Christopher Gray, 21, A Drexel University Junior And CEO/Founder Of Scholly, Has Found A Way To Make

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Barack Obama, Ferguson, and the Evidence of Things Unsaid

Violence works. Nonviolence does too.

by Edwin Ushiro

I have one job, and its a pretty simple job: I come in in the morning, and we look at the news, and I write jokes about it.  And then I make a couple of faces, and like a noise, and then it’s just ch-ching, and I’’m out the door. But I didn’t do my job today, so I apologize. I got nothing for you in terms of jokes and sounds, because of what happened in South Carolina.  And maybe if I wasn’t nearing the end of the run, or this wasn’t such a common occurrence, maybe I could’ve pulled out of the spiral, but I didn’t.   And so I honestly have nothing.  Other than just sadness, once again, that we have to peer into the abyss that we do to each other, and the nexus of a gaping racial wound that will not heal, and that we pretend doesn’t exist. I’m confident, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is… we still won’t do jack shit. Yeah.  That’s us. And that’s the part that blows my mind.  I don’t wanna get into the political argument of guns, and things – what blows my mind is the disparity of response between when we think people who are foreign are going to kill us, and us killing ourselves. If this had been what we thought was Islamic terrorism, it would have fit into our – we invaded two countries!  And spent trillions of dollars, and thousands of American lives, and now fly unmanned death machines over like five or six different countries.  All to ‘keep Americans safe’!  'We gotta do whatever we can!  We’ll torture people!  We gotta do whatever we can to keep Americans safe!’ Nine people.  Shot in a church.  What about that?  'Hey, what can we do?  Craziness is craziness, right?’ That’s the part that I cannot, for the life of me, wrap my head around.  And you know it.  You know that it’s going to go down the same path.  'This is a terrible tragedy.’  They’re already using the nuanced language of lack of effort for this. This is a terrorist attack.  This is a violent attack on the Emanuel Church in South Carolina, which is a symbol for the black community.  It has stood in that part of Charleston for a hundred and some years, and has been attacked viciously many times, as many black churches have. And to pretend that, I heard someone on the news say ‘tragedy has visited this church.’  This wasn’t a tornado.  This was a racist.  This was a guy with a Rhodesia badge on his sweater. I hate to even use this pun, but this one was black and white.  There’s no nuance here.  And we’re going to keep pretending like, ‘I don’t get it!  What happened?  This one guy lost his mind!’  But we are steeped in that culture in this country, and we refuse to recognize it, and I can’t believe how hard people are working to discount it. In South Carolina, the roads that black people drive on are named for Confederate generals who fought to keep black people from being to drive freely on that road. That’s insanity.  That’s racial wallpaper.  You can’t allow that.  Nine people were shot in a black church by a white guy who hated them, who wanted to start some kind of civil war. The Confederate flag flies over South Carolina. And the roads are named for Confederate generals. And the white guy is the one who feels like his country is being taken over. We’re bringing it on ourselves. And that’s the thing: al Qaeda?  ISIS?  They’re not shit compared to the damage that we can apparently do to ourselves on a regular basis.

JON STEWART, The Daily Show (via inothernews)

It Is Expensive to Be Poor

Minimum-wage jobs are physically demanding, have unpredictable schedules, and pay so meagerly that workers can't save up enough to move on.

"This is a Catholic country," was what Irish doctors told Savita Halappanavar after she learned she was miscarrying her pregnancy and asked for an abortion to avoid further complications. She spent three days in agonising pain, eventually shaking, vomiting and passing out. She again asked for an abortion and was refused, because the foetus still had a heartbeat.

Then she died.

She died of septicaemia and E Coli. She died after three and a half days of excruciating pain. She died after repeatedly begging for an end to the pregnancy that was poisoning her. Her death would have been avoided if she had been given an abortion when she asked for it – when it was clear she was miscarrying, and that non-intervention would put her at risk. But the foetus, which had no chance of survival, still had a heartbeat. Its right to life quite literally trumped hers.