The Feminist [unfinished]

She had some radical ideas. She was a feminist, but definitely not your normal, mill-running women’s rights advocate. This chick was more militant than that. Is militant the right word? If we equate Miss Friedan to MLK she’d be Malcom X for sure. Yeah, I’d say that’s militant. And like Mister X, she didn’t want legal and ideological change to equalize men and women, she’d explode on you if you suggested such a thing. Nah, she wanted a total do-over. I mean, what? Like undoing the patriarchy entirely and totally removing it’s rubble before rebuilding society upon a feminist foundation with feminist materials. And I guess the word “feminist” wouldn’t even exist anymore. She’d sooner live a shortened, disease-ridden, cave-dwelling, Paleolithic life rebooting civilization than even consider any kind of logical, realist-type middle ground. Crazy right?

I told her once, in a moment of drunken frustration, that “It’s not going to happen!” that she must be out of her laundry-washing mind if she thinks society, our incredibly advanced society, is capable of anything more than a minor tune-up. And I told her Western society is rapidly approaching the long-sought equality feminist have been pinning for. And I asked her “why? Why do you want a restart?” I told her that “to you equally built upon a history of patriarchy might not be ideal, but that’s all you’re going to get.” I didn’t understand why she couldn’t just be happy with the progress women have made and are continuing to make. I told her, loudly and slurring, that “if you’re rebelling when there is no problem, no harm, and no struggle, then you’re just an annoying, whinny bitch who’d rather live in a fantasy world than actually devote her life to a real-world cause. She reacted to that barrage the same way you expect a militant societal restartist to react. She shut down, didn’t argue, turned around, and walked off. Yeah, go ahead, I thought as she was leaving, just reject reality.

Now I consider myself a feminist, and a strong one at that. I’m against any and all injustice, and if there’s something I can do about it, you’d better believe I’ll be on my feet and marching. It was during my sophomore year, I believe, that I had an epiphany: there’s plenty of time to be prejudiced when I’m old and conservative and angry. Getting old is inevitable. My goal was to out-do that person’s hate so that my net contribution to the world would be positive, progressive, and lasting. There are very few ideals I’m opposed to… but this girl… I couldn’t stand her ideas. I’d lay awake in bed sometimes and get pissed. Like actually pissed for no reason. Maybe it was just the illogical nature of her personal idealism. She’s doing more harm than good. I was convinced people, men and women, would look at her and think “oh god, is that what a feminist is, no thank you.” I knew she’d drive people away from feminism just so they wouldn’t be associated with her.

As far as I was aware, she had no followers. And I also doubt anyone taught her these ideas, she came up with them on her own. God, I spent so much time dwelling on this girl. Why? I thought, to be positive, maybe she’s trying to further feminism by being on the cutting edge. But then the more cynical part of my mind would interject with nah, she just can’t handle the fact that the life’s cause is popular opinion now. She’s just a damn hipster.

The Feminist by Travis Tyler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Defensive Driving

Of the many, many things my defensive driving instructor loudly and articulately told my class you should definitely NOT do while stopped at a red light, a few were unforgettable. He, with his hugely dilated pupils, began with more traditional cautions before delving to depths I never knew existed. Like not moving forward until the light actually turns green. Like not making a left on red. Like not engaging in any kind of Chinese fire drill-like activities. Like not blasting your stereo at a busy intersection. Like not putting your vehicle in park while waiting. Like not blasting your stereo at any intersection because it’s terrible for your ears. Like not texting. Like not taking your eyes off your surroundings. Like not leaving your car unlocked. Like not being oblivious to squad cars in your immediate vicinity. Like not having any illegal drugs or weapons in plain sight. Like not leaving your car for ANY REASON, even if you feel like you might die if you stay in your seat a second longer. Like not looking too paranoid whilst sitting at said traffic signal. Like not anticipating the chance from red to green too much, because the resulting adrenaline rush might result in a crash or a ticket or something worse… Some… thing… much… worse. Like not eating while waiting, no matter how delicious your Whataburger looks or smells as it sits in the passenger seat next to you. Like not succumbing to its greasy siren. Like not glancing over to catch a glimpse of the grease oozing through the bottom of the bag. Like not doing anything that compromises your ability to remain 100% statuesque. Like not not freaking out. Like not freaking out. Like not freaking out. Like not freaking out. Like not looking at other people in the intersection like you little delinquents are looking at each other right now. Like not making a right-on-red from an interior lane even if nobody’s turning from the right lane. Like not forgetting to breathe. Like not thinking too much. Like not forgetting to exhale before attempting another breath. Like not listening to the radio because sometimes ads or songs have siren sound effects in them. Like not worrying about if the oven is on for like one damn second. Like not being fooled into worshiping the red light. Like not not falling prey to its neon majesty only to be betrayed as it vanishes, leaving you broken as horns blare from behind and cars speed around and overtake you. Like not donating to panhandlers, regardless of their personality, cardboard signs, military jackets or lack thereof, gender, race, or otherwise. Like not, in the same vein, accepting any windshield washes… the streaks they leave are teeth-shatteringly appalling. Like not adjusting your seat. Like not focusing entirely on the streak marks left by the panhandler, who attempted to squeegee your windshield despite your protests. Like not dwelling on the fact that your left hand is probably covered in bum germs from when you begrudgingly rolled your window down and handed the squeegeer a fistful of sticky change. Like not forgetting to double check if your doors are locked. Like not forgetting to breathe. Like not breathing fast and shallow, but rather slow and deep. Like not forgetting to roll your window up again, it doesn’t matter how nice it is outside. Like not tailgating the car in front of you by lining up the bottoms of their tires with the hood of your car. Like not making eye contact with your neighboring driver, giving and receiving a slight nod, gunning your respective engines, and exploding in drag race-fashion through the intersection when the light turns green. Like not forgetting, if you do this, to double check for squad cars. Like not becoming, if you do this, hooked on the adrenaline, because boy that wagon’s hard to get off especially if there’s money involved. Like not pulling through a business’ parking lot to avoid the intersection altogether. After that one he just kind of stared at us for a little bit, eye’s like olives, until we all just kind of awkwardly left the class at 4pm

Defensive Driving by Travis Tyler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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High School Gangs

My high school had some serious gang trouble, though it rarely ever affected the school, at least not during school days. Most of the trouble usually happened over the weekends, after a football game, or at one of a few 24-hour fast food places in my town. These weren’t inter-school rivalries or anything, but legit gangs determined – as far as I was aware – entirely by race. I was one of the few white kids at the school; the majority were Hispanic or black. And that seemed to be the divider. On top of that, there were even more, smaller gangs claiming to represent the terrifying Mara Salvatrucha otherwise known as MS13 (wearing all black with long, black finger nails and tattoos extending up to their necks from under shirt collars) and other similar-type violent groups. One can imagine how stressful this must have been for the teachers, who were outnumbered – remember this is a public high school in Austin, in a state and country which values education slightly more than infrastructure… which is to say not at all.

Eventually, during my junior year, it came down form the school board that all campuses must practice “lockdown” drills, complete with simulated “threats,” which at the time included fire, lone gunmen, gang riots, tornados, swam of locusts, etc. It was, pretty obviously, the gang riot simulation that caused the most disruption. The whole simulated emergency production was put on by the theater department in the cafeteria, and I remember thinking even then that this seems like a terrible idea. And then, of course, the fictional, campy, cliché gang fight between the fictional “haters” and “squids” expanded, radiating outward from the actors through the packed cafeteria. The fight was suddenly much more real than the faculty had bargained for.

It’s the teachers’ reactions that I remember most vividly. I watched their faces change from utter boredom to confusion to terror as this invisible wave the theater group was emitting washed over the room. The faces of the theater instructors specifically, which at the beginning of the performance looked so proud of the culmination of their weeks of hard work, suddenly flipped along the spectrum from smiling muse to crying muse. They were panicking – screaming in that limp-wristed-arm-waving way you might expect a theater teacher to flail.

The faculty and school district lit the powder keg by exposing these punks to a cheesy performance consisting of puny theater kids fake-beating on each other with baseball bats. And I thought to myself again, how the hell could you not have seen this coming? By the time I thought that, the whole place had erupted. I mean think about it: the juniors and senior of a gang-infested high school, who had three of four or five years to learn everyone else’s gang affiliation and develop group and personal vendettas, crammed into one room. The police – the entire department – arrived about ten minutes later and ended up teargasing the whole school, everyone, and dragging everyone out individually.

I was homeschooled the next year.

High School Gangs by Travis Tyler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

 

 

Gabe

In his autobiography, despite several witnesses (and history books) refuting it, Gabriel McGuinness, cofounder of the Konns Corporation, claims to have been the one to shoot and kill Chilean president Salvador Allende on September 11^th, 1973, during the uprising and coup that day. According to McGuinness, he and the president, despite having more than a few ideological differences, formed a close friendship. It is widely believed, and ­­­supported by his family, that Allende committed suicide with an AK-47 assault rifle – a gift from Fidel Castro himself – shortly after addressing the Chilean people when Pinchot’s troops entered the palace. McGuinness was, according to his autobiography, in the palace and alone with the president when the rebel forces arrived. He further claims that after handing him the aforementioned assault rifle, Allende begged him to point the gun at him and pull the trigger. He says, the thought of a Pinochet being the one to kill his friend was ‘unacceptable,’ and he needed ‘little more convincing.’ In Chile and around the world, there has been much debate over whether the president indeed committed suicide or was killed by rebel forces, McGuinness’ claim, however, has come out of the blue and revived the debate.

On September 11^th, 1973, Chile’s civilian government was overthrown by Augusto Pinochet, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of Chileans including President Allende and many thousands more during the US-backed junta’s rule. The reasons for the coup and revolution were the same factors that attracted Gabriel McGuinness to the country in the first place, which included (among other things) conflicting political and economic ideologies as well as US involvement . At 21 years old, he was the youngest student in the University of Chicago’s Economics graduate program. There he met many Chilean students, who encouraged him that a visit to their home nation would be an eye opening experience. It was, in fact, a trip that would change his life and apparently the course of history as well.

To understand the complexity of the revolution, the differences between the civilian government and the Pinochet junta, and the economic situation of Chile will require much more depth than the article can achieve – a list of good source materials and links can be found below.

Just two months before the coup, McGuinness and his best friend Franklin Dreary (both students under then-Professor Milton Friedman) flew to Santiago, where they quickly became acclimated – Dreary meeting a woman and falling in love and McGuinness befriending members of the state including the president himself. Dreary, according to McGuinness, was very much opposed to the socialist civilian government and was strongly against fraternizing with members of the state (the view of the woman he loved and her family are unknown), strong differences of opinion that led to falling out between the two friends (McGuinness claims this happened in spectacular fashion during a bar fight in downtown Santiago).

In the autobiography, McGuinness bonds with Allende over their mutual love of discourse and history (specifically the history of science and medicine) after being brought to meet him by a shared friend he purposely leaves out (presumably a high-ranking official). Since then he came and went as he pleased, an honored international guest with whom the president could talk things out (despite the fact that McGuinness was ‘not a master of the Spanish language’). Allende, in spite of being a socialist, welcomed the sometimes heated discussions he had with young McGuinness, who was a strong proponent of capitalism.

[…]

McGuinness goes so far as to claim, during one passage, that he was the unsung symbolic end to the Cold War, 17 years before the Berlin wall came down. ‘I shot my friend, we disagreed but he was my friend, with a gun symbolizing a more militant interpretation of his own ideals to keep him from falling victim to a man with a more militant interpretation of mine. I felt the entirety of the not-so-Cold War in my hands as I killed him and I believe I was the symbolic instrument for its end.’

McGuinness, who condemns the actions of the US and Nixon administration for the hand it played in the coup, lays out a clear moral for readers regardless of political/economic leanings: that pragmatism is the only option ‘in a world so full of hate that economics seems like a good reason to die – it’s not.’ He goes on to say that only one people, without interference and through rational discourse, can ‘evolve and economy or government.’

The entire fantastic story is something McGuinness says he was willing to take to his grave, but felt compelled to admit. ‘The American people are more divided than ever in a time of uncertainty that requires open ears and fewer radicals with loud mouths. I’ve always been a modest and private man and I would have let this story die with me, if it wasn’t so relevant. I just hope it rings true with more than just historians.’ Whether the story itself is true, the moral remains timeless, untainted, and more relevant than ever.

Gabe is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Austin

… we saw the same thing with Austin years before. Thousands of people moved there every day for years. For six years, it was the fastest growing city in the country. Booming tech industry, massive engineering- and business-based university, warm climate, and a hell of a culture to boot. In fact, this six-year period proved to be the largest influx to any city at any point in the 20th and 21st centuries. The Austin economy was flourishing and the city was growing extremely rapidly; necessitating a second airport and improved roadways (roadways which were a mere year away from completion)

The crash, or “Exodus” as it’s known in Austin’s case, proved to be the single fastest and most drastic fall from grace of any city in US history. The Exodus was caused by a multitude of factors of varying importance, but largest contributor was also the least tangible from a planning perspective. The Austin city council and mayor and political entities and city planners and businesses and students and culture and infrastructure certainly all played a part in causing the crash, but it was one simple oversight that dealt the most damage: the failure of the city’s projections to account for the humanity of individuals. The fickleness, short attention span, transience, dependence on “trendiness,” and general free-spirited nature of Austin’s new residents was not hidden any deeper than surface level, but such things – having never been a huge issue before to the modern American city – were not considered to be statistically relevant when planning the city’s future.

The thing about building a massive city is that it’s expensive. The money of course comes from its residents, and if they’re not there… well then you’ve got a problem.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.