforts, and said the federal government would continue to support the island’s recovery for years to come.

Trump’s fresh anger drew swift rebukes from elected officials and residents of the island, where blackouts remain common, 60,000 homes still have makeshift roofs and 13 percent of municipalities lack stable phone or internet service. A U.S. territory since 1898, Puerto Rico’s inhabitants are citizens, though they cannot vote in presidential elections and have only one congressional representative with limited voting powers.

San Juan Mayor Carmen Yulín Cruz, a Democrat who has sparred with the president, tweeted that “Trump is so vain he thinks this is about him. NO IT IS NOT.” Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat who spent part of his youth in Puerto Rico, spoke on the House floor in front of a printout of the Puerto Rican flag, saying Trump is “delusional” and incapable of “empathy or basic human decency.”

Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, sent a letter to the GOP majority Thursday calling for the panel to request documents from the White House relating to the Puerto Rico response.

Trump maintained as recently as Tuesday that his response to the storm was an “incredible unsung success.” ___ Associated Press reporters Colleen Long, Lauran Neergaard and Alan Fram in Washington D.C., Danica Coto in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Michael Weissenstein in Havana, Cuba, and Jennifer Peltz in New York contributed.

By CATHERINE LUCEY, ZEKE MILLER and JONATHAN LEMIRE , Associated Press

[kin-collective]

On Raising Paloma

By Bianca Moran -- 8.31.18

“Tiene el pelo hermoso!  No es como el pelo Negro” - My Colombian grandmother, about my daughter’s hair

“If you marry a *Spanish expletive for a Black person*, I’ll disown you.” – my Mexican father, to me when I was young

“Stay out of the sun or else you’ll get too dark!”- Latin American proverb

I remember a conversation I had with my daughter’s father just before she was born. We were talking about the delivery and he said to me, with deep concern on his face, “What if she is dark?” My heart dropped. I looked at him with the despair of knowing that this was a real question, and simply replied, “Then she will be a beautiful dark-skinned child.” I think back on that moment often, because I realize that I never had that concern while pregnant with Paloma. While I certainly have consciousness around being a woman of color, I have no concept of what it means to traverse the world as a Black woman. What I know, comes from the books I read, the history I studied, the friends I have, and from diligently watching how white supremacy and anti-blackness operate. Having an Afro-Latina child though, heightened my awareness. 

Peace. It feels impossible some days.

There isn’t a day that goes by that I do not sit and ponder the kind of world my daughter exists in. I wonder how, in the years to come, she may emerge from her childhood and walk into a world that is far more intent on dehumanizing her than the world we live in now. I am not an optimist. I do not think things are getting better. There are times I have to stop reading the news or looking at social media because I get so overwhelmed, and the weight of what I have brought my child into feels unbearable. It is not that I wish she wasn’t here; rather, I wish the world we live in was a better place. There are literally stories every day of Black and dark-skinned people being brutalized, killed, maligned or otherwise dehumanized. And then we are bombarded with images of white women intentionally darkening their skin (“bronze”, they call it)  to a shade that keeps their proximity to whiteness and its privileges close at hand, but giving them the skin color people are born with, shamed for and often times places them in precarious situations in the midst of white supremacy. I have read and heard countless stories of Black girls being denied entry into spaces because of their hair, skin tone, and physical features while white women constantly consume this particular vehicle of culture without any ramifications other than being declared “pop culture icons.” And then I see the bodies. The bodies of indigenous women, Black and brown women, assaulted by police, disciplined incrementally more harshly than their white and white passing counterparts, interrogated about their presence in certain spaces, and murdered, while waiting for the BART. How do you even prepare your child for a world that cruel?  

I am careful, cognizant most times and constantly in a state of criticality now that I am a mother. Every choice I make comes with a large degree of analysis around how these choices might shape my child’s consciousness around her identity. I try to engender in her a strong sense of self and love so that she never questions the ferocity of either. Every choice I make around raising her is guided by my desire to combat the systems, people and institutions that she will inevitably encounter, that will try to diminish her spirit and steal her joy. I am committed to giving her the love, in all the ways I know how, that the world wants to deny her. Love is our weapon of resistance; I tell her she is a warrior, and a queen. She is everything that her father’s ancestors and my ancestors ever dreamed possible. 

I do wonder what it means, for her to have me as a mother, a non-black woman, someone she resembles but who lives in a different skin and what it means to have a mother who doesn’t mirror you, in the ways that might matter most. I am also constantly trying to navigate giving her the beauty of all the culture that exists within her. Being Afro-Latina is rife with contradictions and is at times a contentious and precarious space to exist in. In 2018, there are a good number of people who still don’t understand the concept, nor the identity of Afro-Latinx existence. “How can you be both?” is often a question I hear. It is a testament to virulent nature of the mechanisms of white supremacy that Latinx identity, whose very culture is predicated in large part to the diaspora, can be seen as mutually exclusive of blackness. I wonder, when Latinx identity so often denies and excludes any narrative that includes Blackness, how do I raise my child to exist in both spaces?

Unequivocally, there is now and has historically been a pervasive anti-blackness in Latinx culture, and so to raise a child that straddles this divide, it is imperative that I create a space where it is safe for her to explore what it means to be a Black AND Latinx. There is so often, this compulsion for people to categorize, to put other people in packages that make sense to them in order to know how best to consume and determine their value. Afro-Latinidad complicates that for people, especially when so much of history has been either intentionally hidden or misrepresented. The ways in which “race” has been constructed, and it is precisely that; a divisive colonial construction, does not allow for brown and black bodies to exist in ways that might allow for nuanced representations of our collective histories.  

The legacy of colonialism has a great many people fooled into thinking you must either be “Latinx” or “Black,” because the idea that one’s proximity to whiteness is what not only differentiates them but privileges them. Colonialism tells us that Latinx identity then must not be associated with the “inferiority” of Black experience while simultaneously denying the very ways in which the African diaspora directly shaped what we know to be “Latinidad.” Just this past year, I went to an exhibit at the Hammer Museum entitled “Radical Women: Latin American Art 1960-1985”. That is a twenty-five year span of history, of a massive geographic space that consequently also has the largest population of African diasporic people--and yet, there was one Afro-Latina in the entire show, of about 250 works. When I tell you anti-blackness exists, this is how it persists in our institutions and globally. This is what we are up against. That we can deny and erase histories of black bodies where they have literally contributed to fundamental parts of a culture is not only irresponsible, it is dangerous. These are the ways in which “Latinx” identity becomes exclusive of Blackness. Paloma though, she not only complicates that narrative, her existence is a contemporary iteration of the many who have come before her in other spaces and times that directly forces us to critique and investigate the ways in which our identities have been shaped for us through white supremacy. And so how does one occupy both spaces of being Black and Latinx? She is both. She is mine, and she is entirely what her father gave her as well.  And because I am the mother of an Afro-Latinx child, I am not only more aware of how anti-blackness persists, I am always actively engaging in the work of shielding my child from it. I am not only navigating my way through my own womanhood, and my own cultural and political identity, I am also raising my child in a world that is constantly denying her humanity through the brutality, discrimination, pain and trauma of the many other bodies just like hers.  This is where the intersection of my identification as a Latina and raising an Afro-Latinx child collide.  

I grew up with a father who constantly berated Black people, and who throughout my childhood, told both my sister and I he would disown us if we came home with a Black man. I have vivid memories of this.  My grandmother is Colombian, and in her 90’s I recognize it isn’t an easy task to erase her anti-blackness, but it is certainly within my power to limit my child’s exposure to it. My mother, her daughter, is the only child she had with my Peruvian grandfather, and it is not lost upon me, that of her six children, my mother was the darkest child and the one with whom my grandmother is estranged.  There are actual members of my family who support this fascist, racist and grotesque administration. I won’t let them around my child. I am careful about what images I expose her to through television, art and pop culture. It pains me when she gravitates towards cartoon characters that are mascots of white culture. And in those moments, I also recognize that I can’t control her, I can really only aim to shape her. So, when she wears a bathing suit with two white Disney characters on it (that naturally, I did not purchase but was gifted to her), I counteract that with taking her to a museum, or buying her a book that has characters of color in it and the music we listen to, among many other things. But this is my struggle, how to raise this Afro-Latinx child to love themselves without using whiteness as the tool she constructs her identity with.  

I know what it is to grow up around whiteness, and to never quite grasp your greatness or the multiplicity of your beauties. I am 36 years old and I still struggle with acknowledging and embracing my worthiness. Not that my mother didn’t try instilling this, but there were far more formidable forces outside of her that took hold of me. It took me decades to wrangle myself out of their grip. I want and hope that I am able to make that path towards understanding your worth and beauty much easier for Paloma. 

Perhaps because I have a background in education, and taught for so many years, I am always very keen to listen to the ways in which people speak to her. The ways in which they talk about her skin color, or her hair. When they say she is beautiful, I reply, “Yes, but she is also really intelligent and very funny.” I watch the way people to try to discipline her, and I see the harshness of their commands, and their impatience with her, that I know a light skinned child would not elicit. I listen carefully to the language used around her body, and I pay attention to how people look at me when I am with her. It is in protecting her spirit that I am preparing her from what lies ahead. I cannot shield her from everything, nor do I want to. What I can do, is equip her with the knowledge and character to defend herself and to trust her greatness. 

Raising Paloma means many things, but of those, the first is that I raise my child to love herself. For me, what motherhood has released in me is a very strong commitment to knowing my child is loved and valued. This has really shaped the ways in which I interact with my family, my friends, peers and acquaintances--not to mention any lover or partner I choose. I have had to look very deeply at the people I allow into my home and into any space where Paloma is growing into her own being. I have been blessed to have a group of wonderful women, some I have known for decades, some new to my life, who bring both Paloma and I joy and a deep sense of community. Being a single mother, there is nothing more important to me than creating a community of vibrant, brilliant, kind and strong women for Paloma to belong to. These are women who I value tremendously, and who I feel deep sense of gratitude to for being in our lives. I am constantly in awe of my child. I watch her so closely and she is the only reminder I have that she is going to be just fine, not because of me, but because she has the blood of her ancestors ruining through her veins, and the infinite love of those invested in protecting her whom we have welcomed into our space. 

I know we are going to be ok.

[truecantaloupelove-blog]

Steven Universe Finale (FanFic): “The Shattering- Part 1″

Hey, everyone! Welcome to my Steven Universe fanfic finale: this is how I’D imagination the perfect end to one of the best kids’ cartoons in the last 50 years. I little background; part of this fan episode was born from my frustration throughout Season 4, I felt the side episodes were taking up too much time, and there wasn’t as much attention devoted to fusion, gem lore, good action scenes and music like their was in previous seasons. Well, if you want something done right, do it yourself, so this fan work has the full package: fusion, battle, the cluster, ALL the Diamonds, some of of our favorite sidelined heroes returning to the action, and so much more.

A word of warning: this story does contain one OC of mine; a homeworld gem agent named Holy War Quartz. I really enjoy her as a character, I think she’s plucky and strong-willed in a very fun way, but I know how people feel about OCs so I tried not to give her too invasive of a roll in the story.

This episode is meant to take place during the final Homeworld invasion of the Earth, where things REALLY go down and get tense. I’ve filled in some of the gaps in lore that we haven’t learned yet, but I’ve still tried to keep it as close to canon as possible.

This is a fan-friendly, inclusive episode for everyone, just like the creators would want. Anyone is welcome to enjoy it, and there shouldn’t be anything offensive or upsetting in this to longtime hardcore fans of the series like me. Part 2 is one the way soon, so with that, enjoy!

Steven Universe—Series Finale:

S06 E25: “The Shattering”

A Fan-Made Episode

 (Opening credits)

NARRATOR: On the last “Steven Universe” things had gotten pretty heated for our heroes—literally. (Shot of all the Crystal Gems and Connie trapped in a cage above a chasm filled with lava and brimstone) The nefarious Yellow Diamond had captured all but one of the Crystal Gems and decided to hold them as hostage for leverage against the remnants of Earth. But any sort of human counterattack was unlikely as Homeworld’s invasion of Earth was in full force; and all resistances to the relentless assault were being pummeled.

(Scenes of battalions of Quartz, Topaz, and Ruby soldiers decimating sieging and decimating major cities around the globe) As if that wasn’t enough; the cluster had finally begun to emerge, and the effects on the Earth’s tectonic plates were cataclysmic. Steven Universe led a brave defense for his hometown of Beach City, but when a great tremor split the boardwalk in two and swallowed the bulk of its citizens into the earth, this battle too proved futile—and tragic.

(A Quartz soldier spears Greg through the chest. Steven is seen holding his bleeding father, crying) Mortally wounded, Greg Universe was left for dead in the infirmary, but the rage of his father’s loss empowered Steven to do something he’d never been able to do before. (Steven screams a howl of agony and begins to transform, growing older, meaner, stronger) The pain caused him to finally break through the barrier of his pre-pubescent body, transforming this meek, effeminate child into a stout, brawny man bent on revenge. Enraged, he cut a lethal swath deep into the ranks of Homeworld’s forces, but even this effort would have come to naught had it not been for the sudden arrival of a new, shocking, and unexpected ally.

(White Diamond emerges, wielding massive twin swords. He intervenes as Steven is about to be overwhelmed in his berserker rage; the two of them pull together and manage to beat back the enemy) Together, these two brave warriors managed to drive off the invasion party—for now. But the Earth is in a dire state, and all of the forces of Homeworld are massed between Steven and his imperiled friends. Can Steven and the renowned White Diamond possibly hope to turn the tides of this war? Can they save their friends and neutralize the cluster before it fully emerges, wreaking devastation upon the planet? Is this humanity’s last bow? Find out on today’s “Steven Universe”!

 (Aerial shot of Beach City; buildings are in splinters and fires are smoldering everywhere. The Big Donut, its roof ripped off and two of the walls collapsed in, is being used as a makeshift hospital; the remnants of Beach City’s citizens who aren’t too wounded to walk scramble around trying to bring the triage under control. Steven stands over his unconscious father, fists clenched)

STEVEN: Dear old Dad, I remember you once told that no matter what happened, there would always be a guardian angel out there to protect me. Well, now I need that angel more than ever, and only too late I learned you were lying. Yet somehow even now, I can’t bring myself to hate you for it.

(He surveys the wreckage of the city) I was once a boy with a home. With hopes and dreams. With a family, or at least what counted as a family in this decadent world. Now, when the true weakness, the feebleness of my world is exposed for what it is, and when all the rot and decay is stripped away, what am I left with? Nothing. Nothing but the fury, and my own restless thoughts to keep me company.

(As he ponders, a mutant gem monster the size of a rhino bursts through the perimeter and tears havoc through the town. Steven goes for his sword but is too slow. The gem monster is about to trample him when a white crystal blade slashes through its deformed body from behind, poofing it instantly. White Diamond stands there, his chest bare-shirted and his lips opened on a snarl)

WHITE DIAMOND: Keep your guard up, Half-Breed! I can’t afford to be watching your back every second!

STEVEN: (Dispassionately) Oh, yeah. Thanks. (He takes the mutant gemstone and bubbles it) Guess I owe you one.

WHITE DIAMOND: I mean it, Universe. You’re no use to me as an ally if you’re dead.

STEVEN: I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea that you want to be my ally in the first place: I’ve turned Gems before, but never this fast.

WHITE DIAMOND: Don’t flatter yourself; this has nothing to do with you personally, it’s a simple strategic analysis. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

STEVEN: That’s funny, I thought the Diamonds were on the same team.

WHITE DIAMOND: You really don’t understand your own culture even now, do you? You’re comrades-at-arms must have left you woefully ignorant.

STEVEN: (Bitterly) Well, they weren’t exactly the type for answering questions when asked.

WHITE DIAMOND: I’ll give you the shortened version, if only because it expedites my purposes. The truth is, Universe, that there is only one Diamond Patriarch, the White Diamond. This is the way it has been from ages immemorial: one Diamond, to rule them all. All planets, all gems, all the knowledge and technology of Homeworld ultimately belong to him. All the other Diamonds serve him as members of his court, or, as you more primitive humans might call it, his harem.

I too was the ruler of Homeworld, once, like my predecessor and the predecessor before him. But I made the first mistake any Gem can make: I fell in love. Pink Diamond, she was truly the most beautiful of all creatures, and I loved her more than any of my other concubines. So I spoiled her, and pampered her, and did something no White Diamond had ever done, or ever should do. I gave her a planet of her own, to rule. But Yellow Diamond took exception to our love, she became bitter and envious of her sister and plotted how she might take revenge. It took centuries for her plan to be carried out, but finally she found the perfect opportunity, and in one fell swoop, she tricked me, draining my power and forcing me to take residence in this diminished, weakened form. She deposed me, usurping my throne and my birthright. She set herself up as the new tyrant of Homeworld, with that simpering blue peon at her side. She rewrote history, she massacred millions of gems who resisted her blasphemous treason, and she divided the Gem empire, knowing it to be beyond her capacity to rule.

It is fitting, in a way, that the ancient grudge between us should be settled on this planet, where it began so long ago. I have had to live as an exile and a wanderer for thousands of years, but at long last my aching thirst for revenge is about to be slaked. But I’ve learned how to plot, I’ve learned how to wait out the centuries and play her long game. When I re-ascend to take my rightful place as Lord and Master of all Gemkind, I won’t make the same mistake she did. Let me be clear: Yellow Diamond won’t escape this day with her life.

STEVEN: (Wryly) I thought you said you were giving me the short version.

(WHITE DIAMOND yanks him off his feet by the scruff of his pink shirt. Even in his diminished size, he’s still nearly ten feet tall)

WHITE DIAMOND: I will not have my plans for vengeance foiled by your lack of conviction! This day is about more than either of us, Half-Breed! This is restoring the rightful order to the Universe. I have no love of Yellow Diamond; the Kingdom of Gemkind has gone to ruin in her hands! She knows this, she knows full well that only a White Male Diamond is fit to rule our kind, and yet she persists in her debauched, unholy reign, pretending to be a leader when she was created to be nothing more than a consort. I’m going to end her charade, and you’re going to help me do it, Half-Breed. You play a vital role to my plans, and therefore, I order you to stay focused and alert!

STEVEN: If means getting revenge, you don’t have to tell me twice. Now put me down. (White Diamond does so) So, what is our plan?

WHITE DIAMOND: Yellow Diamond currently holds my stolen energy, which puts us at the disadvantage. However, I still know her weaknesses. If we can make it to the throne room, I only need a few minutes of diversion to reabsorb my power, and once that happens, this entire war will be over.

STEVEN: Seems simple.

WHITE DIAMOND: Not quite. Yellow Diamond and her pusillanimous blue lackey are cowards by nature; her flagship is going to be surrounded by literal legions of soldiers, each tier stronger than the last. I know how her battle formations work; at the frontline, she’ll put the crippled, the forced fusion shard gems. Those, at least will be easy enough to hack through, but they’re only meant to wear us down before the real task begins.  Next rank is the corrupted abominations, a shade more difficult to break through if only because they retain more of their sentience. Then after that, come the hybrids.

STEVEN: (Shocked) You mean there are more human-gems hybrids?

WHITE DIAMOND: Indeed. When Earth was colonized we learned to breed and weaponize the humans, some of whom we collected and carried back to Homeworld as prizes. Under my rule, at least, we only resorted to such a disgraceful tactics due to mounting desperation to provide relief contingents for our soldiers during the Great Gem War. Trained under the right conditions, these hybrids can become even stronger with their powers than natural Gems. However, their flesh bodies make them doubly vulnerable to both physical wounds and attacks to their gems. The half-breeds are a sort of trade-off in battle tactics, they have the best of both worlds as well as the worst. And by all means they are an insult to the purity of the Gem race, but do not underestimate their deadliness.

STEVEN: (Hushed) I can’t believe I’m not the only one…

WHITE DIAMOND: You have already met one such hybrid in the past, believe it or not. The agent known as Holy War Quartz 8-X1J was sent to this very town only a mere couple of months ago, will undoubtedly be among their ranks. Like you, Universe, she is in fact half-human.

STEVEN: Amy…

(He has a flashback to 11 episodes earlier, fighting against a tall, limber blond-haired girl in the temple. She appears to have been making short work of all the Crystal Gems in the flashback)

WHITE DIAMOND: “Amy”? That must have been the alias she took on for her mission. In any case, we must stay focused. Beyond the half-breeds lies the real challenge: Quartz soldiers, hundreds of them. And more likely than not a couple of fusions towards the back. Luckily, if we make it through that, all we have left to deal with are her personal guards.

STEVEN: Sounds like a tall order.

WHITE DIAMOND: I don’t understand your human inanities. But listen, Universe, before we march into this glorious battle, you really should consider finding some attire more appropriate to combat. Unlike me, your body can sustain permanent damage from flesh wounds.

(Steven looks down at his tattered pink star shirt. Since his transformation, it’s become far too small for him, exposing his midriff, clinging tightly to his pronounced pectoral muscles and outright shredded where his shoulders bulge through)

STEVEN: What? You mean this old thing? (He rips the shirt clean off, exposing his sleek, muscled physique) I was going to get rid of it anyway. I’ve outgrown it. (He throws the now pink rag aside and searches through the bodies for something more suitable. He comes across Suitcase Sam’s black rugged black trenchcoat) Ah. Here we go.

WHITE DIAMOND: Hmm. Much better.

STEVEN: Couldn’t have said it better myself. (He throws the black trenchcoat on, leaving it unbuttoned to expose his abs. Then he takes his father’s old bloody bandages and wraps them around his head as a headband of defiance) Don’t worry, Dad. Your old schstu-ball is gonna spill some blood for you.

WHITE DIAMOND: Listen, Half-Breed. You have to realize that even with me on your side, we’re going up against nearly impossible odds. If I weren’t a Diamond, it would be thoroughly impossible for the two of us to overcome the legions of Homeworld.

STEVEN: So what’s new for the Crystal Gems?

BISMUTH: Well in that case, maybe you have room for two more in this party?

(Bismuth and Jasper emerge through the perimeter. Steven sees them and runs up to give them a bear hug)

STEVEN: Bismuth! Jasper! How did you guys make it out of the Burning Room?

JASPER: The earthquakes just about leveled the entire Temple, Rose. The Burning Room was shaken off its foundations and all of the bubbles broke loose. We had to spend a couple of hours fighting through the corrupted defectives, luckily, this Bismuth here was sentient and competent enough to help me. Which reminds me, watch your step, the beasts are still swarming the area.

BISMUTH: (Looking around) Are we making bases out of ruins now? Whose terrible idea was this? (Noticing that Steven is now eye to eye with her) And look at you, boy! You’re more shredded than a six-citrine fusion! Whatever happened to that tubby, weepy pacificist who ran a sword through me?

STEVEN: He’s dead, Bismuth. That boy you knew is gone forever.

BISMUTH: Glad to hear it!

JASPER: What happened here, Rose? I know I was out for a long time, but this! This miserable chunk of rock looks even worse off than I remembered it.

BISMUTH: I was about to ask the same thing! This whole place has gone to matchwood! What’s up?

STEVEN: You were right, Bismuth. About the Diamonds, about Homeworld…everything. And I was too stupid to listen until it was too late. Now Yellow Diamond has her invasion in full force, and I’m worried the cluster is about to break free.

BISMUTH: Well, you know what I say. It’s never too late to turn over to a new leaf. Now come on, chin up, boy. We’ve got work to do.

STEVEN: But Bismuth, I…I destroyed your breaking point. I’m so sorry…

(Bismuth starts laughing)

BISMUTH: You really are something else, Rose. Did you honestly think I only made one?

(She drops the bag slung over her shoulders onto the ground; it’s filled with breaking points)

STEVEN: No way!

BISMUTH: Come on, now, everyone arm up! Something tells me we’re going to be needing these in the fight against those Homeworld upper-crusts!

WHITE DIAMOND: I most certainly agree. These two will prove a valuable asset in out assault on the flagship.

(Bismuth notices White Diamond. Her eyes narrow and she takes one of the breaking points, about to charge him)

BISMUTH: You…!

STEVEN: Bismuth, wait! He’s on our side!

BISMUTH: (Disbelieving) What?

STEVEN: He’s an ally! He saved me! And he’s going to help us stop Yellow Diamond!

BISMUTH: So…we’re teaming up with a Diamond to help stop a Diamond…well, I never thought I’d live to see the day…

WHITE DIAMOND: It’s most unusual, I’ll grant you. Believe me, I never expected to be fighting alongside plebian bismuth and a lowly quartz soldier, but desperate times and all.

BISMUTH: Don’t push your luck. Fortunately for your gem, I’ll take all the help I can get right now. Like they say, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

WHITE DIAMOND: Ha! Seems it’s true even a common brigand knows how to speak wisely every now and again.

BISMUTH: I said don’t push it. But enough chit chat! Everyone suit up! Unless I’m mistaken, we’ve got a war to fight!

JASPER: (Picking up a breaking point) Finally. I’ve been waiting to get back to what I was made for a long time now!

BISMUTH: (Holding a breaking point in one hand and a massive battle ax in the other) That’s the spirit! Now let’s go show those Homeworld elites who’s BOSS!

(Cut to a shot of Yellow Diamond’s monumental flagship. Its shape is a golden arm, appearing as though rising straight out the ground the way it’s positioned, the hand at the top clenched into a fist. Cut to the inside. Pearl, Amethyst, Sapphire, Peridot and Connie are still trapped in a cage suspended over a lava pit. On the opposite side of the room, Yellow Diamond paces the room anxiously while Blue Diamond quivers uncertainly, hunched over in her throne. Their Pearls stand by in attendance, apprehensive. Ruby has been quarantined in a yellow bubble, suspended above them. This doesn’t her from kicking, flailing, and screaming mutely)

CONNIE: (Nervous) So…anyone up for a barbecue?

SAPPHIRE: (Deadpan monotone) Your attempts at humor are doing nothing to set anyone at ease.

CONNIE: Well, I have to try something to keep from losing it right now. Do you want us all to just give up hope right now?

SAPPHIRE: Hope does seem to be rather useless at this point. My future vision refuses to grant me even the slightest possibility of success.

CONNIE: Wait…you mean you’ve already seen the future where we all… (She can’t finish the sentence; her voice trails off)

PERIDOT: She’s right, you know, we’re all completely doomed! I’ve calculated our odds of survival, and they’re currently less than 0.000000017% and dropping! Even if we could somehow escape the Diamonds, there are too many dangers threatening the whole planet right now—(A violent tremor shakes the ground)—like that! I’m not ready to die yet, not now, not on this planet! (She curls up into a fetal position beside Amethyst shaking uncontrollably)

SAPPHIRE: (Grimly) Hmm…true, without Ruby I can’t see the future branching off into alternate possibilities, but, I have a feeling that even if I could, I’d just see the same thing in every direction. There’s only one way this ends.

CONNIE: So…listen, I know if we were to be dropped right now, I’d pretty much be a crispy critter and a puff of smoke, but aren’t you Gems basically indestructible?

AMETHYST: (Blowing hair out of her face) Phht. I wish.

PERIDOT: Hold me, Amethyst!

(Amethyst picks her up like a basketball)

SAPPHIRE: She’s right. A gem’s gemstone can be cracked, broken, or corrupted, but in all cases, the consciousness still remains in some form, even if it becomes scattered and diffuse. If you want to truly destroy a gem, you have to apply a more…permanent punishment.

CONNIE: Like melting you down.

(Peridot lets out a howling sob and Pearl covers her mouth with her hands. Sapphire stays stone faced and stoic)

SAPPHIRE: Once the gem is liquefied, it breaks down into its core components. At that point, the gem is truly gone and the being it once held is extinguished.

CONNIE: So why isn’t Ruby in here with us?

SAPPHIRE: She’s the only who can survive at higher temperatures. Theoretically, she could fuse with all of us and extend her protection to everyone. No, I believe they have a far more creative sentence in mind for her. (Ice crystals begin to form at her base)

CONNIE: Aren’t you afraid.

SAPPHIRE: Of course. I’m absolutely petrified. Livid, too, I’m so furious right now I can barely think. (The ice crystals harden and grow)

PEARL: (Mournfully) Our only hope now is for Steven to come and rescue us. But I don’t see how that could happen.

PERIDOT: (Exploding) It can’t! He’s too far away, he’ll never make it in time, even if he could, he’d never be able to make it past the might of the D—

(Amethyst puts her hand over Peridot’s mouth, muffling her outburst)

CONNIE: I sure wish Steven would come and save us all. We need him.

SAPPHIRE: For his own sake, it’s better that he forgets about all of us. Him coming here will do nothing more than throw his life away with ours, and I’d rest easier knowing that he at least saved himself, and is living on peacefully somewhere far, far away from here.

(Cut to a shot of STEVEN decapitating a forced gem fusion with a berserker howl, his sword cleaving downward in a deadly arc. Beside him, Lion is clawing and making short work of a mass of writhing arms. White Diamond has unleashed his swords from their hilts by chains and whirls them around in viscous swaths, every slash breaking the form of a dozen monsters. He laughs maniacally at the thrill of utter butchery. Behind, Bismuth and Jasper are shattering gems left and right, Jasper supplementing her attacks with spin dashes and her crash helmet. There is very little talking for the first 10 seconds of this scene; the focus is entirely on the fighting. A far shot shows the countless hordes of gem armies, Yellow Diamond’s fist flagship looms in the background.

Gradually Gem shards have begun to litter the ground. Steven stoops down during a lull in the fighting and begins bubbling the fallen shards)

WHITE DIAMOND: There’s no time; leave them be! It will take them a few days to reform anyway.

STEVEN: They just keep coming! Is there no end to this? (Cleaves a twelve foot colossus in half through the midsection)

BISMUTH: We’re thinning out the hoards, boy! Don’t worry, this ain’t nothin’ compared to the stuff I fought back in the great war!

JASPER: EEEIIIYAAAGHH!! (She bludgeons a misshapen octoped to dust)

(The fighting continues. Steven mounts Lion and prepares to fight cavalry style. The gang tightens their formation, hacking devastation on every side as they slowly advance)

WHITE DIAMOND: Almost…there! We’re nearing the next tier!

JASPER: (Bloodthirsty grin) I could get used to this!

BISMUTH: I can feel it! We’ll be fine as long as we stick together!

(A tumultuous earthquake shakes the ground, rending a fissure in the Earth’s crust right ahead of the group. Entire ranks of gem monsters fall into the chasm. White Diamond uses his chain swords to grapple to the other side of the rift, simultaneously Steven leaps the fissure with Lion. Jasper and Bismuth are left stranded)

BISMUTH: Clods!

JASPER: Don’t worry about us, we’ll hold the front back here! You two press on! Everything is for nothing if you don’t make it to the ship!

WHITE DIAMOND: Duly noted! (They charge forward)

BISMUTH: …”We’ll hold the front?”

JASPER: Come on, I have an idea!

(Steven, Lion, and White Diamond have moved into the corrupted monsters. Swarms of deformed, animalistic mutants press them in on all sides, only the murderous frenzy of their blades holds them at bay)

WHITE DIAMOND: (Through the onslaught) I can’t believe Yellow Diamond would stoop to such a depth to keep ahold of her own power! (He chops through a feathered Agate corruption with seven eyes) This is sacrilege! Taking loyal, pure-blooded gems and twisting them into these unholy amalgamates! These are the tactics of our enemies! Depravity! (He grabs a bipedal monster by the tongue and slices it off with a lightning fast thrust of the blade. The severed tongue hangs in his hand, still dripping wet and palpitating. It squirms, it struggles, pulsing under his iron grip for a full three seconds before giving out and disintegrating into nothingness. White Diamond takes the rest of the beast by the head and plunges his sword straight through the gem) It’s too late for you, wretched child. The best I can do is make this quick.

(The creature squeals a primal, bloody scream as its gem shatters)

WHITE DIAMOND: How are you holding up, Universe? Is that meat-sack of a body fatiguing you yet?

(Steven hangs on Lion’s back, still violently swinging, but drenched through with sweat and stained with his own blood)

STEVEN: (Gasping) A little!

WHITE DIAMOND: Take this! (He tosses a small bean like crystal through the ensuing chaos; Steven catches it and gulps it down)

STEVEN: What is it?

WHITE DIAMOND: It’s an uznes shard. Extremely rare. It will revitalize your gem and give you energy to sustain yourself. But use them sparingly, I only have three and I might need one for myself!

(Steven’s gem glows bright and his expression immediately perks up)

STEVEN: Oh, yeah, that is some GOOOOOOOD stuff! (He laughs thunderously and decapitates a row of gem mutants with one hand)

(Meanwhile, Bismuth and Jasper are being driven back by the throngs of gem mutants. The untenable defense has forced them into a strategic retreat, taking out whoever they can as they fall back. But the opposition is overwhelming)

JASPER: (Spotting a cave) Quick! In here!

(They rush into the cavern. Bismuth rips an enormous crag off the wall and shoves it into the mouth of the cave as a barrier. The pounding of the gem mutants from outside shudders through the entire hollow of the cave)

BISMUTH: That boulder ain’t gonna hold forever!

JASPER: Bismuth. Fuse with me!

BISMUTH: What? Are you crazy?

JASPER: It’s the only way we’ll be strong enough to defeat them! We can’t last much longer on our own! (The boulder begins to convulse from the battering on the other side)

BISMUTH:  I don’t even know you!

JASPER: Doesn’t matter; I’ve fused with strangers before! Right now, this is survival; it’s fuse or die!

(Bismuth seems to be weighing her options. The boulder begins to crack and splinter, the howling from the outside reaches a crescendo)

JASPER: I don’t have time for this. We have to do it now!

(She grabs Bismuth by the arm)

BISMUTH: What are you doing? Let go!

JASPER: We can beat them together! Just say yes already! (She tries to force Bismuth into a fusion dance)

BISMUTH: No! No! Stop!

JASPER: Quit…struggling! I’m doing this for your own good! (The dance turns into a wrestling brawl. Jasper grapples Bismuth and refuses to let go as they thrash about the cave. Bismuth changes her arms to hammers and attempts to club her assailant into submission, but Jasper is stronger. She pins the Smithing Gem down and holds her firm under the weight of her body. The gemstone on her nose begins to glows)

BISMUTH: Don’t do it! Please!

JASPER: Just relax. You’ll thank me for this later.

BISMUTH: NO!

(The boulder at the cave’s entrance explodes into a shower of rock splinters. Gem mutants pour in like gumballs. Bismuth screams out a primal wail as her body begins to turn into light, her gemstone blazing. The melting figure of radiant energy wavers for a second, struggling, but then the form resolves. Cut to a shot of outside the cave. The entire side on the cliff is literally demolished by the shock wave of power released from the fusion. Boulders fly everywhere, crushing gem mutants by the dozen. A being of pure light rises, growing twenty, forty, sixty feet tall before resolving into a distinct form. The scream turns into a bellow. Then into a laugh)

Sunstone: AAHH-HAHAHAHAHAHAAH!!! Ooh, I take it back! This feels amazing!

(Sunstone emerges from the dust of the cave. To call her burly is an understatement. Her body vaguely resembles a top-heavy centaur in form, but that’s where the similarities end. A scorpion-like tail whip protrudes from the end of the abdomen, and along the back, a row of spikes climb upward. Four limbs serve as legs, their ends tapering down to a fang-like point planted in the ground. The other four limbs serve as arms, two with fully formed hands and two with sickle-like blades. The skin of the fusion is a sparkling burnt orange, the face having Jasper’s shape but Bismuth’s rainbow dreadlocks billowing down to the waist. Two sets of eyes, one ochre and one steel, stare down at the throbbing masses of gem monsters in sadistic glee. When she speaks, she talks with two voices at once, not unlike Malachite. She also appears to still be aware of her component parts)

SUNSTONE: I haven’t felt this good in ages! (Switching persona) I know, right? I told you this was the way to go!

(Sunstone notices the masses of Gem monsters trying to claw at her feet)

SUNSTONE: HA HA HA HAHAHAHAH!!! Puny creatures! I’ll show you what true strength is! (She smashes a dozen monsters beneath one of her legs) We are strong now! Nothing can stand against us! No one can stop me! (With a swipe of her tail, thirty gem monsters are sent flying. She pounds the remnant of the cliff face with her fists, making it rain rocks the size of houses) I am mighty! I am powerful! WE ARE SUNSTONE!

(The scene switches to Blue and Yellow Diamond, watching the commotion of battle from on high)

BLUE DIAMOND: There really seems to be struggle going on down there, Yellow. I don’t understand how anyone could have mounted a counterstrike and survived for this long.

YELLOW DIAMOND: There is only one explanation. He must be down there with them.

BLUE DIAMOND: (Suddenly terrified) You don’t mean…?! No, that can’t be! Perhaps we should withdraw. We may not be safe here anymore.

YELLOW DIAMOND: Calm yourself, Blue. It’s all going to be over soon. This planet, this war…everything. Soon she will emerge, and when that happens, we need not fear even White’s wrath against us. (Another seismic wave rocks the ship) Every tremor of this planet’s crust sets her closer to breaking free. I can feel it now. She is very close. No doubt he can feel it, too. That must be why he’s acting so desperate.

BLUE DIAMOND: (Tearing) I just want this to end.

YELLOW DIAMOND: We’ve come too far to turn around now. You swore to me that you were in this to the very end. I’m not about to let you back out!

(Blue starts crying and her Pearl comes to comfort her. From the other side of the room, the Crystal Gems look on)

CONNIE: Can you tell what she’s talking about?

SAPPHIRE: I can’t see anything beyond a few hours from now. Everything just goes black. Which I can only assume must mean… (She trails off)

AMETHYST: Dark.

(Ruby still thrashes wildly in the bubble, her endurance ceaseless and her temper riled. Sapphire watches her with a hard gaze)

CONNIE: You two were really close, weren’t you?

SAPPHIRE: I would say so. Ruby and I were about as close as any two friends could be.

CONNIE: And…?

SAPPHIRE: And I don’t want her to be hurt. She was my best friend. She was almost like a sister to me.

CONNIE: A sister, huh?

SAPPHIRE: Just a sister, if you’re asking. I’m sorry, but I really would rather not talk about this. It’s already weighing heavy on my mind, discussing only makes the burden greater.

PEARL: Kind of like me and Rose, right, Sapphire?

SAPPHIRE: Yes, exactly like that. You two were very good friends as well, weren’t you?

PEARL: I’d say we were just about as close as sisters too. But the more I learn about Rose, the more I realize I never did understand her.

AMETHYST: Hey, could we worry more about escaping right now?

PEARL: There’s no point. There’s nothing we can do to save ourselves right now.

(Another convulsion rocks the ship. Peridot squeals and shivers in trepidation)

PERIDOT: Will they never stop?

SAPPHIRE: That one felt different. That was no earthquake.

(Blue and Yellow Diamond rush to the portcullis of the ship bridge. They gaze out the panel and behold the image of Sunstone rising, wreaking terror upon the Gem hordes)

BLUE DIAMOND: Great stars! What is that thing?

YELLOW DIAMOND: A wrinkle in our plans. This…this development may complicate things.

BLUE DIAMOND: Oh no, oh no no no no, I knew it was going to come to this! We’re doomed, Yellow! What are we going to do, what are we going to do, what are we going to do?

YELLOW DIAMOND: Calm down, Blue, we’re not in trouble yet! We still have contingency plans.

BLUE DIAMOND: I’m scared, Yellow.

YELLOW DIAMOND: Silence! I’ve had enough of your simpering; just hush and let me deal with the situation! (She presses a button on a comlink and speaks into it) Put the troop into high alert and have them send me up green squad commander. Inform all units to standby for possible deployment.

(The Crystal Gems see the edge of Sunstone’s rampage from their prison)

AMETHYST: Whoa-ho-ho! That thing is huge! It’s even bigger than Sugilite!

SAPPHIRE: I admit, I didn’t see this before. I have a fairly good idea what that creature is, though I hardly believe it myself…

(The doors to the bridge slide open and “Amy”, otherwise known as Holy War Quartz 8-X1J, strides in. In contrast to everyone else in the room, her appearance is absolutely stunning. Her luscious, silken golden locks drip down to her waist, her flawless white skin smooth and gleaming as ivory apples. Her eyes are shadowed with intrigue and mystery yet crystal blue and sparkling like the crisp ocean waves, they flutter like the delicate wings of butterflies beneath deep, seductive lashes. Her body is sculpted to a figure of perfection; tall, slender, lithe and sleek, yet still voluptuous in all the right places. Her liquid legs could enchant even the stoniest mercenary, her wine red pouting lips could send the coldest woman-hater to his knees begging for mercy. There’s not a trace of flab or fat or weakness in her tight, trained and expertly honed vessel of enchantment. She is everything every woman dreams of being, everything every man desires. She is the ideal female figure in every way. Her clothing consists of nothing but a sheer, clinging white tunic, draped off her form like a billowing curtain concealing a masterpiece of art. A curving diamond window is cut into the bust to expose a blood sanguine gemstone, polished to perfection and radiant like the rest of her. She enters before the Diamonds and kneels submissively)

AMY: How may I serve you, my Diamond?

YELLOW DIAMOND: Holy War Quartz 8-X1J, a situation has arisen on the eastern perimeter of our encampment. You will go and attend to this matter; put down the assailants by any means necessary. I am also authorizing you to command our Special Forces Squad V-284 LL “Hydra” to assist you in this endeavor. Be advised that we believe the filthy unregistered Halfling, known locally as “Steven Universe”, is among the counterattack forces. I believe the two of you have encountered each other once before, on a mission where your results were less than satisfactory. Kill the Halfling, take his gem and bring it us as proof of his demise, and you will be well on your way to redeeming yourself for this failure. Go now.

AMY: It will be an honor, my Diamond. I will not disappoint you again.

YELLOW DIAMOND: Indeed you will not, else you be disassembled and returned to your core components and recycled. Go, time is of the essence.

(Amy exits, determined. As she leaves the bridge, she whips out a chain-flail Morningstar, her gem weapon, from the quartz embedded in her bust. Yellow Diamond looks on in admiration)

YELLOW DIAMOND: You will soon learn what it means to cross a Diamond…Steven Universe.

(Back on the battlefield, Steven and White Diamond fly pell-mell into the ranks of gem soldiers. Chaos reigns in side. Confusion, clamor, and the dust of broken gems scatter the battleground of nightmares)

WHITE DIAMOND: Ingrates! Mutineers! Misshapen clods! How dare you attack me, the father of all Gemkind? Has it been so long that you don’t even recognize your own master and creator?

(A Topaz centurion raises a ten foot axe to cleave White Diamond in half, but Steven springs in on his feline mount, intercepting and eviscerating the ugly blob of a gem)

WHITE DIAMOND: Well done, Half-Breed. To arms!

(They collect in a defensive formation. It’s becoming clear that even with their combined strength and determination, they’re beginning to tire. A row of quartz soldiers launches spin dash attacks against them, but Steven blocks all of them with his shield and then slashes their forms with his mighty blade.

Suddenly a roar like a thunderclap echoes across the plain. Steven and White Diamond briefly turn to behold the monstrosity of Sunstone battering her way through the mutlitudes)

WHITE DIAMOND: Inconceivable! Is this another part of Yellow Diamond’s clandestine freak show?

STEVEN: (Dawning) It’s Jasper and Bismuth! They fused!

WHITE DIAMOND: Our allies found a way to increase their power levels that much? I don’t know whether to call it blasphemy or strategy!

STEVEN: Shut up and fight! You can worry about it later!

(Steven repels a platoon of Rubies that just charged them. By amazing coincidence, it’s the same Ruby squad that visited them on Earth several seasons ago. Steven makes short work of them, poofing Eyeball and Army, shattering Doc, letting Lion chew Leggy to shreds in his jaws, and then pouncing on Navy, the last one standing)

NAVY: No! Wait! Please!

(Steven grapples her and begins to choke the Gem to death)

STEVEN: I’m going to repay you for all those times you tricked me and disgraced my companions!

NAVY: (Struggling to speak) ...have…mercy…

STEVEN: You mean like this? (He rams his sword straight through her chest. Her eyes widen and she lets out a strained gasp of agony of before disintegrating into thin air.)

STEVEN: (Bubbling her) The day I let you free will be the day pigs fly, you charlatan. It’s more than you deserve.

WHITE DIAMOND: Universe! Look up!

(Steven sees what appear to be birds descending from the sky. However, as they draw nearer, their true nature becomes apparent)

STEVEN: Lapises! Lapis Lazulis, dozens of them, headed dead toward us, ten’ o clock!

WHITE DIAMOND: Matri con Skrias! Run! Take cover! Find something to grab onto!

STEVEN: Why?

WHITE DIAMOND: A Lapis’ power multiplies tenfold on Earth! With that many of them, they could—

(He is cut off as a tsunami levels the battlefield. The Lapis Lazulis have conjured a tidal wave of epic proportions and slammed it against the coast. Trees are uprooted. Boulders are supplanted. Only Yellow Diamond’s flagship remains intact. Thousands of gems, fusions, mutants and monsters are swept away with the tide. White Diamond, through superhuman effort, manages to plant his chain sword into the ground even as the surge blasts them full force. He clings to the hilt as an anchor with all his might, even while holding his other sword with the opposite hand. Steven grips the blade end desperately, blood pouring from his serrated hands. As the tidal wave subsides, Steven and White Diamond are left waterlogged and frantically panting for breath)

STEVEN: (Gasping) That…just about…did me in…

WHITE DIAMOND: Here comes another one!

(A second wave of equal force pummels them with unrelenting fury. And then a third and a fourth. Blast after blast of pure typhonic force nearly yanks them out of their bearings. Steven’s grip slips and White Diamond has to latch onto his arm to keep him from flying away. By the time the blows finally stop, both warriors have been pushed to their body’s limit. They lie prostrate on the flooded coast, wheezing and struggling to stand)

WHITE DIAMOND: No giving up, Half-Breed! It cannot end this way. We must think of something…

STEVEN: I can’t go on…I’m sorry, Dad…Rose…

(The Lapises descend like a flock of harpies, darting and wheeling about their prey. One of them levitates several water globules with her hands and morphs them into blades. Steven looks up, weary and defeated. He grits his teeth, too exhausted to defend himself. The Lapis readies her volley. She fires. The missiles race toward their target but they never arrive. A whirring blade chops them straight out of the sky. White Diamond is on his feet again, panting but flailing his chain swords with renewed vigor. He stands over Steven, shielding him)

WHITE DIAMOND: I…am…stronger!

(He slashes more water spears out of the sky as the Lapises unleash a hailstorm on him)

WHITE DIAMOND: I am stronger than you low-caste slaves!

(The Lapises barrage him with hardened aquatic spheres, but the razor precision of his weapons dissipates every one of them to mist)

WHITE DIAMOND: I will not bow down to you! I will not be humiliated!

(They draw water up from the earth, forming a sheet to slice the ground from beneath his feet, but he leaps to the side and severs the curtain in two)

WHITE DIAMOND: I am stronger than this planet!

(Full throttle attack; they slam him into the eye of a literal monsoon, but he stays upright against the catastrophic winds, swords in hands, howling in the face of the storm)

WHITE DIAMOND: I am stronger than fate! I am stronger than DEATH! I am stronger than all of you!

(His weapon finds a home embedding itself in one of the Lazulis. She screams before poofing; White Diamond cries out in triumph)

WHITE DIAMOND: You can’t stop me! Nothing can stop me! I’m coming for you, Yellow! I will be avenged at last!

(A fresh tremor catches him off-guard and rocks him off his feet. At that moment of instability, a water bolt catches him dead on the forehead. His gem cracks. The entire world goes dead silent and slips into slow motion as he falls)

WHITE DIAMOND: (In silent thoughts) No…I don’t understand. Was that really it? Did I really come all this way only to be halted now, with victory in sight?

(White Diamond clatters to the ground)

WHITE DIAMOND: All my life…every day, every waking moment has been predetermined and set in stone for me. A Diamond is born knowing everything for every situation; how to act, how to look, even how to think. Every deed was carefully measured and performed in perfection. Every decision was made before us, and the end was known before the beginning.

But now, coming to the end, everything falls apart. Even in exile, there was never a second I didn’t know exactly what I should be doing: I fought to regain my throne. To realign the sacred balance of Gemkind. Because it was what I was born to do; there was nothing else. Everything I needed to know was taught to me before I was born.

But death…death is the one thing we were never taught. How does one prepare for such an illogical impossibility as death? Now I stand face to face with the greatest, blackest abyss in the cosmos, a darkness I was programmed to never pay an instant’s heed to. And for the first time in my life, I ask myself: was it all for nothing?

No. This wasn’t meant to be my fate. Nothing in this adds up. All those years of tyrannical glory, the kingdom, the colonies, the untraveled worlds and the endless mystery of cosmic beauty, what are they now, now that I face the end of existence, the end of me? This isn’t supposed to happen. How can I be dying? I have so much left to see, to explore, to discover, to conquer and rule. My road can’t just end here, slain ingloriously by the blow of a common footsoldier. I…I’m better than this! I can’t die! I won’t die! Not here, not now! My journey must continue; I’ll stand on my feet and show them what a Diamond is truly made of! I am resolved to live! I won’t die! I won’t die! I…won’t…

(Everything fades to black)

WHITE DIAMOND: (Quivering) Keep…holding…

(The screen goes pitch black and there are a few moments of total silence. Absolute void. Nothing. X. 0.)

(A distant noise is heard, a far off stirring like the intonation of music across a winding corridor. The shot cuts to a close up of White Diamond’s gem. The fissures that cracked its surface are receding into nothingness. The shot cuts out just a little, and we see Steven cradling White Diamond’s head. His pink bubble is wrapped around them, the sound of Lapis Lazulis hissing and snarling can be heard outside it)

STEVEN: Don’t leave me.

(White Diamond opens his eyes)

WHITE DIAMOND: Steven! How…?

STEVEN: I healed you. I healed your gem.

WHITE DIAMOND: You can do that?

STEVEN: (Gazing up at the seething Lapises meaningfully) Yes. I can. It’s the gift of my mother, Rose Quartz. It took another uznes shard, but with my stamina restored, I have all of her abilities as mine, including this shield that surrounds us.

WHITE DIAMOND: Inconceivable! All this hidden potential in a mere Rose Quartz, and it was never explored. How greatly the Gem Kingdom could have benefited from this latent power!

STEVEN: Yes…my powers are very useful for healing. But do you know what else they’re good for? (He drops the bubble) KILLING!

(Steven conjures up a swath of thorny vines to shoot straight up from the earth and wrap around the Lazulis in mid-flight, breaking their wings and crushing their bodies until the very life is squeezed out of them. Every Lapis is poofed in a matter of seconds. Their useless gemstones clatter to the earth in a rain of crystal tears)

WHITE DIAMOND: (Laughing) Well done, Half-Breed! I was wise to choose you as my ally.

STEVEN: Now let’s move! The way is clear— (the sound of rushing winds like a roaring waterfall drums the distance) —no. NO!

(More Lapis Lazulis are pouring out of the windows of the flagship. There are hundreds of them, possibly even thousands, darkening the sky)

WHITE DIAMOND: Stand your ground, Universe! It seems our fight isn’t over yet!

(But the winged terrors speed right on past them, not paying a moment’s attention to our heroes. It soon becomes clear who their real target it: Sunstone, still kicking and howling in the distance)

WHITE DIAMOND: Fate has granted us a diversion! Fly! Fly fast as your feet can carry you! This is our chance!

(The two race toward the flagship, but White Diamond soon becomes tired of Steven’s comparative lack of speed and throws him onto his shoulder. Then he really takes off, surging over the yawning plain with superhuman power. They reach the entrance to the ship in less than a minute)

WHITE DIAMOND: Almost there!

(They both stop short, eyes dilating. The entrance to the flagship is wide open. But there, standing at the foot of the entrance, slapping her Morningstar against her palm, is Amy)

TO BE CONTINUED...

[newyorktheater]

oc

Ben Platt accepting his award as Best Actor in a musical, in a speech that seemed to reintroduce the concept of 78 rpm

Sam Shepard at La Mama in 1971

It was a year of shocks. In 2017, we got Hurricane Harvey and Harvey Weinstein, indecency in the White House and terror in Times Square. Meryl Streep began the year speaking out against Donald Trump’s bullying and ended the year accused of remaining silent about Harvey Weinstein’s bullying. To many in America, to borrow half of Charles Dickens’ famous phrase, 2017 was the worst of times, an age of foolishness, an epoch of incredulity. And the theater community was far from immune. But it was also far from passive. This was also a year of standing up and speaking out, resisting and persisting. Below are some of the top New York theater news stories of 2017, presented chronologically month by month, including prominent theater people who died. As you’ll see, in many of the months, a different new (or newly renovated) theater building had its ribbon cutting ceremony. Nearly every month, resisters held a protest or a spoof of the White House went viral

JANUARY

The Anti-Inauguration

The story of Inauguration Day becomes almost as much about culture as politics. The list of performers who decline an invitation to perform at official Inauguration ceremonies certainly exceeds the list of those who accept – and several, including Tony winner Jennifer Holliday and Springsteen tribute musicians the B Street Band, first accepted and then, after getting flak for their decision, reverse themselves and withdraw. The theater community in New York and across the country held events signaling resistance but also hope. The Ghostlight Project saw people gather outside theaters in all 50 states – including 50 in New York City, plus Times Square – to shine light, literally, against what many fear is the coming darkness. Other projects include the Concert for America, the Inaugural Ball at HERE, and The Resister Project.   Trump imposes a visa ban against citizens of six Muslim-majority nations that complicates international artist exchanges. The order sets off court challenges, and revised orders, throughout the rest of the year; the matter as of this writing is still not fully resolved.

Meryl Streep’s speech at the Golden Globes, January 8, 2017: nd this instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone in the public platform, by someone powerful, it filters down into everybody’s life, because it kinda gives permission for other people to do the same thing. Disrespect invites disrespect, violence incites violence. And when the powerful use their position to bully others we all lose.

In accepting  the Cecil B. Demille Award at the Golden Globes, Meryl Streep attacks Donald Trump for having made fun of a disabled reporter — “disrespect invites disrespect” — and addresses Trump’s characterization of foreigners as dangerous.  “Hollywood is crawling with outsiders and foreigners. And if we kick ’em all out, you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.”   Saturday Night Live used a parody of the musical Chicago to spoof Trump aide Kellyanne Conway’s ambition https://youtu.be/sb9ybImGwkU   The non-profit Alliance for Resident Theaters opens a new theater, A.R.T./New York with two performance venues, offering a home — and rental subsidies — to some long-time nomadic companies.  Jitney, the first play that August Wilson wrote in his 10-play America Cycle – one for each decade of the 20th century – is the last of his plays to open on Broadway.

August Wilson

Jenny Schlenzka, current curator of performance MoMA PS1, is appointed the artistic director of PS 122, only the third person in the post since the East Village cultural center began in 1980; the first woman.

RIP

British actor John Hurt, 77 Mary Tyler Moore, 80, beloved TV actress, Broadway producer and Tony-winning performer, co-founder of Broadway Barks Photographer Martha Swope, 88,  ballet and Broadway chronicler for 40 years.

Articles I wrote that were published in January

Staged Resistance   Bridging Cultures at China Shanghai International Arts Festivala

FEBRUARY

Barry Jenkins, left, and Tarell Alvin McCraney accept the award for best adapted screenplay for “Moonlight”

At the Academy Awards, a distracted accountant handed the wrong envelope to Warren Beatty, who announced that the winner of the Best Picture was La-La Land. The actual winner, Moonlight, was based on the play, Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, by Tarell Alvin McCraney (playwright of Head of Passes, the Brother/Sister Plays, etc.), who also won for adapted screenplay. Another playwright, Kenneth Lonergan (This is Our Youth), won in the original screenwriting category, for Manchester by the Sea. Pasek and Paul, the songwriting team behind Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway, won an Oscar as lyricists for the best song, from La La Land. “This is dedicated to all the kids who sing in the rain,” Benj Pasek said, holding his trophy, “and all their moms who let them”   Jack Viertel, the producer of the Encores concert production of Big River, wrote to the Times theater editors calling the newspaper’s review of the show by Laura Collins-Hughes a “ significant humiliation for the paper, a stunningly amateurish piece of work.” Critics of his action suggest that it is sexist. He wrote no letter to the editors at New York Magazine, though Jesse Green’s review offered much the same critique. Hamilton’s original Schuyler Sisters reunite to sing at the Super Bowl

#Hamilton‘s Schuyler Sisters (Phillipa Soo, Renée Elise Goldsberry, Jasmine Cephas Jones) slay “America The Beautiful” #SuperBowl pic.twitter.com/I4BtzUrvQw

— Jarett Wieselman (@JarettSays) February 5, 2017

The 2017 Grammy for best musical theater album was given to The Color Purple Dear Evan Hansen cast recording makes it to the Billboard Top 10, only the fourth cast recording since 1965 to have done so.

Charles Isherwood

The New York Times fires its long-time second string theater critic Charles Isherwood, never publicly explaining why Several shows he championed Off-Broadway in the Times, transfer to Broadway in large part on the strength of his review. The Time gives them lukewarm reviews, and they close after just a few months. After a scandalous confirmation of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, here is my review of Scandalous, the Broadway flop she produced. The Hudson Theater opens as the 41st Broadway house, with “Sunday in the Park With George.” Although built in 1903, it had not been used to present a Broadway show since 1968, when it became a nightclub, then a hotel conference center. The 115th Street branch of the New York Public Library is being renamed for Harry Belafonte, as the singer, actor, activist and Tony Award winner nears 90th birthday on March 1.

Anna Deavere Smith

Theater artist Anna Deavere Smith won the George Polk Career Award, which is a top award in journalism. A 24-Decade History of Popular Music by Taylor Mac and Matt Ray won the 2017 Edward Kennedy Prize for Drama Inspired by American History,

RIP

Harvey Lichtenstein, 87, executive producer for 32 years of the Brooklyn Academy of Music, transforming it from a moribund institution to  “a dynamic showcase for cutting-edge performing arts.”

Arthur and Barbara Gelb

Barbara Gelb, 91, playwright and journalist who, with her husband, Arthur Gelb, produced the first full-scale biography of the playwright Eugene O’Neill Professor Irwin Corey, 102, “world’s foremost authority.”

My articles in February

The N-Word on Stage   China on Stage

MARCH

New York theatergoers look to the government for support of the arts – the government of Canada, when Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau attends “Come From Away” on Broadway, accompanied by some 600 friends and allies, mostly Canadian, but also a number of UN ambassadors, and Ivanka Trump. Her father was invited as well, but according to an article in the Washington Post, he said “Absolutely not,” and flew to Nashville instead to visit the gravesite of Andrew Jackson. That same day, the Ides of March, comes news of Trump’s budget plan, which calls for “the elimination of of four independent cultural agencies” – the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. The Late Late Show with James Corden presented Donald the Musical, with Tim Minchin on a swing singing “When I grow up, I will be president and build big walls, ban Muslims, play with Putin’s (bleep)”? https://youtu.be/WZWNHCRCpNM

Jesse Green

Right before the busiest month in New York theater, theater critics are getting new assignments (a polite way of putting it.) Jesse Green, the current critic at New York Magazine, has been named “co-chief theater critic” of the New York Times. Bryan Doerries, the founder of Theater of War, is named New York City’s Public Artist in Residence, (PAIR.) Theater of War uses the dramas of Ancient Greek and other classic tragedies to help with the healing process. Initially, this was with military veterans, but it has spread.   The Actor’s Fund’s Friedman Health Center for the Performing Arts opens in the theater district https://youtu.be/7hNkQu0fKYU

RIP

Miriam Colón a well-known movie actress who took roles opposite Brando and Pacino (most famously as his mother in Scarface) and many others, has died at age 80. She was the founder of the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater in 1967,  to bring free bilingual theater to venues throughout New York City

Derek Walcott

Derek Walcott, 87, Nobel Laureate, poet, and playwright of more than 20 plays,

My articles in March

Cooling Down: How Actors Unwind After Taxing Performances   Scenes from the original productions of the 11 Broadway plays and musicals that are being revived, for the second, fifth, or 16th time, this season on Broadway.

APRIL

Andy Karl is injured three days before the opening of Groundhog Day, forcing him to miss some performances and wear a knee brace when he returns. In a cheeky bit of improvisation in what was supposed to scene of seduction, he proudly stuck a glass of Scotch on outstretched knee brace. Sweat wins the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It closes two months later

Lynn Nottage

This is Lynn Nottage’s second Pulitzer – she is one of 15 women playwrights ever to win it.   The New Yorker’s Hilton Als won the Pulitzer in criticism, just the second theater critic to do so.   Fourteen shows open on Broadway in April, exactly one third of the entire season.  Mine of them open in the last ten days of the month — as usual “Rebecca” will never open on Broadway, according to the  attorney for its producers, who admits during the trial against the show’s former publicist that the producers have lost the rights to it.

Donald Trump reviews his first 100 days in office. Watch an all-new episode of #TheSimpsons this Sunday at 8/7c on FOX. pic.twitter.com/rDtvNgusFs

— The Simpsons (@TheSimpsons) April 26, 2017

RIP

  Linda Hopkins, 92, show-stopping Tony-winning singer, actress and writer Tim Pigott-Smith, 70, who made a splash on Broadway as the title character in King Charles III

My article in April

History of Infamous Broadway Injuries

MAY

The Broadway League releases statistics for the 2016-17 Broadway season just ended. Revenue made a big jump, even though attendance has dipped slightly. The reason is primarily increased ticket prices. Shows that opened during season: 45 (eight of them not eligible for Tony Awards) Attendance at all shows: 13,270,343 visitors (down about .3 percent from 2015-16) Revenue: $1,449,321,564.64 (up 5.5 percent from 2015-16)   Richard Rojas crashes his car in Times Square, killing one person and injuring 20. Police iscovered he had taken phencyclidine before the crash. He told them he wanted to die in a “suicide by cop” and that he had been hearing voices. Alyssa Elsman, 18, a recent high school graduate, was visiting New York  from Portage, Michigan. Richard Basciano dies at the age of 92, making it likely that the pornography establishment he owned would close, thus leaving only three porn shops in the theater district,  which was once the porn capital of the United States. With reports of as many as four theatergoers in a single night fainting, some vomiting, in reaction to the torture scene on “1984,” the producers announced  that nobody under 13 years of age (“born after 2004″) would be admitted to the show.  Olivia Wilde, one of the stars, Tweeted that “this is not your grandfather’s 1984.” Office of Management and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney attacks a grant given to the 2014 climate change show by The Civilians, The Great Immensity, to justify slashing the budget of the National Science Foundation

(l-r) Katrina Lenk and Tony Shalhoub

Although it closed at the Atlantic Theater Off-Broadway in January, The Band’s Visit sweeps most theater awards during this month of theater awards. (It will transfer to Broadway in the Fall.) “Rebecca” producers were awarded $90,000 from publicist Marc Thibedeau, far short of $10.6 million they sought.Both sides claim victory

Glenn Close in Sunset Boulevard

Quote of the Month: “I’m sorry. Stop the show. Someone there is taking photos. You must know how distracting and disrespectful that is. Now, we can have a show or we can have a photoshoot.” – Glenn Close  

RIP

Dina Merrill, 93, actress and philanthropist William Brohn, 84, one of musical theater’s top orchestrators

My article in May

Power Struggle on Broadway: Escapist vs. Socially Conscious Shows in the 2016–17 Season

JUNE

  Gregg Henry (center) and the company in The Public Theater’s Free Shakespeare in the Park production of Julius Caesar

The Public Theater’s production of Julius Caesar depicted a Trump-like figure in the title role, which prompted many protests, and led to some corporations canceling their funding. Shakespeare companies across the country that had no connection to the Public’s production were also the target of angry protests. “Dear Evan Hansen” won best musical and five other awards at the 71st annual Tony Awards, the most of any show. “Oslo” won best play, “Jitney” best play revival, “Hello, Dolly!” best musical revival. Among the highlights of the ceremony was Ben Platt’s Tony acceptance speech: “Don’t waste any time being anyone but yourself because the things that make you strange are the things that make you powerful.” The 2017 Tony Awards broadcast attracts just six million viewers, a sharp decrease from the 8.7 million who watched in 2016. (To be fair, that Hamilton-soaked show had the highest ratings for the Tony broadcast in 15 years.) The Pearl Theatre Co. files for bankruptcy, and is closing after 33 years. https://youtu.be/PQ04sTZ79HQ

RIP

A.R. Gurney, 86, playwright My 2014 profile of Gurney

My article in June

Politics, Propaganda, and Aesthetics: Sorting through Building the Wall

JULY

  NYC’s first ever “cultural plan” will link funding of arts groups to the diversity of their staff and board. 180-page Create NYC plan

Diversity Concerns Prompt ‘Great Comet’ Casting Shakeup

After a social media storm over the musical’s plan to replace Okieriete Onaodowan, Mandy Patinkin declined to assume the lead male role. But Oak has announced he’s still leaving August 13.

It’s a month for immigrants and other foreigners. The Canadian theater company Soulpepper is wrapping up its month-long residence at Signature. The first annual Immigrant Arts  in America Summit concluded with a rousing concert and resulted in the formation of an Immigrant Arts Coalition. More than 60 artists, including playwright Annie Baker and director Sam Gold, signed a protest letter to Lincoln Center, trying unsuccessfully to get the cultural institution to cancel a production of the Israeli play “To The End of The Land” as part of the Lincoln Center Festival. They objected to some funding that Israel’s Office of Cultural Affairs in North America gave to this play, an adaptation by two Israeli theater companies of a novel by Israeli novelist David Grossman.

Sara Holdren, new critic at New York

Sara Holdren, a recent graduate of the Yale School of Drama who identifies as a theater director, is hired to be New York Magazine’s new theater critic in July, to replace Jesse Green, who was hired at the New York Times to replace Charles Isherwood. She had written just one professionally published review before she was hired. Lawyers for the actor James Franco sent a cease and desist letter to shut down a two-character play entitled “James Franco and Me” scheduled to run at People’s Improv Theater. Initially, playwright Kevin Broccoli promised to rename the play “_____ and Me” and eliminate all mentions of Franco’s name, but otherwise perform it as is.

RIP

John Heard,71,”Home Alone” Dad, “Sopranos” corrupt cop, four-time Broadway veteran

My article in July

John Leguizamo on his life, career, being a theater nerd, and the coming power of Latinos

AUGUST

All 17 members of The President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities, including theater director George C. Wolfe and actor John Lloyd Young, resigned in August to protest President Trump’s comments on the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville. True or false, the first letter of each paragraph in their resignation letter spelled out the word RESIST. Michael Moore debuts on Broadway in “Terms of My Surrender,” opening in August. After one performance, he takes the audience on buses to an anti-Trump demonstration at Trump Tower.    The Fringe makes news by not happening – after 20 years, the company went on “hiatus.” Artistic diretor Elena K. Holy says It WILL return next year, but half the size and preferably in one location.

The new Flea theater

The Flea opens its new $18 million Off-Off Broadway theater with “Inanimate” a play about a woman who has fallen in love with an inanimate object. Lin-Manuel Miranda holds a month long #Ham4all fundraising challenge to raise money for the Immigrants: We Get the Job Done Coalition. Josh Groban’s contribution:

Many challenges accepted! @Lin_Manuel requested Burn! I challenge @thatgracemclean & @brittainashford! #HamForAll https://t.co/3Po3AYhmrS pic.twitter.com/sU1VhtVaiH

— josh groban (@joshgroban) June 29, 2017

Quote of the Month

.@NoahEGalvin interview June,2016. I guess he let NY know: In @DearEvanHansen in Nov https://t.co/thDXj0XIv9 pic.twitter.com/jkbjteT1PD

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) August 23, 2017

June,2016. Interview with Noah Galvin, who announces in August, 2017 he will take over the role of Dear Evan Hansen

RIP

Barbara Cook, 89, singer Sam Shepard, 73, playwright, actor Thomas Meehan, 88, librettist Bernard Pomerance, 76 playwright (The Elephant Man) Jerry Lewis, 91, comedian, director, veteran of two Broadway shows. Stuart Thompson,62,  producer

My article in August

Antigone in Ferguson: Dramatizing the Divide between Law Enforcement and Community

SEPTEMBER

The Atlantic hurricane storm season hits hard, with 17 named storms, Harvey causing extensive damage to Texas (wreaking havoc in the Houston theater district), Irma to Florida, and Maria to Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico has still not recovered.

Lin-Manuel Miranda has been a visible supporter of the recovery efforts in the island of his ancestors, writing an article pleading for Puerto Rican aid, promoting fundraising, organizing a song a la “We Are The World” entitled Almost Like Praying (an allusion to the Maria from “West Side Story”)

When the president attacks San Juan mayor Yulín Cruz  for her “poor leadership,”  and suggesting that the island’s residents are are not doing enough to help themselves, Miranda  goes ballistic, tweeting: “You’re going straight to Hell. No long lines for you. Someone will say, ‘Right this way, sir.’ They’ll clear a path….You’re a congenital liar.”

Miranda then took the logical next step when he visited Puerto Rico in November to deliver care packages: He announced his return to his starring role in Hamilton, in a production in Puerto Rico, scheduled to run from January 8 to 27, 2019 at the University of Puerto Rico’s Teatro UPR

The Great Comet closes, a disappointment to its fans, who ask:  Could it have been saved? When Josh Groban left the role of Pierre, the producers hired Okieriete “Oak” Onaodowan to replace him. Sales did not improve, so they hired Mandy Patinkin, who was to return to Broadway after 17 years to star. Some protested, starting online,  accusing the producers of insensitivity and worse, for cutting Oak’s tenure short, and replacing a black actor with a white actor. Patinkin withdrew. Low box office receipts convinced the products to pull the plug.   There is a lesson here, but different people argue over what it is. Barry Diller kills  Pier 55, his $250 million planned futuristic performing arts center near The Highline. The following month, with help from the governor, Diller changes his mind, the project continues.   In solidarity with the NFL players who have been “taking knee” during the playing of the National Anthem before football games to protest racism, the cast of “Miss Saigon” kneel during curtain call Audra McDonald enters Theatre Hall of Fame, along with Matthew Broderick, The Public’s Oskar Eustis + 5 In her new memoir, Hillary Clinton writes about the healing power of Broadway: “There’s nothing like a play to make you forget your troubles for a few hours,” they wrote. “In my experience, even a mediocre play can transport you. And show tunes are the best soundtrack for tough times. You think you’re sad? Let’s hear what Fantine from Les Misérables has to say about that!”

Iain Armitage

The first theater critic to become a TV star? (surely the first who’s 8) Iain Armitage, who became one of the best known theater critics in the country when he began at age 5 to post his reviews on YouTube, stars in a TV series that’s a prequel to the Big Bang Theory, entitled “Young Sheldon.”

J.K. Rowling

Quote of the Month: After seven books and eight movies, J.K. Rowling thought she was done with Harry Potter. “I genuinely, I didn’t want Harry to go onstage,” Rowling said in the video below. “I felt that I was done.”

RIP

Michael Friedman, 1975 – 2017

Composer Michael Friedman 41 Director Sir Peter Hall, 86 Playwright Albert Innaurato, 70

My article in September

Dramatizing Dystopia

OCTOBER

The New York Times and the New Yorker write articles alleging that movie producer Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed and assaulted young actress for years with impunity. In the two months since then, the list of women accusing Weinstein has grown to more than 80 — and counting. On October 15, actress Alyssa Milano Tweets: “If all the women who have been sexually harassed or assaulted wrote ‘Me too’ as a status, we might give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” In the two months since, almost 50 high-profile men have been fired, resigned or experienced similar professional fallout as a result of accusations of sexual misconduct.

Accused of sexual misconduct: top row, left to right, actor Kevin Spacey, producer Brett Ratner, comedian Louis C.K., actor Dustin Hoffman, and bottom row from left, former Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore, Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., former “Today” morning co-host Matt Lauer and former “CBS This Morning” co-host Charlie Rose,

It takes two weeks into the #MeToo movement for it to bring down the first prominent figure in the theater industry. In 1986, while they were both in shows on Broadway, Kevin Spacey, then 26, tried to seduce Anthony Rapp, who was then 14 years old, Rapp tells Buzzfeed. Spacey issues a statement that is a non-apology apology, and comes out as a gay man. Ninety-seven theaters in the United Kingdom issue a joint statement on sexual harassment “It is the responsibility of the industry to create and nurture a culture where unacceptable behaviour is swiftly challenged and addressed. …there is no room for sexual harassment or abuse of power in the theatre. Everyone deserves to enjoy a happy, healthy and safe working environment. We will support you to speak out, and we will hear you when you do.”  Trump as Lying Theater Critic

While not at all presidential I must point out that the Sloppy Michael Moore Show on Broadway was a TOTAL BOMB and was forced to close. Sad!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 28, 2017

1) You must have my smash hit of a Broadway show confused with your presidency– which IS a total bomb and WILL indeed close early. NOT SAD https://t.co/URgXgzWWVk

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) October 29, 2017

Broadway producer Roland Scahill who admitted scamming friends and others into investing hundreds of thousands of dollars into a nonexistent play about opera star Kathleen Battle has been sentenced to six months in jail.   First Hamilton and now Hello, Dolly have broken $1,000 barrier for box office ticket prices

Springsteen in Springsteen on Broadway

Springsteen on Broadway opens

Annie Baker, 2017 MacArthur Fellow, Brooklyn, New York,

Taylor Mac, 2017 MacArthur Fellow,

Playwright Annie Baker and multidimensional theater artist Taylor Mac are among the 24 winners of the 2017 Macarthur Foundation “Genius” Grants. Ellen’s Stardust offers 31 fired union employees their jobs back thanks to settlement with the union Stardust Family and the National Labor Relations Board.

RIP

Robert Guillaume, 89, actor. best known for TV’s Benson, seven-time Broadway veteran

My articles in October

How do you Theatricalize Oppression? Belarus Free Theatre’s Burning Doors What’s It Like Being on the Autism Spectrum? Andrew Duff in Uncommon Sense

NOVEMBER

Telsey & Co. has fired senior casting director Justin Huff, who has cast six Broadway shows (Kinky Boots, Newsies ) amid internal reports of sexual misconduct. Nine women accuse Playwright Israel Horovitz of sexual misconduct Old Vic releases statement about investigation of Kevin Spacey  The investigation resulted in 20 personal testimonies shared of alleged inappropriate behaviour carried out by Kevin Spacey during his time as Artistic Director. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio signed the repeal of the hated 91-year old Cabaret Law, which made dancing illegal in bars/eateries without a cabaret license. (Only 104 out of 20,000 + had one) “New Yorkers looking to let loose will no longer have to fear the dance police” –  Councilmember Rafael Espinal Jr. Lincoln Center  is killing its Lincoln Center Festival, which for 21 summers has presented theater (and dance and music) from around the world.   At the Broadway Accessibility Summit, organizers explained that soon, every Broadway theater will have “on-demand” captions for hearing impaired through an app, #GalaPro

The Tony Awards nominating committee has ruled “1984” ineligible for Tony Awards because the production refused to allow the journalist Jose Antonio Vargas, who is a member of the nominating committee, to see the play.

RIP

David Cassidy

David Cassidy, 67,  teen heartthrob best known for his starring role in The Partridge Family musical TV series, the son and stepson of two Broadway musical theater stars, and himself a Broadway veteran.

My articles

Will Future Storytelling Include Live Theatre? When the Playwright Has an Agenda

DECEMBER

Suspect Akayed Ullah, 27, sets off bomb in Port Authority bus terminal in Times Square. Four injured. “This was an attempted terrorist attack” – NYC Mayor Bill de Blasio

The Town Hall on sexual harassment in the theater community at the Public Theater

Town Hall on sexual harassment in the theater is held at the Public Theater   In an article in the Hollywood Reporter, Anna Graham Hunter accuses Dustin Hoffman of sexually harassing her when she was 17, interning as a production assistant on the set of 1985 TV film ‘Death of a Salesman,’ Five weeks later, Kathryn Rossetter writes in the Hollywood Reporter that Dustin Hoffman sexually harassed her daily while they both were in the cast of the 1984 Broadway revival of Death of A Salesman Hollywood executives announce the creation of the Commission on Sexual Harassment and Advancing Equality in the Workplace. Chair: Anita Hill After 47 years as avant-garde nomads, Mabou Mines gets his own theater, in the renovated PS 122 building in the East Village, launching The Mabou Mines Theater with Glass Guignol..   A Christmas Story Live, the seventh live TV musical since the trend began in 2013 with The Sound of Music Live, got the worst rating and among the worst reviews. More popular: Fatwa The Musical: https://youtu.be/pDx3vnvSbm8

Top New York Theater Stories of 2017: Reeling, Resisting and Persisting oc It was a year of shocks. In 2017, we got Hurricane Harvey and Harvey Weinstein, indecency in the White House and terror in Times Square.

[lindseyleeblog]

In every passing moment and with every passing day, we are living through historical moments.  History is never a static, distant & fleeting past disassociated from the present moment, a relic from another time and place. Rather, it is intimately connected to the present moment — the here & now. 

We are all very much a part and parcel of living history. Actors of History & enactors of Antiquity, a product of its linear discourse and narratives. The word historia originated from the Greek language, and can now be defined as the study of past events, particularly with respect to human affairs. More accurately, we can understand history as the continuous chronological record of important or public events, particular trends or institutions. Many remain wholly unaware of the ways in which our past dictates and defines the nature of who we are and where we find ourselves within the context of time and space in a circulatory progression. At this critical intersection of history, more than ever now, it is of vital importance that we begin to collectively examine what has taken place throughout the history of the United States’ cultural, national, and violent colonialist narratives that has come to be defined as the American Experience.

We must begin to recognize, reckon, wrestle, and dismantle the dominant and oppressive structures of Western androcentric histories, and how it continues to inform the current political, social, economic, and environmental climate we all find ourselves engaged with. Today I will trace some of those histories through my own experiences as a Girl & Woman. How I came to understand & define my Femme identity in subversion to patriarchal constructions of femininity through an Intersectional Feminist lens & critical consciousness.

Growing up and coming of age in Los Angeles, I had a particular distaste for history as it was taught in schools. I could never fully appreciate the value of learning about the circumstances of monarchs, epochal enterprises, and nation building eras far removed from my own reality. I was particularly disillusioned about patriotic narratives surrounding the conversation of the “Founding Fathers” who had mapped out the Constitutional blueprint of what was hoped to be a great nation, a beacon of democracy, plurality, representation, and freedom. Of course we now take it for granted that those men were only a small handful of white land-owning males entitled to the protection of their rights, privileges, and wealth through the restriction, control, and violation of those who profiled outside their make & model.

State funded public schools deposited a wealth of misrepresented, if not altogether false, histories into our heads, assimilating students into a culture of half-truths and unspoken crimes. Not dissimilar to the Federal boarding schools instituted by the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the 18th century, classrooms served as sites of national indoctrination, pushing imperialist propaganda dressed up & parading as democratic idealism.

Back then it could hardly have been said that I was a star student. I didn’t take direction very well outside of my own intuition, and developed a predilection for back talk. It was not in my character to sit silently still among crowds of apathetic bystanders, to be bullied into submission. I wanted to be ahead of the curve, up on my feet & doing something, making noise, and creating a stir in the streets. I wanted to be part of a living movement, an alternative conversation taking place beneath the static pitch of mainstream white noise.

In the years after the Twin Towers collapsed in smoke & fire, twisted steel & stolen humanity, schools began to assert a noticeably more aggressive curriculum favoring militaristic nationalism, state authority, and the will to power over. Manifest Destiny sowed feverish paranoia over the continent, and in its wake gave license to fear mongering, phobias, and rhetorics of terror. Marginalized and disenfranchised communities were targeted for systemic discrimination, having been marked by racial, cultural, and sexual identifiers. Mass media & fake news organizations propagated stereotypical representations at best, and overtly racist, sexist, homo & xenophobic, religious intolerance at its very worst.  An instinctive human resistance to challenge the social conditions began to take root within my identity, and I began to build walls to protect myself against the inevitable pitfalls of patriotic groupthink. 

In order to get out of the public school system alive with any sort of individuality, integrity, and character, it was absolutely necessary to interrogate everything I had ever been told, taught, learned, and heard. Everything from holiday celebrations, religious doctrine, to gender socialization, national identity, and cultural heritage. It was all up for review, and the only way to question it was to live it. So I rebelled. I questioned & witnessed the abuses of authority. In time with practice, patience & persistence, it became a lifestyle choice.

My parents would have then told you I was a terrorist on the last threads of their sanity, even though I had never once carried an automatic firearm into a school classroom, church, or theatre. Never once did I stay awake building bombs, planning strategies of attack, and sabotage. Rather, I took to pen & paper, stayed Woke for hours into the night reading books, developing ideas, writing essays & stories to recover any sense of universal and fundamental truth that had been buried among the ashes. I shared in diverse dialogue & lively debate with others & built community with people from school & work. We were budding Feminists then, only we had no name or term to theorize what we were putting into action. 

Yet that is the risk that the Rebel takes on when engaging in revolutionary struggle, challenging authority, and critiquing systems of oppressive power. People begin to miscategorize your character, judge & infringe upon personal rights & values, slander reputations, and disrespect active commitments to social justice. I can tell you now after walking a road of resistance for the better part of my life, that the struggle and the risk is always worth it.

For some odd years in my teens and twenties, I made my way through retail corporations and financial institutions, observing and learning social structures of capitalist consumerism. In order to know the enemy better, I had to first become it. And so I entered the labyrinth of the Dragon, and in return received a paltry hourly paycheck, and professional work experience that doesn’t necessarily get my resumé reviewed for consideration.

Shopping is in itself is a social experience. We come together in a store, a mall, a business or boutique, and collectively spend money. We’re all familiar with corporate holidays of Black Friday, Valentine’s Day, Memorial & Veteran’s day blowout sales. It simply provides another opportunity to get the greatest value possible for our dollars & stretch our pennies for every last cent. And yet there is never enough change for the Veteran on the corner holding out a cup & a sign for aid. 

Over those years I learned the art of organizing, welcoming people into browse, try different looks & ideas on, and telling guests a story about a product in the hopes that someone might buy it & part with their money in exchange. Of course my colleagues & I didn’t earn commission on our sales, and therefore did not barter or trade in an economy of competition. We were there to assist the customer, and to support one another. We built strong coalitions & friendships in those open markets of commerce, trading in experiences, personal identities, and dreams of a different ecology outside of our mundane material existence.

Everybody loves money. We love to have it, and when we don’t, it can drive us to desperation. For many years I had believed that cash wealth was meant to be spent in order to do good in the world. That it could buy experiences & create an image of material fortune, even if the complete opposite was true. It was only when I began to follow the trail of money & study federal systems of the U.S. Treasury, I was able to uncover the ideologies it supported, the wars it funded, and the histories it worked so hard to conceal. Behaviors of greed, self-interest, and human waste became abundantly evident. It was a system that took without recognizing the source of its origin, the stolen labor that had gone into its production, and dissociated from its intrinsic value. It was an institution of fraud,  finite in its resources, completely unsustainable, and deeply irresponsible.

Of course because I was part of the culture of materialism, I was unconsciously complicit. I shopped, therefore I was, bought clothes that wore out of style in a matter of months, and ran up my credit when I should have been building my savings. In direct contradiction with my own spiritual compass, I had expended all my energy into a system of excess that exploited the labor of its workforce. It was necessary to work the system where I could & break it open for the people who would come after.

I placed a great deal on the line for myself, my friends, family, and community. While I didn’t intellectually understand it then, I was part of a youth movement challenging clichés surrounding women’s sexuality, and puritanical expectations on how a young Lady is meant to behave. Again, I rebelled and found myself at home & comfortable with a diverse collective of unique trailblazing companions pioneering on the forefront of gender nonconformity.

We were proud of our bodies. We reveled in succulent skins, and honored our youth like it was going out of style, rotting on the vines of time. Still, too many of us were suffocating under the clout of toxic hyper-masculinity, materiality & superficialities. We were breathing in an invisible and highly contractible social disease of advertised self-hate, drowning in pools of alcohol, pills, and media distortion. Everywhere we turned & lifted our eyes, we were met with derogatory stereotypes on billboards selling female sexuality, fetishizing European beauty standards for the consumption of millions. Simultaneously, women’s bodies were sterilized by hypocritical double standards that condemned and neutralized Feminine sexual power.

For those who could afford to, we numbed ourselves with pharmaceuticals so as not to feel the surgical stings of everyday microaggressions & unwelcome sermons on the shape, curve, and transgressive nature of our Holy Flesh. Everyday we were on display, animate mannequins strategically placed behind plexiglass protection. Not unlike the luxury handbags, jewelry, and cosmetics we sold, Women were likewise marketed to the public as though we were still chattel, merchandise on auction blocks, and real-estate property.

At any moment in time, we could assume that we were being monitored by security cameras, recorded, and watched by some outside omnipresent source. Being under the watchful eye of constant surveillance became so pervasive, saturated, and normalized within our daily networks of routine, that their presence nearly became invisible. As a society we have altogether become blind to the ways in which we participate in our own mass surveillance, documentation, incarceration, and control. In resisting the system, we made it a point to look back into the lens of observation that had begun with increasing alarm to invade our privacy. As if they were entitled to our images, state authorities hacked our identities, stole a fortune of personal information without written or informed consent, and infringed upon American Civil Liberties.

No matter if making the rounds at work or walking the streets of the city, our bodies were gawked at & commented on in public denigrations disguised as flirtatious compliments. Street and work place harassment were regular as they were interconnected. I had imagined that racism & sexism were both relics of an archaic good old boys network. In reflection, I realize now we were struggling to find the light in a predatory culture that trafficked in the objectification of women, demoralizing & dehumanizing them within the psychic & physical shames of having been born girl.

It was then, in a state of transition from girlhood, we learned that a lesser value had been placed on our body of work than those of our male counterparts. A premium on our faces, a price on our reproductive labor, and a war waged on the sacred lands of the Divine Feminine. Women learned intimately that we were being measured and weighed. We understood that in order to survive we would have to band together and support one another, nurture & celebrate individual gifts & talents, while recognizing the shared power of our collective truth.

We learned the ways in which society worked to pit us against one another in competition for male admiration, recognition, and respect. Had we known then the extent of the gendered pay gap, we would have been organizing for equal protection and rights under the law, against gender discrimination, and sexual harassment.

Trapped behind the glass cages of teller windows and armored vehicles delivering the exchange of currency, it was through our hands, Women’s hands, that the wealth of nations passed from one financier to another. We were models, distractions, parading from one end of the line to the vaults where we stored our greatest treasures and commodities. Wars on terrorism, drugs, and poverty were played out on theatre screens of mass hypnosis & control, while a culture of state-sanctioned violence permeated into the social collective conscious of good tax-paying citizens. What was less transparent were the ways in which man’s intergenerational wars played out on the body politic & autonomous rights of Women. Landscapes of pristine & unspoiled beauty were exploited through histories of ecological control through rape, violent domestic assault, and white settler colonialist narratives of divide & conquer. 

Understanding the full comprehensive history of what has come to pass, we can all recognize the inequities of federal, state, and local legislative policies. They are as contradictory as they are dangerous in their parallel representations of reality that relinquish no accountability for systemic genocide, sexual extortion, reproductive exploitation, mass incarceration, and crimes against humanity. In subversion to a culture of violence and mass surveillance, I call on everyone to examine systems of oppression, organize, and challenge white supremacist capitalist patriarchal gaze with an even greater power of the Feminine Gaze. We must again begin to work collectively in remembering who we all are, where we have come from herstorically through time to arrive here in the present moment.

  Women’s personal autonomy and reproductive rights are always on the line, up for attack, and negotiation. Women continue to be paid an average of 80 cents to the man’s dollar, 64 cents for Black Women, and 54 cents for Chicana mujeres. Adjusting for the rate of inflation and accrued interest over time, it would take another 45 years into the future to reach full parity, 2059. We can no longer afford to wait patiently for something that we have already earned through sacrifice, dedication, and persistence. We must demand & insist on our full humanity, and march to protect our Constitutional Rights. We must channel the Revolutionary Abolitionist spirit of General Harriet Tubman. In the trenches of antebellum slavery, she lit a candle to lead us through a network of safe houses of the Underground Railroad, liberating thousands from bondage. We must organize in the courage & resolve of Alice Paul, a Suffragist for Women Rights. Nearly a century ago, she crafted the Equal Rights Amendment that would guarantee Women the full rights and protections of the Constitution from discriminations on the basis of sex & gender.

Coming full circle, we must pick up the heavy work of decolonizing our minds and imagination outside & beyond the constructed falsehoods of white supremacist, capitalist, and patriarchal narratives. We must work to deconstruct systems of racial, sexual, and cultural oppression, divest from mass incarceration & surveillance through media & technology. Reinvest in the creation of a world that is fundamentally equal, sustainable, and free in pursuit of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuits of Happiness. Recover your Feminist Herstory.  Uncover the stories distorted by media, erased from textbooks, and destroyed by colonialist design. Define your Truth.

Hashtag #SayHerName #GirlGaze #Herstory #RebelGirl

  Behind the Glass Walls of History: A Herstory In every passing moment and with every passing day, we are living through historical moments.  History is never a static, distant & fleeting past disassociated from the present moment, a relic from another time and place.