Justice for All

For the past week or so, I feel like all I've been doing is arguing. It's exhausting, really. But I would definitely be more exhausted if I didn't argue because I wouldn't be able to sleep soundly at night knowing I didn't defend what I believe to be right.

But the thing that angers me more than any of the bigots, religious zealots, and just plain ignorant people are those who claim the argument doesn't matter.

Of course it matters. Just because you aren't immediately affected by something doesn't mean it isn't worth worrying about. We are debating our state's Constitution; constitutions are documents by the people, of the people, for the people. We are the people, and it is our duty and obligation as citizens to have opinions and voice them about our government.

Further, if you cannot find it in yourself to care about somebody else, especially people who are being discriminated against, then you are exceedingly selfish. If you cannot care about people's rights being ripped away, about the pain and suffering of others, about grave injustices in the society you take part in, then there is no saving you. You are worse than those fighting on the immoral side because at least the opposition is taking a stand for what they believe. At least they have emotions.

Do not try to patronize me for passion. What is the point of living if you don't care about anything? Apathy is not cool; detachment is a mental illness, not a fad. Do not lay passively unless you agree with every single thing in your world. There is always something to be bettered, somebody that needs help.

I will argue until I can't argue anymore. I don't care if I'm defeated, if the amendment makes its disgusting way into our law. I will still fight it because I will still be right. Those who claim it doesn't matter are the truly wrong ones.

"We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."
-Elie Wiesel

Heelprint

I love my college; I really do. I haven't regretted coming here for a single second. I still haven't tired of the ubiquitous blue, the unrelenting (and sometimes downright rude) school spirit, the vibrant community.

All the little concerns that keep college freshmen lying awake at night before they move to their universities disappear within days of arriving. The bathroom arrangement is fine; it's not hard to get along with your roommate; friends will come fairly easily if you smile and say hi; classes are difficult but not impossible; the food is pretty good; the campus layout will unfold itself to you in a few days.

But that is not to say college life is not without concerns. They're just new concerns. What was important in high school is replaced by something bigger, more pressing. There's always a pit in my stomach when I pass a flyer advertising some amazing opportunity and I keep walking. I know I can't do everything; that would be impossible and suicidal. But I have to wonder each and every time if I'm passing up my one great opportunity; maybe that was where I was going to meet my future employer, future passions, even future husband.

But that is ridiculous. I don't believe in fate. We make the happiness we seek. I have actively reached out to organizations I know I will love, and in turn will have an automatic connection with others involved. When I do my homework, I worry I'm not reaching insightful enough conclusions, like I need to force something that simply isn't there. Reach a higher plane. I'm always afraid I'm not stretching enough. Not challenging myself enough, not growing enough.

It's a weird feeling. Everything just seems higher stakes. When once a GPA got me into college, it now gets me a job. Before, most friendships (at least at a high level of intimacy) were only for the duration, now they have the potential for lifelong relationships. I have to make connections, make roots, make a mark. A "Heelprint."

But I know, just as I was freaking out the night before I moved here, that one day I will look back on this moment and tell myself that everything eventually was okay.

Your Becoming

This is absolutely beautiful.

I can't write anything else here because it will distract me from that column, and that'd be a disgrace. I'm just sticking the article here so that I can read it later, where I know where to find it.

"The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. The hours reading poetry and story collections and novels and dead people’s diaries and wondering about sex and God and whether you should shave under your arms or not. These things are your becoming."

Sex in the City

My mom idly put the tv on Sex in the City 2 this afternoon. We were waiting for my dad's imminent arrival so we could partake of her spaghetti (mine consisting only of noodles, making my waiting kind of pointless...). Though it didn't dawn on me then, that we were even doing such thing a rang of the patriarchal society of the past, born from ideas that produce such things as Sex in the City.

I've watched bits and pieces of the show over the years, never even a whole episode. I only watched thirty minutes or less of the movie. But these small snippets told me everything I needed to know: this show is one of those female-empowerment movies that aren't really about female empowerment at all.

On the surface, the four privileged ladies own New York City (or Abu Dhabi, the movie's setting), strutting around, checking out young male models, and generally being what a mainstream male lead would be. This could be construed as progress.

But that is only on the surface. Yes, the women choose to sing karaoke to "I Am Woman." But they were singing the powerful words to impress a supposedly sultry man staying at the hotel. They change into new sets of elaborate, expensive clothes every scene. They ogle a sweaty men's rugby team in the pool. They perpetuate the common myth that women must either be frivolous and slutty or subservient and boring. Their kind of "feminism" means using sex as a bartering tool, manipulating men with the promise of their bodies. Then sitting around drinking Cosmopolitans and complaining about that very quality in men. Double standards are not broken by simply flipping them around.

This false sort of feminism is everywhere, and it's learned young. The summer before sixth grade, my male cousin and I were rooting through all the random junk collected in the nooks and crannies of my grandma's house when we stumbled upon a small collection of what I assume were my grandfather's Playboys.

I flipped through them, intrigued by the novelty of the things; I read some of the articles, even laughing at the desperation ringing through the questions posed in the advice column. But my cousin sat spellbound. The naked images swarmed his consciousness; his hormones glazed his eyes over with a creepy kind of hunger. He asked me for some scissors. I helpfully pointed out pictures that seemed the most practical to remove and conceal, but many were rejected for focusing too heavily on one half of the body or the other.

As he expertly chose the money shots of women draped suggestively over chairs, lying on their backs wearing nothing but stilettos, cradling their boobs like they're precious cargo with faked innocent faces, I began to squirm in my under-developed flesh. I knew I hadn't the power of those pictures, but thought one day I might, but even then, so young, it just felt so wrong.

It wasn't the general society-frowned-upon conscious catching that weirded me out. It was the nature of the power of sexuality, something I hadn't really contemplated before. It seemed somehow unfair, to both the models on the page and eyes feasting upon them. The awkwardness of being an impartial observer to the interaction (and implying the future of the relationship...) made me see how powerful sexuality can be.

Sex and the City tries to show that, but they only really portray superficiality and manipulation. I think maybe a more genuine feminism respects an equal sexual dynamic. It's a powerful tool, and we're not right to give it completely to one sex or the other.

Nor is feminism completely tied up in sex, In the City or elsewhere. Soon, Mom realized that the first preseason football game had started, and we flipped the channel and observed the game with an enthusiasm usually reserved for men. It's this small give and take, realizations that no qualities should be masculine or feminine. That is what a true feminist show would promote. Not snagging the pool boy with the most impressively filled Speedo, as Samantha Jones might think.

Ready

I've never felt more ready to go off to college than I do right now, sitting here in my bed, typing on my laptop at five in the morning. Five in the morning isn't usually when anything productive happens or people feel especially prepared, but somehow, in this moment, I finally think I'm absolutely ready.

It isn't about the piles of stuff heaped haphazardly in the guest bedroom, or the half-read summer reading book waiting to be finished, or the completed textbook order forms, or the move-in plans made, or anything you can check off on a to-do list.

You can prepare logistically to move out of your parents' house forever, but I don't think that's the most important part. It wasn't until this moment that I began moving, consciously at least, all the people in my life from actively affecting me to have affected me. That is not very clear, I realize, but it's a hard concept to force into the limitations of the English language.

I think most relationships reach a point where the people can simply no longer glean anything from each other, whether it's as important as life lessons or as insignificant as lunchtime company. Perhaps it's a bit callous to view people like tools that can outstrip their usefulness and call for replacing, but I can't help but feel that's what is happening to me right now.

Every conversation feels useless and strained, like everyone is just going through the motions because we've all grown accustomed to things going a certain way. There's no joy or relish, no excitement or fervor. All habit, tired routines. We've all been nailed into the caricatures formed by years of familiarity. We rely on the predictably we've created; while this once was comforting, so comforting the thought of leaving it was terrifying, it is now boring and limited. I feel stuffy and confined.

Most dangerously, I feel annoyed. The smallest things get to me. I want so badly to live a new life that things that belong distinctly in this old one are infuriating. All of this is coming from a self-professed hater of change. Nothing is more persuasive to me than the fact that I yearn for change, so often my mortal enemy.

Of course I love dearly all the people that have shaped my current life, and I always will. But I have to get away, or I will kill someone. I need newness, fresh faces that don't know anything about me. People that won't keep secrets from me because they fear judgment that doesn't exist. People that trust me because they haven't time to formulate prejudices. People that are willing to accept changes because they never knew the past. This is what I need now.

So finally, I think I'm ready. Things tend to be over-dramatic at five in the morning, but I'm grateful for these late night "epiphanies." Sometimes they give me the strength to face the oh-too-soon morning.


"I've lived in this place and I know all the faces/each one is different but they're always the same./They mean me no harm, but it's time that I faced it/They'll never allow me to change."

At Peace

While I was visiting, my grandmother sat in her television room and lectured me about opening my heart to the lord so I could achieve peace and direction in life, wiping her plentiful tears on her pink nightgown trimmed in colorful rickrack.

I sat there on the couch, my computer in my lap because I'd been showing her some picture she'd wanted to see, staring back at her, blank faced and stony-eyed. What else could I do?

The thing that annoys more about my grandmother than all the holier-than-thouness, the selfish manipulating, the lies is how she demeans my opinions. To her, I am just a little girl. Whenever I express an opinion on something deeper and more important than a flower arrangement, she laughs at how cute it is. Somehow, I can't help but think deep down she knows I'm right (she is racist, my dad isn't a horrible man, she is judgmental). Her demeaning glance is her way of justifying her flaws to herself: I can't be right, I'm just a kid.

But I'm not a kid. I know what I know. The sixty years or so of life "experience" she has on me means nothing the way she's lived it. She preached to me for so long about how God has been protecting her her whole life. But all that means to her is giving up any personal responsibility. In her world, she was a neglectful mother because God called her to serve the church. Not because she was just a bad mother who didn't know what she was doing and ran and hid. In her world, she was fired from one church because the preacher had it out for her. Not because she's incapable of compromise and highly arrogant. In her world, I am "defiant" because my parent have corrupted me. Not because I'm capable of independent thought, and capable of seeing that I never want to be anything like her.

She simply uses religion to absolve herself of her mistakes. I thought Jesus was supposed to forgive you for your sins, not justify them.

She swears I can't have peace without this same kind of God. I have no god and I want no god.

What she fails to understand is that I'm only at peace without religion in my life. It only makes me feel uncomfortable in my skin, make me doubt myself, a weekly infusion of needless and undeserved guilt. I don't need the sort of justification she does.

I am peace when I know that I'm in control of my life, and that measure of control gives me the strength to deal with what is beyond it. She has no idea how her lecturing solidifies the beliefs she so desperately tries to drive me away from. She has on idea how strongly I feel about them, and how sure I am of who I am.

I played her "The House That Built Me" once because she wanted an example of the music I saw in concert, a song about finding yourself again in your childhood home. All it prompted from her was a smug look on her face and the question, "are you lost? Do you feel lost?" I knew she wanted me to collapse into tears, fall into her arms, and beg her to drag me into the light of God, or some crazy crap. But I simply looked her in the eye and said "no."

It's crazy how many different meanings one word can I have. To her, my no meant I was harboring religious feelings inside, that I secretly possessed a blooming and magnificent relationship with her God. My no really meant that I was happy with my decision to reject her god, that I never felt more secure in my beliefs then when I decided I didn't need or want Christianity. I am not lost, but to her I always will be. She can't comprehend a "found" that is happier than hers or different than hers.

I was lost when I was trying to humor her, I was blind when I tried to sit honestly in a sanctuary, I was a wrench when I lied to myself about my beliefs. But now I see, now I see.

A Reasonable Doubt

I don't usually write about current events here but having just watched what seems like hours of coverage on the Casey Anthony trial, I feel compelled to throw my less than two cents into the discussion. It's bothering the heck outta me.

Of course the death of an innocent little girl is heartbreaking, but it's not the only sickening aspect of this ordeal. Nightline kept showing a shot of the angry crowd shouting "Justice for Caylee" followed by a shot of the angry mob with torches and pitchforks from Frankenstein films. The resemblance is shocking.

Everyone knows the justice system is imperfect; it is made of fallible creatures, therefore will be fallible. But in this case, it might be beneficial to take a leaf from its book.

Everybody is so quick to shout "baby killer" at Casey Anthony, and I admit it very much looks to be true. She may have gotten off through a simple lucky break, or her lawyers were that good, or the "scientific evidence went over the jury's head" like Nancy Grace insists. But all of this seems disgusting to me for one reason: what if she really didn't do it?

We can all speculate til we're blue in the face, but nobody really knows what happened except for the five Anthonys, and their stories conflict. It's impossible to pick which to believe. None of us were in that courtroom, and certainly none of them witnessed her committing a murder. Why are people so sure she killed Caylee, when all they have to go on are sound bites from Entertainment Tonight and speculation by Nancy Grace? Why do they think they know so much more than the jury?

Oh, that poor jury. I couldn't imagine the pressure of sitting in one of those seats. It's easy to say you'd like to dole out the death penalty when you're holding a picket sign outside the courthouse, but what if you're Juror #12 with a vote that can put a woman in jail for life? I don't think the decision would be so easy then. It's literally life or death; that's why our legal system only convicts people beyond reasonable doubt.

It's only right to hand a life sentence to somebody if you're absolutely positive they took it upon themselves to take somebody else's life. How could a jury live their lives if they sentenced Anthony but weren't sure she did it? There's twelve more innocent people, sentenced to a different kind of life in prison.

Casey Anthony doesn't seem like a good person. She appears to be a liar (and even accused her father and brother of unproven sexual abuse), selfish, and a neglectful mother. But we simply don't know if she's a murderer, and maybe just isn't good enough.