#the screaming about racism would be deafening | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

byorder-fanfic · 4 years ago

Text

At The Fair

Summary: It’s the summer of 1924, and Bonnie Gold has his first boxing match at the fair. His father and sisters are watching from the side lines, but will he walk away a champion?

Word count: 2321

Warnings: Swearing, mentions of blood, description of fighting, slightest hint of racism (it is the 1920s)

Author’s Note: Hiya, I just wanted to say that I LOVE Bonnie, he is my favourite character and I was super excited to write about him, and his relationship with Aberama. However, I don’t use Jack Rowan or Aiden Gillen as my descriptions for the characters. Although I loved their portrayal, they are both white actors playing POC characters, so I’m basing their physical appearance off of Rromani, particularly Rromanichal, people. I’m a white gadje, so please correct me if I have said anything offensive or incorrect in my writing. Hope you enjoy xx

The colours were like a painting, Bonnie couldn't help but thinking. Summer days were always full of light cyan skies, vivid green fields, illuminated by the golden glow of sunshine on flushed skin. His veins were pounding, completely disregarding the heat against his olive-toned skin as he tried to resist the urge to just sprint through the crowds of grinning faces. The urge was subsided by the feeling of his oldest sister's hand on his elbow, forcing him to slow down as she turned her head to survey the decorations. In the whole of summer, the fair was always the most colourful: red and white banners strung from the same peppermint-patterned stalls, everyone dressed up in vibrant summer clothes. It made Bonnie feel a little less self conscious, in just his vest top and bright red shorts, as well as the two boxing gloves weighing down his arms. He was skinny but tall (though not as tall as Esmerelda, he noticed sadly as the two walked side by side), with more subtle muscles than the other boxers. His dad had assured him that he didn't need the hulking build with his punch, but the nagging thought still fluttered in his mind. He was easily distracted from it by the giggle of his youngest sister, Florence, ringing over the excited chatter of the crowds. She was bounding over the grass, swerving between the strangers, not held back by an older sister like Bonnie was. Rather, Naomie was watching her little sister with a bemused smile, making sure to keep the nine year old in sight. The two were getting odd looks, distrustful glares and hateful snarls that the younger one didn't heed, just carrying on in her blissful ignorance. Florence was the only one to inherit their father's mousy brown hair, the other three taking after their mother with curly dark hair. Trailing behind them, Aberama was going slower than the rest. Instead of staring at the decorations or scrutinising the many faces he walked past, he was watching his children.

Little Florence was the picture of happiness, dressed in bright yellow so she wouldn't get lost in her curious exploration of the new surroundings. Gentle Naomie was taking calm strides after her, keeping her smile bright as she gave polite nods to the families she passed. Excitable Bonnie looked just like a kid again in his big gloves, his eagerness to get into the ring for the first time obvious. It reminded him of when he was younger, grinning through his bloodied nose as he proudly showed off his newest medal. But those were schoolground fights in compared to this, Aberama thought with a sting of worry. It's not that he didn't have faith in his son and his hell of a punch, but boxing is an inherently dangerous sport, a danger he didn't want to see his children in. His eyes turned to Esmerelda, a woman now. Just like him, she wore a large coat, standing out in the hot weather. Just like him, she kept a gun at her hip. It was one of the greatest tragedies he'd ever felt when his eldest child decided to join his profession, but he could never refuse his children. That was the exact reason they were there in the fair, marching up to the ring where a man twice Bonnie's size waited to get knocked out by the slight of a boy. He was a fierce fighter, Aberama thought proudly, although the boy's goofy smile and soft heart would have never betrayed it.

They reached the ring just as a fight ended. A man fell to the floor, nose evidently broken as blood gushed down his lips. He groaned softly, though made no move to get back up and fight. Esmerelda nudged Bonnie softly.

"Make sure you don't end up like that, hey?" She teased gently. With the same mirthful grin, Naomie brought a hand to attempt to ruffle his dark hair, stopped by one of Bonnie's unproportionable gloves. It was gelled back to prevent it from getting in the way, shining in the sunlight, much to the girls' amusement.

"Don't mess your hair up when you fall down," she said, with a snigger.

"But Bonnie always wins," Florence protested loudly as she beamed up at her brother, showing off the gap in her front teeth. Grinning back, Bonnie knelt down to hug his little sister.

"Course I do, Floss," he said, lightly bouncing his glove on her nose. "And I will win this time."

Aberama hummed contentedly, nodding his head to the man who organised this event- Mr Hamish Lee. He was watching Bonnie cautiously, doubt evident in his raised eyebrows. It had taken a lot of convincing to get Bonnie a place at the fair, considering he was only sixteen. But Bonnie insisted he was ready, ready to start proper fights, ready to start the road to become a professional. Eventually, Mr Lee caved. Maybe the boy would win, like his father insisted, and that would be a good day for the bookies. Or, maybe he lost, and he wouldn't have to deal with Mr Gold's persistent badgering. Hopefully.

"For the next fight," Mr Lee yelled, pausing to get the audience's attention. Children clambered to get to in front of the raised box, adults watching over their heads. "Our champion, Samuel Howard," there were a few cheers as the boxer from the previous round (the one with an intact nose) rose his gloves over his head in premature celebration, showing off his muscular figure. He was taller and broader than Bonnie, Aberama thought with his heart pounding faster than ever before. Then he turned to his son and all worry melted away. Bonnie was grinning, bouncing from foot to foot, already ready to start. Esmerelda nodded to her dad, patting her brother on his back.

"You better get up there, Bon," she said with a smile. "Don't want the fight to start without you."

"He's big, though," Naoime whispered, trying not to unnerve her brother. But Bonnie was still grinning. He was grabbing hold of the ropes, ready to get in, waiting for the call of his name. First, the cheering had to stop, and the conceited boxer had to stop parading about the ring. Aberama moved to stand by his son, clapping his back softly.

"Now, Bon, remember," he said, more sure than he felt. "Keep them on their feet for a bit, make them think it's going his way, and then..."

"Knock him out cold," Bonnie finished with a nod.

"If you get hurt," Aberama began, holding onto his shoulder. The worry was beginning to show itself.

"Then I'll just carry on," Bonnie said, so steady and sure.

The cheering ceased. Mr Lee was pointing to where the Gold family stood, signalling for Bonnie to climb under the ropes, and into the spotlight of the summer glow.

"A new competitor." Bonnie stood proud, head raised as he stared down (or, more accurately, up) the larger boxer. There was a sudden hush over everyone, wide eyes staring at his slim figure next to the other, with disbelief. "Bonnie Gold!"

At the roar of his name, Bonnie heard all three of his sisters scream wildly, joining in with the weak cheers of the crowd. He tried to bite back a smile at their enthusiastic screeches, still certain that they would be deafening their neighbours by now.

"Go on, Bon," he heard his dad clap as he took another step forward, already excited to knock the condescending look off of Howard's face. Mr Lee raised his hand in front of their faces, keeping apart purely by convention and eagerness. Their eyes were only on each other, trying not to let the suddenly sharp glare of sunlight in their peripheral cloud their vision.

"And, fight!"

As soon as his hand was brought back, it was like an invisible wall between the two had fallen. Howard pounced forward, large fist flying towards Bonnie's face, which the smaller boy easily ducked. It was obvious the bigger boxer, just wanted to get this over with, and would only make the fight last as long as one was standing. But Bonnie had a flare of showmanship that wouldn't let it be so simple. Ducking another heavy punch, he made his own hit forward. His glove bounced off the boxer's shoulder, enough to make Howard stumble back. Shocked, he tried to hit again, but Bonnie bat his hand away. The screams behind him carried on, getting louder as the crowd began to cheer more confidently than before. They hadn't seen anything yet, Bonnie thought, allowing excitement to flow through him again. With adrenaline flowing through his veins, he whipped a few punches forward, stronger than his first jab to force Howard to lose his smirk, making him try harder to hit the sixteen year old in the face. Bonnie was proud to see how easily he could get from arrogance to anger, making his aim sloppy. Despite that, he still had a lot of weight behind his attacks, so Bonnie had to drop his gloves in front of his face, stumbling back as he felt a series of harsh thwacks shake his defence.

"C'mon Bonnie!" His dad screamed, somehow louder than Florence's indecipherable screeches.

Bonnie smirked against his gloves, ready for the end. He heard Howard lift his hand back, poising for the next strike. Swiftly, Bonnie dropped his guard. He took a step forward, careful to keep his body grounded as he soared his right fist upwards. The uppercut struck Howard's chin, just as he had planned, with a clang of teeth. The bigger boxer's head was thrown back as he staggered backwards, gloved hands instinctively reaching to clutch his face, but Bonnie was quicker. In a second, he swiped a jab, straight at his nose. He felt the muscles in his arm tense, all insecurities about his toned muscles ceased as he collided with his face. Howard fell backwards, all of him slumping to the floor. Bonnie waited for a second, watching his chest rise and fall as he laid motionless. There was a hush for a moment, as Mr Lee slammed his hand against the ring floor.

One. Two. Three.

Cheers and screams filled his ears as Bonnie swung around to smile at the grinning faces of his sisters and father, who were whooping and yelling, bouncing up and down as they grabbed onto each other. Esmerelda was a little calmer. With a kind smile, she made a motion with her finger to turn around. Bonnie kept his smile from ear to ear as he spun around, soaking up the sound of strangers screaming, holding his gloves in the air and he could almost imagine a spotlight on him. He could almost replace the grass fields with a darkly-lit stadium, almost see the cluster of people below the raised ring multiplied, rows of chairs going back as far as he could see. He won this fight, and that was just the beginning. Bonnie Gold was making his name heard, and it was wonderful to hear it being chanted. The huffs of his chest carried pride, as he saw disbelief fade into impressed grins, and slow, heavy claps. Sweat clung to his skin, the heat of the sun met by a flush under his skin. With a child-like giggle, Bonnie waved over to the crowd as he retreated back to his family, nodding at the wide eyed look at Mr Lee as he clambered over the previous champion and currently unconscious Howard.

Still smiling, he ducked under the rope, practically jumping into his dad's arms.

"Atta boy, Bonnie," Aberama proclaimed, proudly embracing his son. "Well done, we're so proud of you!"

"Cumere, champ," Esmerelda teased as she held her own arms out. Breaking away from his dad, Bonnie wrapped his arms around his older sister, resting his head against her shoulder. "Well done, Bon," she whispered for just the two of them as she hugged him tightly.

As soon as she let him go, Florence was bouncing up and down, tugging on his arms. With a softer look in his dark eyes, he hoisted his little sister up into his arms. She rested herself on his shoulders, hugging him tightly before moving back with a scrunched up nose.

"Gross, you're all sweaty," she complained as she tried to lean back as far away as possible. Bonnie just responded with a menacing grin.

"What was that, Floss?" He said as he gently pushed her closer to his body, wrapping his arm around her shoulders, as she tried to squirm and struggle out of his grasp. "Didn't quite hear you."

"No, Bonnie, stop it!" She squealed through another fit of giggles. Eventually Bonnie relented, placing her back on the grass and far away from his sweaty clothes, and towards their dad, wrapping her hands in his baggy clothes as Aberama threw his head back to let out a loud laugh.

"Yeah, I guess I'm glad you didn't break your nose," Naomie joked as she pulled him into a side hug, grinning up at him. Instinctively, she raised a hand to ruffle his hair, face dropping into disgust as she felt the sticky gel that now coated her palm. "Ugh, gross."

The entire family laughed as she attempted to shake away the gel, scrunching u her nose just like Florence had done seconds ago. Aberama grinned as he watched his family, the three girls in a ring around their brother as they teased and congratulated him, pride and unrelenting happiness at the thought of all the events planned for the future, all the matches Bonnie had yet to win, and he sighed happily. The summer sun itself could not compare to the glow that surrounded the Gold family, as radiant as their name would suggest as they stood in perfect bliss with one another.

#peaky blinders #peaky blinders fanfic #peaky blinders fanfiction #peaky blinders fluff #bonnie gold #aberama gold #Esmerelda gold

36 notes · View notes

indiacater · 5 years ago

Text

Was hoping to have the first part or chapter posted yesterday but that didn't happen. Here you guys go I hope you enjoy it.

Disclaimer: This story is going to include topics of racism, sexism, prostitution, sex and violence. I do not own the characters of TRR nor the world of RDR2. Both are owned by their respective companies.

Tagging: @bobasheebaby @ao719 @bebepac @hopefulmoonobject @cordonianroyalty @kingliam2019 @dcbbw @radlovedreamer @texaskitten30 @darley1101 @sashatrr

PART ONE

Liam rides into the near barren town of Armadillo, hopeful that the person he’s believe can help him is there. After dismounting from his horse and looks around. “This might be all for nothing" he thought to himself as he walked towards the sheriff’s office. Once inside he spots the sheriff lounging in his chair, legs of the desk as he reads the paper. Liam tapped on the desk to get the sheriff’s attention.

The sheriff shot his head up to see who had disturbed his peace and quiet. He took a brief look at the blond haired man and rose to greet him.

“Sheriff Drake Walker. What can I do ya fer?” he asked as he leaned nonchalantly on his desk. Liam respectfully removes his hat and responds “I’m looking for a fella named Jèan Reeves. I wish to request their services and I heard that he was in or near this area.”

Sheriff Walker shrugs his shoulders as he dryly laughs and goes back to his paper. Liam moved around to the front of the desk upset and confused. “And what the hell is so funny?”

Sheriff Walker looks up again from his paper. “Well first, Jéan isn’t the type you go looking for.” He says watching the blond man stand stoic trying not to look offended. “To answer your question. Yes Jéan was here.” He then tossed his head towards the cell where Liam saw four men residing in them. “Collected bounties on all them" As Drake leaned forward on his desk. “However Jéan went out near 5 days ago on a request I ask for.”

Liam just stood there, biting the inside of his cheek trying to think of what to do now. “ Well where did Jéan go for this job? I need his help and as you can understand.” Again Drake chuckles which begins to agitate Liam as he slams his hand down on the desk. “JUST WHAT THE HELL IS DAMN FUNNY?!” he shouted. Drake leans back again in his chair. “I’m laughing because you’re an upper crust, Saint Denis rich boy. Jéan is someone whose help you'd never want. You were better off looking for help from the safety of your golden walls.” Drake says as he watches Liam’s jaw tightened.

By now Liam has taken more insults than he was willing to take. “Why would you think that? What is it about Jéan that I would find unsavory?” Liam spat. “Jéan is descended from a well respected law man, a talented shooter, a renowned tracker, and medical school graduate. I need their help and came all the way here to get it. Why are you trying to turn me away?”

“Because Jéan is a colored. Their granddaddy, you spoke highly of was a colored. And last I checked your lot ain’t too kind to coloreds"

“Well ain’t that the pot calling the kettle black my friend. Ain’t you lawmen herding them up and sending them out to the work camps? “ he said as he stood up with his hands on his hips. “My name is Liam Rhys and I need to find Jéan Reeves. If you know where Jéan is then please tell me so we don’t have to pleasant each other’s company no further.”

Drake yawns and stretches. “Well Jèan should be back in town by ‘morrow afternoon. Was headed west in New Hanover. So I would suggest you go grab yourself a meal, a bed for the evening because you’re better off waiting. As I have said before Jèan ain’t the type of person you go looking for.” Once again Drake goes back to his paper.

Liam puts back on his hat and briskly walks out of the sheriff’s office. Never feeling so angry and insulted. Feeling lost and not a lot of options he headed towards the inn and got himself a room. When evening came he went and got some food in him from downstairs doing his best to steer clear of the drunks and working girls. Liam tried through the night to sleep but barely could. He dug through his pocket to pull out his father’s Platinum watch and remembering his last moments of seeing father alive. Being pushed out of the way as his father was repeatedly hit with bullets, the sounds of his stepmother horrified screams, the hunger crazed look of the scared face, fat gangster as he stood over father as he delivered the final shot ending his life. With the lacking sleep bringing back painful memories Liam gets out his map and sees that New Hanover is a half day away. He went to go pack up his things and get his horse. He wasn’t going to listen to a rude, podunk sheriff, with his head up his ass. Jèan Reeves is his only shot at getting justice and he’s not going to wait around.

As he got his horse and lit a lantern he took off. Despite not knowing where in New Hanover Jèan is or what Jèan looks like he was determined to keep going. After about a couple of hours the morning sunrise began to rise. He stopped to put out his lantern and took a second to see his surroundings. He continues on for a bit longer when he spots an injured solider laying by a tree by the road. Liam immediately stopped and dismounts.

“You’re injured sir. Is there anything I can do to help?”

Immediately the “soldier" springs up brandishing a small knife. “Give me your money and goods now, rich boy" Liam begins to back away when he’s struck hard from behind. As hits the ground he sees a heavy set man, wearing no shirt and in overalls holding a club that he uses again to hit Liam with. He hit Liam a few more times before the deafening sound of a gunshot rang out. Seconds later another, closer shot rang out. Liam opened his eyes wide enough to see the attackers on the ground dead.

Liam turned over to see a figure coming towards him. He could barely make out his savior as the lack of sleep, fear and beating cause him to fall unconscious. The stranger kneels down to examine Liam injuries. Luckily there were no broken bones, and wasn’t seeing any evidence of a concussion. The stranger brings Liam’s horse to his body and hoisted him onto it back. The stranger then grabbed the reigns and calls over theirs. As the stranger mounts they tie the reigns to their horse and begins a steady pace back to the town of Armadillo.

Hours later Liam groggily wakes up and feeling the pain of his attack. He slowly sits up and sees that he’s back in his room he rented at the inn. As he gets up he looks around and see his stuff was not touch or missing. He checked his pocket and sees he still has his father’s pocket watch. Feeling relieved he limps to the window. Outside he sees the unhelpful sheriff having a heated conversation with a unusually dressed colored woman. He then sees Drake pointing to his window and both walking in direction of the inn. About a minute later the door opened and Drake and the stranger walk in.

The colored woman steps forward with her hands on her hips. She looks Liam up and down. And with a smirk speaks. “I’m Jèan Reeves. I've been told you were looking for me.”

#indiacater fic #choices #trr king liam #liam x mc #king liam #the royal romance fic

25 notes · View notes

letitrainathousandflames-archive · 6 years ago

Text

Oneshot

Rating: teens and up

Warnings: symbrock, venom/eddie brock, panic attacks, sensory overstimulation, fluff, hurt/comfort, racism mention

Summary: Eddie’s been having a bad day and his hypersensitivity to loud noises is about to drive him into a panic attack.

EDDIE

“Not now.”

WHAT’S THE MATTER?

“Nothing. Be quiet now.”

Eddie grabs a beer in the fridge and sinks down in the couch, sighing. He can feel Venom’s restlessness and it only makes hims feel worse.

YOU’RE TENSE, EDDIE. WERE TENSE ALL THE WAY HOME.

“No shit.“ Eddie takes a large gulp of his beer, grimacing “All that... mess. Was driving me crazy.”

It’s like he can still hear the police car’s sirens, the children screams, high-pitched and deafening. He shivers, teeth grinding in his skull.

WE DID RIGHT. SAVED THAT YOUNG MAN. WE EVEN BROKE THAT RACIST OFFICER’S LEG INSTEAD OF EATING HIM, LIKE YOU ASKED US TO.

“He was gonna kill him.” Eddie runs his hand over his lips, placing the bottle on the floor “Was gonna kill that poor man in front of his daughters just because he reached for his wallet.”

THAT IS NOT WHAT’S MAKING YOU SHAKE LIKE THIS

Eddie’s eyes went wide. Only now did he notice that he was shifting uncomfortably in his seat, his leg bouncing non-stop and sweat beading on his skin. Eddie tries to speak but his voice gets caught in his throat.

YOU DON’T HAVE TO SPEAK. WE’RE HERE. TALK TO US IN YOUR MIND

Eddie swallows down, rocking back and forth now.

Noise too loud never liked loud I hate that shit hate it and my heart is just racing and I can’t make it stop-

EDDIE. EDDIE, IT’S NOT NOISY NOW. YOU’RE HOME. RELAX

Easy for you to say, goddamni-

That’s when the neighbor next door decides it’s a good time to blast his fucking guitar full volume, and Eddie just shrieks, rolling down to the floor and knocking down his bottle on the way. There’s the sound of broken glass, the stinging pain on Eddie’s arm as he scrambles over the glass shards.

EDDIE!

But for the first time Eddie can’t bring himself to hear Venom in his head, even now when Venom himself sounds panicked. Eddie he feels alone, cornered, terrified like he’s on a free fall down to the unforgiving concrete that will break every bone in his body and Venom will not here to heal him, to fix him.

He can smell blood and it makes him panic even more, tears prickling at the corners of his eyes, drawing rivers over the bridge of his nose. His throat is tight and he can’t breathe, he’s gonna die, he’s dying...

Something rubbery touches his cheek. It’s soft and almos slimy, drawing circles on his skin like a soft caress.

EDDIE

A voice... in his head. Kind and gentle but still somewhat scared like he is.

EDDIE, CAN YOU HEAR US NOW?

“N... Nnnngh!” Eddie chokes out “Can’t breathe...!”

The black matter over his cheek takes the shape of a big, clawed hand that caresses him gently, touch soothing and warm.

FOCUS ON YOUR BREATHING. IN AND OUT, EDDIE. SLOWLY

And it’s like something is stopping the air to leave his lungs so fast, and forcing his chest to stop heaving. Eddie’s right arm, he can feel it hurt, wet with blood... the pain is numbing out as Venom heals his injury.

YOU’LL BE FINE, EDDIE. WE WOULD NEVER LEAVE YOU HURTING

Eddie is still shivering, wide-eyed and drenched in sweat. The guitar noises have stopped by now - the neighbor probably had heard him scream and isn’t willing to bother him any further, probably pissing himself just at the thought of having Venom scream at him again. Venom still caresses his body and mind, black matter wrapping around Eddie’s body, keeping him warm and safe.

SHIFT YOUR FOCUS. OPEN YOUR EYES AND TELL US WHAT YOU SEE, EDDIE

Eddie hasn’t even noticed that he had his eyes shut. He opens them hesitantly, eyes darting back and forth.

“The TV. Half-dead plant. Broken glass.”

GOOD. YOU’RE HERE WITH US, EDDIE.

Eddie shudders, twisting his hands together, clinging to the reassurance of Venom’s words. He’s here and now. He’s safe... right?

“Can you say that again?”

Venom purrs inside his mind, wraps himself over Eddie in a mass of black that emerges from his chest in the shape of his grinning face.

YOU’RE WITH US, EDDIE. YOU ARE OURS, AND WE ARE YOURS. WE’LL ALWAYS BE TOGETHER.

Venom licks Eddie’s face affectionately, and Eddie gives him a tiny smile. He tries to get up and Venom gladly helps him to his feet. Something blooms in Eddie’s chest as he feels Venom pull back under his skin, his presence lingering in the back of his head as always.

“Thank you, love.”

Eddie can feel Venom’s... surprise. Then a smile.

YOU NEVER CALLED US THAT BEFORE. WE LIKE IT.

Eddie scratches the back of his head, sitting back down on the couch. The panic had made his legs wobbly still.

“Don’t get cocky or I’ll just go back to calling you the P-word.”

DON’T YOU DARE

Venom’s tone is half-threat, half-joke. Eddie smiles to himself - to the both of them that are himself and lets his eyes fall shut while Venom eases him back into relaxing.

#symbrock #venom/eddie #i'm so in deep in this fuckin ship #goddamnit #tentacle fluff #tenta-fluff? lmao #racism m/#ask to tag #my fics

137 notes · View notes

zukadiary · 7 years ago

Text

Ill Conceived Terror Trip Day 1: West Side Story

After I made that dramatic post about missing Daimon’s ohirome, one KazukiMotherfuckingSora showed up to rehearsal in red nails and dangly earrings, and here I am for a meager week, something my fear of flying and I never planned nor desired to attempt, least of all in the winter with my vacation days tapped out and my work schedule running 11pm-7am. Daylight where?

This whole situation is so... unfortunate. It’s ticket cancellation hell; I was supposed to go with three friends today and all their tickets evaporated. My second ticket got cancelled too. But faced with the painful reality that barring a true miracle this show will be entirely lost to the void, I’m feeling very lucky for the one shot I got, and very justified in deciding extremely late be extremely stupid. I wish something this good didn’t have to be this ephemeral. I tried my very best to burn it into my jet lagged memory... knowing West Side Story helped.

Other than dilution of the racism issue, the show was basically untouched. Some of that was just kind of lost in translation, but a bit was consciously altered (for example, America is all ladies minus the dissenting Shark men). EDIT: two people have now informed me that this was actually a movie change! Anyway, while it would be cool to see them tackle something like that, I get that there’s no cultural reference point, and I really can’t complain about my experience, other than that it was too short.

I’m rescinding all that haha. After a last minute blessed second viewing in which I comprehended significantly more dialogue, sure some things were still lost in translation but I feel comfortable calling this an EXTREMELY RESPECTABLE EFFORT ⭐

If you’re one of the lucky few with a future ticket, stop here and don’t deprive yourself of the impact.

Moment 1: the curtain rises on a few Jets with Zun-chan at the center looking, to be perfectly accurate, FINE AS HELL. Breathtakingly so. Grown up and absolutely slaying.

Moment 2: they start to move, and the work of the imported Broadway choreographer is immediately evident. Sometimes you don’t realize you’ve been watching Very Takarazuka Choreography until you see the same girls dancing something else.

Moment 3: enter KikiBernardo, and all of my internal organs lurched upward a bit. If this is the beginning of Soragumi Kiki, be very afraid.

Makaze enters casually after the opening dance number, without the typical dramatic “enter PAUSE” that leaves room for everyone to applaud the top star. The more I dwell on it, the happier I am that our first taste of Top Star Makaze Suzuho is a soft role; I live for Makaze struggling to keep the sexface just under the lethal dose, but her softness is also so beautiful. Love at first sight so strong you don’t even care that this asshole killed your brother is pretty unbelievable, but Makaze had me buying in 100%. And the 50s street clothes look—t-shirt under a collared shirt tucked loosely into slightly awkward dad jeans with a thick belt and sneakers, topped with a bomber depending on the scene—is SO GOOD for her.

WSS is home run casting, for all the Soragumi members on this side of the split, but particularly for our pair of fresh top stars, and particularly at this stage. They have a lot of figuring each other out to do as a combi—specifically learning how to sing together—but this worked; they aced the naive and reckless Tony/Maria dynamic. Maria throughout is a flatter character than Madoka is capable of playing, but she took full advantage of the emotional final scene and was excruciating. The silences in between her words were deafening.

Every dance number is an absolute delight: the fights more dynamic than most of the actual stage combat I’ve seen Takarazuka attempt; Mambo with its rotating pair dances and KikiSora giving everyone a lesson in erotic chemistry; America with its cha cha ruffles and my kid leading a pack of fierce musumeyaku; Cool being just that, featuring a really relatable moment of Zun-chan pleading “chill out” and Moeko screaming anyway; I couldn’t pick a favorite if I wanted to. There are some GENUINELY SCARY and hella impressive bits too; first someone... Zun-chan? (it’s APPALLING that my feeble memory is the only place this show can live) ((EDIT: it was Junna Subaru)) does some crazy jump flip thing and everyone catches her. Later Kiki SCALES A REALASS CHAIN LINK FENCE by 1) jumping right up to mid-fence 2) climbing to the top 3) UPSIDE DOWN FLIPPING HERSELF OVER THE TOP and 4) landing like a wild cat, resulting in possibly the hottest single feat I’ve witnessed on a stage (shortly afterwards pretty much everyone in a gang, including the TOP STAR who must be protected at all costs, followed suit with the partially upside down fence scaling).

Our notable Jets: Zun-chan, in addition to upping her look enough to stop my heart, still has this delightful little brother vibe about her that made her the perfect Riff, while still showing impressive leadership abilities as essentially the head of the group while Tony is off being lovestruck dumb. Another favorite was EBI as Velma (Zun’s girl), for her adorable look, her ace dancing, and her PFF BITCH NO faces made at Zun’s attempts to order her around. Fuuma Kakeru is forever the literal best, and likewise picture perfect in the 50s street urchin uniform. Monchi needed more opportunity to use her voice but got to wear glasses. Moeko gave an impressive effort as hot-headed Action, especially considering difficult choreography is not really her thing. BABY TONAMI, fresh 103rd Yumeshiro Aya as Anybodys, went above and beyond ken-1 (I still think roles of pure spunk are the easiest to slay, but impressive nonetheless).

And our notable Sharks, working up to my Main Event: if you count lines said with your EYES, Sao might have had the biggest role in the whole show, along with absolutely perfect disgusting Grease hair (one stray lock on her forehead). She also made me cry at the end when she’s the only Shark to help carry Tony’s body. She outshone Riku (Chino) a bit, but much like Madoka, Riku also turned it up for the last scene, even with completely wordless acting.

Dark, sleazy, terrifying, devastatingly handsome Kiki. Her Bernardo made the show (objectively... I KNOW I HAVEN’T GOTTEN TO *HER* YET). Every face and every mannerism was calculated and perfect. Wiping her hand on her pants every time she had to touch a Jet... somehow manufacturing absolutely electrifying chemistry with Soragumi’s giggliest loser idiot otokoyaku as her lady partner despite being BRAND NEW; the way she like inhaled Sora, and put firm hands on her with her fingers spread wide, and grabbed big deep handfuls of her skirt... Maybe all of Sora’s reactions were just straight up real. Favorite moments: their proper kiss; when they hook up in the Mambo scene and Sora slides her hand inside Kiki’s jacket to touch more of her actual back; Kiki being macho and gross and yelling at Sora to come here and Sora repeatedly replying hell no you come HERE until Kiki gives up (also notable: their perfect height difference, despite Sora in heels and Kiki in flats).

And SoraAnita, who put my sorry ass in this freezing Airbnb writing up this devastating show at 4 in the goddamn morning, who was so so so so good. It’s hard to look past the tight-top floof-bottom dresses and the adorable heeled sandals and the legs and the scene where she’s primping cross-legged in a chair wearing sheer thigh highs with garters and black lingerie that doesn’t even cover her butt which I don’t *at all* remember being in the movie... BUT, she was just so good. She made no attempt to change her voice (even though I’m pretty sure she could have) and it worked; I’m sure she spent much of rehearsal a mess but she was a fiery hot match for Kiki; she nailed all the feminine mannerisms and the bits of otokoyaku left over weren’t awkward but perfect Anita sass; the way she worked that tulle-laden skirt, her DANCING in Mambo and America; the way she big sister’d Madoka; and her final scene where the Jets assault her in the drug store, when she made me fully cry. I would hate myself forever and ever and ever if I hadn’t seen this.

::Sigh:: It’s only a week but I kinda wish this had been my grand finale.

#takarazuka #reviews #west side story #ill conceived terror trip

60 notes · View notes

marrincostello · 5 years ago

Text

White silence on social media: Why not saying anything is actually saying a lot - CBS News

African-Americans across the country have taken to the streets and to their social media feeds to plead through protest that "black lives matter" and "enough is enough." But amidst all the noise and all the hashtags, many African-Americans say there is nothing quite as deafening as "white silence."

Because for all the people who have flooded social media with George Floyd's name, Ahmaud Arbery's image and countless heartbreaking personal anecdotes of racism in action, there are just as many – and possibly even more – who have borne witness to the pain in black communities and chosen to say nothing.

"It's incredibly hurtful," said Broadway star Jelani Alladin. "And you're telling me that you have no hesitation posting a selfie of yourself... or what you're eating for dinner, and yet you're telling me that you're afraid to say something because you might hurt other people's feelings? Or you don't know what to say? Or you don't have an audience to reach? Were you thinking those things when you posted the other photos? I don't think you were."

Social media silence is nuanced. There are people whose feeds have simply gone dark. There are people who, as Alladin notes, have continued posting selfies and pictures of their food as if nothing is wrong. And, as fitness influencer Trammell Logan tells CBS News, it can even be hurtful when white people post messages about #blacklivesmatter side-by-side with more frivolous content.

"In your natural state of being distraught or sadness, if something extremely personal happens to you, I can't see how you can be in that state and post about it or be about it and then five minutes later like post a cocktail mix, or like you dancing. Our emotions don't necessarily work like that," Logan said.

Catherine Moran Ayeni, an attorney in Texas, told CBS News that for her, worse than total silence is when people respond to a "black lives matter" post with the comment "all lives matter."

"It's a very painful kind of silence because it removes our voice," she said. "It doesn't allow us to express our very specific pain... No one would ever go to a breast cancer walk and criticize them for talking about breast cancer. You wouldn't walk up to someone who has experience as a breast cancer survivor or someone who's lost someone from breast cancer, and say, 'How dare you talk about breast cancer? Why not talk about colon cancer? How dare you exclude other cancers?'"

Rachel Lindsay, who famously broke barriers as the first black Bachelorette, said she is taking note of which white friends and public figures have gone silent. And she believes that, in the digital age, it is the duty of public figures to speak out.

"I'm not saying that you have to speak out and have this, you know, this whole spiel about black lives matter," she told CBS News. "I'm not even necessarily saying that I need you to post. But at the bare minimum, a friend would reach out to another friend. 'How are you doing during this time? I'll admit that I've been silent. I'll admit that I've ignored some of the issues that you face as a black person. But I want you to know that I'm your friend and I see you and I hear you.' I am paying attention to friends that aren't doing that."

Ayeni is the mother of a 10-month-old son and she says experiencing recent events through that lens has been viscerally painful.

"I look at my son and I see Tamir Rice. I look at my son and I see Trayvon Martin. I look at my son and I see countless etc etc etc etc boys who were out living, existing, who are treated as a threat... I can tell my child not to wear a hoodie all I want. I can put him in the best schools. I can ensure that he is respectful. And sometimes, it doesn't matter. And that's very difficult as a mother to swallow, to understand that I can't protect him under certain circumstances from people who don't consider us human..."

"And so, when I see people choosing, because they have the privilege to choose, to ignore our pain and our fear and the fact that it feels like half the time we are screaming into a void, and that people are not listening because it makes them uncomfortable," she added. "When I see that, I want to show them a picture of my happy child and say George Floyd was that child. Tamir Rice was that child. Breonna Taylor was that child. That is someone's child. And so the very least you can do is acknowledge the pain. The very least you can do is hear us."

The phenomenon of white silence has existed for centuries – long before social media – but the rise of Facebook, Twitter and Instagram has only served to make its presence more palpable.

"White silence is incredibly powerful," said Savala Trepczynski, executive director of the Thelton E. Henderson Center for Social Justice at UC Berkeley. "It's not neutral. It acts like a weapon. It's not even silent. It speaks volumes, right? And the people of color who are around a silent white person, they hear the silence. And they feel it. And they feel what it means, which is: I don't have your back. Or I don't care enough to get uncomfortable to speak out. Or you know, despite the fact that black and brown people have been acting up and protesting on our own behalf for centuries, I still don't quite get it enough to say something."

Many in both the white and black communities agree that what drives the silence is fear.

"What drives the silence is the term that Robin DiAngelo coined, which is 'white fragility,'" said Michelle Saahene, who runs an organization called "From Privilege to Progress," which is focused on desegregating the conversation around race.

"And that's being scared of what your followers are going to say. That's being scared of you maybe saying the wrong thing and hurting the black and brown community. I know personally that I've had friends that didn't want to post on social media because they're scared of what some racist people will say. And to say that means you are more worried about what racist people are saying than about doing the right thing.... That is a form of complicity."

Ayeni said fear is natural, especially for white people who are surrounded by friends and family members who might not necessarily agree. The first step is "acknowledging that you don't know."

"Acknowledge that you don't know what to say," she explained. "Acknowledge that you have questions and that you're seeing people in pain. The worst thing that you can do is ignore the pain because you're perpetuating it at that point. When you see someone on fire and you look the other way because it makes you uncomfortable, you are complicit in that person being on fire and that fire spreading."

What's more, Saahene points out that most Americans' social media feeds are not integrated, which means that the stories the black community is posting will not necessarily reach white audiences until white people start posting about them too. She was the woman behind the viral video of two black men being arrested in a Philadelphia Starbucks in 2018. That video, she says, went viral after a white woman – now her business partner – shared it.

"The reason the Starbucks video went viral was because a white woman had shared it, and her social media was very white. She didn't have that many friends of color. So, all these white people were seeing this video of racial discrimination that they normally wouldn't otherwise see... So many people that live segregated lives, but still go to Starbucks, started saying, 'I can't believe this is actually going on. I can't believe this is happening.' And people of color were asking, 'Where have you been? You know, it's in our timelines every single day.'"

Now, more than ever, black and brown communities are urging white social media users to take action and do it publicly.

"I would say find the action that fuels you," Alladin told CBS News. "If that means, there's a protest today at 3 o'clock. I'm going. In Times Square. If that means getting up and protesting. If that means donating. If that means speaking in your own words on your Instagram, your Twitter, your Facebook, your outlet, your ways of mass communication, then do it. Stop hesitating. Stop thinking that you'll get it wrong. There is no getting it wrong. There's just doing it."

This content was originally published here.

0 notes

daviddshiki · 5 years ago

Text

The Adventures of David Dashiki-African American Hero- To Inspire Young Black Men to ACHIEVE as Their Fore-Fathers Did

David Dashiki- Hero

You recall during the last entries, I spoke of an admonition from my dad, “ There are some people in this life that will need to have their ass whupped for sure”” It was just a warning. I never suspected that it would occur so soon after those words were spoken. The crew and Ihad falsified records to attend a better high school. We had left the ‘hood’ and were excited about the challenges of the new scholastic environment. However, there was one student in that school who would not accept us...CONRAD CONSERVATIVE. He suspected his new classmates were not legitimate members of the community. Well, Damn! What a bright fellow! All the other students were white and the crew was all of color. The school itself refused to investigate or pursue the issue. It wanted no part of a lawsuit charging it with prejudice or racism. However, this chosen champion of the neighborhood decided to take up the mantel for residency and would not release it. In particular, he singled me out.I appeared to be the leader of the group. He assaulted me daily with words and insults which I, skillfully, ignored. I remembered the words of his father. “Do not disgrace this family. My friend has granted us this privilege I don’t wish any trouble to come to him as he has done this as a favor to me.”

On this particular day, Conrad persisted. He started the lunch period by calling out my name in the cafeteria. I remained silent. Conrad walked across the cafeteria headed in my direction. When he was upon almost, Conrad screamed, “ N---- ! Don’t you hear me calling you? He raised his fist . When Anita saw the closed fist poised above my head , she dashed toward him, slipped , fell and slid on the floor. The students broke out into laughter and she started to cry. In that instant. Conrad thought he would take advantage of the situation and swung that fist at my handsome visage. All hell broke loose. I forgot Dad’s warning. I grabbed a tray and used the sharp edge to block the blow.Now I’m going to really Fou798iuui him up and end this persecution. Conrad squealed like a pig when tray sharp edge and hand collided. He grabbed his hand and looked at the bleeding knuckles. I could only think about his honey sprawled out on the dirty cafe floor with the entire school laughing and mocking her. She had made the supreme sacrifice to save me. Conrad would pay fully for her disgrace. I kicked him in the testicles. A second baby animal cry rushed from his mouth. He fell onto the table headfirst. I proceeded to make his head a table ornament. Anita staggered to her feet to halt the one sided combat. I would not stop. I was doing it all for her. The laughter abruptly stopped. Finally the crew separated me from what was left of Conrad. It seemed to end as quickly as it started.When the administration arrived everything was in perfect order. David and the crew were seated calmly in the far corner of the cafe. . All that was heard was the buzz of conversation. The only thing that was absent was Conrad. No one would confess as to what measures were taken to remove him from the premises, but he was AWOL. The principal was so angry steam was escaping from his ears. He demanded that the school be put on a state of LOCK DOWN until someone would explain what had happened in the cafeteria. The silence was deafening. However.....It was never broken even until to this day.’LOCK DOWN ???” I matriculated into a school miles from my home to now be put on ‘LOCK DOWN. I had never been on ‘LOCK DOWN. I never attended a school in which there were mass shootings or killings. I never had to use my cell phone to tell my parents to pick me up because some lunatic decided it was the right thing to do by bringing arms to school and using them to settle some grievance he had with his classmates or the school administration. I couldn’t get the thought out of my mind that I abandoned what was labeled a ‘ghetto’ school for a school that was now under ‘LOCK DOWN’ . I suspected what was to come next was even more distasteful and severe. In fact, I’m predicting it now

0 notes

liacchin · 6 years ago

Link

So, there is this thing: a group of Americans had invaded and are illegally squatting the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington D.C. for about nearly a month right now, forbidding the actual embassy employees to get inside and take over their rightful workplace. Normally the people in this blue hell would be pósting against this shit and pointing it out as the imperialist act it really is, but because the squatters are from Code Pink, a left-oriented protest group, and their reason to be there is, paraphrasing “To defend the Venezuelan sovereignty and Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro against the imperialistic homophobic white supremacist Juan Guaido”, their acts are okay to ignore or something.

But the more I dug, the more of a history these people of Code Pink seems to have. They turn out to be the kind of “Agent Provocateur” Chavismo loves to pay handsomely, no unlike famous gringo dumbasses Eva Gollinger and George Ciccariello-Maher who after the Chaverment stop paying their potty mouths to defend their idiocy on CNN et al. have become irrelevant and known only for their cringy shittiness on Twitter. Code Pink is on the same vein, a group of people that maybe had a good intention or three back when they began but today are just sad, pitiful clowns futilely trying to keep themselves relevant or profitable, and they are so transparent that other people in the left side, like this Medium articulist, are pointing out on their hypocrisy.

Because, really, a group of people whiter than snow, that doesn’t have a single Venezuelan in their ranks, are calling “White supremacist” and “Homophobe!” on a guy that looks painfully mestizo and that has a history of denouncing the actual homophobic language of the Chaverment. They are a bunch of actually priviliged morons who screams insults and have even attacked Venezuelan citizens living in the States because they are unable to belive there are actual venezuelan in the states not praising El Galactico and El Busetero and their Wonderful Robolution™. They are either very deluded or very well paid by Maduro, Cabello and Co. to be there and inconvenience the legitimate new ambassador and the exiled Venezuelans in the USA.

The whole thing is gold, but i have to put some choice quotes:

Two weeks ago, peace activists from Code Pink occupied the deserted Venezuelan embassy in Washington D.C. These self-proclaimed “colectivos for peace” decided to show their support for embattled president Nicolas Maduro by locking themselves in said embassy, apparently to prevent the government of the “usurper” Juan Guiadó[sic] from taking control of the offices abandoned by Maduro’s government.

Let’s [...] focus instead on the utterly unflattering optics they created for themselves.

For one, the term “colectivo” raises red flags for anyone who has actually lived in, or reported from, Venezuela. The Colectivos of Venezuela have a terrifying reputation. They regularly employ violence both to disperse opposition protests and visit retribution on dissidents and journalists alike.

They have also been repeatedly documented participating in extortion, smuggling, profiting from human trafficking and even extrajudicial killings.

But the terrible name was just the beginning.

[...]

I am in no way trying to understate the devastating impact of Colonialism on South America, nor denying at all that racism exists here. It most certainly does. But when your organization is is almost entirely white, and you are lecturing to people of color about race, sometimes it's best to consider how your message will be interpreted.

Even Amy Goodman of Democracy Now, a journalist famously critical of US motives in Venezuela, pointedly asked the occupiers “Are there any Venezuelans here?” during an interview.

She was answered with deafening silence. It was not a good look for Code Pink.

[...]

[...] I do think that this utterly bizarre and annoyingly self-congratulatory Code Pink protest illustrates a good point when it comes to Venezuela- most Americans are unable to view the issue through anything other than a lense of partisan politics. They see someone that Trump criticizes, and so they assume Maduro must be good. “Because Trump is an idiot who must be resisted, we must defend Maduro of Venezuela!” they say. But it can be simultaneously true that Trump is an idiot, and also that Maduro is a murderous thief.

I should mention at this point that I am vehemently against a US military intervention in Venezuela. Dozens of military experts have expressed horror at the idea. And as I have written before, I am no Trump supporter,

But I can tell you from first-hand experience after six months here on the border that the worst of the stories simply don’t make it out of Venezuela. According to Reporters without Borders, Venezuela has the second worst press freedom rating in the western hemisphere, behind Cuba. And repression against both opposition protestors and journalists has only increased in recent months.

[...]

I used to really admire Code Pink. As an Iraqi war protester during the Bush administration I remember well their rise. It seemed brave at the time. Anti-war protestors from that period were unpopular, uncommon and largely ignored. The White House occupation organized by Code Pink during that period seemed noble.

But since then, they seem to have devolved into attention seekers more than relevant activists. Their messages seem tone-deaf and their antics melodramatic.

Multiple former employees claim publicly that nowadays they seem more interested in fundraising than in productive strategies. They seem to always be against something, never for anything. Well except for selfies, they are definitely for selfies.

They have alienated many allies on the left as well through their selfie-inspired and pointless disruptions. It often seems to come down to “Hey look at me! I’m a freedom fighter!”.

I always want to tell them “Please sit down. The story isn’t about you, as much as you want it to be. Help the rest of us actually do something about it instead of trying to create free publicity for your organization.”

#venezuela #current events #current news

0 notes

samanthasroberts · 7 years ago

Text

Dangerous idiots: how the liberal media elite failed working-class Americans

Trump supporters are not the caricatures journalists depict and native Kansan Sarah Smarsh sets out to correct what newsrooms get wrong

Last March, my 71-year-old grandmother, Betty, waited in line for three hours to caucus for Bernie Sanders. The wait to be able to cast her first-ever vote in a primary election was punishing, but nothing could have deterred her. Betty a white woman who left school after ninth grade, had her first child at age 16 and spent much of her life in severe poverty wanted to vote.

So she waited with busted knees that once stood on factory lines. She waited with smoking-induced emphysema and the false teeth shes had since her late 20s both markers of our class. She waited with a womb that in the 1960s, before Roe v Wade, she paid a stranger to thrust a wire hanger inside after she discovered she was pregnant by a man shed fled after he broke her jaw.

Betty worked for many years as a probation officer for the state judicial system in Wichita, Kansas, keeping tabs on men who had murdered and raped. As a result, its hard to faze her, but she has pronounced Republican candidate Donald Trump a sociopath whose mouth overloads his ass.

No one loathes Trump who suggested women should be punished for having abortions, who said hateful things about groups of people she has loved and worked alongside since childhood, whose pomp and indecency offends her modest, midwestern sensibility more than she.

Yet, it is white working-class people like Betty who have become a particular fixation among the chattering class during this election: what is this angry beast, and why does it support Trump?

Not so poor: Trump voters are middle class

Hard numbers complicate, if not roundly dismiss, the oft-regurgitated theory that income or education levels predict Trump support, or that working-class whites support him disproportionately. Last month, results of 87,000 interviews conducted by Gallup showed that those who liked Trump were under no more economic distress or immigration-related anxiety than those who opposed him.

According to the study, his supporters didnt have lower incomes or higher unemployment levels than other Americans. Income data misses a lot; those with healthy earnings might also have negative wealth or downward mobility. But respondents overall werent clinging to jobs perceived to be endangered. Surprisingly, a Gallup researcher wrote, there appears to be no link whatsoever between exposure to trade competition and support for nationalist policies in America, as embodied by the Trump campaign.

Earlier this year, primary exit polls revealed that Trump voters were, in fact, more affluent than most Americans, with a median household income of $72,000 higher than that of Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders supporters. Forty-four percent of them had college degrees, well above the national average of 33% among whites or 29% overall. In January, political scientist Matthew MacWilliams reported findings that a penchant for authoritarianism not income, education, gender, age or race predicted Trump support.

These facts havent stopped pundits and journalists from pushing story after story about the white working classs giddy embrace of a bloviating demagogue.

In seeking to explain Trumps appeal, proportionate media coverage would require more stories about the racism and misogyny among white Trump supporters in tony suburbs. Or, if were examining economically driven bitterness among the working class, stories about the Democratic lawmakers who in recent decades ended welfare as we knew it, hopped in the sack with Wall Street and forgot American labor in their global trade agreements.

But, for national media outlets comprised largely of middle- and upper-class liberals, that would mean looking their own class in the face.

The faces journalists do train the cameras on hateful ones screaming sexist vitriol next to Confederate flags must receive coverage but do not speak for the communities I know well. That the media industry ignored my home for so long left a vacuum of understanding in which the first glimpse of an economically downtrodden white is presumed to represent the whole.

Part of the current glimpse is JD Vance, author of the bestselling new memoir Hillbilly Elegy. A successful attorney who had a precariously middle-class upbringing in an Ohio steel town, Vance wrote of the chaos that can haunt a family with generational memory of deep poverty. A conservative who says he wont vote for Trump, Vance speculates about why working-class whites will: cultural anxiety that arises when opioid overdose kills your friends and the political establishment has proven it will throw you under the bus. While his theories may hold up in some corners, in interviews coastal media members have repeatedly asked Vance to speak for the entire white working class.

His interviewers and reviewers often seem relieved to find someone with ownership on the topic whose ideas in large part confirm their own. The New York Times election podcast The Run-Up said Vances memoir doubles as a cultural anthropology of the white underclass that has flocked to the Republican presidential nominees candidacy. (The Times teased its review of the book with the tweet: Want to know more about the people who fueled the rise of Donald Trump?)

While Vance happens to have roots in Kentucky mining country, most downtrodden whites are not conservative male Protestants from Appalachia. That sometimes seems the only concept of them that the American consciousness can contain: tucked away in a remote mountain shanty like a coal-dust-covered ghost, as though white poverty isnt always right in front of us, swiping our credit cards at a Target in Denver or asking for cash on a Los Angeles sidewalk.

One-dimensional stereotypes fester where journalism fails to tread. The last time I saw my native class receive substantial focus, before now, was over 20 years ago not in the news but on the television show Roseanne, the fictional storylines of which remain more accurate than the musings of comfortable commentators in New York studios.

Countless images of working-class progressives, including women such as Betty, are thus rendered invisible by a ratings-fixated media that covers elections as horse races and seeks sensational b-roll.

This media paradigm created the tale of a divided America red v blue in which the 42% of Kansans who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 are meaningless.

This year, more Kansans caucused for Bernie Sanders than for Donald Trump a newsworthy point I never saw noted in national press, who perhaps couldnt fathom that flyover country might contain millions of Americans more progressive than their Clinton strongholds.

In lieu of such coverage, media makers cast the white working class as a monolith and imply an old, treacherous story convenient to capitalism: that the poor are dangerous idiots.

Poor whiteness and poor character

The two-fold myth about the white working class that they are to blame for Trumps rise, and that those among them who support him for the worst reasons exemplify the rest takes flight on the wings of moral superiority affluent Americans often pin upon themselves.

I have never seen them flap so insistently as in todays election commentary, where notions of poor whiteness and poor character are routinely conflated.

In an election piece last March in the National Review, writer Kevin Williamsons assessment of poor white voters among whom mortality rates have sharply risen in recent decades expressed what many conservatives and liberals alike may well believe when he observed that communities ravaged by oxycodone use deserve to die.

The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles, Williamson wrote. Donald Trumps speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.

For confirmation that this point is lost on most reporters, not just conservative provocateurs, look no further than a recent Washington Post series that explored spiking death rates among rural white women by fixating on their smoking habits and graphically detailing the haggard face and embalming processes of their corpses. Imagine wealthy white woman examined thusly after their deaths. The outrage among family and friends with the education, time, and agency to write letters to the editor would have been deafening.

A sentiment that I care for even less than contempt or degradation is their tender cousin: pity.

In a recent op-ed headlined Dignity and Sadness in the Working Class, David Brooks told of a laid-off Kentucky metal worker he met. On his last day, the man left to rows of cheering coworkers a moment I read as triumphant, but that Brooks declared pitiable. How hard the man worked for so little, how great his skills and how dwindling their value, Brooks pointed out, for people he said radiate the residual sadness of the lonely heart.

Im hard-pressed to think of a worse slight than the media figures who have disregarded the embattled white working class for decades now beseeching the country to have sympathy for them. We dont need their analysis, and we sure dont need their tears. What we need is to have our stories told, preferably by someone who can walk into a factory without his own guilt fogging his glasses.

One such journalist, Alexander Zaitchik, spent several months on the road in six states getting to know white working-class people who do support Trump. His goal for the resulting new book, The Gilded Rage, was to convey the human complexity that daily news misses. Zaitchik wrote that his mission arose from frustration with hot takes written by people living several time zones and income brackets away from their subjects.

Zaitchik wisely described those he met as a blue-collar middle class mostly white people who have worked hard and lost a lot, whether in the market crash of 2008 or the manufacturing layoffs of recent decades. He found that their motivations overwhelmingly started with economics and ended with economics. The anger he observed was pointed up, not down at those who forgot them when global trade deals were negotiated, not at minority groups.

Meanwhile, the racism and nationalism that surely exist among them also exist among Democrats and higher socioeconomic strata. A poll conducted last spring by Reuters found that a third of questioned Democrats supported a temporary ban on Muslims entering the United States. In another, by YouGov, 45% of polled Democrats reported holding an unfavorable view of Islam, with almost no fluctuation based on household income. Those who wont vote for Trump are not necessarily paragons of virtue, while the rest are easily scapegoated as the countrys moral scourge.

When Hillary Clinton recently declared half of Trump supporters a basket of deplorables, Zaitchik told another reporter, the language could be read as another way of saying white-trash bin. Clinton quickly apologized for the comment, the context of which contained compassion for many Trump voters. But making such generalizations at a $6m fundraiser in downtown New York City, at which some attendees paid $50,000 for a seat, recalled for me scenes from the television political satire Veep in which powerful Washington figures discuss normals with distaste behind closed doors.

The DeBruce Grain elevator. Federal safety inspectors had not visited it for 16 years when an explosion ripped through the half-mile long structure, killing seven workers. Photograph: Cliff Schiappa/AP

When we talked, Zaitchik mentioned HBO talk-show host Bill Maher, who he pointed out basically makes eugenics-level arguments about anyone who votes for Donald Trump having congenital defects. You would never get away with talking that way about any other group of people and still have a TV show.

Maher is, perhaps, the pinnacle of classist smugness. In the summer of 1998, when I was 17 and just out of high school, I worked at a grain elevator during the wheat harvest. An elevator 50 miles east in Haysville, Kansas, exploded (grain dust is highly combustible), killing seven workers. The accident rattled my community and reminded us about the physical dangers my family and I often faced as farmers.

I kept going to work like everyone else and, after a long day weighing wheat trucks and hauling heavy sacks of feed in and out of the mill, liked to watch Politically Incorrect, the ABC show Maher hosted then. With the search for one of the killed workers bodies still under way, Maher joked, as I recall, that the people should check their loaves of Wonder Bread.

That moment was perhaps my first reckoning with the hard truth that, throughout my life, I would politically identify with the same people who often insult the place I am from.

Such derision is so pervasive that its often imperceptible to the economically privileged. Those who write, discuss, and publish newspapers, books, and magazines with best intentions sometimes offend with obliviousness.

Many people recommended to me the bestselling new history book White Trash, for instance, without registering that its title is a slur that refers to me and the people I love as garbage. My happy relief that someone set out to tell this ignored thread of our shared past was squashed by my wincing every time I saw it on my shelf, so much so that I finally took the book jacket off. Incredibly, promotional copy for the book commits precisely the elitist shaming Isenberg is out to expose: (the book) takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing if occasionally entertaining poor white trash.

The book itself is more sensitively wrought and imparts facts that one hopes would dismantle popular use of its titular term. But even Isenberg cant escape our classist frameworks.

When On the Media host Brooke Gladstone asked Isenberg, earlier this year, to address long-held perceptions of poor whites as bigots, the author described a conundrum:They do subscribe to certain views that are undoubtedly racist, and you cant mask it and pretend that its not there. It is very much a part of their thinking.

Entertain a parallel broad statement about any other disenfranchised group, and you might begin to see how rudimentary class discussion is for this relatively young country that long believed itself to be free of castes. Isenberg has sniffed out the hypocrisy in play, though.

The other problem is when people want to blame poor whites for being the only racist in the room, she told Gladstone. as if theyre more racist than everyone else.

That problem is rooted in the notion that higher class means higher integrity. As journalist Lorraine Berry wrote last month, The story remains that only the ignorant would be racist. Racism disappears with education were told. As the first from my family to hold degrees, I assure you that none of us had to go to college to learn basic human decency.

Berry points out that Ivy-League-minted Republicans shepherded the rise of the alt-right. Indeed, it was not poor whites not even white Republicans who passed legislation bent on preserving segregation, or who watched the Confederate flag raised outside state capitols for decades to come.

It wasnt poor whites who criminalized blackness by way of marijuana laws and the war on drugs.

Nor was it poor whites who conjured the specter of the black welfare queen.

These points should not minimize the horrors of racism at the lowest economic rungs of society, but remind us that those horrors reside at the top in different forms and with more terrible power.

Among reporters and commentators this election cycle, then, a steady finger ought be pointed at whites with economic leverage: social conservatives who donate to Trumps campaign while being too civilized to attend a political rally and yell what they really believe.

Mainstream media is set up to fail the ordinary American

Based on Trumps campaign rhetoric and available data, it appears that most of his voters this November will be people who are getting by well enough but who think of themselves as victims.

One thing the media misses is that a great portion of the white working class would align with any sense before victimhood. Right now they are clocking in and out of work, sorting their grocery coupons, raising their children to respect others, and avoiding political news coverage.

Barack Obama, a black man formed by the black experience, often cites his maternal lineage in the white working class. A lot of whats shaped me came from my grandparents who grew up on the prairie in Kansas, he wrote this month to mark a White House forum on rural issues.

Last year, talking with author Marilynne Robinson for the New York Review of Books, Obama lamented common misconceptions of small-town middle America, for which he has a sort of reverence. Theres this huge gap between how folks go about their daily lives and how we talk about our common life and our political life, he said, naming one cause as the filters that stand between ordinary people who are busy getting by and complicated policy debates.

Im very encouraged when I meet people in their environments, Obama told Robinson. Somehow it gets distilled at the national political level in ways that arent always as encouraging.

To be sure, one discouraging distillation the caricature of the hate-spewing white male Trump voter with grease on his jeans is a real person of sorts. There were one or two in my town: the good ol boy who menaces those with less power than himself running people of color out of town with the threat of violence, denigrating women, shooting BB guns at stray cats for fun. They are who Trump would be if hed been born where I was.

Media fascination with the hateful white Trump voter fuels the theory, now in fashion, that bigotry is the only explanation for supporting him. Certainly, financial struggle does not predict a soft spot for Trump, as cash-strapped people of color who face the threat of his racism and xenophobia, and who resoundingly reject him, by all available measures can attest. However, one imagines that elite white liberals who maintain an air of ethical grandness this election season would have a harder time thinking globally about trade and immigration if it were their factory job that was lost and their community that was decimated.

Affluent analysts who oppose Trump, though, have a way of taking a systemic view when examining social woes but viewing their place on the political continuum as a triumph of individual character. Most of them presumably inherited their political bent, just like most of those in red America did. If you were handed liberalism, give yourself no pats on the back for your vote against Trump.

Spare, too, the condescending argument that disaffected Democrats who joined Republican ranks in recent decades are voting against their own best interests, undemocratic in its implication that a large swath of America isnt mentally fit to cast a ballot.

Whoever remains on Trumps side as stories concerning his treatment of women, racism and other dangers continue to unfurl gets no pass from me for any reason. They are capable of voting, and they own their decisions. Lets be aware of our class biases, though, as we discern who they are.

Journalist? Then the chances are youre not blue collar

A recent print-edition New York Times cutline described a Kentucky man:

Mitch Hedges, who farms cattle and welds coal-mining equipment. He expects to lose his job in six months, but does not support Mr Trump, who he says is an idiot.

This made me cheer for the rare spotlight on a member of the white working class who doesnt support Trump. It also made me laugh one cant farm cattle. One farms crops, and one raises livestock. Its sometimes hard for a journalist who has done both to take the New York Times seriously.

The main reason that national media outlets have a blind spot in matters of class is the lack of socioeconomic diversity within their ranks. Few people born to deprivation end up working in newsrooms or publishing books. So few, in fact, that this former laborer has found cause to shift her entire writing career to talk specifically about class in a wealth-privileged industry, much as journalists of color find themselves talking about race in a whiteness-privileged one.

This isnt to say that one must reside among a given group or place to do it justice, of course, as good muckrakers and commentators have shown for the past century and beyond. See On the Medias fine new series on poverty, the second episode of which includes Gladstones reflection that the poor are no more monolithic than the rest of us.

I know journalists to be hard-working people who want to get the story right, and Im resistant to rote condemnations of the media. The classism of cable-news hosts merely reflects the classism of privileged America in general. Its everywhere, from tweets describing Trump voters as inbred hillbillies to a Democratic campaign platform that didnt bother with a specific anti-poverty platform until a month out from the general election.

The economic trench between reporter and reported on has never been more hazardous than at this moment of historic wealth disparity, though, when stories focus more often on the stock market than on people who own no stocks. American journalism has been willfully obtuse about the grievances on Main Streets for decades surely a factor in digging the hole of resentment that Trumps venom now fills. That the term populism has become a pejorative among prominent liberal commentators should give us great pause. A journalism that embodies the plutocracy its supposed to critique has failed its watchdog duty and lost the respect of people who call bullshit when they see it.

One such person was my late grandfather, Arnie. Men like Trump sometimes drove expensive vehicles up the gravel driveway of our Kansas farmhouse looking to do some sort of business. Grandpa would recognize them as liars and thieves, treat them kindly, and send them packing. If you shook their hands, after they left Grandpa would laugh and say, Better count your fingers.

In a world in which the Bettys and Arnies of the world have little voice, those who enjoy a platform from which to speak might examine their hearts and minds before stepping onto the soap box.

If you would stereotype a group of people by presuming to guess their politics or deeming them inferior to yourself say, the ones who worked third shift on a Boeing floor while others flew to Mexico during spring break; the ones who mopped a McDonalds bathroom while others argued about the minimum wage on Twitter; the ones who cleaned out their lockers at a defunct Pabst factory while others drank craft beer at trendy bars; the ones who came back from the Middle East in caskets while others wrote op-eds about foreign policy then consider that you might have more in common with Trump than you would like to admit.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/dangerous-idiots-how-the-liberal-media-elite-failed-working-class-americans/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2018/01/05/dangerous-idiots-how-the-liberal-media-elite-failed-working-class-americans/

0 notes

sincerelymrnaked · 7 years ago

Text

Danger Room: Toronto’s most hostile comedy show for hecklers

“GET OFF THE STAGE MAN BOOBS!”

“DON’T EAT THE MIC YOU FAT FUCK!”

“GET DOWN BEFORE ONE OF YOUR BUTTONS HITS SOMEONE IN THE EYE!”

“SAY A JOKE YOU SAGGING ASSHOLE!”

We walk into the bar known as The Corner Comedy Club, a grimy comedy club with a fitting slogan: “It’s so small it’s funny,” on the corner of John Street in Downtown Toronto. A fat comedian in a red plaid shirt and ripped jeans is sitting on a stool on the stage with a mic in a sweaty hand, getting chewed alive by a crowd of the most ruthless hecklers I’ve ever witnessed.

“YOU’RE AS COMICAL AS YOU ARE SKINNY!”

“Yeah, that’s what your mom said when I was sitting on her face last night!” Fat Comedian calls.

“BOOOOOO!”

“GOOD MOM JOKE YOU FUCKING AMATURE!”

“I PAID TEN BUCKS FOR THIS SHIT!”

The poor guy can’t get two sentences in without being ripped to shreds. Chirps fly through the bar like rapid gunfire, the heavy-duty artillery leaving the brave comedian wounded and humiliated on the grimy stage. He’s struggling to stay upright, pushing weak incest and dead baby jokes, desperate for the slightest trace of laughter that he’s actually responsible for, trying to make a joke and not be the joke. He has no such luck.

But this wasn’t your usual comedy night. This was Danger Room — a night were most comedians don’t last more than one minute before the shark tank of hecklers swallow them whole.

And one of my best friends was soon to perform.

Let’s back up to six hours prior.

I was at the gym near the free-weights when I bumped into one of my old buddies from High School. He’s a writer too and whenever we see each other we often dive into discussions about the pressure to engage readers. He told me he’s been writing a new short story every day, but that he’s also been doing some stand-up comedy to test material in front of a live crowd.

“Really? Stand up?”

“Yeah man. There’s this open mic place I go on Sunday nights on Danforth and Broadview.”

“How’s the crowd?”

“Depends on the night. Sometimes there’s silence, but it’s a good crowd to go to for your first time. Everyone’s pretty open and positive.”

“I’ve got a friend who I’ve been wanting to get on stage for a while. He’s a born comedian! I would love to get him on.”

“You guys should definitely come by!”

My friend Phil is the funniest guy I know. Not only can he spit out any accent with cunning precision, he can also spiral into rants of improvised comedy as if he wrote the stuff down and rehearsed it for weeks. He can play any role. Become any character. He’s quick. Spontaneous. And damn right hysterical. But here’s the problem: he’s nervous about getting up on stage.

Here’s why.

Phil and I are fraternity brothers, and a couple years ago I convinced him to do some stand up for a sorority’s philanthropy event. I had helped him prepare his set, making sure to throw in some of his signature stuff. His Frat Bro PC character he not-so-loosely based off of South Park was one of his best rants, and we decided it would be fitting for a Greek life gathering.

But were we ever wrong.

The audience of sorority sisters, children, parents, and distinguished philanthropists were not prepared for a set screaming about how “PC DOESN’T STAND FOR PUSSY CRUSHING!”

Though his material was comedic gold to my buddies and I, it wasn’t the right time or place, and it left a sea of mothers and daughters staring at him with lowered jaws and wide eyes — all in deafening silence.

Phil’s been rightfully nervous to get back up on stage ever since. I figured tonight would be the perfect opportunity to get him back on that horse.

I shot him a quick message: “We’re going out tonight.”

After meeting up with Phil and some buddies for a quick pre-game, we all hit the road in my buddy’s soccer mom van and drove twenty-five minutes to Danforth and Broadview. This was the night of Thanksgiving Sunday and most of us had dinners with our families that delayed our departure time, so we were running a little late. Actually we were running very late. By the time we arrived at the bar, the show was over and everyone was gone.

Giving up, we considered the alternatives of going to another bar, racking in some shots, and maybe getting Phil a mic anyway. But then my buddy Bernie came up with a final idea.

“There’s another comedy club not too far,” says Bernie, scrolling through his phone. “It’s just on the corner of John Street. Ten-minute drive from here. Some show called ‘Danger Room.’”

“Is it open mic?” Phil asks.

“I think it’s for actual comedians. And I think there’s cover.”

We agree to check it out. Nothing else was happening anyway.

When we get to the bar, we ask the guy running the door — a bearded man in a leather jacket, sporting a red bandana around his head — if our buddy can get up on stage. “You done this before?” he asks Phil.

“This is my first time,” Phil replies, not counting the sorority event.

“First time? And you’re fucking stupid enough to come here!”

In that second, as if on cue, we hear from inside: “GET OFF THE STAGE MAN BOOBS!”

We shuffle through the crowd and find seats near the front of the tiny bar. The place reeks of beer and tobacco smothered clothing, with faint lighting illuminating a small wooden plank constituting a stage. Drunken chirps are firing from a group of guys scattered all around the grubby place; the poor comedian currently up is being publicly decimated. He struggles to squeeze in some of his prepared jokes until one of the drunkest hecklers literally rips him off the stage.

“YOU ARE FUCKING AWFUL!”

“PLEASE! NEVER COME BACK HERE!”

More comedians step on, and nobody does any better. The drunker the hecklers get, the more shameless they are with their heckling. This results in comedic desperation: comedians resort to new levels of vulgarity in hopes of cheaper laughs. Jokes about sex become jokes about overdosing on drugs, which becomes jokes about being fucked by dads, which spirals into jokes about being a child predator. The laughs never come. Well, besides the laughter deriving from shameless heckling. The cycle continues.

One guy is heckled so badly, he tries to avert the attention to the Muslim sitting in front of him, hoping to use pathetic racism to weasel out of the ambush. (Yup, a real stand-up piece of shit.) He’s proven weak and unfit, and this only amps-up the insults.

“YOU LOOK LIKE A GERMAN SKATEBOARDER THAT ALSO DJ’S!” one guy screams at a comedian in a bomber jacket with a big man-bun dangling from a backward cap.

“AND YOUR CAP LOOKS LIKE IT’S TAKING A SHIT OUT OF YOUR HEAD!” another heckler adds. (Not all of them were so clever.)

“I THOUGHT THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE COMEDY, NOT A SPECIAL-ED ASSEMBLY!”

Why would anybody stand up before such a merciless crowd? Simple. To battle the most vicious monster there is, and survive to tell the tale. Most of the guys who go up are actual comedians, who come to Danger Room to test their skills against the worst crowd you could possibly encounter. After a Danger Room attack, silence would feel like a compliment.

But even these guys were used to getting up on stage. Phil was up next.

He sits on the stool and raises the mic to his mouth.

“WHAT’S THIS PUSSY GOING TO DO? SING HIGHSCHOOL MUSICAL?”

“GET OFF THE STAGE PEDRO!”

“YOU LOOK LIKE YOU WATCH CHILD PORN AND JERK OFF IN PUBLIC SWIMMING POOLS!”

Despite these initial heckles, Phil starts off strong by faking weak. He begins with a quaky, loud and high-pitched voice, playing the character of someone terrified to perform — like a voice-cracking thirteen-year-old about to read the Torah for his Bar Mitzvah.

“H-high g-guys, my n-name is Ph-Phillip and I’m s-super n-nervous t-to perform t-tonight in front o-of all o-of y-y-you…”

Before the next heckle can fire, he jumps up, snaps into a booming southern accent — blaring with confidence and authority — and ascends into an incredible rant about the astonishing diversity of the crowd which he “ain’t used to in ma neighborhood back in Virginia!”

Everyone erupts into laughter.

A heckler screams a dumb Jew joke.

He switches from his southern accent to his Gay-Nazi-German-accent. “Vhat nobody veally knows is zhat vee vere all gay!”

His set is completely improvised. He rolls with the punches and starts introducing all his classic characters that were once confined to the frat house living room: Puerto Rican drug dealer, Australian pervert, Chinese businessman — those that were previously only available to the boys at the end of a drunk night with pizza boxes scattered on the floor. For the first time, Phil’s contagious humour is completely unleashed. And nobody could get enough of him.

When the heavy chirps start flying, unlike the other guys, he doesn’t revert to desperate comedy by raising the vulgarity or trying to deflect the cruelty towards people sitting in the crowd. He’s genuinely funny, and not desperate to make the crowd think so. He simply is.

And if you think I’m just being biased, even the drunkest hecklers gave him a big round of applause. It was the first and only applause of the night. None of the boys could believe it. But I’m gonna be a huge cheeseball and say I knew he had it in him all along.

As we walked out, the owner told Phil he could come back anytime. Two comedians gave him their business cards as they hacked darts outside the bar. People who were in the audience asked him where his next gig is. He was the newly-emerged celebrity of the night.

People often feel like they need to ease into challenges. They prefer slowly moving forward, gradual development, and keeping their dignity intact throughout the process. But sometimes your dignity has to be compromised. Sometimes you need to dive headfirst into the trenches of difficulty in order to come out stronger. Sometimes you need to go all in.

Failure has a way of holding people back — the silence of the sorority is something that may’ve stopped Phil from further performances, but the bravery to move on was the key that popped open the door to the night’s success.

Now, allow me to be sincerely-naked-honest for a second: There’s a lot of assholes in the world.

There’s a lot of people who are going to give you every reason possible to stay safely buckled to your seat. They’ll take pride in ripping you down, in laughing or shaming you for even trying. But that’s all part of the system of growth. When you make yourself vulnerable and try to pursue something scary, chances are you’re going to eat shit sometimes. And most times, people will shit on you.

It’s one of the biggest risks of starting a blog — hell, about writing in general. Not everyone is going to agree with the things you’re writing about, and a whole lot of people will make the effort to make their disagreements heard loud and clear. They’ll so much as bombard you with novella-long comments about how you don’t have the right to say the things you’re saying. They’ll send you hate emails. They’ll even straight up say that you don’t have what it takes and that you should just give up — the equivalence of a heckling reaction to a punchline.

When I was the opinion editor for my university paper, it was a hard pill to swallow: the acceptance that not everyone will like or agree with my stuff. But I eventually began to see flack as a necessary part of my development, similar to the way comedians who come to Danger Room see ruthless heckles. It’s part of the process, and the more accustomed you get to the horrors of people protesting against your stance, the taller you eventually stand.

In summary, there’s two ways of approaching assholes who love to shit on you like it’s their day job. 1) You could play victim and cry about being verbally assaulted, complain about feeling unsafe, or blame all lack of success on the pricks that walk the earth. 2) You could suck it up and use those same assholes to make you stronger.

We may bomb it. We may kill it. But until we try, we’re letting the hecklers win.

We all live in a Danger Room. So let’s use those pricks to our advantage.

Let’s raise our red solo cups (or cheap glasses of wine if you think you’re classy or something) to the assholes that make silence feel like a compliment — and who make our worst fears a fucking joke.

Sincerely, Mr. Naked.

#danger zone #comedy #SincerelyNaked

0 notes

restlessjourneyor-blog · 7 years ago

Text

Love Like Sorority Girls

During my college career I did a lot of mind blowing things, from research, to backpacking trips, and studying abroad. However, I must admit that one my the most eye opening things I experienced was sorority bid day. Now, I have never been the sorority type. Maybe because I don't have enough dresses or high heels, or because I am too sarcastic, suck at small talk, and occasionally smell like fish. Nevertheless, my close friend and college roommate decided to join a sorority and told me when her "bid day" was. I, clueless to what a bid day entailed, congratulated her and put it out of my mind. However, as I walked out of the science building that evening of bid day, I heard a noise that must have spread across the entire campus penetrating buildings and cars as they drove by. It was the chorus of hundreds of sorority girls screaming. On any other day I would have speedily walked in the other direction of such a sound but as I realized it was this bid day I had heard about, I instead walked towards the giant mass of chanting girls to see if I could find my roommate and show her some support. I stood around the outskirts, clad in a flannel, cargo shorts, and hiking sandals, like a beacon screaming “I don’t belong here!” amongst the brightly colored tank tops, Greek letter-covered, and face-painted sorority girls. The next hour I spent there is one I won't soon forget. In short, deafening screams and chants that drowned out the microphone, elaborate outfits and signs, and finally.....absolute pandemonium. I learned just from observation that "bid day" is when a new sorority member "comes home" meaning to her respective new sisterhood. These sorority newbies are released to their new sisters at a designated time, the end of bid day, and let me tell you it is quite the sight to see. Bid day is truly nothing short of a sporting event. It is a mix between track, football, dance, and some amount of acrobatics. Girls are flying through the air jumping into perfect strangers arms and hugging them as though they were actual siblings. Huge groups tackled new sisters, and then formed huge circles around them while taking hundreds of photographs while they "throw what they know" for the first time, with tears in their eyes. Pure pandemonium. Despite the chaos, I ended up finding my friend for a brief second to give her a hug and congratulations before she headed back into the sea of people as I continued to observe.

Side note: As a biologist, I wondered if we could harness the energy of sorority girls on bid day and use it as an alternative energy source...I would imagine it would be pretty powerful.

As I stood around the living mass of cheering sorority girls I kept revisiting the absurdity of this whole thing. All of these girls were soooo stoked to meet these new people (who for all intents and purposes were strangers) and to welcome them into their group, acting as though they had been there all along, and that they had known them forever. Following bid day, new sorority girls social media accounts were inundated with loving comments filled with adoration for their new sister (I think that this is super awesome). I was slightly perturbed at first, and for a while, about my perceived “fakeness” of it all. How could you pretend to love some random person so much just because you were in the same organization? It was baffling. And I continued to be baffled until a couple years later, when I had a thought....We should all love each other more like sorority girls.

Can you imagine a world where regardless of how well you know a person you express this outpouring of love and affection for them? Recognizing a common bond shared (in this case it's a college group, but on the world scale we all share the bond of being humans) and embracing it by loving the other people involved. Imagine that! Hugging strangers like old friends and being beyond excited to meet them, commenting kind things on random people's social media accounts, and so on. We could kiss racism and oppression goodbye as love would permeate the world like the sorority girls' screams did my eardrums on that bid day. What I find most fascinating is that as the years go on the sorority girls stay friends, and a lot of them get very close to each other. What started out as a random meeting of strangers joining an organization, turned into meaningful friendships. And it's all because they met each other and connected on one simple similarity; they joined a sorority. So simple. Being human connects us all on a much deeper level then a college organization. So maybe we could try loving each other like sorority girls love their new sisters on bid day: Rather blindly and definitely fully, and maybe with a little less screaming.

0 notes