A Snowball Rolling Down a Hill

"Men are apt to mistake the strength of their feeling for the strength of their argument. The heated mind resents the chill touch and relentless scrutiny of logic." -William E. Gladstone

     I am still insanely upset about the treatment of Ahmed Mohamed, the 14 year old boy arrested by the City of Irving Police department and suspended by his school, MacArthur High School, for three days following an incident that is utterly asinine. Part of what makes me so disgusted with the incident is the fact that both the police department, town and school have completely justified their actions by using modern day events to play on the fears and insecurities of our nation. The same tactics used by politicians, but I will get into that later. I am bothered even more because the kid, and he is literally a child, 14 years old, never lied about what is was, never even tried to pass it off as something else. Mostly because it there was nothing to pass it off as and secondly because he is a naive child who depends on adults, like all children, to make the right decisions and to treat them fairly. He experienced none of those things and I have yet to hear an "I am sorry" from any party. Only justification. At the very least say, "We may have overreacted" and the most, "I am sorry, we overreacted, and we apologize that we humiliated you, assumed the worst in you, and put you and your family through something you did not deserve. You are a smart kid with a bright future."  

      What really gets me is that if the teacher was so disturbed by what it might have been, and asked, which it looks like they did and he said clock, then why did that teacher then ask the student how it works. If he says it is a clock and can tell you how he made it, it probably is a harmless clock. Furthermore, why in the world are so many people jumping to the defense of the school, teacher and police. This was a fourteen year old boy in what we can assume in his first few weeks at a high school, and yet they automatically assumed he was doing something wrong. Something scary. People are using all sorts of scary logic to justify everything this school did and quite honestly it terrifies the hell out of me for many reason. 

     The first is that, the child never represented his invention as anything other than what it was, so every argument about people getting punished for fake guns, or pop-tarts that look like guns, or any other anecdotal justification in that sense just does not make logical sense. He never represented it as a fake bomb, he never said it was anything other than a clock. The laws of semantics are absolutely clear on this one. The irony of post-modernism is that now people, who despised it at its origination, use it to define things they want to fit their own narratives, regardless of the fact that there is an actual truth to it. YOU CANNOT DO THAT IT IS ILLOGICAL. He said clock, it was a clock, even to many untrained eyes it does not look like a bomb. It has no relational stories about where kids bring in fake guns, or knives or anything of the sort. He brought in a clock and stated as such. We all need to bone up on logic 101 and reading comprehension.

"A phobia is a type of anxiety disorder, usually defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation in which the sufferer commits to great lengths in avoiding, typically disproportional to the actual danger posed, often being recognized as irrational." Definition of Phobia

      The second is in regards to the first, because I cannot figure out a scenario where there is remotely any justification for treating a 14 year old child they way he was treated, I can only condense this down to well, the color of his skin, his name, and his religion. Believe me, I am trying to see the other side. But the facts remain, the school was never evacuated, he was not allowed to call his parents, another teacher in the building knew it was a clock, the boy only ever said it was clock. It cannot be that we are so jaded as a society that we do not give our kids, even our proven overachiever kids the benefit of the doubt. Because, if that is the case then every kid in the nation is subject to this kind of treatment and if that is the case then everyone should be scared as hell for their own children. I have worked a lot with teenage kids and I just do not see that being the case however. It really burns me that the teacher, nor anyone at the school asked him how it worked or how he built it. If it was not really a clock he would not be able to have a conversation about it. But that would involve a sort of trust that this kid, born in America, was not granted.

       To me it feels like it was about humiliation. Small minded men exerting their power over a young boy, who neither lied nor threatened anyone. That just disgusts me and the what compounds my emotions is that not one adult yet has come out and said maybe we should say sorry. But what can we expect from a town of a quarter of a million people who elect an openly Islamophobic mayor. (As noted here, http://www.carbonated.tv/news/texas-irving-mayor-beth-van-duyne-islamophobia-sharia-court, here, http://houston.cbslocal.com/2015/09/17/irving-mayor-edits-facebook-post-about-ahmed-mohameds-arrest/, and here, http://talkingpointsmemo.com/muckraker/irving-school-district-ahmed-mohamed ) Therein lies the crux of this problem. Our nations is hurtling down a dangerous path. A path that our founding fathers and those who came after did not fight for. A path that our presidential candidates and other politicans court in earnest as evident of Mr. Trump's latest town hall. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/19/us/politics/donald-trump-obama-muslim.html?_r=0 It has nothing to do with not correcting him about Obama, it is to wacko to even acknowledge but to sit by and laugh while an ignorant jerk asks pretty much when the Muslim population from this country is going to be expelled is beyond disgusting. If Trump had any decency he would not have the man escorted out. Instead he says, "We are going to work that." WTF people. Lets get our heads out of our crazy holes. I have ZERO tolerance for Islamophobia or any other hate mongering ideals that proliferating too many people in this country, unchecked. Small minds breed hate- 

"When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people." -Edmund Burke

       Here is the get down to it facts. The facts that matter, that matter not only logically, but as human beings with emotions. With the ability to think emphatically and sympathetically and if you cannot, I am sorry but you are animal. Literally. If you do not have intellect great enough to gain knowledge about something you irrationally fear, if you do not have the courage to come face-to-face with what you do not know, then you are nothing more than an ostrich with its head in hole of ignorance. There are estimated 1.57 billion people of the Islamic faith in the world that is still only 23% of the whole entire population of the world, of that, there are 2.77 million in the United States. Folks, that is giant, 0.9% of our population of over 300 million people. If you are having trouble comprehending that, it is less than 1%. I cannot believe how threatened people feel by less than 1% of our population in the United States. Furthermore, from the limited amount of research I have been able to do, I have ran across figures anywhere from 93%-88% of the worlds Islamic population do NOT support extremism, making the varying amount of figures of 5%-10% of the worlds Islamic population as supporting or actively participating in extremist activity. The fact of the matter remains is that different people use different questions and yardsticks to measure. Lets use one of those easy anecdotal ones we so love in the United States, out of all the recent mass shootings CNN reported that over 64% were committed by white males, 16% by African American males, 9% by Asian Americans, with the small amount left by Latinos, Native Americans and unknown. But, yeah, watch out for a new 14 year old freshman and a clock.

      When you look at the rhetoric, the misconceptions, the playing on an irrational fear of others, then yeah, maybe I can get grown-ups treating a 14 year old boy as a threat. But I can't. I am a human being and in him I see all the new freshman at the high school I was lucky to work at for a while. I see the ones that struggle to adjust to life as a high schooler. I see my nephew and pray to whatever is out there, that he is never treated this way stripped of dignity and pride of accomplishment. I see all the people I am lucky enough to know who practice the Islamic faith and my heart breaks that hey have to hear the shit that comes out of the mouth of the ignorant and uneducated population of this country. It destroys me that people like Mr. Trump and others in his position refuse to stand up for an important segment of our population. This segment who wakes up every morning just like you and goes to work, sends their kids to school and contributes to this society. I am frustrated that people take the word of someone else and lets hate infiltrate their hearts based on flawed facts, logic, and reasoning. And for what, because it feeds a rhetoric of built-up fear, fear of the other? "But what is liberty without wisdom, and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils; for it is folly, vice, and madness, without tuition or restraint."- Edmund Burke

 

 

STOP

     I cannot think of a cute anecdotal introduction for this blog and it is driving me mad. It is a subject close to my heart and the older I get the more chimeric twin-like it grows on my soul and for that reason, I am just going to come out and say it. I am not just saying it for me, but for all my sister women out there. For every wife or girlfriend who dares to voice their opinion, need, or want. All the moms, aunts, and sisters who tell it like it is and sometimes do so with emotion. For all the women out there who have even just a sliver of personality that shines forth at certain times, STOP CALLING US CRAZY!! Stop calling us crazy because we simply disagree with you. Stop calling us crazy because we stand up for ourselves. Stop calling us crazy because we want things a certain way for us and our families. Stop calling us crazy because we feel passionate about something. Just STOP STOP STOP calling us crazy!

      When and why has that become the defacto defense mechanism for too many men, husbands, brothers, fathers, boyfriends, uncles out there? There are very real problems, STILL, with the way women are treated in this society and this is just one example that reflects these issues. We all have our bad days, sometimes they are weeks or months, but I can tell you this, it is not because we are crazy. We are human beings with feelings, emotions, and passions just like you. I get it that when you call us crazy for expressing these, it is a way for you to not only invalidate our feelings, but you think, and believe me it is mistakenly so, that you are taking control of the discussion. I mean right, because after all, we are just cray cray. Unfortunately all it tells me is that you, my dear penis holders, are still incapable of correctly articulating your positions, incapable of delighting us with  your wit, incapable of giving us your time and effort towards a productive conversation about something you do not want to cooperate with. So, where do we go from here, oh yeah, "Gawd, you don't have to be crazy." Or, "Wow, someone is PMSing and crazy today." To, "Man, she is crazy, must be that time of month." Or my personal favorite, when referring to a 'demanding' woman, "Man watch out for her, she is crazy." Because yeah, a woman who works hard, is successful and demands respect is so crazy, amirite??? (sarcasm) All of these stupid little reductions, and what that does is reduce us in your mind. Obviously, if you cannot control us, we must be crazy right?

      Now, why this bothers me so much all of the sudden? It is not all of the sudden, it always has. But, getting back to the point, we have very real issues with the way we treat women in this society. For the love of God, Donald Trump just implied that Carly Fiorina is not qualified to be president because of, "Her face." Or his casual references to Megan Kelly's "woman issues" as an explanation for why she schooled him at the debate. He is the leading candidate right now in the Republican Party, by the way. Awesome, nice to know someone who capitalized on his career of calling women crazy and ugly can climb so high. Furthermore, people who actually have a mental illness  and are sick, is nothing compared to an your wife who is upset because you did nothing to celebrate her promotion, and when you say that your wife is crazy you are trivializing an illness someone has to live with. An illness they have to deal with everyday of their lives, someone who already has to deal with the stigma of mental illness, but there you go again, that girl in the club that just turned you down, yeah, she is crazy. (Insert eye roll) All of this is an effort to reduce a woman to something that you perceive as less than you. And what a dick move that is.

    When we reduce women's worth or place in society by how they look or if they are "crazy" the only thing that is accomplished is the perception that all the hard stuff should be left to men. I mean we are all just crazy and totally incapable of reasonable or rational thought. God forbid we raise our voice. Here is the worst of it from this accused crazy woman, sorry but not sorry. I do not think it is crazy for me to want the dishes to be clean before they are put away, I do not think it is crazy for me to want the person in front of me to pay attention to what they are doing when they are driving. I also do not think it is crazy that my friend wants to draw boundaries about when their in-laws can and cannot come over. I also do not think it is even remotely crazy to turn down a man's advances when they are unwelcome. It is not crazy to demand child support from the father of your children. I do not think it is crazy to feel frustrated because it feels so often like no one is listening to you. I do not think it is crazy to feel offended or angry at someone and to let them know that. I do not think it is crazy to feel hurt, confused, or just lost briefly in this constant shuffle we call life. And I will never ever think it is crazy for someone to voice those feelings, emotions or passions. If that is the bar for crazy, then what do we think of people who walk around with their hands down their pants like a cave man all day, who chews with their mouths open spewing food like a toddler even when they are in the 50's, leave the toilet seat up or relies on their material goods, in the form of a truck, boat, or gun, to speak for them. Furthermore what, in the name of all that is good, do we think of men whose only counter in an argument or discussion is that the female they are dealing with is crazy?

For the Love of God-

    Every morning I wake up in a king size bed, get ready for work. Which means taking a shower in one of our bathrooms, going into one of our spare bedrooms, where I lazily keep most of our cloths. After that, I walk down the stairs, past another spare bedroom that we use as an office, into the kitchen where we leisurely make coffee and our abundant breakfasts. I might leave the water on too long while washing fruit, because well, it is not something we have to worry about. We make our lunches, if not, we just buy something and head off to work. We both have a 45 minute one way commute, I go North, Ed goes south, while the dog sits in our empty house all day, lounging on the two couches or her chair looking into yet another spare bedroom that we use as our main guest bedroom. She might drink out of the toilet of our other bathroom downstairs, as she prefers that to her water dish. We both drive home, I take the dog for a run and we go about our nightly business, again at a leisurely pace either making dinner or going out for dinner. We go to bed and start the routine all over again the next day. I know mundane right? But at the same time it is completely and utterly asinine.

     It is completely and utterly asinine that I get to do this routine every day when so many people right now have no place to sleep, no place to go, not place to bath or shower (my fruit gets washed every day, yet these people are  not granted the same decency as my flipping fruit), no place to change their child's diaper if they even have a clean one on hand. If they wake up in their own homes they get to spend the day on edge praying they are not shelled, or kidnapped on their way to work, if they are lucky enough to have work. They get to eat if they are lucky enough to be in a region where they can receive aid from a humanitarian group. Every day is literal game of life and death. I cannot even comprehend the feelings that come with fighting for your life and family every single day. To the point where getting into a flimsy boat to travel to a foreign land is a better and safer option than staying in your homeland. It is completely and utterly asinine that I was lucky enough to be born to Pat and Patty of the United States of America and not Rehan and Abdullah Kurdi of Kobani, Syria. (If you are unfamiliar or unsympathetic to the civilians caught in Kobani, here, this should change your mind if you have heart, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Koban%C3%AE)

     I will have mercy and spare you the pictures of Mr. and Mrs Kurdi's drowned 3 year old son Alyan, and do not worry there are no pictures of their 5 year old son, Galip who also drowned along with their mother Rehan. Do you think she tried to save them or at the very least do you think she died trying to hold her babies as they also perished in the waters of the Mediterranean. A sea rife with yachts and luxury party islands on the other side This morning my routine was disrupted because I wept as I drove to work for them. I wept with the photographer who took the photo as he choked up talking about little Alyan's shoes and how they reminded him of his own 2 sons' shoes. I wept because it also reminded me of my little 3 year  old nephew's shoes. Three year old children still need their food cut up, they still need to be soothed by their parents, they copy everything you say and look to their trusted adults for love and protection. It is not different for Alyan or his brother Galip. We, us adults, we let them down and countless others who are in desperate need of literal life saving mercy. Mercy we refuse to grant.

      You see, we seem to jealously guard our space. Our resources are ours and ours alone. I would have gladly taken that family or any other family from Syria into my home. Our Greek brothers and sisters in humanity who have little themselves and it has been like that for years, would have welcomed their boat on the island of Kos, feed them what they could, supplied them with what they could while they wait for the rest of Europe to decide. This has been documented and it gives me hope. Yet every day the EU fights over what to do, more children will die, along with their parents, or aunts and uncles. More girls will be kidnapped by ISIS, more men in many countries killed because they are the wrong ethnicity or religion. They could be saved if we could just open up our spaces to them. If we could just give them the chance to live.

       It is disturbing to see the comments on this. Comments by EU politicians, comments by people reading articles about this. You see, Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary whittles it down to the simple fact that these refugees are not Christian. Gasp!!! Excuse me while I swoon. What I fail to see is how that means anything when it comes to life and death situations. But it seems many want to go there, just read the comment American's posit on the situation. It makes me ashamed, it makes me sick to my stomach and it takes away the sliver of hope for humanity. I am tired of seeing people bitch and complain about immigrants, migrants, refugees. All we do is bitch and moan about others simply because they are others. Do you honestly think people take the idea lightly of leaving everything they know behind. Their heritage, their homes, their families. We think so highly of ourselves to honestly believe that everyone comes here to just take from us? Take what is ours, because we were lucky enough to be born here in America where most of us have no idea what the struggle for life and death is like. Who cares if they are not of the Christan faith, we have the opportunity to help yet we deny that help. Austria denies that help. The United Kingdom denies that help. All the while little boys like Alyan and Galip are drowning in the same sea where the bikini clad rich take their yachting vacations. It makes me gag. My life is completely and utterly asinine because I feel helpless when I could be helping. Western Europe, America, Canada and all the industrial nations have been complicit in the cause of their situation and now we sit back acting stunned that this is the result. And many of us cannot be bothered to open our hearts with the least amount of empathy or sympathy because these people are not the right "religion." Or they are migrants and they are just here to take what is rightfully ours. If there was ever a God above, the one that we preach about in our bibles, the one who we claim to live our lives by, the one whose son is supposedly "in our hearts" who guides our everyday actions, what would he think? What did Gandhi once say? Oh yeah, "Act like Christ, not a Christian." How apt in this situation.

       I am very angry. I am angry that so many refuse to help. I am angry that we have to bring up religion as a justification for our horrific actions. It is extremely upsetting that we constantly have to bring up religion all the time for many things, but this? Do not even get me started on the money. The decrying of our monetary aid, as if that is our sole contribution  to this and we "spend too much of it already as is." If money and religion guide every principle, then we should have an abundance of both to help. I am angry that the burden of help has been graciously and generously picked up by those who have the least to spare and yet do it on daily basis, when the rest of us sit around arguing over whom this "burden" belong to. For the love of God, it is all of ours to bear and bear it we must. If we cannot find rooms in our hearts to help those in desperate need than what does that say of humanity? If we can not imagine what their lives must be like, what does that say about our own psyche or our souls? When it is a matter of life and death for so many, should money or religion even matter? I am confused as to why Germany can open their country to 800,000 and Canada cannot grant one family asylum? (That was the Kurdi families destination, though they were denied entry into the county, denied asylum, denied safety. Denied reunification with other family members. Denied the chance to live.) Why the Greeks can buy what extra food they can to meet with the refugees flooding their beaches, or the Spanish Coast Guard saving boats everyday, but England can only admit one refugee? Why America cannot accept plane loads of refugees when people like my husband and myself asininely have so much, too much? These people are teachers, doctors, lawyers, artists, manual laborers just like we are. They are mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, who just want to survive. They are human beings first and foremost, who just were unlucky enough to be born in a time where war tore everything they know apart. We need to start treating them with the dignity all humans deserve, especially human beings in need of desperate help.