YAWB – Yet Another Writing Blog
Just another Poetry site
No, not as in web2.0, more like WTF is going on here!?
I’m feeling a bit like this tonight:
From the last year of this country, I need that refrain. “Well it’s alright…”
I don’t have a direction for this post tonight. I want to speak to the political situation in our country. I want to speak to the division between those who want to champion other’s rights to a voice and those who would take away those voices. Continue reading “Well it’s Alright…”
Dear Mr. President,
Some things to do in your first couple of months:
The US is a country which has led the world in every endeavor. Make it so again.
Thanks,
Eric
As poets, as writers, as humans, we cannot afford to ignore the terrifying injustices that proceed around us every day. It may be complacency which drives the majority of our human peers to continue living as though these terrors were simply nightmares – shadows driven by overactive imagination. Or it may be fear of falling through the cultural systems we have developed to a space in which they cannot ignore these crimes we perpetrate against one another – the systems do not kindly treat outliers. A life constantly confronted and challenged by these things is hard, it’s difficult; and difficulty is one thing we in America have forever striven to delay/decrease/divorce. It is clear that a person constantly confronting this madness may go mad – there are plenty of examples. On the other hand, there are plenty of examples of intentional ignorance which also descend into madness. Continue reading “After Reading Sam Hamill’s “The Necessity to Speak””
Ran across Lin Dinh’s State of the Union blog today. There are some interesting, disturbing, and inspirational images on it, chronicling the results of the depression the country is in.
Recommended reading. I don’t agree with everything he says, but he’s doing good work, and more people should see it.
Ken Cuccinelli spoke to ODU’s College Republicans Friday night. They did not publicize the visit very well, but AltDaily’s John McManus did cover it. McManus did not offer any critique of Mr. Cuccinelli’s words, but one thing that struck me in the transcription is the following:
“It’s clear: the Founding Fathers believed the foundation, the source of the rights they were trying to protect, was God.”
In Bontoc Eulogy, Martin Fuentes addresses a relatively unknown chapter of American history through a mock-documentary search for family history. This fictionalized account of the search for roots takes viewers back to the Philippine-American war, which as the narrator states, comes across as a “dream muted by the dailyness of life’s events” (Fuentes). The disappearance from history is the subject of the eulogy referenced in the title, and Fuentes capitalizes on early film and photographic documentation of the time to emphasize the forgetting. By centering his camera on archaic representation, Fuentes pulls off the shroud surrounding the treatment of Filipinos in the United States during the earlier part of the twentieth century.
Just in response to a facebook wall post I saw today:
It is a small question, really.
These issues have each been in the headlines recently, especially online. The problem is that they have not been linked by common characteristics. For example, the stories often run in entirely separate sections of news sites, newspapers, or even entirely different websites altogether. What do I see as common characteristics?
Continue reading “What do the WikiLeaks Hunt, TSA Screenings, and DNS Seizures have in Common?”