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linearao3 · 5 years ago

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Dark Water, Ch. 1-16, summarized.

I’ll be publishing the last chapter soon (as in, in the next few hours), but in the meantime, something I said I’d do earlier and forgot to: a flavorless but thorough (read: long) summary of 16 chapters of Dark Water. Below the cut, for content and for lennnnngth.

Francisco "Poe" de Marino, Finn Askari, and Reina Jaffa have a detective agency in Los Angeles. Two clients come from Santa Teresa, a rich town up the coast. One, Armand Huxley, hires Finn to find his missing maid, Rose, and the blueprints she stole. The other, Leila Solo, hires Rey to find her husband, Hans "Han" Solo, who has run away, and also hires Poe to investigate the disappearance of her son, Ben. She tells Poe that Ben was expelled from college for fighting off-campus, stole his father's gun, and disappeared. He was presumed a suicide after his car was found abandoned at the beach. She has just learned that the bar where Ben got in trouble for fighting was a gay bar, and she thinks there might be more to the story -- that's why she hired Poe. Poe discovers that the man Ben got in trouble for beating up in the bar was an old, rich man from Santa Teresa. He is reluctant to go there, because he grew up there and feels guilt about his mother, who died while he was fighting in WWII, but he drives there with Mrs. Solo. She acts strangely while going through Camarillo. Finn discovers that Rose (Vietnamese name Thai Co Hoa) has a sister, Thai Co Be, who rides horses at the track at Santa Anita Park under the name Paige Tico. Rey meets a mysterious man on a motorcycle who tells her that Han will be at the Santa Anita racetrack. Finn and Rey arrive separately, but converge when it turns out that Paige rides horses owned by Han. Since Han is drunk, Rey drives him and Paige to Santa Teresa. Finn tails them, because he believes Paige has the blueprints in her big suitcase. Han also acts strangely while driving through Camarillo. Local male sex workers reveal that the man Ben fought with was Orson Krennick, a local honcho. Krennick has recently died. When Han comes home to the ranch with Rey and Paige, Poe overhears him fighting with Leila, and hears Paige moving around late at night. Rey, who is staying a motel, goes to a bar, where she meets the man on the motorcycle again. He introduces himself as Ren. Rey expresses interest in his bike, but he is reluctant to let her drive it until she tells him to call her by her nickname, implying that she's willing to be his friend. Rey drives it, with him sitting on the back, extremely fast on extremely winding back roads, until Ren directs her to a spot on the bluffs overlooking the sea. He tells her the story of an indigenous woman who was left behind and lived alone on one of the Channel Islands, and when she came to shore, discovered that her entire tribe had died. Ren is moved when Rey weeps at the story. He kisses her, and asks to take her home. She agrees, and they go back to her motel room. After sex, she tells him he can stay the night. Finn, seeing lights on late in the Solos' barn, suspects that Paige is meeting someone to sell or hand off the stolen plans. He sneaks onto the property and is heading towards the barn when he hears a gunshot. He finds Paige dying on the floor and calls for help. The police question him, but the Solos, prompted by Poe, vouch for him. Rey wakes up early to make a call, which Ren overhears, where she identifies herself as Malka Szmacziarz and asks if her parents have been found. He thinks she lied about her name to him because she doesn't trust him, and she reproves him, saying she wants to trust him. Poe comes to pick her up, telling her about the murder, and Ren meets with a yakuza group, for whom he has transported and marked a large amount of money. Ren has been introduced to the group through his Japanese-American friend, Donny Mitaka, and he dreams of become a feared and respected leader of the group. At the Solos' ranch, as Han is speculating that Paige may have been killed by the jockeys' union, which is violently racist, Leila's brother, Luke Skywalker, a war hero with a missing hand and a mystical, self-made religion, arrives with a threatening letter he has received. The letter contains a typo which Leila remembers from old letters of Ben's, but the typewriter matches one used by Beckett, a shady real estate agent who has been pressuring Luke to sell his land. Han takes Poe and Rey to see his prize horse, Blue Hammer, the descendant of the champion he trained, Falcon. They're visited by a greasy horse dealer, Donato "D.J." Jimenez, who goads Han and expresses insincere regret and morbid curiosity with regard to Paige's murder. Han orders him off his property, and asks Poe to ride Blue Hammer in the upcoming race. Finn, investigating the site of Paige's murder, is attacked by a knife-wielding girl who turns out to be Rose. After he convinces her that he didn't kill her sister, she reveals that she only handed the plans off to Paige last night, and that Paige was carrying a lot of cash. Whoever killed her has taken both. Rose tells him about her history as the Huxley family's servant under the French colonial government, and challenges him about his origins, which he carefully conceals with assumed accents. They find a discarded butt of a French cigarette, and speak to Bibiana, the niece of horse-trainer Arturo, who tells them she saw someone tall. Poe comes up with a plan: Rey will pose as an English heiress and ask Beckett for a property like the one Beckett may be trying to extort from Luke, offering an outrageously high price. Beckett is suspicious of the details of Rey's story; while he's making a call, she raids his files and finds a map of Luke's property, Olive Tree School, with an oil line marked on it. Beckett catches her and physically threatens her, but Ren comes to her rescue with a knife he took from her the night before. He asks her to go out dancing with him and his friend that night, and she agrees. The Solos, on finding out that Rose is Paige's sister, welcome her to stay for the night. Rey tells the Solos what she learned at Beckett's office. Mrs. Solo says that the oil line used to belong to her, but that she sold it to Huxley; he pays Luke an easement fee for the passage of the oil through the property. Mr. Solo is alarmed to hear Poe talking privately about the death of Orson Krennick with Leila, and becomes more upset when Poe won't tell him what he's learned. Finn, distraught over the murder, his treatment by the police, and being forced to cut off his hair in the absence of care options for black hair, accepts tequila and gets very drunk. He argues with Rose, who tells him she is a soldier. Finn tells her how he was taken from his parents by British colonial forces and trained to be a soldier from a young age. When parents in his community, including Finn's own father, protested, they were gunned down by British soldiers. He deserted afterwards. Rose tells him how Vietnam has been serially occupied by the French and the Japanese, and the atrocities they've committed. But she's a soldier because she has hope for the future. Rey has dinner with Ren, Donny Mitaka, and Mitaka's girlfriend, Bess Ine. She dances with Ren and he asks where she was during the war. She confesses that she's a Jew from Poland; her parents sent her alone as a child to the British Mandate of Palestine during the German invasion, but she hopes to be reunited with them. She takes him back to her room, where they have sex and sleep together. She wakes up to him having a nightmare, and recognizes him from Mrs. Solo's photograph as Ben Solo. He responds by telling her that Ben Solo is dead, and was a monster from a family of monsters. When she pushes him, he tells her her parents are dead, and flees on his motorcycle. Rey goes back to the Solo's ranch to tell them that she's seen Ben, and what he said to her. Han and Leila fight, with each one claiming that the other represents the "monstrous family" Ben mentioned. But separately, they admit they believe the opposite. During the war, being disqualified from service by his age, Han smuggled drugs and alcohol from Mexico, doing business with Beckett and Krennick, and lied to Leila and Ben, telling him that he was spying for the allies. Leila's biological father was Lorde Varder, aka Anderson Skywalker, a poor firefighter who married a wealthy opera singer, Paz Mayberry, and went into politics after she was committed to the Camarillo mental hospital, crafting policies which deprived Japanese Americans of rights and allowed him to buy valuable land cheaply. He left Luke an olive orchard which used to belong to the Mitaka family, and he left Leila the oil holdings she sold to Huxley, so much of the family's wealth is derived from his immoral actions. Both Han and Leila believe that it was Ben's discovery of the skeletons in their closets which drove him to a mental breakdown, for which they had him involuntarily committed. Ben drives his motorcycle aimlessly through the city, and ends up getting drunk at Maisie's after hours, admitting that he stole Rey's stockings, and that he told her Ben Solo was dead because he had once planned to kill himself. Rey, sharing a bed with Rose, admits to herself that her parents are likely dead, and grieves together with Rose. In the morning, Finn discovers that Huxley has left a message saying that he doesn't need to look for the blueprints anymore. He and Rose agree that that seems to mean that he's gotten them back himself. Rose decides to go back to Huxley. When he takes her to the Huxleys' house, Huxley embraces her inappropriately, while his wife insults and belittles her. Finn sneaks back to the house after seeming to leave, and hears Mrs. Huxley hitting Rose. He finds Rose and offers to work for her for the change she has in her pockets, offering his skills as a detective and client confidentiality. Rose tells him that the blueprints are for a guided missile, which Huxley is trying to sell to the French for use in Vietnam. She is trying to steal the plans and the offer letter that goes with them, so that the Vietnamese government can deprive France of the weapon and undermine American support for the French. Rey thinks that the Solos' stories don't quite make sense and center too much on their individual guilt. Pio, the librarian, tells her that Ben exhibited symptoms of mental disturbance for a long time prior to his "breakdown." On a hunch, she goes to the beach where Ben's car was discovered the first time he disappeared. She tells Ben that she's deduced that he meant to murder someone when he left his parents' house. He admits it: he meant to kill Stephen Pallatine. But he was already dead. He tells her that, while Luke was away as a POW in the Pacific, Pallatine took over the school and caught him kissing Donny Mitaka. Under the guise of aversion therapy, he sexually abused Ben for a long time, keeping him late after school, which his parents never seemed to notice. When Luke returned, he tried to tell him, but Luke was dismissive, and when he tried to tell his parents, Luke encouraged them to believe that Ben was mentally ill. At the mental hospital, he was frightened by the apparently arbitrary shock treatments administered to patients, and falsely confessed to making up the story of his abuse. Rey vows never to let anyone hurt him again, and he carries her into the sea, offering to take her wherever she wants. At Huxley's house, Finn discovers that D.J. is Mrs. Huxley's lover, and smokes the kind of cigarette they found at the crime scene. He tails him to a house in the hills, where Rey has just arrived with Ben. Ben tells her to wait outside, but she and Finn follow him in. Spying, they discover the D.J. has the exact amount of money that Paige was carrying when she was killed, and that he and Beckett are both working with the Japanese mob to take the Mitaka orchard land and turn it into a horse ranch so that they can launder money through the buying and selling of horses. When the mob boss, Oka-san, discovers that Ben concealed that he intervened between Rey and Beckett, he's threatened with having a finger cut off. Rey charges in to save him, and Finn charges in after her. Ben kills Oka-san to save Rey while Rey wounds one of his lieutenants badly and Finn overpowers another. When Rey realizes that Ben intends to take over the gang, not leave it, she tells Finn to go and begs Ben to stop. Ben kills the wounded lieutenant for threatening her and him, and, feeling that Rey has abandoned him, uses her knife to cut the marks of her fingernails permanently into his face. Finn drops Rey off at Luke's school and goes back to see Rose, who has discovered a quantity of cash, also exactly equal to what Paige was carrying, behind Mrs. Huxley's bureau. She can't find the plans anywhere in the house, and she believes Mrs. Huxley murdered Paige, took the money, and disposed of the plans. Finn isn't sure, but he promises her he'll find her sister's killer. Rose kisses him, and they have sex in her room. She tells him to leave, but on his way out, he overhears Huxley arguing with his father, and figures out that D.J. killed Paige and is asking Huxley for money for the plans. He goes back to Rose to tell her what he's learned and that he knows where the plans are. Rey sees a memorial to Stephen Pallatine at the school and tries unsuccessfully to destroy it with her knife. She warns Luke that he isn't safe, because the gang is going to try to drive him off his land, but she ends up shouting at him, confronting Luke over his betrayal of Ben. Luke reveals that Pallatine played on his own fear of insanity, as well as his desire to believe the best of his birth father and his hometown. Ben, overhearing Rey's reproaches and overwhelmed by seeing the memorial and the marks of her knife in it, impulsively uses turpentine from the art room to light the memorial on fire. The other buildings quickly catch. Poe, coming to pick up Rey, finds the fire, and Luke trying to save the school. A fire truck arrives, driven by Capt. Aimee Linn, not in response to Luke's call for help, but to warn them to evacuate because of the risk of flash flood in the long-dry Salsipuedes River. Poe refuses to leave, trying to stay to fight the fire, until Capt. Linn takes over the firefighting and tells him to evacuate Rey and Luke, which he does. They watch from the foothills as the river floods. Rey makes Luke tell Leila the truth about what happened to Ben. With the fire still burning and the flood still raging, she despairs of ever finding a place that isn't weighed down by the sins of the past, since every place she has ever lived has been consumed by conflict. Ben goes to his grandmother's abandoned mansion, despairing of ever succeeding with the gang or seeing Rey again. He is startled when Rose arrives; she saw the candles he lit from Huxley's house, which used to be a sign from Paige that she was dealing with a representative of his gang. She offers him the money she stole from Mrs. Huxley to take her to Hanoi once she finds the plans. Ben, disoriented by the flood and hoping that the money will placate Oka-san's lieutenants, agrees. There's a problem, though -- Rose's money is dirty; it's the marked bills the gang gave D.J. to launder through trading horses. In the morning, Rey is watching Poe ride his old favorite horse, Blackbird, who never got to race because of the track closure during WWII. Poe sees Ben going towards the barn and thinks he's going to burn it, and the horses, the way he burned the school. He pursues him on Blackbird, but Rey jumps onto the horse with him, and then, when Ben runs to his bike, off the horse and onto the bike. When he finally stops driving, he admits that he feels like he's doomed; he had a vague plan to steal horses, but completely messed it. Rey promises he isn't doomed, and that she'll help him get out of the mess he's in. He doesn't feel worthy of help, but Rey tells him he doesn't have to deserve help; he just has to need it. He recognizes that she needs him to help her, too. They have sex and promise not to leave each other. Finn follows Huxley to a meeting with D.J., where Huxley says he doesn't have the cash D.J. wants for the plans. D.J. offers to take land deeds instead, or Rose as a hostage. Huxley threatens to shoot D.J., but D.J. calls his bluff. Finn follows D.J.'s car, but loses him when D.J. goes to the sheriff's office. Finn decides to go back to Huxley's house and try to convince Rose to run away so that Huxley doesn't offer her up as a hostage. Poe visits Aimee Linn in the hospital; she's been badly hurt fighting the fire. She asks him to investigate the condition of the oil line in the Salsipuedes River, and he promises to, but allows Han to convince him to make a call about it to the fire department instead. He and Han go down to Santa Anita to practice on the track. On the way back, Poe is struck with a bad feeling, and discovers that the oil pipeline has blown, leaking crude oil into the sea. Rey wants Ben to run away, but Ben feels obligated to Rose and to Mitaka, since it was his family that stole the orchard from Mitaka's family. Rose suggests that they bet the marked money on Poe and Blue Hammer in the race the next day, which will also earn enough money both to pay the gang for Rose's trip and to buy back Mitaka's land. Finn, discovering that Rose has left the Huxleys, remembers that she talked to Mrs. Solo about Paz Mayberry's estate, and finds her there with Ben, Mitaka, and Rey, who tell him about their plans. Finn and Rose have sex, and she confesses that she wants to have a family; Finn realizes he wants a family with her. Ben and Rey have sex, and Rey confesses her fear that her parents sent her away because she was too weak, and that she didn't deserve to survive. Ben reminds her what she told him: she didn't have to deserve it, she just had to need it. Poe volunteers to help clean the spill, and spends the day riding Blackbird up and down the coast, running messages between park rangers, volunteers, and sailors. In the evening he returns to the Solo's ranch, where Beckett comes calling and tries to blackmail Han. His intention is to blackmail him over Ben's murder of Oka-san, but Han misunderstands him, and thinks, because he has himself mistakenly come to believe that Leila murdered Krennick in revenge for Ben's supposed death, that Beckett is trying to blackmail him over that. As it happens, Beckett murdered Krennick himself, and panics at the idea that he's been discovered; he threatens to shoot Han, but Leila kills him with a poker. Poe is planning to cover up the murder when Ben arrives with Finn, Rose, and Rey, asking for his parents' help.

#Dark Water

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ill-will-editions · 6 years ago

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TACTICAL LESSONS FROM LANSING - (Anonymous, 2018)

On the anniversary of the coup de grâce delivered to Richard Spencer and his neo-fascist shock troops by midwest anarchists and anti-fascists in 2018, which helped send the alt-right into a downward spiral from which they still have still not recovered, we’re re-sharing some tactical lessons from a few folks who were there. -IWE

***

What follows are some tactical reflections from the mass antifascist mobilization in East Lansing against Richard Spencer in March, 2018.

The first weekend in March, antifascists converged in Lansing, Michigan to confront the white nationalists who were planning on attending Richard Spencer’s talk at Michigan State University.

The successes of this weekend have been well documented: Richard Spencer cancelled the rest of his college tour, prominent white nationalist lawyer Kyle Bristow announced he would be stepping back from his organizing, existing divisions within the far-Right deepened, and Matthew Heimbach, leader of the Traditionalist Worker Party, got slugged repeatedly in the face.

Yet we cannot rest on our laurels. The bravery and collective intelligence seen in Lansing will be needed again in the coming years. In hopes that others can learn from our affinity group’s experiences in Lansing and be better prepared for future clashes, we here share a set of tactical lessons, insights and lessons from the weekend.

• If chasing fascists, consider getting rental cars. In any case, make sure vehicles are road-ready and minimally identifiable. • Encourage the separation of time and space for actions (where it’s being pushed for); if peace police have their own event far away, you won’t have to deal with them. This does not mean alienating or excluding unknown folks who aren’t peace police (hella random and ‘unprepared’ folks threw down super hard in Lansing). • Make sure forms of ‘in situ’ communication within/between affinity groups are understood by all. Make sure affinity groups talk beforehand about staying together during the action. • Leave an action in the same car you came in. Last minute changes increase the chances that someone gets left behind. • Make sure people know which ‘situation names’ each of your people will be using for the action ahead of time. • Prepare for the challenges of making decisions quickly and efficiently in high stress situations. For example, practice making quick decisions in a group beforehand. Start with an imagined scenario; impose two irreconcilable options, each having its own merits; then practice resolving the tension quickly, with everyone committing to the chosen option with total focus (don’t dwell on the path not taken). • Cultivate your “creative awareness” together. For example, get together and explicitly vocalize three or four scenarios that are plausible within the situation right at the beginning (upon arrival, or beforehand if possible). Don’t let these discussions wander or become speculative, and don’t rely on hearsay or ‘Cops in X town act like Y normally’ clichés. Stay focused entirely on what you can see, what the situation presents you with. • Don’t allow yourself to be spooked into leaving necessary supplies behind out of fear. You got them for a reason; find a way to bring them. It’s almost always possible. Use your imagination. • Pack your stuff up the morning of the action so you are ready to leave quickly or even leave town immediately after an action. At the same time, also make a fallback plan for people to stay up to 48 hours to deal with jail support. This may mean staying somewhere ‘low profile’ after the action. • Wake up and prepare quickly; no dawdling the morning of the action. • Stay joyful, but try to exercise a measure of seriousness and discipline too: go to sleep on time, eat full meals, hydrate, keep your things tidy and together. • Don’t bring illegal drugs to an action, or carry them in cars you’re using. Never bring sketchy shit in a car without telling the driver beforehand. • Fear is the mind killer. Paranoia can prevent you from acting or being properly prepared. Exercise precaution, of course, but it is important to follow through with plans and not allow paranoia and fear to stop you from doing what you came to do. • Make sure you have clear lines of communication open with other crews. Establish in advance whether other crews will be able to come to your aid or change their plans at the last minute. • If you are organizing in public, be aware of who you can vouch for, and make sure those who you can’t vouch for are explicitly (and gracefully) informed that you will need to disappear sometimes, so it’s not weird in the moment. • Think through who you are going to the action with: are they someone you trust in high stress environments? If not, find a way for them to engage that is appropriately low stress. There’s all kinds of low stress activities of support (media, sound system, transportation, listening to police scanners, food prep, spreading counter-information, etc.). • Choose specific and unique affinity group names/calls. Having a name will help you stay together in a crowd, but if it is too vague or general (“my group”), strangers might respond to the same name. • Compliment and encourage strangers when you see them doing brave or inspiring things. • Don’t dismiss the tactical use of soft blockades. NVDA tactics may not work against fascists but might be effective when dealing with police. • Don’t worry about FOMO or get fixated on particular events; sometimes cool and important shit pops off in other places. • Not having cell phones (or only bringing burners) in a large group makes communication difficult but can be a very beneficial group experience — allowing people to relate to each other in different ways. • Proper black bloc attire should include multiple layers. This is easily accomplished by the layering of windbreakers and rain/jogging pants, all of which should be 2x oversized to obscure body-shape. Ideally, you want one or two distinctive ‘bloc’ layers (black or dark grey/blue), and one or two de-bloc layers: one that allows you to remain in the situation while masked, yet not associated with the ‘bloc’ you were in a moment ago, and another to blend into a citizen crowd entirely when leaving (i.e. normie clothes, including a change of shoes + sunglasses). Pack an empty lightweight tote that you don’t use in the situation, to carry your stuff out with you after you de-bloc. Bring multiple masks to hand out to others and switch between. REI carries the tube-like ones, which offer the best face coverage, come in many colors, and allow you to cover your hair too (not enough people do this!). Trading jackets and backpacks on the ground with your friends is a fun and effective technique to preserve anonymity. Be cognizant of when police commanders are pointing at certain individuals in the crowd, and make sure you notify them that it’s time to change their clothes. • Don’t necessarily give credence to rumors. Don’t perpetuate rumors or feed into paranoia. If someone says “a reporter told us the Fed’s or DHS are here,” it’s fine to listen to this information, but don’t weight it more heavily than your own assessment on the ground. Take it with a grain of salt. • If there are horses, there will be horseshit. Bring multiple pairs of disposable latex gloves. Try to dispose of these without leaving them for the cops (DNA databases are a thing). • Practice group activities in advance, e.g. de-arresting games, group brawling or de-blocking. • Play catch together. Throwing accurately is not a skill most people possess innately. • Don’t love violence: it is a means that is sometimes necessary, but not who we are or how we ultimately want to relate to the world. • Don’t fixate on the police. They can distract us from other objectives. They are an obstacle, not an ‘absolute enemy’. • Have a political read of the situation. Understand in advance the constraints on the actions of the police and which actors will be present the day of. Ask yourself: what would a victory look like? How could we win not only today, but going forward? Could this or that day of action also find ways to contribute to a lasting increase of power for local crews on the ground? • Make a graceful exit. If possible, try to march everyone out of harm’s way all together, ensuring a safe exit. People may argue against this in the moment, but it’s better to leave with “winner’s remorse” (‘we could’ve done more’) than in handcuffs.

– some anarchists

Originally posted on It’s Going Down.

#anarchism #anti-fascism #tactics #attack #strategy #affinity groups

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ymd3signs · 4 years ago

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How To Design Happiness

Design, at its heart, is about solving problems. That’s why it’s so easy to talk to designers. They can explain exactly how their interface is built to help you navigate through your phone, or how a device was shaped to make it possible for mass manufacturing on the assembly line.

But throughout hundreds of conversations with designers, I’ve begun to wonder: If most people’s goal is to live a happy life, why did I never hear designers explain how they’d built something to make me happy?

At SXSW, I moderated an event called Designing Happiness. Its experts included Bruce Vaughn, former chief creative exec with Disney Imagineering; Gabby Etrog Cohen, senior vice president of PR and brand strategy at SoulCycle; and Randall Stone, director of experience innovation at Lippincott. All three brands strive to create happy experiences, not as an afterthought, but as the first step in what they do. It is an approach that’s paid enormous dividends for each company. Here’s what they taught me:

HAPPINESS IS MOSTLY THE ANTICIPATION OF AN EVENT AND MEMORY OF IT

“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so,” said the philosopher John Stuart Mill. It’s a paradox at the heart of happiness. We are hardwired to enjoy the anticipation of a joyous event and savour the memory. But in that actual moment of experience? It can be hard to tell.

So at the creative consultancy Lippincott, designers have a theory called the Happiness Halo–and it’s built upon reconstructing happiness as a three-act structure of anticipation, experience, and memory.

“First it’s about creating anticipation,” Stone explains. “That’s really strong–both from a psychological standpoint but also the anticipation of the experience is sometime greater [than experience]. It goes back to our primitive skills of releasing dopamine. It’s our hunting skills. If we didn’t have this sense of anticipation, we would have starved to death a long time ago.”

Anticipation is so powerful that being excited about a big event, like running a marathon, can give you as much joy as actually completing it.

“The experience itself is really important,” Stone continues, “but an experience is never perfect, and you don’t weigh an experience by adding it up over time. It’s not like you add four and five and get a score that equals happiness. You actually remember the high moment and the end moment, and the most important thing is the memory.”

The end moment is particularly profound–and it’s something every good waiter already knows. One study found that waiters who gave mints at the end of the meal received 3% higher tips, while those who presented the mints with just a bit more effort, asking the question “would anyone like mints at the end of their meal?” received 14% higher tips. It shows that we’re biased to remember endings by nature (remember that when penning your next novel).

YOU NEED A MOMENT OF TRANSITION TO ESCAPE THE REAL (UNHAPPY) WORLD

Anticipation reveals something else about happiness: That with all of the micro-stresses we experience in our daily lives, it helps us to prepare ourselves to be happy, to decompress, wipe our consciousness, and open ourselves to joy.

Disney and SoulCycle both craft experiences specifically to accommodate this transitional time. At Disney, they call it a “portal.”

“Think about Disneyland where you literally go through a dark tunnel, kind of a mythic experience where you go through a compressed space and come out the other side,” Vaughn says. “Architects use this a lot; Frank Lloyd Wright used this a lot in his houses. You’ve completely left the world you were in, and you’re in a very very different world. The sites, the sounds, the smells . . . suddenly you’re in this world where there are marching bands and the smell of fudge and horses and giant mice that are waving at you and people who are very friendly and people are hugging big bears, and it’s just fine . . . and without that transition, without stepping through a portal, you lose that opportunity to reset the state of mind of guests.”

Likewise, every SoulCycle location has been built to accommodate what the company calls the “crossover.” “We purposefully design our spaces so that when you are leaving your class, another class is coming in,” Cohen says. The “crossover” isn’t anything fancy. One cyclist friend describes it as a “hallway lined with lockers.” But that hallway is an important two-way street, designed for the people coming in to cross paths with the people coming out. For the sweatless, it’s a taste of things to come. For the exercised, it’s an audience to provide validation–the cherry on top of their hard work. And for both sides, it can create a longer-lead experience to the next SoulCycle class.

“There are these interactions where you’re rubbing up against people, to purposefully create community,” Cohen says. “It’s all about creating relationships with people so that you’re not just walking out anonymously to your next venture in life.”

EMPLOYEES NEED TO BE EMPOWERED TO MAKE PEOPLE HAPPY, SANS APPROVAL

If any experience is anti-happy, it’s bureaucracy. (Consider how a trip to the DMV is more or less the least happy experience on earth.) And so it should come as little surprise that companies that know how to make customers happy enable their employees to make customers happy.

For instance, take the Haute N.Y.C. dining establishment Eleven Madison Park. Not only does it serve some of the most beautifully plated, scrumptiously paired flavours in the world, but it also employs a staff member called the Dreamweaver. The Dreamweaver is like a concierge for the experience. As Stone tells the story, on one occasion, visitors from out of town expressed that their only regret was not having a slice of N.Y.C. pizza. And so the Dreamweaver responded.

“[The Dreamweaver] jumped in a cab–and here you’re getting a very expensive, multicourse meal–and one of the courses was an authentic slice of New York pizza so they could have everything on their list checked off,” Stone says. “So, if you talk to [Eleven Madison Park], they say, yes, we use food to deliver an experience, but we want you to leave with a memory of being here–not necessarily the dish or the course. It’s about making it a memorable night.”

The Dreamweaver is an empowered decision-maker, focused on customer experience, just like Disney’s “cast members,” who are allowed to intervene and cheer up someone having a bad day at the park. A cast member is trained from day one so that if she sees a problem, she can take care of it. She can replace a child’s spilt popcorn or ice cream; no middle management questions asked. But there’s also a highly organized system of communication that allows cast members to pull off more astonishing feats, too. (Have you ever read the tear-jerking story of Toby, the Bear?)

It’s why cast members–not the million-dollar attractions–are Disney’s highest-rated touchpoint at its parks.

SURPRISE IS THE KEY TO DELIGHT, AND IT’S MUNDANELY EASY TO SURPRISE PEOPLE

These happiness interventions, staged by employees, are the perfect opportunity to inject an essential element into happy experiences: surprise. Much like beginnings and endings, we’re cognitively predisposed to remember surprises, too. And when you have employees primed to surprise customers, it’s far easier to pull off the feat.

“At SoulCycle, we have a program that’s actually called ‘surprise and delight’ where everyone of our managers and key holders has a budget to be able to surprise and delight our riders—whoever they want,” Cohen says. “And that’s at any level. Whether that’s putting a gift in their locker, taking them out to coffee, putting a cupcake on their bike for their birthday, or if a kid just went off to college, and they send them a T-shirt . . . it can be any number of things, because relationships matter.”

A surprise is a tool that’s more effective at dealing with angry customers than catharsis. Complaining verbally actually makes people more upset by reinforcing their negative sentiments. But empowering an employee gives the company a chance to recover–to leave a surprisingly positive signpost in customers’ memories of an evening.

And truth be told, it’s also not that hard to surprise people if you put just a little bit of thought into it.

“It’s about making the mundane memorable,” Stone says. “You can take the most mundane moment of any experience interaction or process and bring it to life.” His example is when checking into the Park Hyatt of Chicago, you’re offered a series of five or so pens. They’re not just Bics. Instead, they might be brass or tortoiseshell or any pen you’d see used by a pen lover.

“They put the box in front of you and for that moment, you sit there and ponder, which pen is the most beautiful? Which reflects my personality?” Stone says. “You ask the person checking in next to you, ‘Which pen are you going to pick?’ And suddenly the most mundane moment becomes one of delight because you’re signing the Magna Carta with this pen. It’s no longer a plastic pen; it’s a ceremony.”

NATURE KNOWNS HAPPINESS BEST BECAUSE WE’RE ALL BARELY TAMED BEASTS

According to Disney’s Vaughn, happiness is real “lizard brain” stuff that’s mostly satisfying the concerns of our core instincts. That is why, fundamentally, Walt Disney’s philosophy was that a key to happiness was feeling safe, and his parks were designed to make you feel safe.

At one level, the parks themselves are designed at a human scale. The streets aren’t built for cars but spaced for pedestrians. And despite their liberal use of concrete, Disney parks are teeming with organic materials.

“In our theme parks, there’s a lot of what we call the ‘living show’—actual live plants, living plants, a lot of water, all these things work on the subconscious level to give reassurance,” Vaughn says. “Great cities have this as well. In the city of Paris there’s a lot of food, a lot of bistros and things. People are very reassured by food.”

We crave the resources of nature, and having them on hand makes us happy. Of course, if you subscribe to this philosophy, the world can look pretty silly! Your favourite water feature is no longer about the sculpture or the art, but a means to tell your basest instincts, “It’s okay, there’s water nearby to drink.”

LEAVE YOUR CUSTOMER WITH A KISS GOODNIGHT

But as I mentioned earlier, endings are necessary. At Disney, they call it a “kiss goodnight,” the perfectly timed element that can turn even a mediocre experience into a fantastic memory.

In Orlando, this could be the spectacular fireworks show. At SoulCycle, it would be the last uplifting track played by the DJ, or the aforementioned “crossover,” where you smile on your way out, feeling accomplished, among other riders about to go in. Even Lyft and Uber have a sort of kiss goodnight, Stone argues. In removing the cash transaction at the end of a traditional cab ride, you can share the briefest of human moments with your driver: a real “thank-you.”

At SXSW, keeping in mind the importance of the power of surprise and the kiss goodnight, while recognizing that nature can give us happiness in a way nothing else can, we had an idea:

“Look at the puppy—if anyone doesn’t feel like the puppy is the embodiment of happiness and joy, then you have no soul, so for me,” Vaughn said. “I feel like nature has done it perfectly, and from there it gets hard.”

So we went full-on Oprah, and we released puppies to the audience. (They were a Lab-Golden Retriever mix–totes adorbs.) Now look, I’m not going to claim it was a tsunami of puppies or anything. We only had ten puppies for a room of 600 people. That’s a 60:1 person to puppy ratio! But the resulting happiness in the place was palpable. People climbed over one another to take photos like the paparazzi. They shared stories of their pets back home while waiting for their turn for puppy snuggles. And of course, their faces melted when they held the pups. In case there was any scepticism that you can design, not just for solving problems, but for solving one of humanity’s biggest problems, I can attest, if you can make someone smile when walking out of an hour-long talk in a hotel ballroom? You can make someone smile just about anywhere.

#illustration #digital illustartion #photoshop #artwork #porfolio #graphic design

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nancygduarteus · 6 years ago

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The White Flight From Football

Shantavia Jackson signed her three sons up for football to keep them out of trouble. As a single mother who works the night shift at a Home Depot warehouse 50 minutes away from her house, Jackson relies on the sport to shield the boys from gang activity in her rural Georgia county. They began in a local league five years ago when they were still little, their helmets like bobbleheads on their shoulders. Now 11, 12, and 14, they play in games across the region. Jackson says she passed up a daytime shift at Home Depot so that she can drive them to games and cheer them on.

Over time, the boys’ coaches have become mentors, making sure their athletes get good grades and stay off the streets. They take the boys on field trips to the beach and to Busch Gardens. Jackson’s eldest son, Marqwayvian McCoy—or Qway, as she calls him—has particularly thrived. Jackson says Qway has been diagnosed with schizoaffective bipolar disorder, which sometimes manifests in bursts of anger and an inability to focus at school. Now his teammates help him when he gets stuck in his studies and look up to him for his prowess on the field. They’ve nicknamed him Live Wire because he can hit so hard.

Jackson dreams that Qway will soon make it out of their home in Colquitt County, a place marked by fields of crops and cotton bales the size of Mack trucks. Football could help him do that. As a middle schooler, he’s already been asked to practice with the high-school team, the Colquitt County Packers, a national powerhouse that in 2016 sent two dozen boys to college with full scholarships. Qway knows his mother doesn’t have the money to send him to college, so he studies websites that track top high-school-football athletes and watches all the football he can online, hoping to get better at the game.

Marqwayvian McCoy at home in his jersey (Dustin Chambers)

As Qway throws himself into football, the sport is facing a highly publicized reckoning more serious than any it has confronted since the Pop Warner youth-football program was established in 1929. Research suggests that tackle football can cause long-term brain injury, and as a result, many parents are telling their kids they can’t play. In the 2017–18 school year, 6.6 percent fewer high-school athletes participated in 11-player tackle football than in the 2008–09 school year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.

Yet not all parents are holding back their kids from tackle football at equal rates, which is creating a troubling racial divide. Kids in mostly white upper-income communities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West are leaving football for other sports such as lacrosse or baseball. But black kids in lower-income communities without a lot of other sports available are still flocking to football. In keeping with America’s general racial demographics, white boys continue to make up the majority of youth-tackle-football players, according to data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. But proportionally, the scales appear to be shifting. A recent survey of 50,000 eighth-, tenth-, and 12th-grade students found that around 44 percent of black boys play tackle football, compared with 29 percent of white boys, as analyzed by the University of Michigan sociologist Philip Veliz. Football at the high-school level is growing in popularity in states with the highest shares of black people, while it’s declining in majority-white states. Other recent studies suggest that more black adults support youth tackle football than white adults.

This trend has become particularly visible as majority-white towns such as Ridgefield, New Jersey, and Healdsburg, California, have dropped their varsity-football programs due to a lack of interest. Meanwhile, in Lee County, Georgia, a majority-black area near where the Jacksons live, a coach recently started a new travel football team for kids to provide them with guidance and mentorship. These racial divides show up in the football that America watches: Today black athletes make up nearly half of all Division I college-football players, up from 39 percent in 2000. White athletes make up 37 percent, down from 51 percent.

This divergence paints a troubling picture of how economic opportunity—or a lack thereof—governs which boys are incentivized to put their body and brain at risk to play. Depending on where families live, and what other options are available to them, they see either a game that is too violent to consider or one that is necessary and important, if risky. Millions of Americans still watch football; NFL ratings were up this season. That a distinct portion of families won’t let their children play creates a disturbing future for the country’s most popular game.

Sam and Megan Taggard’s colonial-style home in West Simsbury, Connecticut, has no shortage of sporting equipment. The couple’s four children stack bikes in the garage and clutter the wooden living-room floor with footballs and tennis balls. On the day I visited them last October, the Taggards’ 13-year-old son had two hockey games and their 7-year-old daughter had a basketball game. The family’s two younger sons horsed around a hockey goal in the living room.

Tackle football, however, was not on the agenda. “My kiddos aren’t playing,” Sam Taggard told me. Taggard played football years ago at Babson College, and he says his 44-year-old body is still bearing the damage: He had back surgery two years ago and is slow to get out of bed in the morning. He also did a clinical doctorate in physical therapy and has seen how debilitating head and neck injuries can be. Football requires kids to endanger their brain every single game, he said: “In football, you’re literally trying to decimate the person in front of you. If you’re not, you’re not playing well.”

Sam Taggard played football in college and had to have back surgery later in life. (Monica Jorge)

The Taggards aren’t the only family in their neighborhood pulling their boys from tackle football. At one of the day’s hockey games, I chatted with five other parents—all of whom were white—in the frigid stands of an ice-hockey rink on a private-school campus as their sons skated past. Four told me they wouldn’t let their son play. The fifth, a mother named Sharon Walsh, said she had objected, but her husband and son overruled her. She hated signing the waiver saying that she understood her child might die. Thankfully, she said, her son recently decided to give up football on his own.

Ron Perry, another hockey parent, echoed the sentiment that he wouldn’t let his son play tackle football, because of concerns about concussions and head injuries. A friend of his coaches a rec-football team and is always looking for players, Perry told me. But he wouldn’t recommend his son. “There’s just constant hitting,” he said. (Hockey, it should be noted, can also lead to head injuries. USA Hockey, which oversees high-school and club hockey in America, has been relatively proactive about safety, deciding in 2011 to ban bodychecking in games until age 13.)

A huge amount of evidence shows that football poses a risk to developing brains. Athletes who begin playing tackle football before the age of 12 have twice as much of a risk of behavioral problems later in life and three times as much of a risk of clinical depression as athletes who begin playing after 12, according to a 2017 Boston University study. A separate study from Wake Forest University found that boys who played just one season of tackle football between the ages of 8 and 13 had diminished functions in part of their brain.

One of the biggest risks of repeated head injuries is that players could develop CTE, or chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a condition that occurs when a protein called tau spreads through the brain, killing brain cells. CTE is linked with behavioral and personality changes, memory loss, and speech problems. Conversations about CTE tend to focus on the dangers of concussions, but brains can also be damaged by frequent hits to the head. A February 2018 study found that mice with repeated traumatic brain injuries, regardless of concussive symptoms, still had CTE. The condition has been found in the brains of many high-profile football players who committed suicide in recent years, including Junior Seau, Andre Waters, and Terry Long. One 2017 study of the brains of 111 former NFL players found that 110 of them had CTE.

Because of this research, a growing number of elite-level football players are trying to get kids to wait until high school to start playing tackle. By then, kids’ bodies are developed enough that head trauma may not be as detrimental, and the kids can better understand proper tackling procedures and control their body to follow them.

[Read: The future of detecting brain damage in football]

Even if kids wait until they’re in high school to play tackle football, though, they’ll need something else to do in the meantime. And that’s where Sam Taggard’s kids have an advantage over Shantavia Jackson’s. Throughout the country, affluent school districts offer more extracurricular activities than poorer districts, and upper-income parents can pay for more activities outside of school. On top of hockey, the Taggard’s oldest son, Jack, plays trombone in the band, volunteers to teach music to disabled kids, and participates in the chess and ski clubs. Jack expects to go to college whether or not he excels at sports. Both his parents did, and his father has a master’s in business administration. Shantavia Jackson is still working on getting her GED.

As brain-damage fears have grown, upper-income boys have started decamping to sports such as golf or lacrosse, which are less available in poorer communities. The kids are influenced by adults who have their own biases about the safety of football. Just 37 percent of white respondents told researchers that they would encourage kids to play the sport, while 57 percent of black respondents said they would, according to a working paper by the sociologists Andrew Lindner of Skidmore College and Daniel Hawkins of the University of Nebraska.

The Taggard family outside their home in Simsbury, Connecticut (Monica Jorge)

Now getting white kids just to play flag football can be a tough sell. Jim Schwantz, the mayor of Palatine, Illinois, and a former linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys and San Francisco 49ers, tried to start a flag-football league as an alternative for families in his area worried about concussions. Despite a strong start in 2012, interest fell each year in the mostly white suburbs where the league operated, because parents saw the sport as a gateway to tackle football. Schwantz decided to scrap the league in 2017.

Meanwhile, in Colquitt County, where the Jacksons live, football remains the biggest thing around. The county’s population is just 45,000, but it’s not unusual for the 10,000-seat high-school stadium to be full of local fans for Friday-night games. Timmy Barnes, a former player who later traveled with the football team as a police officer, has called Colquitt County “a community who only has football.” He wrote that after Rush Propst, the high-school coach, was nearly suspended after head-butting a player but saved when he apologized and the community rallied around him.

On a fall afternoon, I sat with Shantavia Jackson on the metal bleachers of a high-school stadium in Thomasville, Georgia, a town in a neighboring county near the Florida border, as successive teams of boys came to play in a tournament branded “The Battle of the Babies.” Jackson was there from the start. She wore a gray long-sleeved Colquitt County Cowboys T-shirt to support her youngest son, Chance, whose Pop Warner team played in an early game. She cheered for him while keeping her 12-year-old, Jyqwayvin, entertained in the stands. Qway’s undefeated team was playing a team from Atlanta in the last game of the day, so the family’s day was dominated by football.

The stands were mostly empty when the 6- and 7-year-olds played around noon under a scorching Georgia sun, but they began to fill up as games featured older boys, who could run, jump, and hit harder than the little kids. Amid the sounds of the tournament—the cowbells and hollering from the parents, a DJ blasting Drake from the end zone, the referee’s whistles and the grunts of adolescent boys counting jumping jacks behind the stands—no one seemed bothered by the thuds of the hits. These happened constantly: when the 6- and 7-year-olds ran smack into one another trying to get a fumbled football, when a 9-year-old caught a pass and got leveled by a boy twice his size, and when an 11-year-old got yanked around the neck and tackled by another 11-year-old.

[Read: How students’ brains are in danger on the field]

“Get him, come on!” a grandmother yelled at her grandson, a tiny 61-pound 9-year-old named Zain who was flattened by a boy 40 pounds heavier. Zain came off the field crying and his mother went to stroke his head. With the exception of Zain and his family, nearly every other player and family in the stands was black.

By the time Qway’s game rolled around, the stands were packed and the sun had set, turning the sky a purplish blue. The game was a rout; the team from Atlanta was faster, bigger, and more organized than Qway’s team, and so the boys started getting violent in frustration, tackling one another after the whistle, grabbing at necks to pull one another down. Parents yelled at the referees for what they perceived as missed penalties, and then turned on one another. “We’re in the sticks now!” one Atlanta parent yelled, taunting. Qway got hit in the groin, and Jackson stood at the bottom of the bleachers, her hand by her mouth, waiting to make sure he was okay.

Shantavia Jackson (Dustin Chambers)

Jackson knows football is dangerous. Her father broke his neck playing football when he was in high school; he was in the hospital for weeks and had to get screws in his spine. But she has a fatalistic attitude about injuries. Her boys could get injured in a car accident or a drive-by shooting. They could get injured if they joined gangs. “If it’s meant to happen, it’s going to happen. We can’t stop it,” she said. “You can get injured in any sport.” All she can do, she told me, is hug her boys and tell them she loves them before each game.

Other parents in the stands said similar things. One mother: “Boys will be boys. They need a little roughness.” Another: “You have to keep your child busy so they don’t have time to get in trouble.” One woman, Hope Moore, started her son in football when he was 6. At first he wasn’t interested in playing sports, Moore said, but she wanted to get him off the couch and away from video games. He fell in love with football from the moment he started playing. Moore used to worry about the hits, pulling him from games if she thought he was getting hurt. But the coaches told her that her son needed to learn to make mistakes, and how to get hit, she told me. Now he’s getting invited to live in other school districts so he can be on their teams. “It’s going to help him in college,” Moore said.

Even as the dangers associated with tackle football become more evident, the sport is growing more lucrative. Universities can make money from football on ticket revenue, broadcasting fees, licensing opportunities, and sponsorships through bowl games. Some of the biggest schools have doubled what they make from football over the past decade, according to Forbes. The football program at Texas A&M University, one of the nation’s top teams, brings in $148 million annually.

Seeing the revenue opportunities, many schools have expanded their football program and started offering more scholarships. Since 1988, the NCAA has added 62 Division I schools that are eligible to offer full-ride football scholarships, representing about 3,000 more scholarships available. By contrast, 31 fewer schools offer NCAA Division I scholarships for men’s swimming and diving than in 1988. “If [universities] started giving boys the same amount of scholarships in swimming, you’d see a whole bunch of poor kids jumping in the pool,” Robert W. Turner II, a professor at George Washington University who briefly played in the NFL, told me.

In communities like Colquitt County, many families see high-school seniors get full-ride football scholarships and aspire to something similar. Jackson’s boys, for instance, look up to Ty Lee, a former Colquitt County football player who was recruited to Middle Tennessee State University. They visit him when he’s home from school. Around 78 percent of black male athletes in the lowest income quintile expect to qualify for financial aid through an athletic scholarship, compared with 45 percent of white males in the same income bracket, according to a forthcoming paper by the Portland State University sociologists CJ Appleton and Dara Shifrer.

[Read: Football has always been a battleground in the culture war]

College recruiting can happen as early as middle school, which means kids can feel pressure to start playing sooner to hone their skills. If parents in Colquitt County were to prevent their kids from playing until they’re 14, their kids’ athleticism and knowledge of the game would be far behind that of boys who have been playing for years. Chad Mascoe Sr., who played football at the University of Central Florida and in the Arena Football League, and who now lives in Thomasville, Georgia, told me that his 14-year-old son, Chad Mascoe Jr., had three recruiting offers before he got into high school. Now, as a star freshman, Chad has 13 offers, according to his father. He was recently recruited to transfer to an elite boarding and sports-training school in Florida later this year.

The NFL starts marketing to children when they’re young, which has attracted criticism from groups who say the league’s material portrays football as safe and healthy, even as research shows that it is not. The league runs a website and app for kids that has 3 million registered users, and it has funded NFL-branded fitness and healthy-eating programs in more than 73,000 schools. A study published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine found that the short-term health of students improved more in participating schools than in those not enrolled. In Colquitt County, schools got a visit from an Atlanta Falcons player through one of those programs in 2014. (The NFL declined to comment for this story.)

Even without the NFL’s presence, though, Colquitt County prioritizes football. In 2016, Colquitt County voters approved a ballot question that allowed the school board to use some proceeds of a sales tax for education funding to build a $3.7 million, 73,000-square-foot indoor multipurpose space that allows the football team to practice even in the heat of a Georgia summer. Propst, the high-school coach, made $141,000 last year, according to Open Georgia, which provides salary information for state and local employees. Most teachers at Colquitt County High School make less than half of what Propst does.

Colquitt County High School (Dustin Chambers)

Without football, the options for boys in Colquitt County are limited. Only 80 percent of incoming freshmen at Colquitt County high schools end up graduating. Of those who do, just 29 percent go on to four-year colleges. For those who stay, job options are bleak: More than two-thirds of households in Colquitt County make less than $50,000 a year. That’s less than half the median household income in Connecticut’s Hartford County, where the Taggards live.

The people who do seem to be pulling their kids from football in Colquitt County are the ones who can afford other opportunities. I talked to Todd Taylor, who is white and lives in Moultrie, Georgia, a few miles from Shantavia Jackson’s hometown of Norman Park. He played football and baseball at Colquitt County High, and his family has season tickets to Colquitt County Packers football games. But his wife really doesn’t want their 8-year-old son, Jud, to play, because of concussion dangers. Instead, Jud plays baseball and dives at Moss Farms Diving, a powerhouse facility in Moultrie that has trained dozens of divers who get college scholarships. Moss Farms offers training tuition-free to those who need it, but diving remains an expensive sport in America, requiring pool time and lots of travel. Sixteen percent of the Moss Farms roster is made up of people of color.

The divide on the football field makes it hard not to see how inequality in America is worsening health disparities and raising the specter of another, darker era of American history. In the early part of the 20th century, black Americans were prevented from buying homes in well-off neighborhoods by racially restrictive covenants, excluded from trade unions and the jobs they guaranteed, and paid less than their white counterparts. The segregation that resulted has long had health implications. Today simply the fact of being black can be hazardous to one’s health. Low-income black boys are more likely than low-income white boys to live in neighborhoods with persistent poverty, violence, and trauma. These neighborhoods also have little access to healthy foods.

Despite the benefits football can provide, it may also be worsening these health disparities. The medical care accessible to low-income families in poor neighborhoods may be helping to obscure the dangers of brain injuries. Low-income black communities have less access to good medical services and information that would emphasize the downsides of playing football, says Harry Edwards, a civil-rights activist and emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California at Berkeley. “Nobody advises them as to the long-term medical risks,” he told me. “They are out of the loop.” Black people who said they had followed news about concussions were less likely to encourage children to play football than others who hadn’t been following the news, according to Lindner and Hawkin’s study.

[Read: The worst part about recovering from a concussion]

When black boys from low-income families look for examples of men who have come from similar backgrounds and succeeded, they don’t have as many positive role models outside of sports and music. Black NFL players who came from poverty are featured in commercials selling products, sitting behind desks at halftime in tailored suits, holding up trophies. They’re in newspaper stories and TV specials in which they talk about growing up poor in the South, raised by a single mother, and making it big in the NFL. “The media serves up encouraging stories for black kids to consume,” says John Hoberman, the author of Darwin’s Athletes: How Sport Has Damaged Black America and Preserved the Myth of Race. Low-income black boys do not see the hundreds of athletes suffering in silence as their brain deteriorates, who ache when they get out of bed every morning, who damaged their body playing in high school or college but who didn’t even make it to the NFL.

While black boys are disproportionately getting channeled into a violent sport, white people are making the most money off of it. Seventy percent of NFL players are black, but only 9.9 percent of managers in the league office are. The NFL was just 52 percent black in 1985. Only two people of color are majority owners of NFL franchises: Shahid Khan, the Pakistani American owner of the Jacksonville Jaguars, and Kim Pegula, a Korean American businesswoman who is a partial owner of the Buffalo Bills. “If you’re going to avoid 21st-century gladiator circumstances in terms of football, the teams have to look something like the demographic representation of this nation,” Edwards told me.

Last year, the NFL expanded its Rooney Rule, which was first implemented in 2003 and seeks to diversify teams’ coaching and front-office staff. Still, the gladiatorial overtones are hard to overlook. Players who want to get recruited by NFL teams must attend the NFL Scouting Combine, a week-long showcase in which they perform mental and physical tests. Athletes’ hand size, arm length, and wingspan are measured during this event, and players are asked to stand naked but for their workout shorts so that team recruiters can see how they are built, according to Edwards, who also works as a consultant with the San Francisco 49ers. NFL and team executives, mostly white men, are evaluating the bodies of black players, deciding whether to make an investment.

Even as broadcast networks lost viewers generally, NFL ratings were up in 2018. Americans still appear to have a growing fascination with the sport, even if a majority-white segment of the population doesn’t want their children to play it.

Without a reversal in economic fortunes for poor communities across the country, football could one day become a sport played almost exclusively by black athletes, while still enjoyed by everyone. Black athletes—who already make up the majority of players in the most dangerous on-field positions—would continue to suffer from long-term brain damage, their life cut short by dementia and the scourge of CTE. Black boys would continue to be drawn to a sport that could make their life painful and short. Everyone else would sit back and watch.

Efforts are under way to try to make football safer. Youth leagues are implementing concussion protocols, lessening the amount of hitting players do in practice, and even distributing helmets with special sensors that analyze whether an athlete has gotten a concussion. Dartmouth College eliminated live tackling in all practices in 2010; other Ivy League schools adopted similar rules in 2016. The NFL has made some changes, too, adding a concussion protocol in 2009 and altering kickoff and tackling rules to lower the risk of injury. The 2018 NFL season saw a 28 percent decrease in concussions, compared with the previous year.

Still, the league can’t do much about the fact that football, more than any other sport, requires players to run into one another over and over again and fall to the ground. “Football at the elite level is about as close as you can get to war and still stay civil,” Edwards said. Concussion protocols can’t erase the research that suggests that primarily brain trauma, not concussions, leads to CTE.

The Colquitt County Packers practice field (Dustin Chambers)

Some lawmakers want the government to get involved by prohibiting kids from tackling in football before high school, or by banning youth tackle football entirely. Bills introduced in five states to restrict tackle football have faced backlash. “To demonize just this sport is unfair. It’s illogical, and frankly, it’s downright un-American,” Mike Wagner, the executive commissioner of Pop Warner’s Southern California conference, said in reaction to the Safe Youth Football Act, a failed California bill introduced last year that would have set a minimum age for organized tackle-football leagues.

The disappearance of tackle football could be a real blow to some communities, unless something changes so that those places offer more opportunity and less peril for low-income black boys. If tackle football were banned, for instance, Shantavia Jackson’s boys would lose the coaches who look out for them. Without football, they wouldn’t have something to look forward to on weekends, or as big of a community of teammates. They might not have a dream they can pursue that’s quite as tangible and achievable as playing college football.

Before she had kids, Jackson wanted to leave Colquitt County, but she ended up staying in the same town where her father and grandmother still live. The stakes are higher for her sons, she says, especially for Qway, whose mental-health condition sometimes sets him apart. He needs to be somewhere bigger, with more people like him, she told me. “There’s really nothing much here for him,” she said.

White parents may be doing the best thing for their sons by pulling them from tackle football. But parents of black boys in the rural South are facing a different reality, Jackson says. She believes that she is being a good parent if she gets her sons excited about tackle football. Their opportunities grow if they learn how to hit and tackle and run—how to be as much of a live wire—as well as they possibly can.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/football-white-flight-racial-divide/581623/?utm_source=feed

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ionecoffman · 6 years ago

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The White Flight From Football

Marqwayvian McCoy at home in his jersey (Dustin Chambers)

Sam Taggard played football in college and had to have back surgery later in life. (Monica Jorge)

[Read: The future of detecting brain damage in football]

The Taggard family outside their home in Simsbury, Connecticut (Monica Jorge)

[Read: How students’ brains are in danger on the field]

Shantavia Jackson (Dustin Chambers)

[Read: Football has always been a battleground in the culture war]

Colquitt County High School (Dustin Chambers)

[Read: The worst part about recovering from a concussion]

The Colquitt County Packers practice field (Dustin Chambers)

Article source here:The Atlantic

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alangraysonus-blog · 7 years ago

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Injustice Anywhere is a Threat to Justice Everywhere

Today, we memorialize one of America’s greatest humans, Martin Luther King, Jr. When he published “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, King had been jailed for campaigning against racial segregation in Birmingham, in violation of an injunction against anyone “parading, demonstrating, boycotting, trespassing and picketing.” His letter was written on the margins of a newspaper, scraps of paper that another prisoner gave to him, and then a legal pad that his attorney left behind. It has been an inspiration to millions of people; I am one of them. Here are some excerpts:

MY DEAR FELLOW CLERGYMEN: … .

I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly….

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we stiff[ly] creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dark of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Fu town is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you go forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness” then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience….

But though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal …” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary’s hill three men were crucified. We must never forget that all three were crucified for the same crime—-the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thus fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment. Perhaps the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists….

I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham, and all over the nation, because the goal of America [is] freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s destiny. Before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence across the pages of history, we were here. For more than two centuries our forebears labored in this country without wages; they made cotton king; they built the homes of their masters while suffering gross injustice and shameful humiliation-and yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands….

One day the South will recognize its real heroes. There will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. There will be the old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: “My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest.” There will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience’ sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Never before have I written so long a letter. I’m afraid it is much too long to take your precious time. I can assure you that it would have been much shorter if I had been writing from a comfortable desk, but what else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?…

Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

Martin Luther King, Jr.

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fultas01 · 8 years ago

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This post is part of Blogging Abroad’s 2017 New Years Blog Challenge, week two: The Danger of a Single Story.

Hello reader,

Adichie shares ‘the danger of a single story’, warning that if we only hear a single story about a person, country or issue, we risk great misunderstanding. She says:

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.”

Today I’m responding to the blog prompt: the danger of a Single Story. If you are unaware of this idea, here is a link to the TedTalk video.This video will help you to understand The Danger of the Single Story and I hope it will help you to understand my response.

Okay, without further ado.

I have encountered quite a few single stories here in Moldova, and some of them I fight everyday. I’m going to share 5 single stories that I have encountered over this last year.

Moldova is a third-world country

When I began my research into the Peace Corps, the overall idea that I gleaned from these stories was that I would be living and working in one of the poorest countries in the world. The number one image that comes to mind when thinking of the Peace Corps is of a young woman (or young man) working in Africa. So I researched Moldova and found that it was the poorest nation in Europe, and the pictures showed little villages with people riding around with a horse and cart.

But when I came to Moldova, I was surprised to find a bustling Capital city in Chisinau. I was surprised to find out that there different public transportation systems, that while maybe not as accomplished as some American cities, was better than the public transportation system found in Ft. Wayne Indiana.

While the country remains poor, and not every house has an indoor toilet (a thought that still turns me into a squeamish little girl, determined to hold her bladder for the weekend) the country is industrialized. Moldova has faster internet than found in the US, and room for entrepreneurs. The people here are not starving, but they are hardworking. They are a multilingual community that acts more like a small village or family than we could ever imagine in the United States.

2. The rich American.

An example of this single story comes from a few weeks before Christmas, when I was asked for 35,000 lei. You aren’t reading that wrong, thirty-five thousand. When I tried to explain that I didn’t have that kind of money, the person just told me that it was less than 2,000 USD (which I still didn’t have). I finally got out of the situation by pointing out that I didn’t have that much money in country, and my American card did not work here in Moldova (both true). It has left me feeling awkward, and more like an ATM than a help to my community.

As many Americans (and probably all peace corps volunteers) can relate, many of my host community members see me as a rich, and likely weird, American. I joined the Peace Corps right after college (boarding an airplane less than a month after graduation), meaning that I didn’t have a career to give me lavish amounts of money (and the teacher’s salary I’ll go home to is no where near lavish), plus I’m using the Peace Corps as a way to pay down the amount of debt that a bachelor’s degree has left me in. All in all, even back in the states I was living below the poverty line.

Nevertheless, many host country nationalists don’t consider this. They show me how much a USD is worth here in Moldova (generally around 20 MLD to 1 USD), and talk about the difference in salaries in the US versus Moldova. I get it, but living and working in Moldova means I’m not making that money. Instead I’m living on a Peace Corps stipend, which has evaporated by the end of every month I’ve been here.

I wear dirty and rundown clothes, walk to school, I don’t buy things like coffee everyday, and I’m rarely out on vacation. Not exactly the story of the rich American these people were expecting.

3. The north is full of superstitions

I heard this idea secondhand from another volunteer, and I had heard similar murmurs while in the Capital. This is the single story that the people in the Northern part (especially the far north where I live) are much more superstitious, and religious, than those found in the center and south. This single story was brought to my attention when someone said they were sorry when they heard I was moving to the north of the country. Why? Because (according to them) the Moldovans in the north are more superstitious about and are far more religious.

So, I went north expecting to go to church every Sunday, all the windows to always be closed, no cold water, not being aloud to sit at the corners of tables, etc. What I found out is that my host family and community is no more (or less) religious and traditional than any other village in Moldova. I live in a village, and just like in any small town in America, this means that life comes at a slower pace, and it is more conservative than you would find in most cities, just from lack of diversity.

When I found a weird quirk about the soap disappearing out of the bathroom and winding up in odd places in the house, people told me it was more than likely a superstition. However, when I paid attention to some of my family members, I realized that they were just using that bar of soap to scrub some things clean, and leaving the soap where they left off. This story isn’t as interesting as some of the ideas thrown my way (one person suggested that it could be my host family trying to ward off evil spirits).

In fact, my host family and host community in large has seemed exactly on point, or even a little progressive, compared to some of the stories I hear from other volunteers. When I get sick, my host family asks if I need to go see the doctor, they give me my space, and (I’m sure to my mother’s dissatisfaction) they let me sleep in on Sundays, not caring that I’m not joining them for church. The north is the same as anywhere else I’ve visited.

4. America is an amazing land of wealth and opportunity

While this may be true to many, and something that Americans would love to point out as being true, it is a single story. Not everywhere in the US is prospering, and not everything the country does is ‘amazing.’

This last semester I told a couple stories to my students that they just couldn’t believe. The first being that there were Native Americans in the US, but few survive today due to the massive genocide of their people and culture by white American expansion. My students (and the teachers) all looked at me liked I had grown a second head when I shared this information. Their text books don’t talk about the native Americans, so I took it upon myself to tell them about some of them. I shared about the people that used to live in Indiana where I’m from, and the only thing that remains of them is the name of some parks.

The second thing I shared, was a book of poetry written by one of my professors. The poems are about growing up in Gary, Indiana. And if you don’t know Gary, it’s not exactly booming. No, the city looks like a ghost town, a falling apart, and incredibly impoverished city. After reading some of the poems, my students said they didn’t think these were about The United States. They seemed depressing, and too dark to be written about the US. When I first shared these stories, I didn’t think anything of them. These ideas were things that I learned in high school and college. So I’m hoping to share more of these stories with my students soon, so they can see more of the US than what is in the movies.

5. Peace Corps volunteers are young outgoing people who want to change the world.

While I am young and I do want to change the world. I know that this is a single story of a peace corps volunteer. I know volunteers in their 50s and 60s, who are just as hungry to make a difference as I am, and they are honest to god inspirations. They are role models of how I would love to see my life. Do amazing things throughout my prime, and volunteer abroad as my retirement. What could be better?

Along with us not all being a certain age demographic, we are also different genders, races, religions, orientations, political views, etc. We come from all over the world (there are a lot of American immigrants in the Peace Corps, which is super cool!). I think that the Peace Corps is as diverse as the US. I am not necessarily an extrovert, so I know that even the personalities of volunteers are different. Each and every person in my cohort is different from the next person. No fill-in the blank form for a volunteer.

End thoughts:

These are just some of the single stories that I have come across. I try to show myself and my country in a fuller light everyday to my community, and every blog post is my way of sharing new stories about Moldova with the world. I want to make all of these single stories into a more diverse understanding of the people around the world.

Until next time,

Angela

Expanding the View This post is part of Blogging Abroad's 2017 New Years Blog Challenge, week two: The Danger of a Single Story.

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