Love or Fear: The Choice Is Yours

Can’t sleep. I will soon. I think the primary problem is I feel like I can’t write. When I am angry I don’t want to write. I am angry. I don’t feel like writing or having ideas. This is what alcoholism does to me and I don’t even get to drink it. There is a feeling of helplessness in not being able to help all the people you love. I love a lot of people, leading to the helplessness compounding. I don’t even care about people’s supposed vices and problems. I just want them to be happy and they are not. Misery abounds. The more I love life the more I want to share that. I don’t know how. I don’t want to hurt people and confronting your misery hurts at first. 

I have studied the positive thinking movement. I don’t think life is about ignoring reality or pretending everything is always okay. Balance is the answer. Balance in knowing that when there is bad there will once again be good. Balance in knowing your past and where you came from and looking forward to the future without the regrets of past mistakes or the worries about things to come that are out of our control. I like it when I have a focus or a point to write about. 

I find I spend most of my time just contemplating life. Meditation is described as the clearing of the mind. I think that is a good start but a bad description of the goal. To me it seems more about letting life and its energy in the form of thoughts flow freely through you without questioning why they are happening. If you are completely alright with who you are in your life it should be good how you got to be here no matter how hard it was and it should be good to be headed wherever you are going because it is your path alone that you are forging. 

You are only allowed one perspective in this life. You never will hear someone else’s thoughts or see what someone else sees. Writing, movies, and all art try and accomplish this but it’s always an inadequate attempt at knowing what it would be like to not be you. Even when you read a pointed story or a song with specific lyrics, you can never fully know how the artist’s mind thought of it. You can only know the representation of their thoughts that they are trying to share with you. Will anyone ever read this drivel? 

I just watched a funny movie about the end of the world. I prefer my comedy dark and gritty. It’s interesting that morbid is a word with a negative connotation. There are only two certainties in life, birth and death, everything in between is subject to change.
There are two fundamental sides of life, love and fear. Hate is what many people would describe as the opposite of love; there would be no hate without fear. Hate is bred from insecurity. We fear the unknown. We fear what is similar to us because it makes us confront our own problems and perceived flaws. We fear standing up to and confronting other people and so instead we hate them. Hate is for cowards. 

They call it brave to shoot an assailant. It is never brave to take a life out of your own fear. I call it brave to try and understand how someone could be hurting so badly. Try to understand how someone can be so afraid that they are blind to the beauty of all it means to live and breathe, by hate.

Where was the beginning of consciousness? Is this a planet full of other conscious beings we never take the time to try and communicate with? Some people do but as a larger culture we don’t. We treat animals as slaves to humans, our resource to consume. If we met alien life on another planet and it looked like a Rhino would we try and talk to it? What if it looked like a virus? 

We magnify the skies. We magnify ourselves. Does all this magnification lead us to better understanding? For some of us it does. There is still a hierarchy of knowledge. We as a culture spend very little time trying to reach people who we deem beneath us. Everyone has someone who they deem beneath them. No one is beneath me; I am connected to everything through forces we don’t yet fully understand. 

Division is keeping us unhappy. Fear is what causes this division. My greatest act of fearlessness is constantly relearning to trust other people. We are taught to think we are mere animals. Animals display as much cellular complexity as we do as human beings. Our water that we drink is filled with tons of things we assume are not there because we can’t see them. Scientists know they are there. We walk around as if blind we would know the world of seeing. We assume because we don’t know how to see things that they are not real. 

We used to not know how to see cells. They were an idea. We used to not know how to see an atom. Now we can split one, what a good idea that was. Now well renowned scientists of lengthy careers refuse to discuss the existence of quarks. What will we know in 50 years that we do not now? Think about all the things we didn’t know 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago and beyond. We are constantly evolving, ever learning. To insist on being a person who always stays the same is to deny who you really are. 

Friends who haven’t seen me in 10 years understand who I am the essence that has always been me. I found my greatest weakness in putting myself out there and really connecting with people on a deeper level is actually my greatest strength. I was made to believe I was naïve and foolish for this trust, this desire to want to connect with other people. I have always said, once you really know someone, know where they came from, and know what they’ve been through, it is impossible not to love them. 

The problem in this world is that everyone fears strangers. We fear anything we don’t already know. This fear stops us from creating vast communities of connection because we don’t want to be confronted with the fact that everyone will hurt you at some point. Everyone makes mistakes. The thing that makes a mistake a mistake is that is inadvertently hurts someone else. There is a casualty. 

We are living in a world of mistakes. I just want my life to be about helping the people I love and some of them don’t even want to talk to me because of it. I have no value to this world unless I make a weekly paycheck and pay my taxes like a good little girl. It doesn’t matter that I want to change the world. It doesn’t matter that all I see around me is pain and emotional abuse, rampant drug addiction, people so detached from their reality they don’t even know why they must pay the bills they pay, why must they do the job they do. They don’t question why they are living every day in pain. We just assume life is pain. 

Pain is an important part of life but we could be trying harder to minimize it. If the world was going to end in a few weeks and we all knew it, what would be your top priority? Writing might be meaningless if the whole would was disintegrated. What use is keeping a record if it won’t persist into the future? That’s the thing though. I would still do it. I don’t do it for anyone but me because it is what I love. I hope I’d gain the courage to sing. When you have nothing left to lose shouldn’t fear disappear? Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. I suppose it depends on what kind of person you are. 

Perhaps some relationships aren’t worth saving, if only because I believe in personal choice. It is my choice whether or not to participate in someone’s painful life. Just as it is their choice to live it. Even when I’m not there it weighs heavily on my mind. I have a sea of people in my dreams who I never stopped loving. Call it a savoir complex perhaps. I don’t know why. I am so alright with me. I am the person I want to be almost all the time. 

I want everyone to know real freedom, and even I don’t know that. I know what I imagine it to be like, freedom to learn at your own pace, in your own way, freedom to love whomever you want, whenever you want, freedom from the jealousy that persists in this culture. All judgments we make on others are routed in jealousy which is caused by fear. 

Somehow we were taught to believe that love is finite. That once we love one person and another, we have less and less to give with every person added to the list. This is entirely false. Love is a learned behavior and energy, just like fear. The more you practice loving other people the more people you are capable of containing in your web of love. Love is infinite. It is the light that binds us together. Hate cannot drive out hate because life is a balance. Light drives out the dark, and darkness makes us appreciate the light. One cannot exist without the other. 

I don’t want to take a medication that eliminates the intense feelings of life’s ups and downs. Life is just a ride. Perhaps people who’ve never made an unsafe choice are truly happy. I certainly wouldn’t know. I have pushed my boundaries and tested my limits. I lived to tell about it. But the important part is that I’ve lived. I’ve loved and lost and lived to love again. 
I used to loath goodbyes; they felt final as a child. I thought I’d never see people again if they left me. I now know that is the farthest thing from the truth. I am always amazed by the random ways that life brings meaningful people back into my life time and time again. 

I could never have been a formal writer. I do everything wrong. I speak in slang; I use too many descriptive words. I should use different words instead of very this or extremely that. But would that help anyone understand what the fuck I am trying to say? 

I have been having a hard time trying to write dialog. As a kid I would lie awake at night for hours imagining conversations with people I knew that never happened. I stopped doing that because it was very disappointing when nothing ever seemed to work as well in reality as it did in my mind. One mind communicates far more effectively with itself than two minds do communicating with each other. 

I love getting to know people. I always want to hear their stories. I spent a lifetime in a hair salon. I spent a childhood hearing other people tell stories: Stories about their families, stories about their jobs, their heartaches, their struggles, and their triumphs. Some of those stories are entirely made up. That’s the beauty of people, through elaborate lies we can create lives we’ve never had. There wouldn’t be a very good fiction selection if no one knew how to lie. Sometimes we lie to protect people. Someone we lie just for fun. Some people are telling stories, and we assume they are lying, but to them everything they are saying is the truth; The truth from their perspective. The truth as they have seen it. We may think they are batshit crazy. Their family may tell us they never did the things they say they did, they don’t have the family or life they think they have. But maybe to them, they do. 

Who are we to decide what another person’s reality looks like, we will never know. Most people don’t know they were born artists. Most people aren’t trying actively to express, to the people they love and the world, what they see and what they know. What we see as an elaborate lie meant to hurt us is probably more likely designed to protect them or their mind from a hurtful truth. 

Finding your truth is a painful process in this world. We don’t have a universal way to help people understand the phases of life they are going through. We all wander through life trying not to change things too much, trying not to disturb the peace, rock the boat, or throw a wrench in the gears. You are not a cog in a machine. Machines are simplistic recreations of ideas learned from observing the complexities that exist in life. As technology advances to further complexity it more closely resembles life. Some people think they are simple creatures. Those people know absolutely nothing about themselves. 

I am starting to overcome my inability to stop picking at perceived imperfections in my body. It’s not even about societies expectations of my body; I have a specific manifestation to pick at my skin as if there is something constantly wrong with it. If there is a problem, it is only bad wiring in my brain of how I perceive my world. 

In this world money has the ability to deny you contentment. Food, water, and shelter cost more than many people can afford. How can that be? We live in a world of abundance. Technology has advanced so much farther than almost anyone could have imagined and yet so many go without. 

I don’t want to live in a world of fear any longer. Drastic changes in human consciousness don’t happen in a day. What is a day? It’s amazing how every day seems the same until you look back and realize everything is different now. I never feel like I am making enough progress. When I look back I cannot believe how far I’ve come. I try and remind myself when so many days feel the same. I know soon they will be more different than I realize as it is happening. 

I know I am doing right by being who I am. I want more people to have satisfaction that they really know who they are and are living the life they want to lead to the best of their ability until they can move forward and be even closer to the end. Accomplishments and success are nonexistent. They are abstract concepts of our created language. All that will remain of you when you are gone is the energy you left in the electromagnetic hearts and electrifying minds of those you loved deeply enough to share yourself with. 

If the truth was easier to find people would be very fucking interested: On Education

School is Ridiculous. I can't get into it. It's so lengthy, awww shit, here goes!... Kids should be kids and not be doing bullshit paperwork to keep them busy and shut up. Zack loves school. I tell him any day he wants mommy will pull him out and he will know WAY more stuff if I am teaching. He wants to go because he loves the kids. Man kids suck but they love each other, and they need to go to school to learn how to interact. If you exclude some of the kids from the rest as they grow up, or even create classes of public and private schools kids don't learn about all of the kinds of people in the world. I look back on my school experience and wonder if I'd have been classified now. My mother would have said, “fuck no I am absolutely not putting my kid on Ritalin.” I had an 8 year old friend who was on it; she didn't get better, not necessarily from the meds but definitely because the mom did nothing and that's what it comes down to. Some kids need more time to do shit. They called me pokey as a kid because I was always the last kid out of a group out the door. 

My first grade teacher put in her notes that I was defiant and slow, at 8 they had to call my parents in because I tested with a genius IQ and that part of my record needed to be fixed. All kids are different. I didn't find out any of this until adulthood. My mom was always super mom when it came to advocating for me as all parents should be. The teachers need help, smaller groups, and aids in the class for the kids who struggle. We need extra tutoring for kids that need it, and teachers who get paid well for doing it. The tax money is there thanks to the middle class, we spend it on administrator BMWs. 

That 1st grade teacher didn't like me because she said "Jacqueline would you like to go to the board and do the problem?" And I being 6 years old and terrified of things like going to the board and basically everything in the world said, “No.” I have always been very honest. She yelled at my mom, never a good idea. My mom had to explain to her that I was the most compliant little kid ever, because I was terrified of getting in trouble, and that She Asked Me A Question. If she said, “Go do the problem on the board.” I would have said, “Okay” and done it. That is who I was, obedient. Nothing like my mom, who had written in her Kindergarten permanent record, “She displays a willingness to stand up for herself too much” in the world of women circa 1960. “Stands up for herself” is a negative?

So how do we teach children that they can change the world? Education is a fundamental principal of this nation because it sets people free. There is a reason oppressive nations try to shoot girls who go to school. The American Education Machine is severely broken. There are castes of education. There are kids segregated out, Private schools for specific religions and social classes. We should not be allowed to segregate any longer. Education needs to be universalized. Keeping children with their appropriate age group has been shown most effective because their emotional development is similar. All children learn differently though. We have a system tailored specifically to kids who know how to predict the answers adult test writers want when you fill in the little circle. I am fucking awesome at the little circle and yet I got average grades in school. 

It’s a subtle manipulation that has transpired, gradually accelerating the amount of paperwork and homework with every generation. We justify our kids doing it because we did it. We never question because American schools aren’t about questioning. They are about obedience. No speaking out of turn. No getting up because you feel the need to get up and pee. “No I am not lying (asshole), I really have to pee.” Every one of us has had that experience as a kid. Nothing our children do takes into consideration their needs and their schedule. It’s all planned so we can get to work on time, so we can get them all to eat lunch on time. What the fuck is time but a social construct that we never question? 

There should be 1-2 hours of formal teacher guided study in school and the rest should be tailored to the students’ interests. Everyone has unique and valuable interests. Killing a child’s spirit is a sure way to keep them from realizing what their talent is. My entire life I just wanted to excel at one thing. I wanted to have this obvious thing I should do above all other things. It turns out to be writing. But that wasn’t presented as a valuable skill in my schools. I had one teacher who taught me about science and outlines and made us to a do a writing clinic in 6^th grade. Mrs. Cox I am forever grateful. One good teacher can change your life. It is interesting we don’t talk about writing as a valuable skill since everything you have to learn is written by writers. It is an important part of learning to know who wrote the text you are reading. So when you question it, you have some foundation as to why they may have seen history or science the way they did. 

How can children be the future of science discoveries when they barely learn science? When they do it is with the invisible brick wall. They take you just far enough to never realize that we don’t know all the answers. They only tell you about the questions already solved. What good is a book full of already solved problems? Stimulating our imaginations is important. Some of the most monumental changes in our social order have been from fictions. In fictions we can tell the stories that no one is allowed to believe in real life, fantasies to some but realities to the mind that creates 

As long as children learn to love and appreciate reading they will eventually take care of the rest themselves. Anything they fall in love with, to study it further, they will have to read about it. The faster you read the more quickly you can learn the things you want to know. There is no other reasonable way to learn things currently. Online teaching tutorials teach menial skills that are better learned with excitement from a good teacher than from the internet. You cannot learn a love of reading and knowledge from the internet that has to come from a teacher, a mentor, a friend. When you teach children the history of how we write down our thoughts they can understand why it is important to learn. We started with drawings and pictures and now we have letters to create pictures with words in our mind. You are in control of your life if you are in control of your mind. Teach them that and it won’t be a chore to get them to go to school and learn. 

We take the fun out of learning with monotony and dittos. Why would anyone want to waste their time on this planet doing paperwork? Most paperwork is a meaningless time consuming representation of reality and school worksheets are the worst kind. It is about learning to follow directions. It is not at all about learning to think. Especially not learning how to think for yourself. All it takes is a couple outspoken people to change the world. We teach children powerlessness and submission. We leave them without enough adult supervision. We undervalue teachers and instead of getting their jobs because they worked hard or because they love and relate to children they get their jobs because they know someone in the administration who can get them a job. 

In a severely undereducated nation there are 4500 teachers for the 400 jobs available in my state. I can tell you right now every one of those teachers is necessary and valuable. Teaching seems like a sweet “summer’s off” kind of gig, but it requires far longer hours to really create a learning experience in this world of “lesson plans”. Life is full of deviation and variation, how are we teaching children to handle life when school contains neither of these things? 

If you apply math and sciences to reality they are interesting by nature. They Are nature. The world we live in and ways to possibly try and understand that. Religion is a set of questions with answers provided; if you have further questions religion and dogma are not for you. Learning is the way to continue on the quest of human development for future generations. We don’t teach them about children who were once not allowed to learn. Women and minorities were kept from school to keep us from changing the system. If children knew more of the truth instead of these myths the world would not be this bleak place it is now. 

Far too many children suffer adult atrocities, but some of them don’t, and many of them maintain their hopeless optimism and imagination in the face of things adults have taught themselves to no longer imagine or face. Upsetting things and difficult experiences are what give us the power to control our own lives. When you survive something you never thought you could survive it reminds you that most of the fears holding us back are not real. They are just ideas in our mind that were planted there at a younger age. 

What would it mean to truly be free? Would it mean free access to education and all information? School should consist of teaching children how to use resources to study what they love, not what we think they should know. Just like some librarian taught me about the card catalog, we should be teaching children how to use resources to find things on their own instead of force feeding them nonsense nationalist propaganda. Our technology has come so far but how we teach has not. 

All children could have a tablet with the entire catalog of human knowledge on it. It is entirely possible, we just don’t do it. We would never have to cut down another hundred year old forest for dittos and handouts if every child starting at school age received a small computer of their own where they could complete all their school assignments. 

School is just one more way as a society that we instill fear in children instead of love. Fear of not doing your homework. Fear of not completely the task in the right time frame or to the appropriate standards. None of these arbitrary standards of measuring a child’s worth to our world have any merit. The problem isn’t that America is full of stupid people. The problem is no one has taught us that we are all very intelligent powerful beings in our own way. Being here in life is the mission to discover what makes us tick, what are our unique and beautiful strengths? What is the meaning of life? When your days are numbered how will you have spent them? Will you think what you did was the right way to spend your time? 

It has been confirmed through anonymous sources that I am a dangerous person to associate with. I might accidentally explode the truth all over the giant charade that is the American media. Artists know art. Nothing happening in journalism has anything to do with art. Facts are bland, facts don’t get people to click and pay advertisers. Advertisers love clicks. They have access to the statistics on how the human mind works and what makes us tick, but we don’t.  Gossip gets people to click. So we trick them into clicking with gossip and then try and hide some facts around so they feel informed.

Really people just want their lives to be interesting. They want to know interesting things if their life feels monotonous. We focus on celebrity because we can talk openly about strangers and we are afraid to share the experiences of our friends, lest we betray their trust. We can make the things that matter, the facts that need to be told to the children who are going to change this fucked up world, interesting. They are interesting. That’s why they have to dump so much bullshit all over social media, and popular culture. If the truth was easier to find people would be very fucking interested. 

One of the Lucky Ones: Rape Culture

If I have learned anything after this past weekend, I am more than ever opposed to child stars. It is cruel. There should be laws against children on T.V. and advertising towards children specifically. That’s why everyone is so upset about Miley and I’m not, they loved her. They thought they knew her, and she wasn’t even old enough to know herself. Someone wrote the lines of her life and herself, for her. I bet Billy Ray is sorry now. It is a monster that is far out of his control. Not her, her career. His very daughter is being used as the primary distraction for an aggressive military intervention. The people in the media obviously sacrificed Miley for their own gain. If there was no news it would be obvious they were hiding open dialog about Syria. This way they can blame us, see you were so distracted by the Former Disney star, you let us start a war. Never mind that the VMA stories were shoved down our throats. I have my algorithms tailored to seeing global news and conspiracy theories. But my actual friends and family make sure I see every last bit of propaganda. Are pop stars just another form of sex slave?

A 17 year old girl killed herself. She was raped at 14 years old by a teacher. The judge declared she “seemed older than her chronological age" and was "as much in control of the situation" which alleviated some of the responsibility of the rapist. Let’s get this straight. Children, let’s establish that as anyone a teenager or younger can’t consent to rape. Coerced rape, or violent rape. Sex with a child is rape. Let’s face it, we have all seen and personally experienced teenagers’ lack of self control, they are children. When someone is in a position of power and they use that to have sex with children there should be the harshest of punishments. That’s how you know we are neck deep in a culture of child rape. No one in that court room batted an eye that this person got only 30 days in jail. Far less than someone smoking a joint, less than burglary of bullshit household junk, the only one who noticed was this 14 year old girl who had to face a world so heinous she chose to kill herself instead of continue on. I know she was 17 years old when she died. But she had spent 3 years dealing with severe trauma and betrayal and obviously didn’t get adequate support from the courts or rape counseling so she was still 14 in her mind. 

Most children who are raped never face their accuser. If they do it is to be violated all over again in a court room and see their rapist get away with a slap on the wrist. You can recover from these things, I know this primarily because so many women have to. It’s not about the rapist in recovery; it is about learning that the love of your family can surpass the trauma to make life worth continuing to live. I know you can recover to be the beautiful person you are meant to be because my best friend, one of the most beautiful people I have ever met, was raped at 5 years old by a family friend. The only reason Jerry Sanduski is in jail forever is because he raped many boys and had control over hundreds if not thousands of children in the course of his long career coaching children. 

Anyone who can rape a child can never be around any children. Diocese choose to protect rapists, schools choose to protect rapists. We send our children off with the supposed Leaders of our Communities, those who we specifically entrust our children’s safety to and they use that power to Rape them. Personally I know a man who raped a teenage girl that was a member of the church choir he was an instructor of, he was out of jail in less than a year. Had he had the chance he would have raped one of my other best friends, I kept her away from him. She still suffers nightmares because now every interaction they’ve ever had she sees through the lens of he was trying to fuck her. All the loving gestures of family friendship were manipulations. The girl at the church had been raped before as a younger child. The rapist received leniency since she was already sexualized. So being fucked up already by ANOTHER rape counts against the victim? It means she Wanted to be raped and further victimized by being blamed in a court of law before she was even out of her teens? Instead of the man who was supposedly trained to teach children being severely punished, she was punished further. I could tell he was a creep. I hate to say this because someday I will be wrong about the wrong person. But I always have the hairs on the back of my neck stand up when people like that are around. His body seemed just a little too up kept for his age, he had too much of a tan. He leaned in too closely when he wanted to compare tattoos. 

As a teenage girl I realize that some of my odder behaviors and fashion statements had to do with keeping creepy fucking grown men away from me. Instead of being prude with my clothing, I chose to be outrageous. I loved myself and my body, even though culture and society told me I was wrong and that I was fat and ugly and needed to fix myself. I was conflicted about that. I chose to be angry all the time, as a way to control who I let into my world. I hate when a grown man tells a young girl to smile. How fucking dare they! You would never say that to a man, or a boy for that matter. We say other horrible things to boys, “Boys don’t cry.” But that’s another matter for another post. 

Miley Cyrus is being slammed in the media. I’d like to focus on potential war and many people are right that it is more important immediately. But the culture that perpetuates the sexualization and the shaming of women has been around for a long time and it is time we address it. I heard nothing about how Robin Thicke, a Thirty Six year old man with a wife and a child of his own was grinding on someone who the media considered a child up until her latest single dropped. They even acted like he should have been ashamed to be on stage with her. We take these child stars. We sexualize them because let’s face it, if women in Hollywood have to open themselves up to sexual harassment and possible abuse to get ahead, do you think it would be any safer for children, children whose parents sold them out for a buck and their own desire for fame?

Fame is overrated. I am the mother of a very beautiful boy; I was often approached when he was a baby and toddler and told to put him in modeling and acting. I didn’t want to travel for hours to the city, wait for auditions, be stressed out, compete against other people, why would he? So I had to make a choice to protect my child as we all do. Would he love a college fund? I’m sure he would. But I’d rather we continue to live in poverty until I can convince the world we need free and easy educational access on the internet than subject him to possible abuse and a culture that deems his only value how cute he is, until he is not. 
Children deserve childhoods. There used to be laws about how much a child actor could work. They were required to attend school still. They were forced, in some cases by their parents, to have an education and opportunities outside of acting for the inevitable day they can’t make money doing that anymore, or just don’t want to. Once your child is in that industry and your family income depends on their career it becomes a lot more difficult to parent and to take back the reigns if something goes wrong. 

Miley is a grown women, I support her right to be as naked as she wants. Naked female bodies are not a crime. What she did was overly sexualized but it had nothing to do with her body being bad or wrong or something of shame as the media talking heads would have you believe. Someone is using her though right now and it is sad and horrifying. I never watched The Disney Channel much as a kid. I find their programming disturbing and lacking in depth for some reason, maybe because I was reading novels by 8 years old. Their message is tailored but often overlooked, the princess of a little girl. How many more child Disney stars have to devastate their fans with their quick decent into madness before we stand up and say, these people are fucked up because we fucked them up as children. People who haven’t had counseling and faced their abuse head on still act like and have the mentality of children. I see it all the time interacting with adults in the real world. 

We are so obsessed with youth, 70 year old women in poor health worry more about their wrinkles than their ability to walk. There is a tumblr I just found out about called “thigh gap”. Perpetuating and encouraging women to starve themselves instead of love themselves. I love the internet for the ability to communicate it has given me and over 1 billion other people. I love that we can network globally. I love that it is so much harder for governments to hide secrets. It isn’t hard for pedophiles to hide secrets though. Hackers spend countless hours trying to expose child pornography and trafficking rings on the internet because those are the criminals lurking in their corners of the internet. Disenfranchised silenced people need a place to speak openly, to be Anonymous. It is difficult for them and yet child sex slavery is rampant?

It seems to me that there is enough power in the world governments that if they wanted to crack down on child pornography and really do away with it, they would. It seems that if they really wanted to do away with children all over the world, mostly women, being sold into sex slavery, they would. Every time there is a major sporting event planned thousands of sex slaves are flown in from around the globe to satisfy the needs of our culture. Someone is fucking these children. How can the people being fucked take the brunt of the blame? People use their positions of power to take advantage of children and often times those children never get to leave those situations of abuse. Until we legalize prostitution completely we won’t see these things change. 

Women should not be shamed for doing a job that primarily men are paying for. When prostitution is legal it will empower women. When selling sex is the choice of a woman and not her master because let’s face it, every prostitute has a pimp. They need a keeper, they need protection, and they have no choice. You can’t call the police to report a violent John. That equals jail time. If you come forward with a rape accusation as a grown woman get ready for the full on attack of your character, in the media and in the courtroom. So no one with a questionable past (i.e. every normal human being but especially sex workers) can come forward. Expect that everything you’ve ever done will be put on trial if it might make you look bad and your rapist look less bad. 

1 in 3 women will be raped, usually before adulthood. I don’t want to be “one of the lucky ones” anymore. I want children to be safe. This world is not safe for children. You know it’s not. You don’t take your eyes off them for a second in public if you are a good parent. You wonder about and meet all their teachers and coaches and hope that if something was wrong you’d know. But the fact of the matter is, despite the hairs on your neck, you probably wouldn’t. 

Corey Feldman came forward recently claiming the death of his best friend Corey Haim was after years of torment and drug addiction caused by the abuse they suffered as children. The family of the deceased asked him NOT to speak up. I understand there must be shame involved in finding out your son’s suicide was due to the abuse you “let” happen to him as a child. You need to stop blaming yourself. No one wants that for their child. You need to stop blaming the kid who is still alive and speaking up, and start telling the whole world about child abuse. It is rampant. Most kids are suffering some sort of emotional or verbal abuse regularly. Children are taught to be silenced. “The adults are talking.” If adults can’t speak up for them, how on earth can they have the courage to speak up for themselves? 

I remember the fear of childhood. You are smaller, you are weaker, and this is a competition driven world, kill or be killed. Alpha children are no safer; they spend more time striving to succeed, more time with coaches and adults outside their home, more time trying to please. Somehow society decided children are here to serve us. When idiot politicians say children need to go back to learning the value of hard work I want to puke. Or maybe just show them black and white photos of children in factories at the turn of the past century. Maybe just fill their mind with statistics of how many child lives were lost before we had safety standards in the work place and child labor laws. You know, those pesky regulations getting in the way of business and profits. 

We live in a culture where whether working or “stay at home” mothers never work hard enough. Where fathers are praised if they do us the privilege of sticking around, because raising children is so awful. They can just leave, they can be states away, family number 4 and nobody bats an eye. Try being a woman telling people she has children states away, or who live with her first husband. The scenario is rarer for women and almost accepted as normal behavior for men. As if men are animals that need to be tamed and not fellow human beings. Every person is capable of loving children, of hearing them and understanding them. You have to be taught how though. This world teaches how to gain power, how to get ahead. How to control others to your advantage, children are just a casualty of the land all of us adults live in. 

I wanted to start writing funny things. I have heard I am funny. I always laugh at my own jokes. I think I am the only person who ever will. How can I write impactful funny stories of inspiration when this is what I am confronted with on a daily basis? The average American sees 500 advertisements a day. Televisions are everywhere you go, Facebook, YouTube, magazines, newspapers, radio, and more flood our subconscious with images and sounds designed to illicit an emotional response, often a sexual response. About mops and food? I can’t be the only one who thinks this psychology is not okay to be using on people, and not just sometimes but consistently throughout the day.

A lot of these advertisements are geared towards children. Hook a loyal customer in childhood, brand them for life. That is why so many people are upset about Miley. They think they know her. They don’t realize her entire self is a construct of some male writers sitting in a conference room. They love her as if she were a child they watched grow up in real life. To see the beginnings of a downward spiral we have seen many times before with Britney and Lindsey and all the other children Hollywood has chewed up and spit out was too much for the viewing public to take. On top of that, those of us who keep ample tabs on global news know she was used. She was the sacrificial lamb of the news media. The media doesn’t have to explain why all they cover is Miley and not Syria when people actually do care about Miley. That is the most brilliant part of all. 

We only read the drum banging pro-war Syria headlines, while we are engulfed in what will happen to this young girl, and once they start another military action of aggression they can say, “But we had to make this decision without you. You chose to click Miley so it is your fault no one spoke up and stopped this war.” It isn’t your fault, or mine. There are plenty of people speaking up in the name of peace. Those voices can be easily drowned out in this sea of information technology. An internet that could potentially be filled with every single bit of human knowledge known to man, and instead it is filled with porn and brain candy. We could publish every single scientific study online. All knowledge could be free to access and if I have my way someday it will be. Freedom of information, freedom to educate ourselves, will set us free from these horrible things. Right now the internet is full of pornography that shows primarily mutated female bodies doing acts that don’t remotely resemble normal human sexual practices. 

We have advertisements constantly thrown in our faces when we choose to use “free” services like Facebook and YouTube. I finally saw so many advertisements about what is wrong with my belly fat and my body on Facebook that I started taking screen shots of them so I can write about that as well. I am perfect, Facebook wants me to think otherwise. We cannot simply choose to abstain from the world of child sexualization and advertising. We cannot stop the objectification and slavery of women by avoiding these things. That is often the answer most often given, don’t look. You don’t Have to read those horrible things internet trolls are saying about women constantly. The facts are though that these things exist, not only do they exist but they are rampant, and if no one stands their fucking ground nothing about this system will change. 

Find the pedophiles hiding behind internet security. Find the men who profit and get off on the sale of women and children. Protect all women, sluts or not. Children’s issues are women’s issues. We are all in this together. These same things hurt men, they may receive slight privileges but they can no more protect their children from this world than we can as women. The culture of finding all men who date our daughters threatening has to change. Once we weed out the bad men (and women) who perpetuate the abuse of children we won’t have to fear all men. Men don’t rape because women are promiscuous or because no one stopped them. Rapists rape because they are awful people. It is the good people staying silent to this injustice that surrounds us that keeps these problems from being solved. 

“There comes a time when silence is betrayal.” – Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Today was the 50^th anniversary of the March On Washington. Instead of write about civil rights of black people and how far we’ve come and how far we have to go I chose to write about my issue; Women’s civil rights as a representation of civil rights for all. At the March On Washington Martin Luther King, Jr. said labor rights is our issue. The dignity to work for a living wage, women are paid less for the same jobs as men, as are black people and other minorities. It's time we take back the world from the "beautiful" people and regain our meritocracy. We need everyone who has valuable ideas and work ethic to have access to contribute. Slinging burgers for minimum wage doesn't help you contribute. Working just to pay your child care costs and have someone else raise your children does not help you contribute.

Our culture has taught us that sex is the be all and end all of our happiness. It is, but a small part, of a vast amount of life experiences that bring happiness and love. 

There is a young girl on trial for sending her girlfriend pictures of herself nude. They are teenagers, children, 14 and 19. The older girl was 18 before the trial started. Other girls have been brought to trial and faced potential jail time for sending nude pictures of themselves to boys they trusted who forwarded them to the entire school. That has become a common form of bullying and abuse inflicted on naïve teenage girls, making them trust you and then humiliating them publicly. There is even a website for grown men to post the nude photos of women who have broken up with them. Makes me so glad our cell phones never had cameras in high school. Nude female bodies are not a crime. All naked images of children should not be seen through a sexual lens, only in this world they are. Even the models we chose for runway are children, we put 6 ft tall anorexic 14 year old's in garments made for mannequins and call it fashion. Well not anymore, there is a law now that they have to be 16 years old. If you've been following along, any teenager is still a child. It is really just another way our society worships the youth and destruction of women instead of us as whole beings. 

There are hundreds of thousands of pedophiles around the world with nude photos of children or trafficking real children and our justice system wastes time prosecuting teenage girls, children, for their own mistakes. These mistakes in this world never go away. Once an image it out there, it exists on the internet forever. Jail time doesn’t rehabilitate anyone, or teach them a lesson. It just makes an example out of another girl being told what is “appropriate” for girls but doesn’t also apply to boys. Plenty of teenage boys (and Mayors and Congressmen) send pictures of their dicks via text and Facebook, I never hear about any of their trials. 

We are brainwashed from infancy to be sexualized objects. Wigs for your baby? WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING? If god forbid you act on that sexuality and take a nude photo of yourself, or dress provocatively, if you are raped or harassed online or IRL you will suffer the full brunt of our judgmental society. Tell me again how I’m a fucking feminazi for supporting the civil rights of women in this world. I want my ERA. If you don’t know what that stands for Google it and stop being a part of the problem. I want laws that make sense about child abuse, and child pornography. When we as women remember how to speak up for ourselves, we will save the children and all the men and women they grow up to be.