01/29/17

My first day of student teaching the students shuffle into the classroom silently take their seats and being to write the morning message. One student walks slowly eyes half open. He sits at his desk and rests his head in his arms the dim classroom with the glow of the smart board softly illuminating the room. The classroom teacher begins to give the student a hard time he makes comments about napping in class. The small sleepy head just rests quietly looking back at the teacher carelessly.

Throughout the week I asked the teacher if I could pull his low readers to work with them on a computer reading program one on one. He sends me his lowest students or students that are behind on their reading work. He sends me the student who is homeless, he sends me a student at the kindergarten level as a third grader. All the while I kept my eyes on this sleepy child. Something seemed off or different about him. On the last day of school for the week he asks me if I want a challenge with a smile. I return a grin and say absolutely. He sends the sleepy student my way from the first morning of the week. He lazily sits beside me then with lighting fingers logs into his account. I open up his reading program and he hasn't even finished the initial baseline assessment questions...It's January. I ask him to begin to read the short articles to me aloud.

The student with a tired monotone voice flawlessly reads the entire piece. He read it fluently, he read it using appropriate pacing based on punctuation. This sleepyhead began to destroy even and every word on the article, he was reading irregular proper nouns, and multi syllable words. At the end of each article he quick as lightning hit the right multiple choice answer and moved to the next.

I was awestruck.

It was amazing watching this child read. I turned to him shocked and I said, you are doing amazing why haven't you finished these questions to start reading in this program? He told me he always forgets to check the website and he doesn't like that he has to move the mouse pad to click the answers, he'd rather use the keyboard. This child was clearly gifted and very technologically savvy. After we finished reading together I again told him how great he did and that I'd love to keep reading with him.

While the class was in specials I told the teacher about it. He pulled the students' third grade reading guarantee test scores on one of the tests he scored insanely high on the other ridiculously low. The teacher went on to explain how brilliant the kid is, he would just rather play around with the technology of the computer than do his work.

I cannot wait to keep working with this student. I want to see how high I can get this child to read. I want to see if I can find a way to get this student intrinsically motivated to do his work.

He was also wearing Jordan 11s but not concords...spacejams I told him I loved his shoes, he shrugged and told me he doesn't know about shoes but his parents got them for him. I've always wanted a pair, I can't wait to meet more of the class.

Student teaching has been amazing. I can not wait to have my own classroom in September! 7 months away.

Seafret - Oceans

01/26/17

You Matter To Me - Sara Bareilles and Jason Mraz

01/22/17

You Only Find Love When You Stop Looking For It
what a horrible cliché

The start of the month I deleted that terrible dating app
I went on too many dates feeling no spark for any of them
I was physically connecting with women I felt no connection too

Then I find someone
Not exactly find
We met last summer

Love is a very strong if not the strongest word, I'm certainly not anywhere near using that word
but spark is certainly an understatement.
I'm not sure what it is
All that matters,
all that I know,
I like it, I want more of it

I want to see her more
We never seem to have enough time to run out of things to say
when we meet

Isn't that what matters?
To connect
to share
share life
share thoughts
share experiences
to share yourself with someone
isn't that love
isn't that sex?

I'm not sure what I'm doing
I shouldn't have caught feelings

I don't think this can even happen
I want it to happen
But I promised to keep an open mind while dating while I can't be given what I deserve
But it's hard to want to date
It's hard to want to go on dates
It was bad enough before with women I felt no connection with
Now to continue while a spark of something potential sits in my gut

I'm afraid we will miss each other

If it's meant to be, it's meant to be
Is that a real thing or do we need to kick down doors to get what we want?

Nothing in the world is worth having or worth doing unless it means effort, pain, difficulty... I have never in my life envied a human being who led an easy life. I have envied a great many people who led difficult lives and led them well.
-Theodore Roosevelt

That feels like the truer truth.
I feel that in my bones.

Nothing that's worthwhile is ever easy. Remember that.
-Nicholas Spark

I'll spare my cynical thoughts on the writer Nicholas Spark but my taste for his work doesn't negate the truth of his words.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do.
This is such an adult problem.
The older we get the more serious everything in our lives become.

Back as a kid if we lost a job it was just a crappy job
now it's a career

back as a kid if we forgot a chore the garbage would just pile up
now it's a foreclosure notice

back as a kid if we broke up it was a simple high school fling
now it's divorce

The older we get the more our decisions affect the people we care about
Our choices can really hurt people

What am I doing?
What should I do?

I'm torn between two paths

there is the social noble path, there is the gentleman polite and nice path
but that path isn't authentic, if I am being truly honest with myself that path isn't what is in my bones in my guts. I wouldn't be living honestly if I didn't try for the effort, pain, difficulty, the risk.

Life is happening
we are in all reality dust
a speck on the map of both time and space
I want to lead a difficult life and lead it well.
I want to pursue the things that make my heart beat
That give bumps down my skin.

There's an older man who stands in a buffet line,
He is smiling and he's holding out his plate,
And the further he looks back into his timeline
That hard road always led him to today,

Making up for when his bright future had left him
Making up for the fact his only son is gone,
And letting everything out once, his server asks him
"Have you figured out yet, what it is you want?"

I want a little bit of everything
The biscuits and the beans
Whatever helps me to forget about
The things that brought me to my knees

So pile on those mashed potatoes
And an extra chicken wing
I'm having a little bit of everything

This life is all that we have and none of it is promised.
I could have a tumor growing in my brain as I type this right now.
I could very easily never see 30
Never get the chance to touch my retirement roth IRA

I don't want to stand in the buffet line piling on the comfort food to forget about the cowardly way I played this singular life so safe.

Maybe I'm way to emotional, maybe it's this shit that makes all of these perfectly nice women I've been on dates with seem so wrong. But if I get the chance to feel something in my heart towards a woman I need to take that shot. I need to at least try.

I believe the point of life is to be walked out.
All of it every bit of it to walk it out and to know
to taste and see

When you are young, your potential is infinite. You might do anything, really. You might be Einstein. You might be DiMaggio. Then you get to an age where what you might be gives way to what you have been. You weren't Einstein. You weren't anything. That's a bad moment...

...I came up with a new game-show idea recently. It's called The Old Game. You got three old guys with loaded guns onstage. They look back at their lives, see who they were, what they accomplished, how close they came to realizing their dreams. The winner is the one who doesn't blow his brains out. He gets a refrigerator.
-Confessions of a Dangerous Mind

I've never asked to be Einstein, or DiMaggio, I want to live a simple life. I want to work in a Columbus City Elementary School for 30 some years, I want to live in the community I teach in. I want to work the land I own to cultivate the food my family eats. I want a wife I've chosen over all other women. Not Settled for, not comfortable and familiar but chosen, desired. I want children with that woman. I want grandchildren to fill my house in that same Columbus community I worked in as I help the next generation of my family grow in my retirement.

And the further I look back into my timeline I don't want to settle for not blowing my brains out, I want to weep at the beauty of the family and community, love has created. I don't want the world to ever know my name. I don't want a tombstone or a grave marker, I want to be buried in the soil and a sequoia planted above me. I want my body to return to soil and that soil to be the nutrients for a tree that will stand for thousands of years.

A photo posted by Tempestt Stivers (@queentempestt) on Jan 21, 2017 at 3:38pm PST

She is beautiful
she is so rare
she is married

I like the way she talks about the rain, I like how much she has traveled, I like her gentle spirit, I like her awareness of her own little bubble and her desire to break out. I like the way she helps me study for my tests. I like the way she feels about music. I like when she looks at me. I like when she opens up to me when she puts the walls down. I like that she's awkward. I like that she hates compliments, but she's working on that. I like the way she reads and cares about issues. I like the way she wants to help. Her heart seems so right. I want to know more about her.

But she's fucking married.
What the hell do I know about marriage?
What right do I have to talk to a married woman?

I told her I would give her space
space
the thing I seem to find myself giving the women I want none of it with
I need to be picked
but...marriage...that's such a heavy thing

I think about Doug and Sara
I think about Susan and David
I think about the way I feel with her
Looking at other people's paths, why do we do this?
Why don't we each walk our own?
What is love, marriage, commitment?

This space fucking sucks. I want to ask her about her day. I want to hear her vent about how she hates her job and how grad school is killing her slowly. I want to hear about the things that bring her life. I want to hear about the places she wants to go, the adventures she wants to go on.

I can't seem to get the image of her standing beside my car in the streetlight out of my mind.
that grey sweatshirt, those faded jeans with the slip ons, her hair pulled back perfectly in a ponytail, those big brown eyes and that smile.
I can't stop thinking about it, wondering the 'what ifs'

I wanted to grab her, press her against my car and kiss her.
I wanted to squeeze her for the whole night
but how could I?
It wouldn't be right
She's fucking married

So now I'm stuck checking notifications on my phone and day dreaming about that moment by my car

what else could I have done?
What choice did I have?

If I wanted any sort of honest chance with this woman I had to walk away, I had to stay away and now I have to give space.

Giving s p a c e.
So here we are,
apart.

I want to express myself to my friends.
I want to tell the people close to me in my life
But none of them will listen
None of them will understand they will all be disappointed and disgusted with me
I'm trapped in my own head with all of this stuff.
So here I am expressing and writing it all out on here
What else can I do?
I miss talking to her.

I want a woman who makes me feel something, she makes me feel something.

She's imperfect but she tries
She is good but she lies
She is hard on herself
She is broken and won't ask for help
She is messy but she's kind
She is lonely most of the time
She is all of this mixed up
And baked in a beautiful pie

Sara Bareilles - She Used To Be Mine

01/16/17

Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr - The Three Evils of Society - August 31, 1967


Mr. Chairman, friends and brothers in this first gathering of the National Conference on New Politics. Ladies and gentlemen can you hear me in the back? I don’t know if the Klan is in here tonight or not with all the troubles we’re having with these microphones. Seldom if ever has we’re still working with it. As I was about to say, seldom if ever has such a diverse and truly ecumenical gathering convened under the egis of politics in our nation, and I want to commend the leadership of the National Conference on New Politics for all of the great work that they have done in making this significant convention possible. Indeed by our very nature we affirm that something new is taking place on the American political horizon. We have come here from the dusty plantations of the Deep South and the depressing ghettos of the North. We have come from the great universities and the flourishing suburbs. We have come from Appalachian poverty and from conscious stricken wealth. But we have come. And we have come here because we share a common concern for the moral health of our nation. We have come because our eyes have seen through the superficial glory and glitter of our society and observed the coming of judgment. Like the prophet of old, we have read the handwriting on the wall. We have seen our nation weighed in the balance of history and found wanting. We have come because we see this as a dark hour in the affairs of men.For most of us this is a new mood. We are traditionally the idealists. We are the marchers from Mississippi and Selma and Washington, who staked our lives on the American Dream during the first half of this decade. Many assembled here campaigned lasciviously for Lyndon Johnson in 1964 because we could not stand ideally by and watch our nation contaminated by the 18th century policies of Gold waterism. We were the hardcore activists who were willing to believe that Southerners could be reconstructed in the constitutional image. We were the dreamers of a dream, that dark yesterdays of mans inhumanity to man would soon be transformed into bright tomorrows of justice. Now it is hard to escape, the disillusionment and betrayal. Our hopes have been blasted and our dreams have been shattered. The promise of a Great Society was ship wrecked off the coast of Asia, on the dreadful peninsula of Vietnam. The poor, black and white, are still perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. What happens to a dream deferred? It leads to bewildering frustration and corroding bitterness.

I came to see this in a personal experience here in Chicago last summer. In all the speaking I have done in the United States before varied audiences, including some hostile whites, the only time I have ever been booed was one night in our regular weekly mass meetings by some angry young men of our movement. Now I went home that night with an ugly feeling. Selfishly I thought of my suffering and sacrifices over the last twelve years. Why would they boo one so close to them? But as I lay awake thinking. I finally came to myself. And I could not for the life of me have less impatience and understanding for those young men. For twelve years, I and others like me, have held out radiant promises of progress. I had preached to them about my dream. I had lectured to them about, the not to distant day when they would have freedom, all here, now. I had urged them to have faith in America and in white society. Their hopes had soared. They were now booing me because they felt that we were unable to deliver on our promises. They were booing because we had urged them to have faith in people who had too often proved to be unfaithful. They were now hostile because they were watching the dream that they had so readily accepted, turn into a frustrating nightmare. This situation is all the more ominous, in view of the rising expectations of men the world over. The deep rumblings that we hear today, the rumblings of discontent, is the thunder of disinherited masses rising from dungeons of oppression to the bright hills of freedom. All over the world like a fever, freedom is spreading in the widest liberation movement in history. The great masses of people are determined to end the exploitation of their races and lands. And in one majestic chorus they are singing in the worlds of our freedom song, “ain’t gonna let nobody turn us around”.

And so the collision course is set. The people cry for freedom and the congress attempts to legislate repression. Millions, yes billions, are appropriated for mass murder; but the most meager pittance for foreign aid for international development is crushed in the surge of reaction. Unemployment rages at a major depression level in the black ghettos, but the bi-partisan response is an anti-riot bill rather than a serious poverty program.

The modest proposals for model cities, rent supplement and rat control, pitiful as they were to began with, get caught in the maze of congressional inaction. And I submit to you tonight, that a congress that proves to be more anti-negro than anti-rat needs to be dismissed.

It seems that our legislative assemblies have adopted Nero their patron saint and are bent on fiddling while our cities burn. Even when the people persist and in the face of great obstacles, develop indigenous leadership and self-help approaches to their problems and finally tread the forest of bureaucracy to obtain existing government funds, the corrupt political order seeks to crush even this beginning of hope. The case of CDGM in Mississippi is the most publicized example but it is a story repeated many times across our nation. Our own experience here in Chicago is especially painfully at present. After an enthusiastic approval by H. E. W’s Department of Adult Education, SCLC began an adult literacy project to aid 1,000 young men and women who have been pushed out of overcrowded ghetto schools, in obtaining basic literary skills prerequisite to receiving jobs. We had an agreement with A&P stores for 750 jobs through SCLC’s job program, Operation Breadbasket and had recruited over 500 pupils the first week. At that point Congressmen Paccinski and the Daley machine intervened and demanded that Washington cut off our funds or channel them through the machine controlled poverty program in Chicago. Now we have no problem with administrative supervision, but we do have a desire to be independent of machine control and the Democratic Party patronage network. For this desire for a politically independent approach to the needs of our brothers, our funds are being stopped as of September 15th and a very meaningful program discontinued. Yes the hour is dark, evil comes fourth in the guise of good. It is a time of double talk when men in high places have a high blood pressure of deceptive rhetoric and an anemia of concrete performance. We cry out against welfare hand outs to the poor but generously approve an oil depletion allowance to make the rich, richer. Six Mississippi plantations receive more than a million dollars a year, not to plant cotton but no provision is made to feed the tenant farmer who is put out of work by the government subsidy.

The crowning achievement in hypocrisy must go to those staunch Republicans and Democrats of the Midwest and West who were given land by our government when they came here as immigrants from Europe. They were given education through the land grant colleges. They were provided with agricultural agents to keep them abreast of forming trends, they were granted low interest loans to aid in the mechanization of their farms and now that they have succeeded in becoming successful, they are paid not to farm and these are the same people that now say to black people, who’s ancestors were brought to this country in chains and who were emancipated in 1863 without being given land to cultivate or bread to eat; that they must pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

What they truly advocate is Socialism for the rich and Capitalism for the poor.

I wish that I could say that this is just a passing phase in the cycles of our nation’s life; certainly times of war, times of reaction throughout the society but I suspect that we are now experiencing the coming to the surface of a triple prong sickness that has been lurking within our body politic from its very beginning. That is the sickness of racism, excessive materialism and militarism. Not only is this our nation’s dilemma it is the plaque of western civilization. As early as 1906 W. E. B Dubois prophesized that the problem of the 20th century, would be the problem of the color line, now as we stand two-thirds into this crucial period of history we know full well that racism is still that hound of hell which dogs the tracks of our civilization. Ever since the birth of our nation, White America has had a Schizophrenic personality on the question of race, she has been torn between selves. A self in which she proudly profess the great principle of democracy and a self in which she madly practices the antithesis of democracy. This tragic duality has produced a strange indecisiveness and ambivalence toward the Negro, causing America to take a step backwards simultaneously with every step forward on the question of Racial Justice; to be at once attracted to the Negro and repelled by him, to love and to hate him. There has never been a solid, unified and determined thrust to make justice a reality for Afro-Americans. The step backwards has a new name today, it is called the white backlash, but the white backlash is nothing new. It is the surfacing of old prejudices, hostilities and ambivalences that have always been there. It was caused neither by the cry of black power nor by the unfortunate recent wave of riots in our cities. The white backlash of today is rooted in the same problem that has characterized America ever since the black man landed in chains on the shores of this nation.

This does not imply that all White Americans are racist, far from it. Many white people have, through a deep moral compulsion fought long and hard for racial justice nor does it mean that America has made no progress in her attempt to cure the body politic of the disease of racism or that the dogma of racism has been considerably modified in recent years. However for the good of America, it is necessary to refute the idea that the dominant ideology in our country, even today, is freedom and equality while racism is just an occasional departure from the norm on the part of a few bigoted extremists. Racism can well be, that corrosive evil that will bring down the curtain on western civilization. Arnold Toynesbee has said that some twenty-six civilization have risen upon the face of the Earth, almost all of them have descended into the junk heap of destruction. The decline and fall of these civilizations, according to Toynesbee, was not caused by external invasion but by internal decay. They failed to respond creatively to the challenges impingent upon them. If America does not respond creatively to the challenge to banish racism, some future historian will have to say, that a great civilization died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all men.

The second aspect of our afflicted society is extreme materialism, an Asian writer has portrayed our dilemma in candid terms, he says, “you call your thousand material devices labor saving machinery, yet you are forever busy. With the multiplying of your machinery you grow increasingly fatigued, anxious, nervous, dissatisfied. Whatever you have you want more and where ever you are you want to go somewhere else. Your devices are neither time saving nor soul saving machinery. They are so many sharp spurs which urge you on to invent more machinery and to do more business”. This tells us something about our civilization that cannot be caste aside as a prejudiced charge by an eastern thinker who is jealous of Western prosperity. We cannot escape the indictment. This does not mean that we must turn back the clock of scientific progress. No one can overlook the wonders that science has wrought for our lives. The automobile will not abdicate in favor of the horse and buggy or the train in favor of the stage coach or the tractor in favor of the hand plow or the scientific method in favor of ignorance and superstition. But our moral lag must be redeemed; when scientific power outruns moral power, we end up with guided missiles and misguided men.

When we foolishly maximize the minimum and minimize the maximum we sign the warrant for our own day of doom. It is this moral lag in our thing-oriented society that blinds us to the human reality around us and encourages us in the greed and exploitation which creates the sector of poverty in the midst of wealth. Again we have diluted ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the protestant ethic of hard word and sacrifice, the fact is that Capitalism was build on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad.

If Negroes and poor whites do not participate in the free flow of wealth within our economy, they will forever be poor,giving their energies, their talents and their limited funds to the consumer market but reaping few benefits and services in return. The way to end poverty is to end the exploitation of the poor, ensure them a fair share of the government services and the nation’s resources. I proposed recently that a national agency be established to provide employment for everyone needing it. Nothing is more socially inexcusable than unemployment in this age. In the 30's when the nation was bankrupt it instituted such an agency, the WPA, in the present conditions of a nation glutted with resources, it is barbarous to condemn people desiring work to soul sapping inactivity and poverty. I am convinced that even this one, massive act of concern will do more than all the state police and armies of the nation to quell riots and still hatreds. The tragedy is, our materialistic culture does not possess the statesmanship necessary to do it. Victor Hugo could have been thinking of 20th Century America when he wrote, “there’s always more misery among the lower classes than there is humanity in the higher classes”.

The time has come for America to face the inevitable choice between materialism and humanism. We must devote at least as much to our children’s education and the health of the poor as we do to the care of our automobiles and the building of beautiful, impressive hotels.

We must also realize that the problems of racial injustice and economic injustice cannot be solved without a radical redistribution of political and economic power. We must further recognize that the ghetto is a domestic colony. Black people must develop programs that will aid in the transfer of power and wealth into the hands of residence of the ghetto so that they may in reality control their own destinies.

This is the meaning of New Politics. People of will in the larger community, must support the black man in this effort. The final phase of our national sickness is the disease of militarism. Nothing more clearly demonstrates our nation’s abuse of military power than our tragic adventure in Vietnam.

This war has played havoc with the destiny of the entire world. It has torn up the Geneva Agreement, it has seriously impaired the United Nations, it has exacerbated the hatred between continents and worst still between races. It has frustrated our development at home, telling our own underprivileged citizens that we place insatiable military demands above their most critical needs. It has greatly contributed to the forces of reaction in America and strengthened the military industrial complex. And it has practically destroyed Vietnam and left thousands of American and Vietnamese youth maimed and mutilated and exposed the whole world to the risk of nuclear warfare. Above all, the War in Vietnam, has revealed what Senator Fulbright calls, “our nations arrogance of power”. We are arrogant in professing to be concerned about the freedom of foreign nations while not setting our own house in order. Many of our Senators and Congressmen vote joyously to appropriate billions of dollars for the War in Vietnam and many of these same Senators and Congressmen vote loudly against a Fair Housing Bill to make it possible for a Negro veteran of Vietnam to purchase a decent home.

We arm Negro soldiers to kill on foreign battlefields but offer little protection for their relatives from beatings and killings in our own South. We are willing to make a Negro 100% of a citizen in Warfare but reduce him to 50% of a citizen on American soil. No war in our nation’s history has ever been so violative of our conscious, our national interest and so destructive of our moral standing before the world. No enemy has ever been able to cause such damage to us as we inflict upon ourselves. The inexorable decay of our urban centers has flared into terrifying domestic conflict as the pursuit of foreign war absolves our wealth and energy. Squalor and poverty scar our cities as our military might destroy cities in a far off land to support oligarchy, to intervene in domestic conflict. The President who cherishes consensus for peace has intensified the war in answer to a cry to stop the war. It has brought tauntingly to one minutes flying time from China to a moment before the midnight of world conflagration. We are offered a tax for war instead of a plan for peace. Men of reason should no longer debate, the merits of war or means of financing war. They should end the war and restore sanity and humanity to American policy. And if the will of the people continues to be unheeded, all men of free will must create a situation in which the 1967-68 elections are made a referendum on the War.

The American people must have an opportunity to vote into oblivion those who cannot detach themselves from militarism, and those that lead us.

So we are here because we believe, we hope, we pray that something new might emerge in the political life of this nation which will produce a new man, new structures and new institutions and a new life for mankind. I am convinced that this new life will not emerge until our nation undergoes a radical revolution of values. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people the giant triplets of

racism,
economic exploitation
and militarism

are incapable of being conquered. A civilization can flounder as readily in the face of moral bankruptcy as it can through financial bankruptcy. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. We are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s road side, but that will only be an initial act. One day the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be beaten and robbed as they make their journey through life. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar, it understands that an edifice which produces beggars, needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth, with righteous indignation it will look at thousands of working people displaced from their jobs, with reduced incomes as a result of automation while the profits of the employers remain in tact and say, this is not just. It will look across the ocean and see individual Capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia and Africa only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries and say, this is not just. It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, this is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war,this way of settling differences is not just. This business of burning human being with napalm, of filling our nation’s home with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normal humane, of sending men home from dark and bloodied battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year, to spend more money on military defense then on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

So what we must all see is that these are revolutionary times All over the globe, men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and out of the wombs of a frail world new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the Earth are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the west must support these revolutions, it is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of Communism and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has the revolutionary spirit and in a sense, Communism is a judgment of our failure to make democracy real and to follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world, declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism. With this powerful commitment, we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust morals and thereby speed the day when every valley shall be exalted and every mountain and hill shall be made low and the crooked places shall be made straight and the rough places plain. May I say in conclusion that there is a need now, more than ever before, for men and women in our nation to be creatively maladjusted.

Mr. Davis said, and I say to you that I choose to be among the maladjusted, as my good friend Bill Coughlin said there are those who have criticized me and many of you for taking a stand against the War in Vietnam and for seeking to say to the nation that the issues of Civil Rights cannot be separated from the issues of peace.

I want to say to you tonight that I intend to keep these issues mixed because they are mixed.

Somewhere we must see that justice is indivisible, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere and I have fought now to long and to hard against segregated public accommodations to end up at this point in my life, segregating my moral concerns.

So let us stand in this convention knowing that on some positions; cowardice asks the questions, is it safe; expediency asks the question, is it politic; vanity asks the question, is it popular, but conscious asks the question, is it right?

And on some positions, it is necessary for the moral individual to take a stand that is neither safe, nor politic nor popular; but he must do it because it is right.

And we say to our nation tonight, we say to our Government, we even say to our FBI, we will not be harassed, we will not make a butchery of our conscious, we will not be intimidated and we will be heard.



2016 - The other America 1967
2015 - Why Jesus Called a Man a Fool 1967
2014 - But if Not 1967
2013 - A speech at Riverside church

01/08/17

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

It's been around four months on Tinder. On average I've been on about a date a week. Ballpark, that's roughly 20 women I've met. I was semi interested in two of those women both of them ghosted me. Thursday night I decided to surrender the fight. I give up.

Seasonal affective disorder is starting to kick in once again the cold dark days of January the endless first dates with people I feel nothing towards.

I want to be a dad so badly but I don't want to be with any of these women.
I give up. I deleted the damn app and I'm slowly accepting it.

The only woman I could potentially have strong feelings towards is, of course, married.

I'm done. I have one more week of work before student teaching begins and my income drops to 0.
I will be forced to spend the winter and most of the spring trapped in my house to conserve money.

The family made it very clear that I shouldn't ask for money, although their words spoke of generosity their whole demeanor as long as I have been a member has said otherwise. I'd rather live on the streets and panhandle bus fare to get to my student teaching school than ask my family to help me financially.

I don't know call that pride of a man but for whatever reason the thought of it makes me ill.

I feel like I've spent all of my 20's as a poor college student except with not much to show for it.

Amorelle texted me this week telling me she knew a girl that I should meet.
I hate when friends try to set me up.
Getting a date has never been the issue, it's the feeling, feeling something for someone is the issue.
The girl is friends with Maddie which of course I can't stand that woman and I realized I'm also terrible at making new friends.

Fuck it.

This must be the seasonal depression talking because I feel so defeated right now. So emo.

If I have to go on one more first date I'm going to lock myself in my room and hibernate until spring when the days are longer the plants begin to come back to life and there is the sense of hope once again.

Winter isn't all bad though. I do love how strangely quiet the snow seems to make the world. I love how still and at rest everything seems to be. Winter strips away all of life's performances all of the world's impressive attempts at attracting this or that for their own gain.

Flowers bloom to attract insects in order to spread and pollinate
Trees out stretch their beautiful leaves to grab the rays of the sun
Animals come out to perform and show strength in order to win a mate

But in the winter all the fake is tossed away. The squirrels become fat. The trees lose their leaves exposing how thin they truly are. The flowers wither and die hoping the seeds of the next generation are laying in wait for spring's rain.

All seasons have their beauty, all seasons have their ugly.
But what is ugly to some other life depends upon it.
Decomposition to the worm is a special kind of beauty we humans cannot appreciate at the same level.

I just have to make it to March for the Colorado trip.
Trudge the snow to reach a few rocky mountain summits.

I found out I will be teaching 3rd grade at Leawood Elementary in Columbus City schools.
That starts the 17th. I'm very excited to begin the last chapter in my path to becoming a teacher.

Though we travel the world over to find the beautiful, we must carry it with us or we find it not.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

I think about the time John Muir and Emerson met in the Yosemite Valley. The way John viewed Emerson and his friends. I wonder the perspective Ralph had on Muir. I wonder who lived the better life. Is there a better? Is there a right answer?

dodie - Sick of Losing Soulmates

01/01/17

New Years Resolution 2017:
boycott facebook.
Get a Columbus City School teaching job for the autumn.
Turn 30 years old.

Here we go.

But as for me, I'm the simple kind
I'll live and die in this town
It ain't much
But it's good enough for me

The Moon is Down- Radical Face