{"id":1082,"date":"2016-08-24T15:46:12","date_gmt":"2016-08-24T20:46:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gilcanrun.com\/?p=1082"},"modified":"2016-08-24T15:46:12","modified_gmt":"2016-08-24T20:46:12","slug":"running-earthquakes-and-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gilcanrun.com\/?p=1082","title":{"rendered":"Running, Earthquakes, and more!"},"content":{"rendered":"

So I’m still in Denmark, won’t be back in Italy until mid-September. Not being sure how far the earthquake this morning went, I needed to check in and make sure my people were tutt’OK! (All ok) So then I went for a run<\/a>.
\nThe run went pretty well, except for one little issue. I kept up a great pace and felt good, but when I got back and took off my shoes and socks…BLISTER! Oh no! Right on the end of my big toe. I get them so rarely, but they totally suck. Luckily I just am going to get a few miles tomorrow and then take Friday off. We’ll see how my foot reacts.
\nSo after thinking about the crapiness of seismic activity, I thought about the fact my dad is retiring in a few months. So much time has passed, and yet I feel like just yesterday I was a kid in Kindergarten. What really gets me is all this time has supposedly passed and yet nothing seems to really change.
\nToday, a friend was denied entry to a bar, because that friend doesn’t conform to the gender “norms” and this was in New York City! When I was a kid I thought games like softball would be obsolete by now because all the girls would just be playing baseball. I thought we’d be done with all the silly crap, but we’re not. We’re not even close. Drumpf is evidence enough of that, and all his racist-ass followers. It’s not so much that I ever felt like I was spinning my wheels, but I feel like society is just spinning its wheels.
\nMy dad, he taught me a lot about how to look at our fellow human beings, and while my parents weren’t always there, and sometimes they really didn’t pay too much attention, they did teach me to be good to everyone. That the only way the working people get out of this is by sticking together, not being out for ourselves. When I was younger, I thought if we just fixed the problems causing poverty, all the other problems would magically be solved. As I’ve grown, I’ve been lucky enough to realize that is not the case, and there are worse things out there than poverty, believe it or not.
\nPoverty actually points out the larger problems. The most glaring of which can be seen here<\/a>. If you look by numbers, you see that there are more poor “white” people than any other group, but there are many many more “white” people in general. When you look by percentage you see how horrible the problem really is. Racism is real, this isn’t a problem of “laziness”, or “desire”, or “families”, or “absent fathers”, or “black-on-black” crime. All that is bullshit. The system is meant for certain people to succeed and others not to. It really is that simple.
\nBut in the end, we have to start to really work together. Don’t let anyone red-bait, tell you you’re a communist or anything, those aren’t bad things anyway. But we have to stick together, and the first thing we need to do is accept others as they are. To really love our fellow human beings. To understand our kinship to each other, and the planet on the whole, and then we can start to fix these things. Hopefully these things happen sooner, rather than later.
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