December 5, 2016

TRAVELER



Made a new friend on Thursday night at the cafe down the street. I asked a stranger if he'd mind if I took a photo of his t-shirt, and he immediately asked if he should sit or stand for the picture.

Tony, visiting from Florida, and formerly a resident of New Orleans, is a writer and a great listener as well as conversationalist. We bonded instantly and had a five hour conversation until the cafe closed at 11pm.


December 1, 2016

A CHANGE IS GONNA COME


Times are rough, and 2016 is coming to a close with love packing its bags and peacing out, knowing that nothing can save humans from themselves. 

But there's also knowing that the true damage has not yet been done. 

Still, I go about my day, spirits high despite everything. Nothing too exciting, just getting glimpses of others, wondering what life must be like for them. What do they think of as they lay in bed at night, the ones who seem like they have no one? Last Friday night in CVS an old frail Italian man tripped over his cane and fell over right as I turned into an aisle looking for peppermint lip balm. I heard a ruckus as a few people called for help, so I looked around the corner to see now a huge standing banner that had been upright next to him waft down over his small frame as he grasped at it frantically for support, and then disappeared beneath it.

The homeless Asian lady with grey hair and rubber slippers still sits by herself in a section of the Prudential center. She smiles to herself, her trashbags filled with belongings at her ashen feet. I've seen her in the exact state for the nine and a half years I've walked through Back Bay.

I sit in Barnes & Noble eating a pretzel in their cafe area while observing an Indian lady talking animatedy to a bookshelf a few feet from me. She wags her finger at the shelf, and then smiles flirtatiously and touches her face shyly. When she glances around to see if anybody is watching her intimate dalliance with a bookshelf, I pretend to be absorbed in my pretzel.

Who knows what life has in store for us? Where will home be? Who will be the one to stay with us through it all?


November 26, 2016

THOSE WHO DENY FREEDOM TO OTHERS DESERVE IT NOT FOR THEMSELVES


It is said that only true romantics can become revolutionaries. I believe this, as one does not fight so passionately and relentlessly unless they really know what love is. Love for their land, love for their people, love for their culture and values, and the urgency to protect those things that mean very little to Western imperialists and their sycophants. I started writing a post about privileged, spiritless people last night, those who look for another flag to wave on a whim, looking for a specific, satisfactory way to live as long as it suits their wants and desires at the expense of others.

And then Fidel Castro died.




As divisive a figure as he was, much like Ernesto Guevara, or Ahmed Ben Bella, I tend to believe that severity is a stage one arrives at when they are pushed towards it. Those who don't know suffering, and not just their own, but of others, don't know truth. Nor do they know what that can trigger in a person. Here was a man who brought down Fulgencio Batista, the US puppet, who had allowed his country to be reduced to a brothel and hunting ground for Western pedophiles and criminals. Puppet leaders like Batista, and those who support them, are not romantics. They do not know true love, to see their land and their culture as sacred, and to stand up to the evil consistently imposing itself on all that is sacred in the world. Castro expelled entitled Americans and their supporters from Cuba, dodged their endless assasination attempts on him, and sent Cuban doctors to assist in South Africa, subsequently helping to end the apartheid that had been endorsed by the United States. In retaliation for protecting his country, the US imposed a vindictive embargo on Cuba, leading to a long and cruel punishment on a people who chose sovereignty over slavery.

It's another loss for the minority of true romantics left in the world. Those who fight against the status quo, know the true meaning of freedom, of love, of death, of sacredness. One by one, true romantics, true revolutionaries have left us, leaving in their wake an ongoing battle that they had fought for most of their lives. Times are different now. What these people have left behind after years of defying giants, are now left in the hands of a weak, passive, narcissistic, pro-American generation, who readily adopt capitalist values to replace their traditional ones. 

If Seneca suggested that all cruelty springs from weakness, where then, does weakness come from? Lack of self awareness? Absence of wisdom? Excessive freedom? Because one only needs to observe the state of America and its inhabitants to see the price people have paid for "freedom". And there is a difference between absolute social freedoms, and the freedom I believe in, that of which is self-determination. How does an individual or group achieve freedom in a society that bases itself on consumerist values, controlled by corporations and old white men? Endlessly speaking of freedom does not make freedom a reality. It makes it an illusion, a zealous marketing campaign that helps a country project an image of absolute power and leadership to the rest of the world, dangling this fantasy from a high horse - don't you want to be like us?

There was a meaningless article I read a few days ago, titled As a US traveller, I sported a Canadian flag patch under Bush. Time to dust it off. The title alone made me roll my eyes as I scanned the Guardian front page, and like many of the shortsighted op ed pieces on the site, it does beg the question, why is there so much unsophisticated nonsense on a serious news site? The writer, a twenty-something white female based in New York City basically shares her embarrasment of the previous Bush administration, which had compelled her to lie to others on her travels by pretending to be Canadian. She was fine with the Obama years, she wrote, but now with Trump prepared to take office, she, like many other privileged white Americans, are desperately hoping to move to Canada because, "would you like a president who boasts of “grabbing women by the pussy” or a prime minister who actively calls himself a feminist and encourages others to do the same?"

I don't get people like this. Maybe you should ask yourself how much you love America and the freedom you keep going on about when it's convenient for you, and if it's something you would fight for, regardless of who its leader is. Consider also, are you part of any of the targeted minority groups that will be feeling the actual consequences of white nationalist ideology? Those who can't just pack up and book a flight out and re-settle in a different country with more white people? In times of hardship, pack up and look for another flag to wave around, another label to stick on yourself so it can define you instead of having your values define you. When things are going great and to your liking, stay and call yourself a proud American (or any other nationality, really).

Imagine having these sort of weaklings in your society, reaping the benefits that everyone has helped establish, and then looking for another stable, developed country to move to once your own falls on hard times and needs all the help it can get. But this is the mentality of those with no strength of character - their existance is only valid if they can associate themselves with all that is powerful, white, western, mainstream, beautiful, wealthy, convenient.

Weakness resides in all of us, for different reasons, in different circumstances, and it can develop within us based on our life experiences and how we learn from them. But true romantics are not made. They just have the soul of a spirited poet, a learned individual, a devoted parent, a courageous fighter, a compassionate child, innate and unshakeable, all at once.

Here's to the few true romantics, the true fighters now gone, who defied their aggressors and occupiers, and knew what true freedom meant - that it is something in your soul and in your mind that nobody can ever take from you.


November 8, 2016

SMOOTH CRIMINALS


How free are a people, really when the only two choices they can pick between are Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton? Both horrible people, both so disconnected from the marginalized, from principle, from authenticity. Both unworldly and uninteresting. Remember when American presidents tried to engage with the rest of the world? Herbert Hoover spoke fluent Mandarin. John Quincy Adams was fluent in three foreign languages. Thomas Jefferson studied Latin, Greek, French, and Spanish, and had a library filled with Arabic and Welsh dictionaries. The modern age of American presidents seem to be of the anti-intellectualism school of leadership in comparison, where the idea of the US being "the greatest nation on earth" means the rest of the world should learn America's ways, the culture, the language, the hollow values.

How free are a people when they tolerate what is possibly the most asinine election campaign in human history? Those voting for Donald Trump may be doing so for appalling reasons, but those voting for Hillary Clinton because "it's time for a woman president" are just as dense, if that's their reasoning. With a track record just as bad, and a talent for being two-faced, why not wait for the right woman instead of a woman?

This whole campaign has been completely pointless posturing so that yet another megalomaniac can have a turn at playing God in the white house.

Democrats had the option of electing Bernie Sanders and they chose to rally behind Clinton because she's a woman. They made their bed, now they must lie in it.


September 12, 2016

A WOMAN HITTING A NEO-NAZI WITH HER HANDBAG

Hans Runesson, 1985


Enraged that a neo-Nazi demonstration was taking place in her city of Växjö, Sweden, Danuta Danielsson emerged from a crowd that had gathered on the street and swung her handbag at a member of the group. Her mother being an Auschwitz survivor, Danielsson's symbolic confrontation with the Neo-Nazi illustrates the disparity of scale in terms of power, aggression, hate, and reason.

The more I think about the idea of "freeom of expression" the more I question it. If hate groups are given a platform to thrive and spout their ignorance because Western ideology stresses on the fanciful concepts of "freedom" and individualism - concepts that, as evidence shows, amounts to enslavement of all peoples, of lack of social cohesion or moral responsibility, then we are complicit in disregarding what is best for the greater good of humanity.

While the photo continues to provoke debate today, and supporters rally behind Danielsson's spontaneous attack of what is unquestionably wrong, she regretted her actions for the attention it received, and committed suicide two years later.

September 1, 2016

WHEN WORDS LOSE THEIR MEANING, PEOPLE LOSE THEIR FREEDOM



Watched The Occupation of the American Mind earlier tonight. This is an important film. It's not just another Israel-Palestine study, but it delves into the problem of extreme brainwashing that the United States enforces by using tactics that include the repetition of falsehoods, manipulation of facts, and dominating discourse through powerful PR. The entire goal of the two propaganda machines known as the United States and Israel is to portray one side as the victim, and the other the aggressor. 

The extremist methods that relationship exercises is akin to Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, the meticulously crafted propaganda documentary made upon personal request by Adolf Hitler in 1934, and which is often hailed a masterpiece to this day. There is not a war raging between Israel and Palestine, because war entails combat between armed groups. And there can be no combat between a highly trained military equipped with sophisticated weaponry sponsored by the world's largest arms dealer, the United States, and a people imprisoned within their land, who defend themselves against the world's giants with sticks and stones. What is raging within the Israel-Palestine conflict is, essentially, psychological warfare. 

Since it's release, The Occupation of the American Mind has been largely ignored, and no major film festival has chosen to screen the film. Shame about all the cowardice in the world.


July 18, 2016

HOW TO NAME YOUR CHILD ACCORDING TO WESTERN STANDARDS

In an article published on the Guardian blog recently, Phoenicia Hebebe Dobson-Mouawad prescribed some advice to would-be parents in a piece titled, “How not to name your child - five golden rules”. The main purpose of the commentary stems from the writer’s own personal struggles with her given name since childhood, as a mixed race person growing up in the West. She prefaces her article with the opinion that “naming your child shouldn’t be a chance to prove how cool or creative you are.”

I immediately came under the impression that the article would discourage the celebrity trend of giving children unconventional names such as “Apple” or “Audio Science”, because as Dobson-Mouawad suggests from personal experience, an unusual name will have a long term negative effect on a child. Instead, she refers to her own name to make the case that there should be a standard of acceptable names for children. This standard should be met so that children do not grow up feeling like a misfit, and also, it is a solution that caters to the convenience of others.

In order to be good parents and people in general, according to Dobson-Mouawad, five rules should be considered when deciding on a name for a newborn child.

The first rule asks, have you heard the name before? What this suggests is that if it is not a traditional Western name, or falls into the standard of “normal”, a child will be singled out for having an odd sounding name, and face ridicule instead of being treated respectfully or equally.

The second rule questions, can you pronounce it without having to look it up? Essentially, if a name is difficult to pronounce, it is not worth the trouble, and nobody will appreciate the inconvenience of having to learn how to say or spell it.

Thirdly, it is best to avoid hyphens unless both names are easily pronounceable. Here Dobson-Mouawad uses her own hyphenated last name as an example. She claims that “Dobson”, which is a common Anglo-Saxon surname, is fine, but her Arabic surname, Mouawad, is already a challenge on its own, therefore unnecessary.

The fourth rule insists you ponder, can a child of primary school age say it? Much like what was described in the past three rules, if other children find a name confusing, opt for something easier and familiar, probably implying that other kids will want to be friends with yours if they can pronounce their name, thus saving your offspring from a life of ostracization.

Lastly, the fifth rule instructs, remember that your child’s name is for their happiness alone and not to prove to the world how cool and creative you are.
Let’s just set aside the disturbing fact that Dobson-Mouawad seems to harbor some internalized racism without even realizing it. With these five golden rules she illustrates, whether aware of it or not, how crucial it is for people to adhere to comfortable standards of normalcy in American/Western society. Having a unique name indicates an inability to conform, or assimilate into conventional American culture (I am referring to American culture specifically here, because the article was also featured on the US version of The Guardian site), which is a contradictory statement if American values really do claim to accept a vibrant mix of distinct cultural elements from people of all backgrounds. Dobson-Mouawad’s article is problematic with its advice in that she clearly propagates an idea that is popular with many white Westerners.

In response to a New York Times article last year, Professor Jerry Hough (2015) of Duke University commented on the issues within the African American community in the United States by pointing out that at the school he taught at, “every Asian student has a very simple old American first name that symbolizes their desire for integration. Virtually every black has a strange new name that symbolizes their lack of desire for integration.” The notion that having a nice “American” name plays a part in determining how well-integrated and successful a person can be is not a new one, but it definitely slants towards a prejudiced belief in seeing one type of name more favorable than another.
Dobson-Mouawad, and others like Hough promote an ethnocentric concept which insists that in order to fit in and be less different, it’s advisable to stay away from odd sounding names that clearly do not sound mainstream “white”. It is strange to regard a uniqueness of a name as being un-American simply based on the standards set by one group within America.

I am curious as to how Dobson-Mouawad’s advice would register with Americans of Latin American origin, many of whom practice the Spanish tradition of being given both their parents’ surnames, which often ends up with a child having five or six names. Furthermore, there is no consensus on what is a normal name, and what is considered odd. Is Hermione a name that children would be able to pronounce or spell? Barack Obama managed to become President of the United States. Were Saoirse Ronan’s parents trying to be cool and creative when they named her, or is Saoirse a popular Irish name that dates back to the 1920’s? Dobson-Mouawad’s advice about naming children following a Western checklist of approval set by a subgroup within a culture brings about the question of how socialization within American culture affects people’s idea of identity and self concept.

Some understanding about Dobson-Mouawad’s own upbringing and socialization could shed some light on the ethnocentric angle of her article. Perhaps interacting with a certain group of people and being exposed to a particular mindset, thus resulting in embarrassing situations, such as having to endure her name being ridiculed by others, molded her own idea of “normal” or “right”. It is also evident by my own observations that in cultures around the world, giving children mainstream Western names is on the rise, and this, in my opinion, can be attributed to wide exposure to Western standards and popular culture. In places like China or Korea, for instance, there has long been a practice of people adopting Western names as their second name so as to make it easier for Western employers or acquaintances who struggle with having to learn traditional East Asian names. This practice is sad, and I use “sad” here to mean pathetic. All it does is encourage the dismissive, entitled mentality of some Americans or Westerners to thrive unimpeded.

In an article written in the Telegraph last year, American entrepreneur Lindsey Jernigan shared her intentions of giving Chinese people looking to adopt Western names more favorable options through her website, BestEnglishName.com, which states on its front page, “We can help you find a name that is cool and unique but that won’t make Westerners feel uneasy”. Yes, your real, unique name makes Westerners uneasy as it is, so let's help you find something more pleasing to them.

The website, according to the article, sees 30,000 visits a month from mostly young women hoping to study overseas. In a more globalized world, having Western names is seen as progressive and “cool”, to use Dobson-Mouawad’s term she applies to “unique” names, and it reflects the growing influence of American culture and norms in particular which dictate the standard of uniformity and acceptance.

In conclusion, Dobson-Mouawad’s ignorant advice about naming children is more senseless than it is helpful. Her unpleasant experiences in the past are not ones shared by everyone with lengthy, different sounding names, nor those of us who are not phonetically challenged, due to a less homogeneous upbringing. To say that people should abide by certain standards that are culturally acceptable in America when thinking of baby names, yet disregard the fact that America consists of people of different ethnicities and values is quite dismissive of those who come from cultures that boast their own traditional names, and are more receptive to different kinds.

Dobson-Mouawad seems to assume that as a Westerner who belongs to a certain culture, she must be right in extending advice to everyone, irrespective of origin or cultural differences, as though she is assuming that everyone wants to, or should strive to be “white.”

June 3, 2016

THOSE WHO TELL THE TRUTH SHALL LIVE FOREVER



Muhammad Ali caused an uproar in America in 1967 when he refused to be drafted into the US Army.

"My conscience won’t let me go shoot my brother, or some darker people, or some poor hungry people in the mud for big powerful America,” he said at the time. “And shoot them for what? They never called me nigger, they never lynched me, they didn’t put no dogs on me, they didn’t rob me of my nationality, rape and kill my mother and father. … Shoot them for what? How can I shoot them poor people? Just take me to jail.”


Ali was convicted of draft evasion by a jury. He was given a five-year prison sentence and a $10,000 fine. The US government exacted punishment on him by stripping him of his passport and his heavyweight title, and he was banned from fighting in the United States. Public support for Ali diminished and many of his fans turned against him for what they considered disloyalty to his country and flag. 

Though Ali would remain out of jail on posted bail while his case was being appealed, he would not obtain a boxing license again until October 1970.


April 21, 2016

DINNER



Best impromptu dinner made for Izzat, Pedro, and me courtesy of Julio.

It was a night of banter and eating between two Malaysians, one Mexican, and a Puerto Rican.

April 20, 2016

BOYS



This guy showed up in my brother's living room with his brand new guitar and started showing off while I was sat on the couch, eating a whole chocolate cake from its container.

I showed the above photo to Julio later when I went downstairs and he asked what I had been doing upstairs. He gazed at the picture and then said, "I have that exact same IKEA carpet."


April 18, 2016

TELL ME ALL YOUR THOUGHTS ON GOD


Some of the best conversations I have are with my atheist or agnostic friends. They range from heated debates, to tactful discussions about religion when the subject arises, and it inevitably does.

And what I am grateful for is that my atheist and agnostic friends are not idiots, so the conversation is not reduced to the usual questions (to which there are numerous theories, depending on which philosophical school of thought seems more reasonable to you) posed by smug types — if God exists, and he is so powerful, why would He allow for so much evil and suffering in the world? Why doesn't he intervene?

There is nothing wrong with asking those questions, of course. It's using it specifically, and completely as the basis of your argument, with smug arrogance, that immediately outs you as an ignorant, self-serving prat. Because it is disregarding the ideas of free will, of morality, of choice, of human inclination towards evil and selfish desires. Should God only intervene in wars, perpetrated by human beings, and not when an individual behaves immorally in more isolated incidents with less tragic results? At what point should one actually take responsibility for his or her actions, or the actions of others, instead of looking elsewhere to place blame?

I much rather prefer, and enjoy discussing religion with my worldly atheist or agnostic friends, more than the "religious" people I've known. In an ironic way, the atheists/agnostics I know have spent more time thinking about God than those who actually claim to believe in Him. As Immanuel Kant pointed out, the wrong education of one's religion will only produce inward hypocrites, and speaking to many self-proclaimed believers has revealed this to be true. Hence, debates with Julio, my committed atheist friend, over dinner at his apartment is always more meaningful and sincere because his character does not contradict his words.

April 17, 2016

PERSPECTIVE


Paid a visit to the used bookstore in Fairmount, a few blocks down on a lazy afternoon.

Reminds me of how little I've been reading lately, or writing, for that matter. So I browsed for awhile and ended up in the poetry section.


I don't know why, but I was slightly distracted by the fact that these lines by Rumi reveal that narcissists already existed as far back as the 13th Century.


IN PHILLY



The last time I was in Philadelphia I witnessed a man kick a violin out of a young female busker's hands as she was sat playing it on a street corner.

It was so bizarre. It was one of those moments when you think out loud, what just happened? And then you stand there across the street, looking around incredulously to see if anyone else had seen a violin fly through the air and land with a crash some feet away from a sobbing, wailing girl. A bunch of people had seen it that quiet Sunday afternoon in Center City, and while most of us simply stood there in shock, a bike messenger went after the aggressor, who had brazenly walked on down the street. Bike messenger guy confronted him, and then grabbed the man's briefcase and flung it to the ground in a fit of rage.

Philadelphia is interesting that way.


Yet it shouldn't be, since there is always so much hate one witnesses on the streets of America.



Spending time with my dad and brother for the next few days. 


April 16, 2016

JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS


Rittenhouse Square Park

When casting a glance back into the past, far behind, the fractured remnants of my memories seem to live on like ghosts. I remember a time and place, the drab structure of my old high school, the sunlight filtering through the branches of the lone mango tree in the front yard of my old house, how I drove the empty roads of Kuala Lumpur in my beat up grey Proton Iswara late at night, or too early in the morning, looking for adventure, for solace, for escape. I remember looking at certain people I'd only just met, and wondering if I could leave a piece of myself with them, if we ever parted ways. The romantic in me always persuaded me to. The realist in me convinced me I could not. It would be like dismembering myself. The poet Aracelis Girmay wondered something similar. Parts of my body strewn here and there, shed like dead skin, and I would lay in wait for an Isis to recover those pieces, and re-member me, like she did for Osiris time and time again, so that I could be whole again. But real life is not like Egyptian mythology. Or is it?

My brother, the bicycle mechanic always tries to fix things. He joins together different components to build and make something whole again, but only to the extent of inanimate objects. He is the one connection to my past, in that he is in the present with me, albeit five states away. He has changed, as have I over the course of our different explorations through the years. But he’s a link to the ghosts of my past, while others have faded mostly into obscurity. I am glad I haven't lost parts of myself, not the more important parts, anyway. Instead I am able to build myself upon my entirety, unimpeded by grievances of what I've lost or no longer have. 

I suppose it is like when people say they want to “find myself” and feel they have to go on a journey to do so, when in fact a person can find what they need in the people in their lives, past and present, or their memories. I am cautious, because the thought of leaving a big piece of myself with many different people is a devastating one, for I constantly think about the importance of the self as being complete, and it’s not exactly something, like books, or a sweater you can ask from an old friend, partner, or family member, “can I have it back?”

The late science fiction author Philip K. Dick was born with a twin sister, Jane, who died a few weeks after her birth. The loss of his twin affected him for the rest of his life, and is apparent in the recurring motif of a phantom twin in many of his novels. I tend to think that was a way to always have a part of him that he had lost present and alive, a way to re-member with a missing piece of himself. And when he died, he was buried beside his twin sister, under a tombstone that had been made fifty three years earlier with his name already inscribed, waiting until the day he would be reunited with her.


March 17, 2016

RUN



Spent four hours earlier today with some good men from Somalia, Sudan, Guinea, and Haiti. 

Most of the people I work with, from different nations around the world already speak two or three languages fluently, and are now learning or improving another. That's diligence. I can't even be bothered to improve my rusty Malay. 

But there I am in one of life's many conflicted instances. I am running with many other people, from different parts of the world, only we are running in the opposite direction. But I once ran in the similar direction, almost a decade earlier. Not for the same reasons, unless what some of them felt was mere disillusionment. There we are, struggling to integrate, and to escape.


February 12, 2016

OLD BOY



I was standing outside of the community center near Chinatown earlier today, with some minutes to kill before my volunteer tutoring session began with a student. An old Chinese man, possibly in his 80's, walked towards me in hurried steps while glancing over his shoulder several times. There were a large group of school children emerging the same way he had come.

He suddenly darted, as well as an eighty year old man could dart, behind the utility pole a few feet away from where I stood, and grinned at me from under his hood. Pointing to the buzzing group of school children approaching us, he said to me, giddily, "my granddaughter. Surprise her."

Attempting to hide behind the pole until he spotted his granddaughter, he then revealed himself like a magic trick, beaming down at her with his grin as she recognized him in surprise. As she disappeared into the community center along with the other children, he waved, and then continued his slow, solitary walk down the cold, empty street.