Day: November 10, 2015

Last month not a whole lot of people knew who Jonathan Butler was. Now he is the man who led a football team to not play and a university system to its knees. I am of course, talking about the Missouri situation. When I think about the term discrimination I see it as a form of bullying. It is one group deciding to tell another smaller group what they can and can’t do and where they can and can’t do it.

Externally, we don’t deal with discrimination and bullying all too well. The moment Americans ‘don’t feel safe’ that is a signifier that bad times are ahead for the place where we don’t feel safe. It is quickly followed by that foreign population telling us to go away. However, if someone tells America to go somewhere else, we will invade your country, take your oil, and then build you a bunch of new stuff so our corporations actually do feel comfortable staying right where they are. Of course there’s money involved there, so we are fundamentally invested in the financial outcome as a capitalist society.

I feel like the tide has fundamentally shifted internally. Nowadays when someone says, ‘I don’t feel safe’ we tell them to go somewhere else. It is as if we suddenly believe that if you don’t feel safe in one place or one section of our vast nation then instead of confronting the problem you should get up and move somewhere you do feel safe. The situation in Missouri was (and continues to be) that black students faced a great deal of discrimination and the authorities refused to do anything significant about it. The situation was treated simply as ‘how things are’ in Mizzou. That is, until the largely black football team decided to stop playing. This became such a big deal that even Fox News had to tell the tale–though the bold faced headline they led with touted the protestors as the problem.

I don’t pretend to know all of the details in the Missouri situation, but I know that we are a nation literally founded on civil disobedience. I find it ironic that the same people who tout the Boston Tea Party as a core moment in the birth of our nation look so disparagingly upon a group of ball players saying they won’t play until conditions are right. I guess when it affects something that matters to you, the way you perceive things change dramatically.

 

 

 

 

I’m writing this post sans internet, so it won’t be up till the morning when I’m sitting at my regular booth at Village Inn writing the next one. At some point I became the guy that has a regular booth, waiter, time of arrival, and meal at a breakfast spot. In a way it’s the guy I always wanted to be—the guy you see at the front of those old small town mysteries who stumbles on to something nefarious and tugs at the threads until it unravels, revealing itself as a great plot.

That, or I’m just a guy who goes to the same spot to write every Tuesday and Thursday morning and gets a thrill just knowing he’s living the writer’s life. Slowly I’m getting a great deal better at that construct, moving away from the nonsense of slow dying and moving inexorably towards a life of real happiness—not just from the three bright stars in my life, but in love and work and the deep practice of writing and reading.

And video games too. Lets not forget that, despite the hours of senseless button mashing, there is a wealth of creative storytelling to be found in games. I wish I had more time to access that—maybe the summer. Maybe I’ll design a summer research project around embedding popular gaming into the classroom (How I learned Math through Warcraft?). It comes down to finding the time and love to do the things in life that are good for your heart and soul. It comes down to finding the people to do it with.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I haven’t seen my dudes since I skyped with them Saturday morning. I feel like I’m impeding on their special time with their mom when I interrupt to call or to let them know that I’m still out here in the world missing them and loving them. I haven’t been with them since Thursday, which is the longest I’ve been without my kids in as long as I can remember. It isn’t a happy feeling to be away from them for that long. I’m crazy about those boys. I’ll be seeing them in the afternoon!