From: owner-eda-thoughts-digest@smoe.org (eda-thoughts-digest) To: eda-thoughts-digest@smoe.org Subject: eda-thoughts-digest V4 #36 Reply-To: eda-thoughts@smoe.org Sender: owner-eda-thoughts-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-eda-thoughts-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk eda-thoughts-digest Monday, March 12 2001 Volume 04 : Number 036 * If you ever wish to unsubscribe, send an email to * eda-thoughts-digest-request@smoe.org with ONLY * the word unsubscribe in the body of the email * . * PLEASE :) when you reply to this digest to send a post TO the list, * change the subject to reflect what your post is about. A subject * of Re: eda-thoughts-digest V3 #xxx or the like gives readers no clue * as to what your message is about. Today's Subjects: ----------------- ET: i am at peace for tonight. [Katherine Alexandra ] ET: and another shooting... [Katherine Alexandra Subject: ET: i am at peace for tonight. i need women friends. i say this too myself while i stare at the toilet seat up, again, by my male roommate. who has been there for me in the past week. the man i have been wrapped up into for over a year now, has decided that he no longer wants me to be his girl. i took this news with tears and longing to be home. i am so far from home. i was not expecting this, when i looked at my future college life. i was not expecting to stay at home on friday nights, while reading russian novels and drinking wine. i thought i would be in the mist of all the madness that only university brings. only to find myself needing self exploration, needing to know who i am. this has been an obsession with me since i was a child. i have gone at great lengths at "knowing" who i am. from developing friendships in every circle possible, to purposely getting in trouble to see how would myself would deal with the punishment, to living overseas and backpacking through europe. i have always needed to go a step further. move cross country. go into therapy. read those russian novels. meditate. i am unsure of how i even got here. got to the point of self analyzing and living in a self-obssesed world of wanting to know why i do what it is that i do. this, who i am, is not who i invisioned at 10 or even 16. i was not expecting to ever allow my hair to turn its natural brown, or take out those contacts that i begged my mother to allow me to wear at 14. i have become aware of my sexuality, without fear of it. without forcing it, without confronting it. i have found this incredible balance of self. yet this feeling will only last for so long. it drifts away so quickly. that moment of grabbing onto self. of knowing who i am, if only briefly. knowing the core of myself without taking that philosophy course. and i blame my father. for praising emotional growth as children. for pushing us to identify those emotions, the ugly ones and beautiful ones. the ones that we are ashamed of, and the ones that we are proud of. for forcing us to question our own reaction. for pealing the layors off ourselves, and not allowing any person to do this but ourself. i sit here, on a saturday night, reading the catcher and the rye. with of a rush of acceptance running through my blood. for now, i feel complete with my history. i am no longer angry at the pain or ashamed of who i am. i am no longer searching for missing links. i am at peace. i am at peace for tonight. Yahoo! Auctions - Buy the things you want at great prices. http://auctions.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 00:39:28 -0800 (PST) From: Katherine Alexandra Subject: ET: nostaligic nostalgic so now we are talking about yestarday. this time with a smile. i have my nervous laugh. we act as though nothing has changed. we act as though that year was a good one. we forget the bad. just for a moment. we let it all slip under the rug, as we remember first kisses and blushes. as you tell me how fantastic i am. and i tell you how brilliant you are. we are in love. briefly. through nostaligic memories... Yahoo! Auctions - Buy the things you want at great prices. http://auctions.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 00:53:49 -0800 (PST) From: Katherine Alexandra Subject: ET: and another shooting... this is one of the most talked about to death subjects, the school shootings. thought i would just throw this out, in curiosity of what you guys think of this. a great deal of you on this list are still in high school or jr high, where these shootings tend to take place. as everyone, i have my own thoughts on this and would really like to hear what others think of it. i was surprised we went a few months without any, and just like that, 2 happened in one week. yah! the cancer is still in america and we are still surprised and unsure of what to think. but something was different this time. kids were taking photos of this...to me that seems creepier then the person that went shooting (that person almost always being a white suburban male in his early teens), and to me it seems kinda creepy that we are already starting to get desensitised by all of this. its like hearing of a horrible murder over and over and over and over again...at some point people stop realizing that it is actually happening. it seemed like the students weren't even seeing themselves as part of the pain, but as observers, watching the news, wanting a photo to remember this grande media event. same ol' american story now. its for all of the reasons that people say, guns are too easy to get, parents aren't involved, overcrowded classrooms, violance, video games, lack of fathers, lack of mothers, too high of expectations, too low, suburban blues, angst... but i think part of this "problem", is that we refuse to look at the root of it. its like we refuse to look at why the kid pulls the trigger, or why the classrooms are too large, or why the parents aren't involved, or why the kids are being teased (the most important reason of all). maybe we need to start look at the school system and why so many people feel as though they have fallen through the cracks. why is it that so many children (and we must always remember that these are children, they need to be protected by society, even the children that shoot in the schools, they too need protection),but why is it that children feel this intense of pain, why are they being hurt so much inside of the schools? why such low tolerance? just wondering what the rest of you think... kat Yahoo! Auctions - Buy the things you want at great prices. http://auctions.yahoo.com/ ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 14:40:26 EST From: JonBoy911@aol.com Subject: Re: ET: and another shooting... this is an article from an amazing speaker and writer, and Kat's words made me decide to forward it on.... School Shootings and White Denial - A White Person's Perspective Tim Wise, AlterNet March 6, 2001 I can think of no other way to say this, so here goes: white people need to pull our heads out of our collective ass. Two more white children are dead and thirteen are injured, and another "nice" community is scratching its blonde head, utterly perplexed at how a school shooting the likes of the one yesterday in Santee, California could happen. After all, as the Mayor of the town said in an interview with CNN: "We're a solid town, a good town, with good kids, a good church-going town, an All-American town." Yeah, well maybe that's the problem. I said this after Columbine and no one listened so I'll say it again -- white people live in an utter state of self-delusion. We think danger is black, brown and poor, and if we can just move far enough away from "those people" in the cities we 'll be safe. If we can just find an "all-American" town, life will be better, because "things like this just don't happen here." Well bullshit on that. In case you hadn't noticed, "here" is about the only place these kinds of things do happen. Oh sure, there is plenty of violence in urban communities and schools. But mass murder; wholesale slaughter; take-a-gun-and-see-how-many-you can-kill kinda craziness seems made for those safe places: the white suburbs or rural communities. And yet once again, we hear the FBI insist there is no "profile" of a school shooter. Come again? White boy after white boy after white boy, with very few exceptions to that rule (and none in the mass shooting category), decides to use their classmates for target practice, and yet there is no profile? Imagine if all these killers had been black: would we still hesitate to put a racial face on the perpetrators? Doubtful. Indeed, if any black child in America especially in the mostly white suburbs of Littleton, or Santee, were to openly discuss their plans to murder fellow students, as happened both at Columbine and now Santana High, you can bet your ass that somebody would have turned them in, and the cops would have beat a path to their doorstep. But when whites discuss their murderous intentions, our stereotypes of what danger looks like cause us to ignore they're just "talking" and won't really do anything. How many kids have to die before we rethink that nonsense? How many dazed and confused parents, Mayors and Sheriffs do we have to listen to, describing how "normal" and safe their community is, and how they just can't understand what went wrong? I'll tell you what went wrong and it's not TV, rap music, video games or a lack of prayer in school. What went wrong is that white Americans decided to ignore dysfunction and violence when it only affected other communities, and thereby blinded themselves to the inevitable creeping of chaos which never remains isolated too long. What affects the urban "ghetto" today will be coming to a Wal-Mart near you tomorrow, and unless you address the emptiness, pain, isolation and lack of hope felt by children of color and the poor, then don't be shocked when the support systems aren't there for your kids either. What went wrong is that we allowed ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security by media representations of crime and violence that portray both as the province of those who are anything but white like us. We ignore the warning signs, because in our minds the warning signs don't live in our neighborhood, but across town, in that place where we lock our car doors on the rare occasion we have to drive there. That false sense of security, the result of racist and classist stereotypes, then gets people killed. And still we act amazed. But listen up my fellow white Americans: your children are no better, no nicer, no more moral, no more decent than anyone else. Dysfunction is all around you, whether you choose to recognize it or not. According to the Centers for Disease Control, and Department of Health and Human Services, it is your children, and not those of the urban ghetto, who are most likely to use drugs. That's right: white high school students are seven times more likely than blacks to have used cocaine; eight times more likely to have smoked crack; ten times more likely to have used LSD and seven times more likely to have used heroin. In fact, there are more white high school students who have used crystal methamphetamine (the most addictive drug on the streets) than there are black students who smoke cigarettes. What's more, white youth ages 12-17 are more likely to sell drugs: 34% more likely, in fact than their black counterparts. And it is white youth who are twice as likely to binge drink, and nearly twice as likely as blacks to drive drunk. And white males are twice as likely to bring a weapon to school as are black males. And yet I would bet a valued body part that there aren't 100 white people in Santee, California, or most any other "nice" community who have ever heard a single one of the statistics above. Even though they were collected by government agencies using these folks' tax money for the purpose. Because the media doesn't report on white dysfunction. A few years ago, U.S. News ran a story entitled: "A Shocking look at blacks and crime." Yet never have they or any other news outlet discussed the "shocking" whiteness of these shoot-em-ups. Indeed, every time media commentators discuss the similarities in these crimes they mention that the shooters were boys, they were loners, they got picked on, but never do they seem to notice a certain highly visible melanin deficiency. Color-blind, I guess. White-blind is more like it, as I figure these folks would spot color mighty damn quick were some of it to stroll into their community. Santee's whiteness is so taken for granted by its residents that the Mayor, in that CNN interview, thought nothing of saying on the one hand that the town was 82 percent white, but on the other hand that "this is America." Well that isn't America, and it especially isn't California, where whites are only half of the population. This is a town that is removed from America, and yet its Mayor thinks they are the normal ones, so much so that when asked about racial diversity, he replied that there weren't many of different "ethni-tis-tities." Not a word. Not even close. I'd like to think that after this one, people would wake up. Take note. Rethink their stereotypes of who the dangerous ones are. But deep down, I know better. The folks hitting the snooze button on this none-too-subtle alarm are my own people, after all, and I know their blindness like the back of my hand. Tim Wise is a Nashville-based writer and activist and can be reached at tjwise@mindspring.com ------------------------------ Date: Sun, 11 Mar 2001 15:11:11 EST From: DrkShadws85@aol.com Subject: ET: provoked thoughts these are some thoughts that i had after watching a show about shootings, and the victims behind them arent known.. ~~ - --she cant-- Just because she can talk with confidence and I cant Doesn't mean that I am less than The world Or at least any less that I already knew That I was I was walking down a dark ally Like mom always told me not to And I met myself Sitting on the corner With what I thought that I could never have Which was a smile that someone else Gave to me I was sitting around thinking of someone They never thought of me back But that was a never a issue In my hands I was washing away your impurities And taking them into me In my mind you loved me and I was never more wrong You live you learn and then you go away And I can choose from one color to another and that may not mean anything If you are completely blind to everything Which I have already discovered that you are Don't lie and tell me you know the truth I see the look in your eyes when you look in the mirror In-between the pain and the joy There's something there Not because I want to because I have to I was never left with the choice of Right and wrong Just survival or don't survive There's a fire waiting for you to light If you hold the right words you could easily Get your hands on a gun Bang bang bang Little boys playing cops and robbers Think about it, though they don't know it Not quite as innocent as you think You would think that someone would teach their child Morals, right from wrong, good from bad And sometimes they know it and don't care Because what feels right may come before Any other decision Don't come crawling around anymore I don't think that there is anything left that I can do I tried to heal your wounds and I couldn't I just could hold you in my arms all night Cherishing the things that you did give me and wishing That I could remember everything that I gave you The fact that you couldn't was okay I just didn't want you to forget me when you left Never good and juggling people Never one or the other Please everyone before yourself Because they have to be better than you Everything is better than you Even that girl that talks with confidence I watched my skin dry and crack I watched my brain fall out through my ears I missed something so much and dreaded writing the letter That was to ask what in the heck was going on Did you leave for some particular reason Or was it the fact that you didn't want to stay Didn't want to say good Were you afraid that by some chance you may miss me to? We don't always get the answers that we are expecting What bugs me you let others take over your world What bothers me more is I saw you acting like me I never doomed you to that and now All these tears are for you honey Even though you never saw them and you never heard my voice It was all for you She cant move from all the pain And letting her insides eat her away Is all she knows how to do She cant accept what's going on outside her window Maybe someday one of those people with the words Could get her a gun Get her the spotlight Get her out of everywhere that she is And everywhere that she doesn't want to be ------------------------------ End of eda-thoughts-digest V4 #36 *********************************