Thoughts

The abortion debate has been irritating me lately. I am often reminded of how abortion is the Christian equivalent of murder. And all these arguments are tacitly about females. Females getting abortions, females murdering children, females taking the morning after pill etc. But what of the role of the male? Do we just deny the immature rebuttle to wear a condom? Are we forgetting the often male induced lust for sex? Are we forgetting the high school pressure and coercion of males? Because all of a sudden, when the women is faced with pregnancy often in part caused by caving from male pressure, all of a sudden she is a virgin mary, and she is the murderer, she is the guilty one, she is the one who must bear the child and the consequences too. And we forget the boyfriend that left when she was in her second trimester and told her he would always be there. We forget the false promises. We have trained women so well to be submissive. To give in to men's desires. To deny sex tacitl...

in the more widespread second wave feminism, we have worked so hard to argue the social construction of gender, and much of this is valid. We have argued that "hysteria" (a greek term for the wandering womb when a woman is not having enough sex or giving birth enough that suffocates a woman and makes her go crazy) is a cultural term used to keep women down, and it is. We have argued that  emotionality, nurturing, and submissiveness are traits pushed onto us by society, that enchains our body to reproduce. It is society which demanded us to be domestic, to have sex with husbands which at the time would lead to the inevitable role of our biology--reproduction. And this was a vicious cycle, both our bodies, and our society were telling us to stay home, and not go into the world made for men. Then birth control came out, and women's ability to control their reproduction allowed them to step out, for the first time, of the vicious cycle. To gain autonomy of their bodies so t...

It started with a cabalistic garden. A garden in which the first (presumably white) couple lived in paradise: the Garden of Eden. And it was here, secluded from the outside world, that the first tokens of God’s affection lived, in all the blessings of that cabalistic garden. These were God’s humans--gods blessed ones.  They lived in ignorant contentedness until the serpent told Eve that if she ate the apple of the tree, “your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”. Eve ate the apple. We still live in a garden, half brain child of human creation, and half wild stepchild. This garden is nature. This nature is deemed a garden purposely so. Because, there is no place on earth where humans, like god, have not changed something about it. Suited it to their own liking; created it for themselves. There are places on earth where in our Eurocentric egoism, we may pretend are pristine, forgetting the ancient indigenous cities, the ancient field burnings to...

I, a white female, went to my first Black Environmental Thought conference this weekend. The conference was wonderful, and the people extraordinary; I honestly cannot thank them enough for the opportunity, but also for their acceptance and embracement of me that they were in no way were obligated to do (for once). I want to back up a little bit, to before the wonderful people here made me feel so comfortable. I am a student with the Nelson Institute of Environmental scholars program. Some jargon that basically says I am in an environmental program that gives us some awesome real world opportunities. I received an email inviting me to write a short paper on what "community engagement" meant to me in order to get the opportunity to go to an expenses paid environmental conference with one of our new (excellent) professors. I thought, fabulous, I couldn't be more excited. I saw the conference and it was the "Black Environmental ...

As a highly cognitive creature we have the ability to ask why, and this is dangerous. We have the ability to ask why, to analyze, to investigate mentally. For the first time, a species, humans, are not content merely to live, but to know why they live, what meaning it contains. But the problem is that the more times we compute “why”, the more anomalies we find with our previous answers, so we must ask again, “why”, and after countless computations, we are destined to reach the answer, null. It’s not that atheists don’t want to believe the world has meaning and order, they do; but unfortunately they have asked why too many times to believe in the previous responses anymore.  So now, in order to pretend our life is not null or void, we have to come up with a more shallow ways to distract ourselves, distraction itself. Some of us are content with meaninglessness, some of us humor ourselves with the beauty of humanitarism, and others simply try not to think about it. ------ O...

Just sent 134 emails to legislatures about global climate change and what they are doing about it. I'm going to keep this post updated on their responses. The emails include all of the Wisconsin State Senate, all of the Wisconsin House of Representatives, the Mayor, The President, and The Governor.

Perhaps the poetry we find most beautiful are the ones that are purposefully left most vague, because it allows us to weave our own stories between the letters. and for some reason, seeing our story, interwoven on a string of vague beautiful words, makes our lives seem more aesthetic and meaningful. As if the very credence that those words exist, the words that hold one’s story, solidifies the credence of one’s life itself. It is as if the vagueness and mysticism of the page reinforces the mysticism of the world. Away from scientific explanations into everything mathematical, and into the mysticism that our lives, and our existence. Matters. And you know what is really interesting, is that, their lives do become more aesthetic and meaningful. As the experience of life is inevitably subjective; the credence of those words, the mysticism they entail, and the beauty they create for someone. is real. And so through the power of the human imagination, an imaginary interweaving of ...