So yeah
OK, got my run in yesterday, but was super busy, and had no time to write. When I woke up this morning, I had just a slight discomfort in my Achilles’, so I think the KT Tape and focusing on a more upright running stance, pushing my foot-strike forward is helping. In fact, I was only 1 minute off my fastest 5 mile out-and-back along the Lungomare. So not only am I tackling the pain, but I seem to be picking up pace, because this run I did have a little discomfort at the start which slowed me. Considering it’s much hotter now, to the point I am soaked with sweat upon finishing my run, this is fairly impressive.
So a lot has gone on. Shitheads following people who make sure they have poor education, have destroyed the relative peace of a pop concert in Manchester. I feel terrible for those people, but why is there not this outrage about Syria, where children are dying every day as bombs from all over the world are falling on them? Where is this outcry and show of how great communities “come together during adversity” when suicide bombers hit Baghdad, or Kabul, or Lahore? When it’s in the West, we’re all over it, but anywhere else, from Africa, to the Middle East, to Asia it goes largely ignored. Perhaps brief lip-service is paid, but nothing beyond a passing blurb on the news-ticker, or a few words from the anchor before moving into the latest advertisement for something you don’t need.
Why don’t we care? I know the overall answer is racism, but there has to be more than that. There has to be something more that makes us shut off and not care. Because we should care. Empathy is our natural state; I know when I care about these things, as much as it may hurt it’s right. I don’t need to know someone there, I don’t need to have anything at stake personally. It’s normal for me to worry about, to care about what happens to total strangers. They’re here too, and they have every right to be here. Yet so many of us allow ourselves to be trained to believe that some people don’t belong here. We don’t question the removal of our kindness or empathy. For some it’s a natural reaction to external trauma, but for others, there’s almost a glee in it. Look at the heartlessness at work in the United States today.
There’s an entire movement of people motivated by the hatred of skin color, let’s face it, that’s all it is at this point, you cannot deny it. As Trump has done EVERYTHING anyone ever claimed was wrong with President Obama, and has even committed crimes at this point (something Pres. Obama never did) and yet they still support Trump and claim it’s somehow not the case. But more than that, the whole GOP is gleefully trying to kick people off health insurance. In the current proposed budget up to 9 million children, 9,000,000 children will lose their health insurance. Surely, CHILDREN are not “lazy takers”. How can they justify that children don’t deserve to be able to see a doctor? They slash every single government program, except for one thing. The military budget, already higher than the next 12 militaries in the world combined, they get more money. And with this multi-trillion dollar bloodbath of programs that protect our land, air, and water, which feed and clothe the most vulnerable among us, which make sure that children can get to see a doctor when they need it, what do they do? They cut taxes for the wealthiest among us by an even larger margin. So what is left is being paid for almost entirely by the people who are being denied any benefit of their own taxes. They claim tax cuts pay for themselves, however there is NO HISTORICAL EVIDENCE OF THIS. Unless you are taxing people at a specific rate, which the United States is nowhere close to! Lowering Federal Taxes will only cause a rise in other taxes anyway.
But they’re giddy about this. Not just the Orange Buffoon, but all of them. They know this tax plan has no chance, but they will come up with something as bad, or worse, that they can sugar coat and get passed. But this is what they want. They want to lower the bar. Companies are still moving jobs to countries where they can more readily exploit the workforce. They will do it regardless of how low we make the taxes, they will do it regardless of how much the unions are diminished. If they can’t outsource, they will automate. They will lower the quality of education, they will lower the standards of living. They will pump as much as they can into a military budget, and tell you that is your way to prosperity. They do it all over the world. They’ve learned this is the best way to keep as few people’s hands on the majority of resources. Who are they? They’re us, but specifically, they’re the ones who manage to get themselves into power. Most of the world’s resources have been under the control of the same families for hundreds of years, you can’t tell me that’s coincidence.
Just the other day on my train-ride home, I was sitting next to two guys from Senegal on one side, they were sailors on leave in the city; and two Pakistani guys on the other side, and we were all talking and having a good time. Some Bengali guys came and sat at one of the stops, they didn’t talk much, they were eating. But none of us had any problems with each other. I felt bad for the Pakistani guys though. They were brought here to work in a clothing factory, and their papers ran out, so they were told, and now they’re forced to work 15 hour days. That’s pretty atrocious. But they said it was better than living in Pakistan, even if living in the camps here are pretty shitty too. I encouraged them to try and reason with the other workers and fight the factory owner for fair treatment, petition the government for proper status. But the government doesn’t want to give them status. As much as politicians will speak against these sorts of things, the fact is they get donations from the factory owners, more than that, they get them from the label owners. I’m sure not one stitch of any of the Trumps’ clothing lines were ever done by one worker who wasn’t being exploited. This isn’t something that happens “over there”. This isn’t something that happens in Southeast Asia, or Central and South America. This happens everywhere. We allow our politicians to create situations where people’s only hope is to escape. We then allow them to make it impossible for those people to legally escape, thereby creating this giant, exploitable, massively profitable work-force. And we watch the advertisements and buy the products, and feed the whole beast.
They only want enough people in the “Middle Class” in order to feed this beast. Not because they want to kill people and destroy the planet, they don’t even care about that. Trump doesn’t care, he doesn’t think anything he does destroys the planet. He thinks that exercise will make him sick, he doesn’t think eating all the shit food he does is what makes him fat. (Not fat shaming, just saying he’s fat) He doesn’t care if people die, he doesn’t give a rat’s ass. He only cares about having more money and fame and power. That’s the whole thing. The idiots that support him and the entire party of sick bastards think one day they can have that money and fame and power too. They crave it. They buy into this idea that they are equally as “chosen” and they don’t understand it’s all a scam by people who truly don’t care at all.
I need to learn Italian quicker, because I need to be a voice for those guys I met on the train. I have legal standing here, they can’t take that from me. I can speak, I can petition, I can fight, and so I should. Because I care, because it is right to care, it is the way our brains are supposed to be. I’m going to keep caring, and I’m going to fight for what’s right no matter where I am in the world and no matter what may happen to me.
No hero is going to come and save us. There’s no Captain America, there’s no Superman, there’s no Black Panther, there’s no Wonder Woman. This is on us, we have to learn to be our own heroes, we need to learn to look out for each other. We need to resist, not just the system’s inequities, but the system’s drive to destroy our empathy, to kill that which makes us who we are. I keep coming back to this, we have to disarm ourselves, somebody has to be willing to allow someone else to fire the last shot. We need humility, we need empathy, we need compassion, we need unity. We need fairness, we need a system that works. If multiverse theory is correct, there is a world out there where we face none of these problems we have today. I hope, before it’s too late, we can view this world one day and see all the horrible mistakes we’ve made here.
Have fun, keep running, and remember; if Gil can run then so can you!
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