Tag: ‘murica

I wonder what the textbooks of tomorrow will look like

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, I was helping mythical gf clean out her classroom, and I couldn’t help but take a little bit of time to look through some of the textbooks that her students used.  Obviously, it’s been nearly 20 years since the last time that I had a county-issue textbook to learn from, so I was curious to see just what kind of stuff children are inundated with these days, since the world has for lack of a better term, changed somewhat over the last 20 years.

Now, not a tremendous amount of things were at all that different, since math is math, and the rules of math aren’t ever going to change.  However, including the math, the social studies textbook were giant explosions of color and photographic content, that I certainly don’t remember being the case when I was in contemporary education. The text is gigantic, the photos are bold, colorful and honestly visually captivating, as I am sure there are educational experts who do this by design in order for the eyes of young children to absorb them as much as possible.

Naturally, as an adult looking at elementary school-level content, it’s a little surprising to see how rudimentary the subject matter is, but then again I’m 20 years past this point in my education and should know this stuff and thankfully I do.  But I think things are meant to be way easier for the kids of today than they were back when I was a kid, with pretty much all key information and subject matter being pre-bolded, pre-highlighted and basically be given to students on a silver platter for testing purposes, without the kids necessarily having to study that much.

However, the point of this whole post really stems from the thought that despite the fact that mythical gf’s class didn’t have any U.S. history textbooks, it really got me thinking about how I’d be very curious to see one today, to see just how educators spin some of the more historic things that have happened over the last 20-30 years, as well as how they describe and try to educate of events that I remember learning about, like all the wars of American history.

This is of course, leading to the inevitable mentioning of the rise and regime of our current president, whom it doesn’t require a lot of imagination to see just how divided the nation is as a result of their ascent.  But I’ll admit that I think I’d be fascinated to see just how the educational field treats all of it from the standpoint of teaching children of what was happening in the United States during this time.

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The America we live in

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Typically, I try not to write things that are remotely political in nature, but ultimately the point of my brog is to have a space in which I write out my thoughts, and whether six people read my words or zero people read them, it’s still an exercise in putting my thoughts into words and occasionally seeing if I can get any further clarity out of expressing them.

It’s hard to ignore and remain silent on the topic of gun control, considering the latest episode of American Massacre involved a bunch of high school students and faculty getting gunned down by a mentally unstable person who somehow had possession of an AR-15 automatic assault rifle.  I don’t mean to sound ignorant and uneducated in all the facts, but the truth is that I have not gone out of my way to learn more than the surface facts of the whole tragedy because frankly I don’t want to get too detailed in what I already know is a horrific incident that could probably have been prevented if not for the simple fact that firearms, and extremely deadly firearms, are just way too fucking accessible in America.

Ultimately, I’m fine with handguns and the general guidelines of the Second Amendment.  Believe me, I thought long and hard about acquiring a gun after some stupid shitheads kicked in my front door with the intent to rob my house, except that I was home when it happened, and they ran instead of seeing if I were packing or not when I came running down my hallway.  However, my thoughts were always a handgun, or a shotgun at most, and only one.  Not a weapon that a Taliban fighter would be carrying on their person at all time, or any weapon that would be available by default in first-person horde shooter.

I don’t think assault weaponry needs to be available to the public in any capacity, yet here we stand, in an America where quite literally, anyone can somehow manage to get their hands on one, regardless of their mental capacity, or existing rap sheets with law enforcement.  If someone has enough murderous intent, they’re more than capable of acquiring an instrument of mass death.

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What would Alabama be without college football?

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

I don’t really like to talk about politics, but I just read an article about how Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore was quoted stating something about how he believes that the last time America was great, slavery was still in existence.  The same Roy Moore who has also been in the crosshairs recently for alleged sexual misconduct with underage girls.

However, this is also the same Roy Moore, whom in spite of these discouraging associations, is not only not out of the running for the senate seat, but statistically neck-and-neck in the race with Democrat Doug Jones.

All I can really deduce from this absurd notion is that red state Alabama’s conservative voters are so against a Democrat gaining some measure of power, that they’d knowingly and willingly continue to vote for and support a pretty known sex offender and seeming racist Republican on their own volition.

This isn’t so much a discussion about politics as much as it is revisiting the frequent topic these days of where human values have gone, really.

So yes, the headline is a serious question: what would the state of Alabama be reduced to if college football were removed from the equation?  As fanatically blind and brainless as the voters are in the state, there’s no shortage of blind loyalty and prestige that the success of college football brings to the state.  But if the University of Alabama and Auburn University either bottomed out permanently, or ceased to exist, what would the state of Alabama really have left?

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This is America, circa 2017

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Something that should never happen: a man is ashamed and full of regret because he decided to stand during the National Anthem, because it broke solidarity with the rest of his peers

Try to take a few steps back and look at the scenario as a whole: this is a man, a veteran, who served the country so that people could have the freedom to make individual choices – is full of regret, because he chose to stand for the National Anthem.

As an American, this is an absolutely heartbreaking story, and as I’m sure so many people say on a regular basis these days, just what the fuck is wrong with our country?

I’ll be honest: when Colin Kaepernick first refused to stand for the National Anthem last season, my knee-jerk reaction was disdain and vitriol for a player I didn’t care for as a player.  But through lots of deliberation and pondering opinions from all around me, I’ve kind of come around to a more neutral position that can see both sides of the argument.  Personally, I’ll never not stand for the flag and/or the National Anthem, but I can’t really say I’m going to criticize those who choose to peacefully protest the gesture, as long as they’re doing such because they legitimately believe in it and aren’t just being sheep, in light of current America.  After all, having the freedom to choose to stand or not is basically the quintessential point of American freedom.

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This is precisely why my trust in white people is fractured

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Among the vast majority of nerds that comprise of the vast majority of my social media circles, there was an individual that many of us knew/knew of identified as having been present in Charlottesville during the weekend of hell there.  This was confirmed by commentary made by them that stated as such, and that’s pretty much all that there needed to be known by the community before the witch hunt began and the shit started to fly.

Typically, my go-to move on social media is to unfollow people but not outright unfriend people, if I don’t like seeing what people post.  Whether they post too much for my liking, post opinions that I don’t want to see, flood my streams full of narcissism and/or selfies, or all of the above, among other reasons, I’ll usually unfollow first, but rarely unfriend.  I don’t want paranoid people eventually discovering that they’ve been unfriended and to have an uncomfortable conversation later down the line, and if it can be avoided, I’d rather avoid it.

But it’s not every day that you find out that someone you know personally, have allowed into your home, and allowed to pet and carry your dog, with smiles and seeming sincerity, marched in a rally and chanted discriminatory rhetoric with known white supremacists.

This is why my trust in white people has taken a critical hit, and why I can’t feel like I can ever let my guard down with them.  Even those that I’ve known for a while, apparently.

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A wise man once said

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

– George Santayana

Across the country, statues representative of Confederate history are being defaced, vandalized, toppled or removed outright.  I understand why these particular symbols are being attacked especially in relation to current events; but I don’t agree with it.

Sure, the Confederacy is symbolic of racism, and racism is a never-ending hot topic, but I just think that there’s something inherently risky about the rabid want from the left to have all Confederate statues and monuments removed. 

I don’t like the whole slavery and discrimination representative of the Confederacy as much as the next liberal-thinking individual, but I’m also cognizant of the face that this shit actually happened.  It’s history, these are things that have actually occurred on American soil, and I think that there is something important that we as Americans, should always remember this kind of stuff, whether it is good or bad.

Removing statues, plaques and historical markers doesn’t delete history, but it does serve to assist in the forgetting of it.  And forgetting history leads back to that famous quote that has been paraphrased and misquoted by many, however with the intended meaning never really changing: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

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What Charlottesville has done to me

~ dannyhong ~ Leave a comment

It’s not often I want to go back to a major topical event, but admittedly, I’m having a hard time letting this one go.  It’s on the tongue of every news outlet, and even in the endlessly flowing stream of social media, it’s still a hot topic that is still the talk of the town.  But the emergence of blatant white supremacy, the supposed neo-Nazis, and just plain eruption of bigotry that took America by storm in of all places, Charlottesville, Virginia has been a pretty big story, with some everlasting repercussions and impressions, whether people other than myself want to admit to it or not.

Originally, I assumed it was mostly populated by the degenerate hill tribes of Virginia where the KKK is known to still be around, but it turns out that it was slightly more organized, and comprised of people from all around America.  Why Charlottesville was chosen as their point of conglomeration was a small question I had, but given the obvious answer that such a demonstration would never have been able to fly in Northern Virginia, where they’d have been eaten alive by the vast mixing bowl of the region, with the same sentiment being similar in the Commonwealth’s capital of Richmond. 

My friends and I have laughed about how this would only have ended in tragic-ironic gun violence if it happened in the next largest populace of the Virginia Beach-Tidewater region, which has very large black communities with many notorious gang issues, whom would probably love to band together to oppose a bunch of white supremacists, so it pretty much left Charlottesville, home to the University of Virginia as the only logical place to gather and blather on about white-this and white-that and all their stupid shit that they somehow think is remotely acceptable in 2017.

I can’t get over the irony in that Charlottesville is the place where I learned Korean, a language not belonging to whitey, is also a place where large numbers of angry white bigots gathered to light tiki torches and chant about their supposed dying culture.  Obviously, it’s not so much a reflection of Charlottesville itself, as much as it is the unfortunate choice of gathering of a bunch of racists, but that’s how history works; Charlottesville is a site where hatred gathered, boiled over, and became national news.

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