Blatant

You are not being replaced.

You exist alongside families that were displaced.

There is no a war on your favorite holidays.

You can keep your consumer-fueled craze.

Your statues did not represent something that should be celebrated.

You own a history of violence that hate and greed created.

Your bathrooms are not a dangerous place.

Your schools are dangerous but you refuse to look the problem in the face.

Nobody is taking your job away.

You wouldn’t work some jobs no matter how much it paid.

Your way of life is not being threatened.

The threat we’re all facing should be a life lesson.

 

The Things We Do To Our Kids

We give our children our voice without knowing it.
and they sound just like us.

The intonations.

The verbiage.

Thought processes.

Values and beliefs.

Even those that rebel can’t escape it.
They all end up in some capacity like the blank slate before them.
Weather does that to everything over time.
You can’t deny nature without great effort.

The things we do to our kids aren’t right.

Simply through living we tell them how to live and how others should live.

In our own biases we give them bias.
In our own hates we birth hate.
In our own love we birth love.

All of this through the words we choose so carelessly because we don’t know the impact they have.

Some do though, I guess.
Some realize the hate they give and the love they dole.
Some are aware of the biases they keep alive through another generation.

A mama’s boy and daddy’s little man.
Daddy’s princess and mama’s little girl.
All they want to do is please and when its all they know it’s so hard to come out of what’s ingrained inside of you.

You grow up knowing whats right and whats wrong through a keyhole.
It’s amazing what you see when you open the door.

 

Women Wednesday

I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep this up because my memory is garbage but I thought I would like to dedicate an entire day to celebrating women in whatever way I can think of whenever I can think of it.  Of course most of my rambling writings are about women and me pining for them, but that’s different.  This isn’t going to be going on about lost love or potential romance but positively embracing a culture that includes women as equals and not merely sex objects and baby makers.

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It’s funny how a male-centric society twists everything.  It really isn’t funny, it makes sense.  Most things that are female oriented are seen as less than or second rate.  Cute.  Quaint.

Women’s sports, for example.  Growing up in a sports-loving household we only really watched baseball and football.  Every sport has its own female offshoot that isn’t as popular for a myriad of reasons but nobody ever thinks as to why.  The main reason given is simply because men are better at sports then women.  It’s science, right?  Man is strong, woman is weak.  Grunt.

Perhaps it could be because society funnels millions upon millions of dollars into training these male athletes to perform at the top of their ability while women athletes get the bottom scrapes of the barrel.  Boys are shown from a young age that their heroes can be sports stars while women have had few athletes in the past to look up to, and those they did have either had to go through hell to get to where they were or were physical marvels that had a physique that not every girl could reach.

Men are just better at sports, right?  If this were true then offshoot leagues of baseball and football and basketball that start up and fail, or are highly diminished in quality of play, shouldn’t happen.  There should be an endless supply of amazing athletes to feed these leagues.  But that isn’t the case because what happens is the trove of dollars set aside to scout, train and develop these athletes is mainly spent on men and in some cases twice as much.

If the dollars were spent more equally by college sports and professional perhaps the quality of play that is seen as less than would be improved?  Or does it even need to be?

Think of the best tennis player you can think of right now.  My first thought always goes to Serena Williams.  She is incredible, to put it lightly.
I don’t watch soccer but I will never forget the 1999 FIFA Women’s Cup Final with Brandy Chastain’s winning kick.  Not because of her reaction afterwards but because of the intensity of the game and how much of an amazing match it was.  Outside of that I can’t recall a single soccer game aside from the one where the French player head butted the guy in the chest like a psychopath.

So, again, maybe it’s all just false beliefs we’re believing that we were told as children that women’s sports isn’t as good as men’s sports.  Maybe, with a little more support, they can be just as entertaining.  Perhaps not in the form of raw power across the board but as an equally entertaining event.

There are a lot of false or errant beliefs I was fed when I was younger.  Parents often end up doing that to their children.  Political views.  Religious views.  Societal views.  When we get old enough to ask questions a lot of the time we still accept some of what we were shown as being fact when we really don’t know.  During the civil rights movement people didn’t accept that non-whites and women shouldn’t have a voice even if they were told those lies as they were growing up.  We should continue to question our own lies, no matter how trivial seeming because they always lead deeper.