i am feminist. activist. woman. vegetarian. pansexual. queer. human. smith college junior. i prefer female pronouns.
i love people. rwanda. love. human rights. learning. africa. exotic animals. photos. beauty. dancing. LGBT rights. the ocean. heat. sun. my boyfriend roth.
Sudan’s President al-Bashir is the world’s worst mass murderer. Indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide, he has for 20 years repeatedly butchered whole communities that challenged his rule. And it’s happening again — unless we stop him for good.
Click the link and please sign the petition. You can make a difference.
For real, sign this petition. Avaaz has gotten a lot done in the past few years. Click here to sign: http://bit.ly/qRbzRA
**trigger warning for dating violence and murder**
A flurry of texts, a final meeting
They had broken up, but Nate Fujita pushed hard to see Lauren Astley the night she died.
—-
This is a difficult article to read, and brings to light a lot of issues within the teen dating world. This is an extreme form of violence that we are seeing far too often now, but others are made to suffer through physical and/or emotional abuse for far too long. Teens get attached and have a difficult time letting go. Emotions are at a high, with few places to put them all, and dating becomes a sort of contract that’s difficult to escape from.
There were some nights when I was a teenager when I worried about this a bit, and thank goodness it never got to this point. I like to think that I have a good head on my shoulders, and it just goes to show that this can really happen to anyone. We need to teach children to have healthy relationships and offer counseling if they need it. Break ups can be very difficult, and seem like the worst thing in the world when you’re young, but they never have to amount to this.
“We love disasters that have nothing to do with us”
-Mark Doty
I find this quote eerily true. The amount of people speaking about instant atrocities such as tornados, hurricanes, earthquakes, tsunamis, fires, etc etc shocks me in comparison to those speaking about human-made disasters such as climate change, human rights abuses, political disasters and repression, genocide, mass atrocities.
Why is this? Because we feel guilty? Because we don’t want to confront something scary that could be inside us? because “natural disasters” seem somehow purer, less explainable, more godsent? Because human-made disasters seem more circumstantial and explainable, but natural disasters are seemingly random? Because we can make someone an enemy in a human-made disaster, but there is no controversy in a natural disaster?
Both occurrences are preventable in different ways. The increase in natural disasters is intimately linked to climate change, and the amount of mass atrocities and human-made disasters is linked to wealth and power inequality perpetuated by capitalism and globalisation, particularly the concept of neocolonialism, which I will not go into detail now, but will dedicate some time to examining in a later entry.
Is it worse to be killed in an earthquake or murdered? I don’t know, both seem pretty grim. But I think more time, energy, policy, and money needs to be spent investigating human-made disasters and how to end and prevent them than continually responding too late.
