Enough With the Selective Boycotting.

Ever since the Chris Brown-Rihanna incident, I've made a personal decision to never buy his music or in any other (conscious) way support his business financially.  Because of her response to the incident, especially as a role model for young women and in particular young black women, I also don't buy anything by Rihanna and change the station when her music comes on.  I can't listen to her without thinking about men beating up women and how terrible that is.

I'm inspired that so many people are boycotting and calling out Chick Fil-A for its CEO's hatemongering toward the LGBT community.  (I want to vomit that Bloomberg actually said it's not government's job to get in the way of beliefs of a corporation.  Um, yes it is.  If a restaurant were blocking women, or patrons of a given race, or those with disabilities, it would be a major problem and the government would most certainly be involved.)

But Chris Brown and Rihanna are also businesses.  So is Charlie Sheen (spousal abuse), Sean Penn (spousal abuse), Roman Polanski (sexual abuse), Woody Allen (child abuse, I'd say), etc etc.  If you are against it in life, don't fiscally support the perpetrator of it in leisure.

I'm not going to overlook horrific behavior, especially when people are unrepentant, just because I might enjoy something that an artist produces.  Once I find out about someone of influence doing something really damaging, I just can't enjoy their work anymore anyway.

In the U.S., we vote with our wallets.  So let's all be aware of what we're paying for.  It may not be easy - I love Target but had to push myself to switch stores as much as possible when it came out (ha!) that it was funding an anti-gay organization.  Honestly, I'd rather just shop at Target and tell myself my little purchase doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things.  But integrity is just more important.

I could be better at this.  I read the expose on workers' conditions in Apple factories in China on my iPhone with only a twinge of guilt.  But this isn't a pick-your-cause thing.  Even if you're not part of the group that's being hated on - I've never been abused, I'm not gay, I'm not a factory worker, etc - it's truly all connected.  If we allow one company to discriminate based on X, what's to stop another company from discriminating based on Y?  We need to have each other's backs as a society.

The Black Power Mixtape

I'm finally watching the documentary The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975.  It's blowing my mind on so many levels, mostly because (I'm ashamed to admit) I know very little about the full scope of the black movement in the 60s-70s.  Definitely recommend.

I especially love this quote from Courtney Callender, who was also New York City's first African American Deputy Commissioner of Cultural Affairs.

“This whole kind of, uh, falling in love with black things for a short period of time is essentially racist. It still is hypothesized on a great sense of separateness and a sense of treating black activities as kind of a curiosity either benign or threatening one or the other. When it’s threatening, you know, they’re gonna riot or something; and when it’s benign, let them paint or draw or sing or dance or whatever they want to do until we the white community get tired of it. And that whole structure is essentially racist.”

Sigh.  The more things change, the more they stay the same?  We've come so far as a country, and still have so very far to go.

The Dark Knight Rises

I went to see The Dark Knight Rises yesterday.  It was tougher than I expected.

We saw it at Battery Park, which is alongside the financial district, where most of the action in the movie takes place, which makes things jump off the screen a bit more.  It's also right next door to ground zero, which makes seeing films with killing or large-scale destruction harder to swallow.


But of course, in light of the Colorado shooting, it was impossible not to picture how everything happened that night.  I was also ultra-alert every time someone got up during the movie or came into the theater after the lights went down.


And while I'm trying to process the movie, I'm also trying to process how something like that happens.  What makes someone descend down that dark road?  Was it nature or nurture?  How could anyone ever stop something so unexpected?  How did people in the theater feel in that moment?  How do they move on with their lives?


I got really emotional toward the end of the movie.  There's a theme of the characters choosing to do the right thing versus choosing to be selfish or evil, and of certain characters moving on with their lives.  And then I also thought of the plane that landed in the Hudson River - on the other side of the Battery Park theater - and how all those people survived a plane crash, something people don't usually walk away from.  While all these people last weekend went to a movie, the last place you'd expect to not walk away from, and yet.  All of this was too much, I had to cry it out for a few minutes as the credits rolled. 


I have a terrible habit of making terrible jokes, usually in the form of eye-rolling puns, right after a tragedy - it's a sideways way of dealing with it, of avoiding looking something horrific straight in the face.  So I'm glad when I'm overwhelmed by an event, when I cry for people I've never met.  It reminds me that we're all human, all connected, and that life is ever so fragile, and a gift to be intensely grateful for every single moment.

Newsflash: My Demographic Doesn't Favor Romney

Shocking, I know.

This post by my favorite Jezebel is hilarious.

"Even though single people's strong preference for President Obama could tip the election away from the GOP, Romney campaign needn't fret. The election's still four months away, and there's still plenty of time to nominate a running mate that will appeal to single women — Channing Tatum wearing glasses, perhaps, or the song "Call Me Maybe" (what do you mean the constitution doesn't allow politicians to nominate musical compositions for office? Stupid activist court system)."


Well, I suppose if the GOP can make a VP out of Christian Bale making me dinner while reading me O Magazine and queuing up the latest ep of True Blood, I could sway right.  


Then again, probably not.