Social Change - Step by Step

The Introduction to Sociology class has helped me put many names to systems, ideals, and practices I already knew of, but more importantly it has helped me to understand my short-comings in acting and analyzing the social world.

A lot of critiques I've made of the past have left people off the hook. I lea

rned that this practice is called "reification." Going forward, I understand now that it will take a lot of work to really figure out who is

behind the perpetuation of systems of inequality. Despite the amount of vigilance and research that I will undertake to dig up these people, it will be worth it in the end, for I believe a transparency and accountability are parts of a healthy society.

Another thing I need to pay attention to is the functionalist view of how society works. From the readings that we've done, and arguments I've heard in the past, it is usually a functionalist view that is used to maintain the status quo, and all the inequality and oppression that that carries with it.

Although, for me, it is much easier and simpler to argue the conflict perspective, but, for the sak

e of meeting people where they are at, it is a priority of mine to begin analyzing social practices in a functionalist perspective as well. I feel that Merton's Typologies of Deviance will certainly help me along this path.

Finally, this class has helped me gain a deeper understanding of three big "-isms" that continue to privilege a few and oppress many: racism, classism, and sexism. It is my intent to understand how I personally play a part in all of these systems of oppression, and to pick apart the seams that tie them together. To better understand how I can change these systems, I first have to have a better understanding of myself and the socialization I underwent in my respective class, race, and gender assignment. From there, I hope to be an ally in which ever way possible. I hope to take part in an anti-racist training for white activists next Summer with the Catalyst Project, up in San Francisco.

Because I am privileged from so many angles, I've been spread thin over where to put my energy. Also, because I've taken on anarchist ideals, its easy for me to get involved any struggle to lift oppression. However, what I must remember is that every bit helps. I've already been in the practice of challenging people's preconceived notions of what it means to be a male or female, and I've already been pointing out what privilege looks like in various situations. Soon, I will actively and deeply engage myself in food justice, because it is there that I see a lot of intersecting struggles.

I hope my spirit remains genuine, and my cause just. By letting the human need for love and compassion guide me, I know change is only a matter of time. Here's a clip to remind us of our Bay Area history, and to encourage us to keep marching forward for justice.

Gender

I was born, then I was socialized to be male. Going into how this was done would take a whole book, so I'll just stick to the prompt and discuss the advantages and disadvantages.

I'll list the advantages that I've experienced, as a male, in a way that's similar to Peggy McIntosh's "White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack:"

1. My gender gets first introductions in mixed gendered groups meeting for the first time, and first "good-byes" upon leaving
2. If eye contact is made, people usually acknowledge me with a nod, wave, smile, etc.
3. People assume I know what is going on
4. People are less likely to talk about me behind my back or judge me upfront
5. Walking down the street, I am not prone to feeling eye-fucked by everyone
6. There are no expectations to how I should look
7. I do not have to smell "pretty"
8. People will listen to what I have to say, and not take it for granted

For now, that's all I can think of. But here are the disadvantages of being a male:

1. I can be called upon at anytime to defend myself from violent and aggressive people
2. I am expected to stick up for others in a disagreement
3. In my sex life, I am called upon to be the "dominant" person
4. I am expected to make the decisions
5. I must be independent to be worthwhile
6. Emotions, sensitivities, and insecurities must be kept to a visible minimum
7. Affectionate touch comes only from lovers
8. I can be drafted into the military
9. Drivers automatically assume I am spiting them and act aggressively toward me when I might accidentally cut them off or get too far into their path
10. People are less likely to have intimate discussions with me

Now, that's about all I can think of for how society perceives me as a male. I primarily identify as a queer, so I feel it's worthwhile visiting those advantages, then disadvantages:

1. I can dress in whatever feels right at that moment
2. I can be with whomever attracts me
3. I can disregard traditional roles in intimate and public settings
4. I can be expressive and emotional
5. I can be called upon for emotional support and caregiving, no matter what gender the person is who decides to call

Disadvantages:

1. The workplace is very hetero-normative and not always an easy place to be myself
2. I must explain what being "queer" means to a lot of people
3. I am called upon to justify my identity by relating non-heterosexual experiences
4. Some male, heterosexual friends act insecure or threatened by how I interact with them
5. Some female, heterosexual friends dismiss my being open to men as not having any interest in them

I am more attached to my gender-queer identity, although I cannot completely do away with the male gender people ascribe to me.

If I were a girl, and raised a girl, I'd assume life would have been a lot different. For one, my sister and I would probably have a better relationship. Secondly, I would probably be living at home or closer to home. I might still have found myself to be rebellious, being the younger child of the two, but who knows.

If I were to really consider this, I'd have to look at my sister's life. I might have just gone along for the academic ride, done what I was told, and became a teacher or found an area of interest in the medical field, since those professions both run in the family. However, I'd say I'm partly upon that path already. I've decided to not use my privilege and go across the states, in part so I can be more accountable to my family. I've learned massage therapy and now I'm on the path to studying nutritional science and/or sociology, which I plan on using to teach people. My life probably wouldn't be too materially different. It would be different in substance, however. I don't think I would have been through as many transformative situations as I have, in the sense that I've come to question class, gender, and race.

Race - First Experience

My first experience in which I was conscious of race was in elementary school. In fifth grade, I would stay after school and play in the yard. My play buddies where Anthony, who is black, Erica and Mirella, who are Latina, and Michael and Chris, who are white. I would walk to school with Chris and Michael, since they lived in the neighborhood just adjacent to the school and on the way.

Well, there came a time when I had a crush on Erica. Kid crushes are pretty simple, so I'm guessing I liked her because she was pretty good at playing tag, a pretty fast runner, and good at climbing the monkey bars. However, as time went by, I noticed that she took preference to Anthony, and they eventually became a "couple." (I say that in quotes, because I don't know how much of a couple kids can really be at that age, but then again my first kiss was in preschool).

It didn't really hurt me to know that she would prefer Anthony, because at that time I told myself that they would probably be better together because of their similarly darker (than mine) skin color. I figured she preferred him for that very reason.

But even that I'm not sure is the first official time of recognizing race. Is that really recognizing race if I thought that they were better together by belonging to the same "People of Color" group? To me, it doesn't represent the understanding of race, as not only one of separation based on color, but also of privilege. In my example, there is no privilege that was recognized, just skin color. It would almost be like saying that one pair of socks go better with those shoes.

Social Class

I hadn't been to a mall in ages, so this assignment was hard to do. Luckily for me, though, I was able to ground myself a little while I was there by going through the back corridors and having a bite of Cinnabon, things I used to do back in my mall rat days.

Valley Fair is made up of the "standard" mall shops: Vans, Hot Topic, MAC, Apple, Macy's, Forever 21, etc. I would say that the majority of the stores are catered to the low to middle classes.

For my study, I decided to focus on Hot Topic and the Apple Store. Hot Topic, as the name implies, adorns itself with the latest trendy counter-culture items. Basically the whole store is a commodification of that which is on the fringe of acceptance. The music is full of angst, as are the shirts. Because not many people went into there, I didn't feel like it was a good place to stake out. However, those that did walk in came with bags from places like the Sunglass Hut, Pacific Sunwear, and Levi's.

The apple store was strategically designed to put their newest item up front, the iPad. Tons of people hovered around these contraptions, but I don't recall seeing too many people actually purchasing any.

Here's what I used as status markers from both stores: shoes, bags (as in purses and shopping bags), and glasses. At Apple, there was a wide range of shoes. I often look at people's shoes to get a sense of their personality. However, in all these things, shoes notwithstanding, I've found that it's not so much what people carry on themselves or wear that determine class, but more their behaviors.

I didn't stick around long enough to observe individual behaviors, but in terms of classifying people into an economic status, at Valley Fair I'd say that a good majority are working-middle class. Those articles of clothing and accessories that stood out as "fancy," were the exception to the rule, and not the norm. It might be conspicuous consumption, where someone spends beyond their means to produce a false class status, or it might just be that those people are of the minority that had extra money to spend.

Either way, malls aren't fun for me. Looking back now, I should have probably gone across to Santana Row to really see the distinctions between the two groups of people.

Deviance - Propaganda by Deed

Very recently, a man named Faisal Shahzad had pleaded guilty in a New York City courtroom for attempting to set off a car bomb in Times Square.

In his plea, Faisal referred to himself as a "M

uslim soldier," and said that in the war the US engages itself in he is "part of the answer to the US terrorizing the Muslim nations and Muslim people."

In an attempt to legitimize the indiscriminate nature of his failed action, Faisal said "Living in the United States, Americans only care about their people, but they don't care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die."

I believe that Faisal raised a really good point in regards to the United State's engagement in terrorist activities. Is not occupying a country and subjugating that population of people based on looks or religious affiliation terror? Wouldn't

the constant threat of death by bullet or bomb, or the threat of losing a loved one or a cherished building, constitute terror?

Within the conflict view of deviance, the Labeling Theory explains how deviance is determined by the audience, and that an action is only deviant when it is labelled as such. In this case, the deviant behavior was the attempt to cause civilian casualties, and the label Faisal Shahzad received is "terrorist." Unfortunately for Faisal, he doesn't have the power in society for his accusation of the US being the "terrorist" entity for very much public opinion to be persuaded to his side. It also doesn't help that he stands out for his action, whereas those people in power in the US who decide to bomb areas that lead to many civilian casualties have the privilege of anonymity. The chain of command also limits liability and obscures accountability; a person acting on their own is much more vulnerable to scapegoating than those who act according to orders.

Although indiscriminate attacks on civilians, a.k.a. terrorist attacks, might seem new, they have actually been around for quite some time. When the US was more of a closed system than it is now, many radicals took up the banner of "propaganda by deed." The point was to show the general population of people that they have the power to take down powerful people and bring revolution closer by way of assassinations and bombings.

Émile Henry came to mind when I first read some of the things Faisal Shahzad said. Émile was a French anarchist who, in 1894, threw a bomb into a cafe that killed one person while wounding twenty. His reasons for indiscriminately targeting civilians were because "The whole of the bourgeoisie lives by the exploitation of the unfortunate," and he was out for revenge.

In his defense speech, Émile, like Faisal, doesn't proclaim to be innocent. In fact, the two of them have a similar level of righteous conviction for what they've done, or attempted to do. Both of them explain how their actions were done for the liberation of those most oppressed: for Émile, it was the working class families and families of the repressed radicals, namely the anarchists; for Faisal, it is the Muslim people who feel the weight of discrimination in the form of deadly arsenal raining down on them.

Group Think

Group think is difficult to avoid in this society, especially when a majority of us are conditioned for over 12 years to conform to certain standards in school. On top of that, we're taught to draw inside the lines, raise our hands before speaking, and follow the instructor's every word.

However much contrived and coerced group think may seem bad, especially when perpetuated by institutions such as compulsory education, it is my sincere belief that social group think, brought by peer pressure and willful ignorance, is what really damages our intellectual capabilities. Case in point, I had plenty of frie

nds growing up who would drink beyond their tolerances. Shit, I still have friends like that, but I diverge. Although binge drinking is never good, what is even worse is driving while intoxicated. I lost a friend to drunk driving because of two group think kinda behaviors: 1) people believing they are fine to drive after having too many drinks and 2) trusting too much in the protection of a car.

Drinking and driving is dumb, flat out. The pa

rt where group think comes in is when the group, as a whole, permits this behavior. But for my friend's death, the silence of his friends wasn't the only factor. As I mentioned above, an even bigger false belief, that people should also not have while driving sober, is that cars are perfectly safe.

An object weighing several thousand pounds moving at several times the speed and average person can run is a deadly object. It's a pretty simple deduction, really. Of course, the larger your car, the more safety you have at the expense of others. Because people perceive cars as safe, they engage in distracting behaviors such as talking on the phone, eating, shaving, etc., that takes attention away from the act of driving.

I was going to go into car culture, but I feel that would make this post obnoxiously long.

Reading News Articles

Think humans, think! Sometimes I wish I were an extraterrestrial, so then I feel less ashamed of the human capacity to absorb and repeat. This desire is all sparked by my friend, who employed his Facebook status as a means to disseminate his opinions about anarchists via an article he read in The Mercury News.

If you've taken a history class or an anthropology course, you should know that first-hand accounts and documents are the most valuable to any story. What the Mercury News did was get testimony from the captain of the police force and utilized a video provided by ABC 7 with participant footage and next day thoughts from Santa Cruz students and business owners. The whole thing was sensationalized, pitting the "violent" protesters against the victimized businesses. Several things were misrepresented:

1. It was not a protest, like the Merc and ABC 7 say it was, but a street party, in a Reclaim The Streets fashion.

2. The "fire" on the patio was protesters putting their torches down, with no visible sign of burning seen by the workers the next day.

Well, my friend took the face-value information, from the Merc, and announced his feelings about anarchists based on his ill-informed opinions. Several things should be learned from this:

1. In reading an article in corporate media, dig deeper to find the source. My friend didn't do this, so he assumed the anarchists were endangering children and immigrants, when really the party was billed as a dance party at night with an ambiguous notion to either have a lot of fun partying or fucking shit up.

2. After finding the source, check out what other people have to say. From the following link, you can read other peoples' responses as well as follow other links to other accounts.

3. After you have a general idea of what happened, remember that the people in the story you read about don't represent everyone who share a similar identity, or title. My friend stated that he's fed up with anarchists since they do this shit all the time. That is a blanket statement, where one specific group of people are used, usually very stereotypically, to define a whole variety of groups. For instance, all white people are greedy. You know this is not true as long as you know me, and of course there are others. I could have just as easily said that socialists are elitist, but I know that that is not always the case. In this specific instance, these anarchists that performed destructive acts (note how I do not say "violent") against property are insurrectionary anarchists, and really don't help in the anarchist cause unless there does come a day when the government decides to make the USA a police state, which some feel it is already. Although I recognize we are living in a semi-police state, I also recognize the need for structure and coordination among anarchist groups in order to build an international solidarity base.

4. Finally, once you've identified the specific group who are the actors in the story, it relies on you to fill in the missing links in the story based on informed opinion. So basically, this step is to emphasize asking "Why?" On this note, we need to look a lot deeper into the reasons behind specific actions and tactics.

In this instance of insurrectionary anarchists, what drives them to destroy property, without distinguishing between local, family-owned businesses and the corporate chains?

Because I share similar feelings - albeit different tactics, mind you - and a similar world view, I believe I can answer this based on my own feelings. Private property, ever since its inception, has put people out of work and displaced people from a place in which to dwell. Before private property, people held the land and worked the land in common. Granted, the land belonged to royalty, but at least they had a place to live and food to eat. Now, people who own property use up all the resources on the land, they horde it all to themselves, or they sell it for profit. This makes property owners those with the most power and voice ("vote with your dollar" bullshit) in this society, as it is the working class that must sell their labor to these property owners in order for them to survive and pay for necessities. When one has this view, it would be easy to engage in destructive acts against property without distinguishing between corporate and family-owned.

Also, why would the insurrectionists choose to veil themselves in a street party and engage in property destruction then?

As I mentioned earlier, some people already believe we are in an all-out police state. With that said, most insurrectionary anarchists will veil themselves with bandanas and dress all in black so identifying features do not stand out to cameras and can't be reported to police. Because we live in an age of mass misinformation, these anarchists feel it is also necessary to veil themselves from the general public because the general public, in their eyes, are most often sheep to the slaughter, and therefore corroborators to the police. When engaged in acts of liberation, against property and non-consensual authority, many anarchists adopt this masked and blacked out costume. In terms of doing it during a street party, their aims may have been to disguise their destruction of property as a celebration of free space, or they really felt inclined to just take the party a step further. The street party was already breaking the laws of obstructing property and being an unpermitted march, so breaking windows of the institutions that keep people powerless wouldn't be much of a leap. What's true of any act of liberation, is that it snow balls. When one person demonstrates that they can cast off the shackles of society, or unjust laws that favor the property owners and not the dispossessed, then what generally happens is that others follow suit. When done as a solitary act, as in an assassination or arson attempt, it doesn't have much power and usually becomes discredited as an act of terrorism. But when people do it in crowds, it has the possibility of invoking revolt, insurrection, and even revolution. The problem with the black bloc, as the blacked out and masked anarchists are called, is that their costumes often alienate the rest of the crowd, who aren't likely to follow suit when the individuals they see performing the action isn't someone with whom they can identify.

As you can see, the situation is more complex than one makes it out to be. Thoughts?

Pollutants: STAR, pesticides, oil, etc.

Upon arriving to the elementary school, we, the volunteers, were assigned to our own classes to help out with. When I heard that one class was going to be working in the garden, I quickly volunteered myself for that classroom. I went over to room 22, where a 3rd grade class was in the middle of the classroom portion of a two part lesson about pollution provided by two UCSC undergraduate interns.

The discussion of pollution was definitely themed toward the Watsonville landscape of farms. A lot of the topics seemed to go over the kids heads, and I don't blame them. The UCSC students even gave the 3rd grade students a chance at guessing what nonpoint source pollution (NPS) could be, which I just had to look up myself to know exactly what those terms meant when put together. They also didn't have all their facts together, as they said that pesticide kills bugs and not weeds, but really pesticides kill anything considered pests, including weeds, although they are more specifically labeled as herbicides.

The second portion of the pollution lesson consisted in going out to the garden where the children got into groups and created a simulated contaminated water supply. The ingredients were water, grass, vegetable oil, beans, vinegar, paper clippings, and cumin. They represented water, runoff foliage, car and industrial oil, poop, acid, trash, and pesticides, respectively. Although it could have served as a good simulation for educational purposes, the kids' age range was not on point. In third grade kids need to be involved and constantly challenged in order to keep their attention and interest. In this exercise, I feel more time was spent by the UCSC interns and the teacher in keeping the kids seated at the benches and quiet than actually teaching them something. To me, this is all because of the structure of the lesson. It is my feeling that kids at that age still learn very kinesthetically, by movement, so keeping them contained will not only hamper their learning, but it will be damn near impossible.

...break in non-stop writing...

I am blessed to have friends who have already graduated with degrees in areas that I'm interested in pursuing or researching myself. I just got off the phone with my friend who now teaches 3rd graders and majored in Psychology with a concentration in Child Development and also majored in Philosophy. After speculating in the previous passage about how kids learn at that age, especially in that context, I just had to get her opinion. Turns out I was pretty much spot-on!

She reference one of my favorite authors, Paulo Freire, who talks about how education can be transformed to actually serve the needs of the students more in his book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. In the case of the 3rd graders that I was working with, the UCSC interns were using the banking method of teaching to get the kids to "learn." The banking method of teaching is the idea that students' minds are a tabula rasa, Latin for "blank slate," upon which teachers deposit their knowledge. In this instance, the interns assume the kids don't have any knowledge of pollution, and therefore it is the teachers' duty to fill in that space in their thinking. Sadly, this form of education remains the main mode of teaching throughout public education, which devalues the student's own experiences, their abilities to critically think, and the student's actual needs in learning.

While there were aspects of the lesson that required the students to come up with their own answers, most of the information was prescribed. Also, as I mentioned, the students were not being engaged. This leads me to emphasize the importance of experiential learning paired with problem-posing education. Problem-posing education was presented by Paulo Freire as and alternative to the banking approach, in that problems that can be and need to be solved by the students are the main focus, encouraging students to have an active role in their own education. While the 3rd graders did get a simulated polluted water supply, very little of the lesson utilized active problem solving. At the wrap up, when we asked the students what they learned (or remembered in this instance), very few of them could even recall what all the ingredients represented.

Before recess, the teacher had told me that in a conversation she had with her daughter the other day, she expressed that she didn't really feel like she was teaching her students anything except how to take tests. I discussed this concept a little with the group, with Scott reminding me that, at this point, it's not our place to criticize the failure of standardized testing. Really, how can we when this stupid test has been around since I was in K-12, until I graduated in 2006? If no one has abolished it yet, then who are we, as tutors and as unqualified outsiders, to tell a struggling school that succeeding in it is as relevant to the kids success as learning to juggle, but when the school's funding depends on it?

After recess, we got back into the function of containing the children's energy before we passed out the STAR practice tests. Because the teacher had already expressed to me that her focus was on teaching the kids how to get through the test, I understood the process when she taught the kids to look for key words in the question in order to find the answer in the text. The sad part was that in my mind I was thrown back to high school, when my professor was teaching me the exact same thing in order to succeed in another standardized test.

One student, Jesus, got done with all the questions really quick. I checked them, from afar, to see if they were all correct, and they were, though his answers started at #1 when the questions we were working on were #11-16. When time came to go over the questions as a class, he was totally in his own world of energetic, attention-grabbing behavior. Once again, I was reminded of back when I was a kid, but I eventually was diagnosed with "ADD," which I know think is a bogus diagnosis because I've recently been finding that everyone pretty much has ADD. I feel the problem isn't the child being inattentive, but the institution not giving the child enough to be interested in. So rather than fixing the problem in the institution, psychiatrists drug kids so they "misbehave" in uninspiring classes. I digress.

In the end, I did feel like all we were doing was getting them prepared for standardized testing. Furthermore, STAR might be the first test that gets students to think in this fashion, of working the system rather than actually learning and applying one's knowledge. This to me is an indicator that we should be encouraging critical thinking a lot sooner than high school, when critical thinking was beginning to be introduced to me (aside from punk music). If standardization, as a process of conforming minds to a certain standard, begins in elementary school, then we are wrong in thinking that beginning a discourse on how to think critically in high school will really do anything. By then, the standardized form of schooling has been ingrained. (Click the link for John Taylor Gatto's breakdown of compulsory education to see what I mean, and how it has very negative effects on our society, since we're over consuming and all). Standardized testing, because those who design the tests don't take into account the differences - class, race, location - among school settings, the tests also privilege mostly white middle-class students, who don't have to deal with internalized oppression as an active force affecting their judgement going into the test.

As an anarchist, I do not see the viability in traditional education nor in standardized testing. Standardized testing doesn't make sense. Because humans live, breathe, eat, sleep, and clothe themselves differently, it is likely that they will think differently. That means they will do some tasks at different paces than others, it means that they will do different things according to the different situations, and it means they can focus more in some areas and less in others compared to other people. People generally learn differently from other people. I'm not saying that you can't put people into some loosely defined group based on types of learning, but nothing is ever fixed. Therefore, testing that gets standardized county-wide, state-wide, and nation-wide are useless in showing a students' performance. Using these standardized tests to decide what funding schools will get is an injustice to people everywhere, and it's a sad reason why schools are turning charter and killing unions. But that's another issue.

The structure of schools are also against my principles. Schools set up a hierarchy of knowledge, and, as Gatto mentions, diffuses critical thinking. The system sets up a prison-like day-care center for kids where rules must be stringently obeyed, especially those of the people in authority, namely teachers and administrators. The fear of these peoples' positions, as well as the rules they enforce, make it hard to question ones' environment. Not to mention the sad fact that every piece of knowledge has gotten compartmentalized, so that once you learn about the great mechanization of industry you don't learn about the horrible alienating reverberations sent throughout society. Anarchist back in the day realized the lack of attention to class in school, so they set up modern schools. Now-a-days, anti-authoritarians and forward thinkers realize how compulsory schools and higher learning institutions facilitate a concentration of knowledge, and therefore power, while simultaneously devaluing community based education and experiential learning. To combat that, skill-shares and free skools have been organized to provide non-hierarchal education on a range of topics. I've been meaning to make it out to the Santa Cruz free skool myself, and I tried to get a skill-share going during Tent City, but we got mostly rained out and I didn't plan it out well enough. Let me know if you ever want to go.

Drugs: Just a side-note of the ride to the Watsonville elementary school

On Friday, April 23, I went with the TOUCCh crew down to the elementary school in Watsonville with all seats filled in Scott's van. We had some good conversations about decriminalizing marijuana and the effects of drugs in general. Obviously it wasn't a subject matter that we would carry over into our work with the children, but it was nonetheless good that we were talking about such things.

I saw Angela Davis, the prison abolitionist and professor at UCSC, on Wednesday at SJSU. She explained how prisons serve as depositories for all the things that we don't want to deal with and face up to. This is what I've come up with: We don't want to deal with poverty that causes people to steal, throw the poor in jail. We don't want to deal with the alienating effects of a culture of competition and hierarchy, throw the bank robbers in jail. We don't want to deal with public spaces and cultural centers disappearing, throw the addicts in jail. It seems we have reached a point in which the prison population, 2.3 million, is too much to ignore, and yet simple things such as drugs are still stigmatized.

I think it's essential that we talk more about our own experiences with drugs, hopefully with the end being that they become familiar enough that we don't devote whole conversations solely to defining what it's like to be on them. For the sake of starting this conversation, I'll have you know that I'm in support of plants and minimally processed substances. I smoke marijuana from time to time, drink alcohol from time to time, and, when it calls to me, I'll eat psilocybin mushrooms. I don't like cigarettes because they are owned, usually, by some fucked up corporations. I don't like cocaine, because it's a total waste of money and time and brain cells, but I do support indigenous people using the coca leaf, which is the unprocessed form. I think LSD should be done by people who are grounded in themselves, but I'm still forming my opinion on this substance. I don't like ecstasy because, to me, it represents our culture's excessive focus on the superficial sensations. Plus it usually comes with the territory of dumb people (at least temporarily), unsafe situations (STDs, nonconsensual groping, horrible decision-making in shady situations, etc.), and the unknown factor, as in you don't really ever know what's in that shit. Finally, I totally hate crystal meth, a.k.a. methamphetamine, because I've lost several high school friends to that and seen the long term effects in my friends' sister, who has two kids at 25, and a former renter of a room at their house.

All in all, if you all decide to do any drugs, I can give you my personal opinions and share my experiences with you. As I said before, and I'll say it again, I've found that the natural and minimally processed tend to be the best for me in certain instances. All substances have their correct places to do them and a desired effect, so it's best to know this if you're totally committed to doing a specific something. I would emphasize people to take a more spiritual approach to these substances, rather than just sheer bodily pleasure. Also, one thing to really consider in all of this is whether whatever it is is ethically and ecologically sourced. I stick to local/domestic weed, local/domestic alcohol, and domestic shrooms. For more info, talk to me or check out Erowid.

p.s. I'm trying to break with caffeine, another drug, but it's still providing too much of a daily purpose.

From freethinker to anarchist

In this mind boggling existence I know as life, there has been one thing that has really helped me along in understanding the world around me: freethinking. I have considered myself a freethinker since I was just about to turn 15. The idea of questioning ideas proscribed to me in school was a familiar practice; I learned how to mindfully challenge authority back in middle school when I gained the concept of authority and rebellion through punk music. Even farther back, in preschool, I would evade the preschool aides who assigned me timeouts for bad behavior by running into the jungle gym. But I digress.

Freethinking can be a relatively simple practice. One can begin by looking at two opinions about the same issue and then forming ones' own opinion. But for me, freethinking is not enough to understand our complex systems of interactions and socially constructed identities. That is why I am a radical. Radical comes from the Latin "radix," meaning root. To be radical, means to look at the root of the issue. While freethinking does utilize multiple opinions, science, and logic, it doesn't, to me, go as deep as radical analysis, which often incorporates an acknowledgement that whatever is in question, and the ways in which one does the questioning, has flaws of their own rooted in the current social order.

To be more specific, I am an unapologetic anarchist. *gasp* Some people decide not to take specific titles. A lot of people group themselves into the larger definition of progressive or radical for the sake of not having to defend their ideas. However, anarchist is a specific identity that I feel those of us with decentralist, community-based, and collective-power oriented tendencies need to own up! Corporate media and hegemonic history books paint a picture of anarchists as destructive, reactionary individualists. Fighting this image of anarchism is necessary. To me, reclaiming the identity of anarchism is as vital to social justice as informing the world that NO ONE IS ILLEGAL, that WAR IS NOT INEVITABLE, and that MARKETS ARE NOT NATURAL PHENOMENA.

Anarchism has a rich cultural history. One can point to Gerrard Winstanley and the Diggers as an expression of early anarchist tendencies at the outset of private property. In the 19th century, anarchists were among the first to advocate free love, an idea that challenged marriage and can now be considered the dialectical opposite of that institution of ownership. Anarchists have, since their first written accounts, had the belief that human behavior is social, and therefore learned. This line of thinking is what has made anarchists question the legitimacy of hierarchal structures that run contrary to how humans have traditionally functioned. Furthermore, this idea is, to me, an indication that anarchists were thinking sociologically far before any theories labeled "sociological" in retrospect.

Well, I'll leave it there for now. I'll be incorporating anarchist fact into my weekly blogs in any case. Good night.