look. everyone is sick of hearing about it and talking about it. of turning on the tv and seeing the images. we're a culture, not just a country, built on the ideology of silencing violence -- believe me, it's been on my mind, i just wrote a whole fucking chapter about it for my graduate work. the ways in which social spaces reject violence because it's unpleasant. because it messes with the safe order of things.

but check it. and check it straight. there can't be anything good to come of catastrophe, and i don't wish this harm and injury that won't be healed for any number of years that pass in the individual lives it has touched. but i do know one thing -- i am grateful that finally, finally, there seems to be some wide-spread acknowledgement of some of the topics for which i have and will continue to dedicate my life to in this very real and unfortunate 'natural' disaster.

poverty. racism. the legacy of slavery and oppression, especially in the still impoverished and forgotten lives of so many economically disenfranchised african american southern united states lives.

if there's anything that this country that i live in and this current administration and the power of the people who voted him into office have taught me over and over again in my life -- it's that brown skin will never be afforded privilege and that prejudice and the privilege of white christian idealism will continue to proffer the unfortunate attitude that ideology breeds intolerance. and worse yet, it breeds generations on generations of blindness and silence.

the catastrophe isn't the destruction brought by any weather--it's the violence that has taken place for years and years before. that continues to take place. the won't see significant change in my lifetime. i'll keep trying. one chapter at a time. one student at a time. one white girl teaching white kids who've likely never seen more than a handful of black people in their life time and who have no idea what the word ghetto means, beyond labeling the 'bad part' of their middle class privileged home towns. who think that crime is that one of their psychotic spoiled white class mates compiled a list of the kids he thought made him feel bad about himself and said he might do them harm and so he was kicked out. that's no understanding of living in fear -- that's being spoiled in a world that you already expect to love and care about you.

[okay, i better stop before i fall off the soap box and break the people who already know all this anyway. plus, other people are saying this better than i ever could, anyhow. just check the ny times.]

the tragedy, obviously, is that no one was talking about the real tragedy going on already.