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Politics
I am a dual citizen, both Russian and American. My mother just got her green card and my father has trouble entering the country, which is a shame. I'm protesting because I fight for humanity, I support everybody, which is why I'm against Trump's immigration ban. My dad likes Trump, we used to fight about Trump all the time, but recently my father's agreeing with me.
~Rodion
I am an activist journalist and I went to Mexico 3 years ago to learn Spanish, it was a total culture shock. I met a girl who had come to the US as a child, she got caught by immigration when she was arrested at a protest in Texas. There's a law that if you are in jail for 3 days waiting for immigration, you are free to go, but they got her before that time expired. ICE came for her when she was only 18 but the rest of her family is still here. You wouldn't be able to tell that she's Mexican, perfect Spanish, perfect English, she still works for an American company that outsources to Mexico to this day.
I've been doing activist journalism for three years and I've met several undocumented immigrants, this one guy, the sweetest guy I know, became an undocumented immigrant because it was the safest way for him to come here, but now he can't leave the country even if he wants to. At least he's happy here. It usually takes six months of processing in order for a person from Mexico to come to the states, even to visit, because the government is so against anyone coming here, but for us we just need our passports because the Mexican government benefits from American tourism.
~Matt
I am not an immigrant. Nor am I a member of an ethnic minority. I also have not grown up within a position of strictly limited economic means. Although I arrived to be at Fordham through an unexpected series of events, these events from my past have allowed me to be fortunate enough to obtain an upper level education. By living in this rather progressive city over the past four years, it has only further enabled me to value the importance of political awareness. I want there to be persistence. I want those around me to be filled with the desire of activism. Although I believe that the political climate has only caused heightened tensions among the preexisting problem areas of this country, I like to hope that in the face of this "time of upheaval" people will resolve these systemic inefficiencies with compassion, strength, and hope.
~Anonymous
This Christmas I asked for several books and got most of them. One of them was Don't Let Me Be Lonely by Claudia Rankine. Funnily enough, I "read" this book in my sophomore year of college in my English class: Writing New York. Ironically, I actually didn't read the book - I should have, but I didn't. Anyway, fast forward, this year I read Rankine's book Citizen and went to a talk about it with Claudia herself. It made me want to go back and read the book I never read. So, I got the book and read it. One page stuck out to me particularly. It was harrowing to think about it in the face of this election (image of said page is attached) and really made me think about the importance knowledge and awareness is.
Something that really stuck out to me was the line "you don't remember because you don't care." This is something that my Mother also used to say to me. She would always tell me that it was no excuse to "forget" someone's name because if you really cared to remember it you would. This has always stayed with me and I have always taken the time to remember people's names and what they tell me. To me, it is imperative to do this because doing this shows people that you are listening to them and furthermore, care about what they are saying.
When Rankine says: "in Bush's case I find myself talking to the television: you don't know because you don't care" I hear my mother's voice. The President "forgetting" whether or not it was two or three people that drug a black man to death in Texas is extremely symbolic and representative of what I feel our country currently represents. "They don't know because they don't care" In the face of the Black Lives Matter movement it is extremely difficult for me to wrap my head around the fact that it solely exists on the basis that people just don't care about black lives. They' don't know because they don't care. How do we get people to care? We know that black lives don't matter in this society, but how do we change that? How do we change a culture that invalidates and ignores a whole population's basest identity?
~Lienne Harrington
A common misconception about this election is that all the hatred, violence, and vitriol we saw on the campaign trail, and continue to see legislated by the current administration, is anything especially new or bad in this country. The men and women currently in power are not historical anomalies by any metric, they're just singularly abhorrent extensions of American history. The problems that plague marginalized communities in this country are nothing new, either: people of color, women, queer people, Muslims, immigrants, the working-class-all of these groups have suffered in this country, under dozens of past administrations. The only difference now is that the current one is disgustingly unabashed regarding their intentions.
The forces of history govern nearly everything we believe and do as citizens of this country. Because of the historical narratives we inherit, whether they're true, false, or erased, we believe the world we inhabit to be a certain, unfixed way. But there's always room for us to change, and to grow. That's the whole point of stories, both historical and fictional: to change the way an audience absorbs the world around them. We're social animals, and we love a good story more than anything else. There is a kind of power in reclaiming a history, in shedding light on old stories to make room for new ones, and now, more than ever, we need to understand how we reached this point, and how we can break old cycles to stop this from ever happening again. America has no one story, no one culture, no one history, that makes it what it is. That's the whole point of it. Instead of propping up the false history that culminated in our current White House, I can choose to raise up stories that are not considered part of the historical and cultural canon we cling to. I can use fiction, poetry, essays, or whatever other illegible scribbles I can manage to help rewrite, or at least deepen, a reader's understanding of what being American means. I can use my privilege to tell stories other than the ones I'm just "used to," reshaping the space I inhabit into a platform for those endangered by this administration to tell their story, to let the world know their testimony is valid. And I can tell my own stories as a means to redefine how I engage with this administration, how I protest, how I listen, how I interact, how I fight. I built myself, my entire life, out of the stories I was told, but now I have the obligation to tell new stories, to fight against stories that are "set in stone," and to help give untold stories room to breathe.
At protests over the next 1,400 days or so, you'll probably hear variations of the phrase "silence is violence." As writers, this refrain takes on a deeper, even more desperate meaning. We can't stop telling stories, we can't stop trying to engage with the reality of the history we're living. On some level, we don't have a choice.
By turning to our collective history as an act of self-preservation, we can find a way to make a future that we want, one that the generation coming after us deserves.
~Matthew Apadula
The tides are always changing, and with every stage of the moon's ascension into it's visible whole brings with it new stories, each as relevant as the other. It's hard to come out and surely say that one topic is the most relevant in today's political climate. I believe it is unethical to pick and chose a most relevant story to pitch to the world, and to you dear reader.
However, I believe that it is important to dissect the origins of the troubling divisive political climate. Perhaps all of these issues that have surfaced in today's politics stem from a rotten core. Instead of focusing on the minute details of governmental decisions made by leaders to "other" a whole nation we as a people need to delve into reasons behind such an irrational fear of mongrelization and this obsession with white patriarchal dominance. The lack of education on sociological matters, especially the intersectionality of gender, race and class needs to be addressed. The fact that people still hold on to the outdated beliefs that question racism and sexism's presence in present day society, as well as ignore the economic and cultural implications that come with that needs to be rectified for progress. We need to go to the root of the problem and expose the rotten floorboards of the foundations of democracy and freedom. I perceived this problem when I first arrived to the United States, a country that preaches it's values with pride and paradoxically has little to show for it. Perhaps it is an ideological view of the world, but there is an obsession with this dominant Superiority complex that I believe hinders the development of a country with such ripe potential. Instead of treating and replacing the floorboards of the foundation of America in order to strengthen it, it is employing a cheap alternative, allowing the wood to rot, and adding putrefied yet sanded and freshly painted floorboards to mask the realities of the political, economic and social climate. This needs to stop. For justice, equality and the integrity of democracy and freedom.
~Soukaina Alaoui El Hassani
My mother's cousin, when we visited him pre-inauguration, was a very well-intentioned Trump supporter-a foster parent devoted to carefully articulated sarcasm and Sunday potlucks. His son shared his passionate support of Florida sports teams and the elected president. We did not talk about politics, the divisive subject misplaced in dialogue between family that had spent years apart. The sports rivalry was more pertinent, less transient, a staple of our reunions. Shielding fragile conversation, we don't prod for the information that shapes his viewpoints.
We may have even naively assumed our raw source material was the same, concluding that we had just resonated with different solutions.
Now, as the president and his administration dictate coverage of pretend events and analyze fabricated statistics to massive audiences, we must all engage diligently with well-researched reporting. We must also hope that the public does the same, but the campaign culture that has transcended its temporality makes blind allegiance, by some, to the word of the president seem possible, if not probable. The president advocates for a distrust of the media, working to destroy its credibility amongst certain sects of the public. An informed skepticism of the media replaced by blasts of its absurdity.
Investigative and honest insight into the government is imperative to an accountable democracy. Transparency of executive action will come from adversary media, which we cannot guarantee to be taken seriously anyone who might be trusting only Trump-approved sources. Information, today, acts as currency, and withholding it allows the proprietor dangerous amounts of freedom from public accountability.
Haphazard deception from such powerful figures creates a disillusionment with the truth that makes subjectivity and objectivity harder to discern from one another. Critique of information sources will be a vital form of citizenship in the coming years, independent of what you believe and what you believe in.
~Anonymous
When I think of the word "upheaval," what I immediately think of is results. Upheaval is always caused by something else, and when all of those results are negative, then the causes must be negative too... right?
I think that a secondary result of our world being in a time of upheaval is that many people place the blame on themselves and others for the state we live in, and that we forget that not 100% of everything and everyone is constantly in this state of upheaval.
The story I would want to tell would be one about good intentions. I would want to show in a concrete but human way that to be a good person, you have to start with good intentions. We all make mistakes along the way, whether it's out of ignorance of another culture, thinking that that boy or girl you had a crush on was the one, etc. To live a full life, however, is to learn from those mistakes and to grow, and the reality is that some people mourn their failures and get stuck in a rut, and some people grow. Beyond that, there are many ways in which a person can grow.
I want to tell a story of a group of people who all face the sudden change in their life (it could be a death in the family, alien invasion, or buying a new house), but who come from a variety of different backgrounds and who face their similar situations in seemingly opposite manners. It would be a human experiment in fiction depicting that it always makes sense to have different opinions and reactions to the same thing, depending on where you come from and who you are at your core. I want to tell a story that might instill the reader with something that this time of upheaval lacks: acceptance.
~Anonymous
Today's Muslim ban reminds me of around 10 years ago when my dad sponsored a young doctor from Egypt to come work for him in San Francisco for a year. His name is Muhammed, and he is a practicing Muslim. When he stayed at our house for a few days while looking for an apartment, he was a very gracious, kind, and polite guest. Eventually, his wife and 2 small children came to join him in San Francisco, and my family and I became close friends with them. Muhammed's wife, Rasha, would always tell us how she was nervous to go out in public wearing her hijab. It makes me so sad that such kind hearted people lived in fear, right here in the U.S. We still keep in touch, but I remain discouraged by today's anti-Muslim sentiment in a country that supposedly values the freedom of religion.
~ Julia Bonacini
