Donald Trump, 2012?

The fact that Donald Trump was considering running for President of the United States used to really irritate me. It seemed like Sarah Palin in 2008 all over again--this ridiculous publicity stunt that carried with it the frightening potential to become a four-year national nightmare.


Trump's attacks on President Obama's citizenship irritate me. (Yes, Donald, he fooled us all. It's the greatest scam in American political history.) They are reminiscent of Republicans' rise to power in the early 1950's because of their success in attacking Communism. Republicans created a political climate in which they attacked people, not their policies; Trump is doing the same. (Richard Nixon was among these Republican Communist Crusaders, and this jump-started his political career.) Unfortunately for Trump, Obama's U.S. citizenship is a non-issue, unlike Communism (there were actual communist spies in the government, though we undoubtedly overstepped our bounds with the persecution of suspected Communists). Trump just looks silly and unprofessional questioning the President's citizenship, and I think it's disrespectful too.


But I've come to be at ease about Trump and his possible candidacy in thinking it over, and talking with other people about it. So let's suppose he actually runs.


If so, he'll probably be running as a third-party candidate because he's not likely to get the Republican nomination. In 2008, Republicans made a big deal out of Obama's "lack of political experience," but Donald Trump literally has no political experience to speak of. I think Republicans would be much more comfortable nominating someone like Mitt Romney who is more towards the political center, and who has solid political experience and a good track record of success.


This means that for Democrats, Trump's candidacy might actually be a boon. No reasonable Democrat would vote for Trump because he's too far right. As a result, he wouldn't be stealing Democrats' votes from Obama, but would be splitting the Republican vote and weakening the Republican nominee.


Trump is running on...nothing. Nothing of substance at least. In interviews I've seen, he has talked about two things: Obama's birth certificate, and his own success as a businessman. To be taken seriously, he needs to discuss in earnest the real issues like the economy, the budget, or foreign affairs.


In the end, I'd be surprised if this was serious. I think it's more of a publicity stunt, and it's all just about getting Donald Trump's name out there to promote himself and his TV show...it's always fun to get attention. It's easy to talk about all the things that are wrong with the country--there certainly are many things--and it's easy to blame the guy at the top, the President. But it's even harder to do something about it.

April

I don’t like you, April.

I don’t like the way you flirt

So seductively with May,

Tugging at her,

Whispering her name in your winds,

But keeping February close to your heart.

You let loose those days of lucidity and warmth—

The way Spring should be.

But those days are betrayed by those other days,

Days of cold, rain, and blustery winds.

You know the ones I’m talking about.

When we’ve already made it through Winter,

As well as March’s own deceptive effulgence,

The last thing I need is you, April.

I’m ready to embrace Spring, wrap my arms around her.

Your “showers” are fine, I don’t mind,

But what I can’t take, is more grey, more cold. 

A Week With Elvis

A few weeks ago, I read a biography of Elvis Presley for my U.S. history class at school. We raced through the book, reading it in two sittings, and were assigned to write a paper on the book and its author, Bobbie Ann Mason. I started and finished the entire paper this week, starting Sunday afternoon and finishing Friday night, working diligently and persistently every night of the week. 


My schedule has been crazy this week: I've been juggling a physics project, a piano performance, rehearsals and performances with the Tmen, play practice (and memorizing lines), and homework. I would get home from play practice for A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to the Forum around 9:30 or 10:00 every night. I would eat something and then start working on the paper and regular homework for my other classes. I would take a nap around 1:00 or 2:00 AM, set an alarm to wake me up at 3:00 or 4:00 AM, work for an hour or two, go back to bed, and then wake up and go to school. 
Using these naps and energy drinks to sustain me, and NyQuil to put me to sleep, I wrote the longest paper I have ever written, at 7,000 words. I dropped it off at my teacher's house at Midnight on Friday, the day it was due. (Writing this, it is impossible for me to ignore the parallels of my drug use with Elvis's--he used prescription pills to boost his energy for performances, and then more pills to calm him down and provide a release from the pressure and stress of his hectic life.)


But the paper almost became this entity on its own, this constant in my life with which I had a relationship. Writing the paper, I got to understand Elvis's life so well (or at least, the life that Bobbie Ann Mason,  presented) that I completely wrapped my mind around it and felt like I absorbed just about everything Mason had to say. 


 As Elvis took Las Vegas by storm in the early 1970's, entirely in his element, he had come into his own as a performer and had mastered the stage completely. I also felt that in some ways, with this paper, I mastered the kind of essay our teacher has had us write for the third time: explaining an author's purpose in writing a book. I felt at ease and confidant writing the paper, supplied with all the information I needed, having only to sort through and synthesize it articulately. 


I found myself almost crying while writing the last few paragraphs of my essay, thinking angrily about Tom Parker (Elvis's manager who exploited him horribly for his own gain), about Elvis's drug addiction and the neglect of his friends and family, thinking about his pained, restless relationships, and his struggles with whether or not he deserved all the fame and success that came his way. Recalling as Mason did the sweet, youthful, and ebullient Elvis of 1956, I was sad for Elvis because he always had the best intentions despite his flaws or what his critics said--at heart, he was a simple boy from the south, and all he ever wanted to do was sing as well as Arthur Crudup (a blues singer whose music Elvis heard growing up). I was definitely happy to finally be finishing this monster of a paper. 


Mason writes about Elvis with a thoughtful, gentle and sympathetic hand, understanding him like an old friend who had simply made a few mistakes during his life. With Elvis Presley, she is able to provide and informative and detailed account of the King's life which is supplemented with interesting anecdotes, and she does this in only 169 pages. It was very insightful and told me much more than I ever knew about Elvis, who was such a bright and dominating figure in America's cultural landscape for only two short decades. 

Sailing for All

This past summer, I had the opportunity to sail for eight days from Aalborg, Denmark up to Kristiansand, Norway aboard the Tenacious, a 65 meter-long tall sailing ship. The ship was owned and operated by a British charity called the Jubilee Sailing Trust, which subsidizes voyages aboard their ships for physically disabled people. The Tenacious was equipped with wheelchair lifts that allowed people in wheelchairs to move about all three levels of the ship, as well as plenty of hand and foot rails for the blind.

Four days into our voyage to Kristiansand, we stopped at a small Norwegian port town called Risør (in the picture) to spend the night. The day we arrived in Risør, I went on a hike up to a swimming hole with the other kids my age sailing on the Tenacious. With us from the ship came Lilly, a sixteen year-old girl who had been in a wheelchair since birth.  She was a sweet girl who didn’t talk much, but she was easier than any of the other disabled people aboard the ship for me and the other kids to connect with since she was our age.

       
                                                                                                                                                       It was a bit of a hike to get to the swimming hole, and when the path became too steep and rocky for Lilly’s wheel chair, it was disheartening to think that Lilly would have to wait back at the ship while the rest of us went swimming. However, this did not happen. Instead, one boy from the ship decided that he could carry Lilly, the only physically disabled person on our hike, up the hill so that she could go swimming with the rest of us. Once we reached the top, we all went for a swim, including Lilly, who, much to our amazement, was able to breast stroke magnificently in the water. After drying off and carrying Lilly back down the hill, I got to push Lilly in her chair through the town and back to our ship, and something strange and unexpected happened during this trip back to the ship. While I was pushing Lilly through town, I saw countless people look at her apologetically or with looks of pity. They would look up at me, and I would meet their gaze and they would furtively look away again. This happened with almost everyone we passed, and it enraged me to see Lilly become some sort of spectacle to the passersby. I was embarrassed for Lilly, as I realized that she must go through this whenever she is in a public place; indeed, I never gave much thought to the ability that “normal”, able bodied people have to remain comfortably anonymous in public.

A couple days before we arrived in Risør, Lilly’s older sister Tyga and a sixteen year old boy aboard the ship named Ollie asked Lilly if she would like to go for a walk around the ship. I had no idea what they could possibly mean by this, as Lilly was clearly in a wheelchair because she was unable to walk. Upon hearing Ollie’s question, I quickly dismissed it for a joke, as there was certainly no way that Lilly would possibly be able to walk, let alone stand up straight. Tyga and Ollie picked Lilly up out of her wheelchair and supported her under her arms (kind of like the way two football players will help an injured teammate off the field), and Lilly actually put one foot in front of the other and tentatively yet exuberantly made a full lap around the main deck of the ship. Everyone on the deck watched with amazement and reverence, but there was silence—no one knew what to say. However, I think I have something to say now.

Though I am still puzzled about the existence of God or a higher power, I do think that people like Lilly have been divinely placed on earth for us to meet, interact with, learn from, respect, and love. While pushing Lilly around in Risør, I saw a spark inside of her every time she smiled or laughed or told a joke and her face lit up. Lilly’s amazing contribution to the world is allowing people to look at themselves more carefully after spending meaningful time with her. I think that Lilly’s walk around the deck of the ship was so stunning because it was an absolute confirmation of Lilly’s spirit, her personhood, her life.

 In spending time with Lilly, I came to appreciate the nature of my blessings and the incredible fortune I’ve had in my life. I have come to see that through some accident of birth, I have been given an amazing head start in life. Because I can run, jump, throw a baseball, kick a soccer ball, shoot a basketball, hit a tennis ball, swim, or climb the masts of the Tenacious, it felt really good to be able to cooperate with the other boys to carry Lilly up the hill that day in Risør —I felt like I was doing something purposeful and using my own physical gifts to help Lilly, who was not treated to the gift of being able to walk or run or climb.

I’ve been extremely blessed, and while I acknowledged this before the sailing trip, I think that it took this trip to make me realize in full the nature and extent of my blessings. My sailing trip was an inspiring experience because seemingly expansive boundaries between able-bodied and disabled people were broken during this voyage aboard Tenacious.

 Being in a wheelchair can definitely have a dehumanizing effect on the people in the chair. But for me, the brief time I spent with Lilly confirmed for me that Lilly was a person, too. Her smile is infectious, and seeing her happy has such a tremendous effect on everyone around her. With these characteristics, Lilly was able to elegantly, humbly, and gracefully rise above the dehumanization and disappointment of being in a wheelchair. I think Lilly was in my life to open my eyes and allow me to appreciate the many beautiful things she, or anyone in her position, has to offer the world. On the ship, she was surrounded by love, and that love was fully reciprocated back to us. Because of this relationship, it is people like Lilly who really allow and enable us to love. This experience that took place in the incredibly intimate environment of a ship allowed me to grow spiritually, and made me realize that really incredible things, like a girl in a wheelchair walking, are in fact possible.

Reparations

I recently finished reading a book called The Good German by Joseph Kanon in my history class. The novel is set in Berlin during the summer of 1945, right after the war in Europe had ended. It follows an American journalist named Jake Geismar who travels back to Berlin after working there before the war to look for a married woman he was in love with, but he soon gets caught up in an international murder mystery. But more interesting than the plot, for me, was the tough questions the book raised about what kinds of reparations there should be for the Germans who were part of the Nazi machine during the war. 


What should happen to a Jewish woman named Renate who worked for the Nazis as a greifer, someone who spotted Jews, her own people, living in Berlin and informed on them to SS officers, who would then take these Jews away to work, starve, and die in concentration camps? But what if this woman's elderly mother was threatened with being sent to camps, and by working for the Nazis, this woman would be able to save her mother and feed her infant son with the payment she received from the Nazis? Renate says, "You would do anything for a child..." 


What about a talented German scientist named Emil who worked under the Nazis designing rockets, but was also put to work figuring out things like the bare minimum number of calories (1100, it turns out) Jewish prisoners in work camps needed to be productive and avoid starvation for a few months? Should he and the dozens of other brilliant scientists living and working in Germany during that era have been prosecuted and locked away for the rest of their lives? Or should they have come to America or Russia to work on the space programs of these two emerging global powers? It would be a shame to let minds like that go to waste...


At one point, Jake says to Emil, "Everybody in Germany has an explanation. And no answer."
"To what?" replies Emil. 
"Eleven hundred calories a day. Another number."
"And you think I did that?" 
"No, you just did the numbers." 


Was Emil simply a tool of the Germans, following orders because he had to work to feed his family? Or was he consciously contributing to the deaths of thousands upon thousands of innocent people? Did he have a choice? 


Even though a retired German police officer named Gunther Behn says, of the Nazis, "I worked for them too. We all did," Kanon does provide a model for a good German. He comes in the form of Emil's father, Professor Brandt, who was also a mathematician who worked at the same institute as Emil. The Professor says that when the Nazis started systematically firing Jews who worked at the institute, he resigned in protest, and refused to work for the Nazis throughout the war. Kanon suggests that the best thing to do was separate entirely from the Party, and refuse to work for this machine, even if they might just replace you with someone else to do your task. 


Another frustrating and saddening aspect to Berlin in 1945 was the fact that there were so many people who were guilty of war crimes, but so little manpower behind the effort of prosecuting them and bringing them to justice. In addition, both the Russians and the Americans were competing with one another to bring these German scientists back to their own respective space programs. Because of the sheer magnitude of what happened to the Jews--the enormity of the crime--it seemed as if the entire country was responsible, and it was overwhelming to think of bringing everyone to justice. Kanon, narrating, says "If you made the crime big enough, nobody did it." 


Ultimately, in The Good German, Kanon stays true to his spy/mystery/thriller roots, and provides a fast-paced action adventure. But more importantly, he challenges us to make the tough decisions and be the prosecutor of these Germans we meet in the novel. In one chilling, and telling statement that stuck with me throughout the book (as it was near the beginning), Kanon, sweeping over the ruined, destroyed landscape of Berlin, states meditatively: "This is what happens when one man overreaches himself."

The Downside to Driving

When my Grandmother gave me her old 1998 Buick Century (in the picture) last summer, I was ecstatic. I had gotten my driver's license earlier that spring, so I couldn't wait to have a car of my own. I was convinced that the quality of my life would instantly improve once I had a car to myself. And it has certainly been more convenient to have my own car, as I never have to wait for my parents to pick me up or drop me off anywhere--I'm always on my own schedule and my own time.

The other day, I accidentally locked myself out of my car. I called a locksmith, but when he arrived, he told me it would be $200 to unlock the car... the website said $15. Apparently that was just the service fee. Read the fine print.

This incident capped of my list of reasons for why I've grown to really dislike driving.


First and foremost, it hurts the environment. There's nothing more frustrating for me than sitting sitting in rush hour traffic on York Rd or Northern Parkway and thinking about the inefficiency of the whole thing, and thinking about how much we're all polluting the air. I'm always reminded of this a few days after it's snowed, and there gets to be that black, sooty grime on the snow patches on the side of the road.


It's dangerous and life threatening, unsafe at any speed. I never quite believed my driving instructor who always harped, "There are a lot of bad drivers out there,"--but he's right. I've never gotten in a real accident, but I've had plenty of near misses (some my fault, most others' faults) that jar me and remind me of how quickly things can change on the road. "In the blink of an eye," my dad always says.


It's expensive--and will only get more and more expensive as time goes on. Our economy depends primarily on petroleum to fuel it, and as the cost of petroleum rises because it's getting progressively harder and harder to reach because we've already picked the low hanging fruit. Because of this, the cost of everything we buy and consume will only continue to rise. An example: A stamp cost 3 cents in 1950. Today, they cost 44 cents. Sure, inflation has to do with it, but as petroleum gets harder and harder to reach, it becomes more costly to acquire because oil companies have to dig deeper into the earth to reach it, so it must be sold at a higher price in order to make a profit. Accordingly, the van that the mailman drives becomes more expensive to operate, and the stamp that pays for the gas must become more expensive in order to cover the higher cost of fuel.


I have found MVA astoundingly frustrating beyond belief in its incredible inefficiency. (As a side note, I'd highly recommend Fred's Tag and Title on York Rd...It's a little out of the way, but they provide great service and there are never any long lines). But before I discovered Fred's, I made at least seven trips to the MVA trying to sort out the transfer of title, replacing the new tags and registration, getting new stickers, a safety inspection, and then straightening out insurance policy for the car. As I waited in lines and made trips back and forth, talking to the wonderfully dedicated and motivated personnel there, I realized without a doubt that the MVA is government bureaucracy and inefficiency at its best.


Most of all, I hate that there seems no way to get around driving, despite all these negative things that happen as a result of it. Everything is so spread out--schools, shopping centers, and workplaces are all miles apart from each other, and we can no longer walk into town from our homes and to do everything we need to do.


I've driven almost 8,000 miles in my car since this summer, and I've come to regret every single mile. I hope to live someplace in the future where I don't have to have a car, even though I'm not sure what that would entail or what kind of lifestyle that would require me to live. But after not even a year of driving, I'm sick of it. This time last year, I couldn't wait.

The American Dream

So I go to a really, really good private school. There, I can learn from exceptionally dedicated teachers who have an amazing commitment to teaching. And my parents—how supportive they are, how incredibly invested they are in my success. At the school they’ve sacrificed to send me to, we’ve got Smartboards, a 60 acre campus, astroturf, tennis courts, baseball diamonds, rain gardens, outdoor classrooms, an art room that’s bigger than a single floor of my house, computers everywhere, books, a dining center (not a cafeteria), low class sizes, low student-to-faculty ratios, and we have all these resources, and I can study hard, do the homework, get extra help, come in early, stay late.

And I can do this, and I can apply to really, really good colleges. Maybe I don't get into my top choice, but that’s okay, the others will do just fine. At college, I can challenge myself, push myself with my courses, come in early, stay late, talk with professors, take them out to lunch, do research with them, get glowing recommendations, read interesting and invigorating things, learn more about the world, and eventually, graduate, and move into the Real World (not the TV show). I can get a job, maybe through a connection at an internship I did over the summer. And maybe I got that internship because of that research I did with that professor who wrote me that glowing recommendation. 

So then I’m working, and earning money. And I can work hard--harder than others at my company or firm, I can rise to the top because of my work ethic, my drive. I make money, and of course, spend--consume--and I contribute to the economy through my consumerism! This is great! This is how it’s supposed to work! Money that I’ve made goes back into the economy! And who knows, maybe I’ll have enough money left over to have kids. That would be nice. 

With this, I successfully participate in Capitalism! Don’t you see? I studied harder than others at school! I worked harder at college than others! I worked harder than others at my job! Deservedly, I make more money than others.....Deservedly? 

Really? What did I do to deserve this? It seems like I was given this opportunity through some accident of birth, a roll of the cosmic dice. See, what we neglected to consider, was the fourteen year-old girl living in that terrible part of [substitute your favorite American city here]. She takes care of her four younger brothers by herself because she’s never met her father, and her mother is generally too busy looking for work or money or heroin or cocaine. The other problem the girl has (besides feeding and clothing her younger brothers, and going to school herself), is she’s pregnant with her seventeen year old boyfriend’s child. She’s been hanging out with this boy because he has been giving her money he’s earned from slinging drugs. School’s mostly a thing of the past for him. Naturally, he wanted sex, and she obliged. Was there really any choice?

Now, tell me something. Is this her fault? Is she poor because she didn’t work hard enough, like I did? Is she lazy? Is it unfair for her to receive “handouts”? And I’m wondering: why are people hungry in the richest nation in the world? Maybe the problem isn’t with her, but with the situation she was born into. Maybe it’s a systemic problem instead of an individual problem.

But I studied hard, I worked hard—I certainly did, So why should I have to give my money that I earned to people like this girl? Because I was given an amazing head start on life. It’s like I’ve been placed on a completely different playing field, and given the chance to compete. And compete I did.

And the fourteen year-old girl’s playing field? Well, not quite the same as mine. Hers isn’t made of Astroturf. More like concrete. Hers doesn’t have big white stadium lights, just the neon sign of a liquor store. 

So go ahead, call me a socialist. Call me vindictive. Call me Anti-Capitalist and Un-American. You can tell me I’m being too political, but I’m really just trying to be humane.