March 28, 2014

• consideration

  So. It's been a little while.

  I don't really even know where to begin. I used to go through these phases where I'd post on here all the time, partially due to the incredible history wrapped up in this blog and partially because I was enjoying the combination of anonymity and oddity that is this place. To be honest, that feeling is gone. Xanga 2.0 is a royal screw-up, and I lost money because I paid for a premium product that now ceases to exist in favor of a new premium product in its place that I also pay to use. I get it, the site was dying and I'll give the admins and creators credit for acknowledging that. But okay, here's an analogy. My band used to work with a booking agency that got us great shows and reasonable time slots, but had the worst social media presence I've ever seen. We stopped using them because we learned not to do pay to play, but it got frustrating sometimes because they didn't do any work to get people out to shows. We were expected to be both full-time musicians and full-time promoters, and that's bullshit. That's what I see with old Xanga. The site's demise was obvious several years ago after the world fled to MySpace. But still to this day the Xanga twitter page or facebook profile are essentially useless. Instead of migrating to new servers and making the old faithful pay to stick around, there could have been a real effort by the people who started this place to keep their own house in order. That didn't happen, and I don't feel nearly as much connection to this blog as I did for the past several years. I'm not writing that to attack anyone, but I figured out recently that it's how I feel. Why did I keep avoiding coming back here to write? Because it's not the same place. It's the ballpark they built on top of where the shitty old one used to be - sure, there's still baseball, but it smells too good.

  I've got about a month left in my first year of law school, and I'm going to tell you one thing about the whole experience that I never really anticipated: it's lonely. That's not to say I don't have friends or that I'm not surrounded by wonderful people (because I do and I am) but there's something completely unique about existing in an academic atmosphere with classmates who all know they have to do better than the people sitting around them in order to get the grades they're accustomed to getting all their lives. As someone who almost dropped out of high school, nearly flunked out of community college, and was a lazy student for years before getting my act together, it's not a competitive drive I can completely share (at least in terms of the classwork) but it's always in the air. I said to a close friend that the week of finals you can literally feel the collective tension floating in the hallways. I don't mean that in any figurative sense - it is a different type of oxygen that we breathe during that week, and the only comparison I can make is to how it felt walking from building to building in Estes Park, Colorado. You're breathing, you're pretty sure there's air coming in, but your body sure as hell isn't convinced it's doing any good.

  I see it all the time on blogs I follow: don't go to law school. Often times the headlines are accompanied by snide commentary on the state of biglaw and the horrible transgressions that some prominent lawyers have committed in the public forum. Here's a couple of fun realities about that sentiment from someone (me) with firsthand knowledge of what the inside is like. Yes, it's an awful time to get a job in most law-related fields. Yes, the entire graduate school industry is a scam, from the loans and crippling debt to the textbook prices and constant new editions that are magically only available brand new at the university bookstore. (Want to buy used online? Great! You'll have them for week three of class because that's when your loans will process and be available to spend if you don't use the university-provided scuzzball bank, Higher One). That stuff sucks, and it's a constant reality. I'm going to exit law school in just over two years with a J.D. from a barely-top tier school, 100k+ in student loans, a bleak job market, and a shitton of other comparable grads all looking to take the same jobs.

  Here's the hope though, and trust me, there's plenty. I don't want to work in biglaw. If you offer me a job in biglaw, I'll turn it down. I want to work with the people that no one will touch. Yeah, that means sometimes they're the people who are criminals, minorities, drug users, homeless, and maligned by rich, racist Republicans as takers or moochers. (Side note on that in a moment). Whether it's working as a public defender, non-profit advocate, or community activist, I want to have my feet on the ground and not under a desk. Desks are for people who need to push papers around, and while that's an incredibly important role in our society (and I truly mean that) I wouldn't be caught dead living my life behind a desk. Hell, I don't even use my own desk that sits in my room with a nice lamp and everything - I'm typing this from my bed, feet away from my desk, because it's where I'd rather be. My hope is rooted in idealism and a passion for equality that my parents made sure I understood at a young age because I may have been born into an upper-middle-class family but that does not give me the right to believe others are below me. In fact, it gives me the responsibility to take my privilege and treat it as something that can be redistributed to the world for the betterment of others. I'm confident I can find a place that will pay me barely enough to live to do work like that, and I can't wait.

  Here's that side note about our obsession with "moochers." This whole movement is rooted in the Moral Majority that Reagan put together in the late 70s/early 80s. He manipulated church leaders (because while he was an awful President he was a damn good actor) into joining his coalition and helping him get elected by making sure they would have some sort of influence in government to continue the backlash from the expansion of the social safety net under LBJ and to some extent (although he basically failed at it) Jimmy Carter. This alliance of evangelicals and fiscal hawks eventually lead to the 1994 election landslide, the Contract with America, and so forth, which in turn gave white Christians immense power within the Republican party. That's how we ended up with George W. Bush - the GOP stacked the courts, got a 5 person majority on the Supreme Court, and stole the 2000 election with the most horrific non-slavery decision in the history of that formally-distinguished body. Because of this whole progression, white Christians now think a whole lot of things that aren't true because they were spoon-fed a narrative by rich people who don't actually care about the well-being of the entire country.

  If you believe that poor people are all lazy and undeserving of your help, you're not an awful person - you're just horribly uneducated and close-minded. You're also wrong, and both history and scholarly analysis will prove you wrong time and time again. We aren't that far away from a period of time in the history of this country where we sanctioned discrimination at an institutional level. African-Americans were sent to schools that did not have even the slightest ability to help them learn, because they were shams designed to perpetuate the era of slavery that many of these people subconciously believe we were better off never leaving. Think about this: Plessy v. Ferguson stood well into the 1950s - that's when many of these religious leaders were growing up or being born and taught by their parents how they don't owe other people anything.

  Remember "you didn't build that?" from the 2012 election? Let me tell you a really simple truth: you didn't build that. If you made a bunch of money in your life, it happened partially because of your hard work and partially because all of our tax dollars went to the police that kept you safe, the government that built the roads and subsidized the airports that transported you and your clients, the IRS who kept you in line but also made sure that other people were playing by the rules as well, and endless other examples of how society helped you become who you are today. Free market capitalism may breed innovation but it also creates a helpless underclass of citizens that are designed to be mocked and scorned as lazy, stupid, ignorant and useless.

  That's what the modern-day church endorses. I believe that completely, and it's the biggest reason I left. When you support the present status quo of bigotry, discrimination, hatred and institutionalized damning that exists at the highest level, you are culpable in remaining uneducated about where the money you put in the offering plate goes. The church was built as a movement of those who society didn't embrace - Jesus loved the prostitutes, tax collectors, and betrayers - and the men who followed in his footsteps were horribly persecuted. You, the modern white Christian who might be forced to actually touch a gay person (or god forbid bake them a cake) at someone point are not being persecuted. In fact, you've become the Roman Empire: your institution has made a decision to try and force their beliefs on the rest of the world, and they'll do it by brute force if necessary. I'm done with it, and I'm done pretending that it makes any sense. The bible is historically inaccurate at every turn. Creation science is an inherently contradictory term and if you've convinced yourself its anything but bullshit you've been brainwashed. (That's not to say you can't believe by faith that a god created the earth, but don't pretend you have any evidence).

  I say all of this to say this: our society has horrific income equality, and it has come from institutionalized discrimination. Look at the pay rate, gender gap, incarceration rates (that's a HUGE example), urban plight, and so much more. We have systematically abandoned an entire segment of the population and the people who carry the religious torch that would seem perfectly fit to lead the charge against this are the ones most willing to give them the middle finger and blow by in a nice new car while they ask for change at the stop light. That's why I'm in law school. I don't want Christ in my schools or my government or my health care - I want his philosophy in all of those things; that philosophy that says we are all horribly imperfect and nothing we do can ever truly atone for that reality so why waste time hating one another when we can work together.

  If you believe the lie perpetuated by some media that the poor deserve what they have, I can't help you. You're wrong, and if you don't already realize that you're remaining willfully ignorant of the truth. That's on you.

  Yeesh. That was a journey. I'm sure we're all shocked that my side note ended up longer than the rest of my content. I had a professor tell me recently to "fall out of love with words" and it might be the best advice I've ever gotten. I love to write but it takes so much adjustment to rein in that desire for legal writing and be direct and to the point. It's not easy. (Look at that sentence! Only three words!)

  Perhaps I'll be around here more often if I get the chance. I'm really only able to write this today because benevolent forces came together and magically cancelled both of my Friday classes and a scheduled meeting. I'm not sure what I did to deserve that (nothing) but it was a welcome and much-needed surprise.

  I'll amend what I said at the beginning - Xanga isn't completely gone. She's different, much like the high school friend you run into at the grocery store the day before thanksgiving, but I'd like to believe that internally she's still the same. (Not literally, like servers and stuff, but some sort of in-between context). I'm not too far away from my 10th anniversary on here, so we'll see how the next months and years go. Maybe at 10 years I'll call it quits, take archive, cut my losses and move on to a pursuit more fitting for my future adult career. We'll see.

  • 5:26 PM
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