The Old School Lunch

[Because apparantly every Amish kid during Rumspringa starts smoking]

The first time I put Devil’s Playground in my netflix queue, they sent me the wrong DVD. It was Devil’s Playground, alright, but it was some weird 70’s movie about some dark night at a church.

Anyways, this time I got the actual documentary and some interesting things I learned:

1. The Amish aren’t necessarily so anti-technology as people would believe. One guy cites an example of how an Amish community could potentially embrace a solar-powered battery charger while completely dimissing cars and motorcycles. It’s not so much about hating anything that require electricity as opposed to seeing how certain new things could negatively impact the “slow down, enjoy the scenery, don’t obsess about material things” community attitude.

And, unfortunately, that’s about it. I can’t name anything else. This was a very disappointing documentary because I feel that it could’ve been so much more but concentrated to exhaustion on the teen partying/drugs/alcohol “I want freedom” one-sided aspect of it while almost completely ignoring anything that has to do with gender, sexism, or race. I don’t know, but when in the beginning you have an Amish girl saying something along the lines of “you’re supposed to have kids until you can’t have any more” and “women are the weaker sex so they don’t do men’s work” it’s probably something to follow up on as the kids venture outside into the world. They do sorta get into it with that Velma/Verba character but that’s more of an “I want an education and career and choices” thing (though she does say that if she returned to the church, she’d have two kids by now) but it’s not nearly enough or specific enough. The documentary does dangle some bait at you though when one Amish girl says “during Rumspringa, the boys dress in English clothes but the girls usually still wear the traditional clothing” at which point you’d think “hmm, the filmmaker probably asked a follow up asking why, right?” Wrong. No follow up because either they didn’t think it was important or they wanted us to come to our own conclusions which I think is pretty lazy documentary filmmaking.

And race. I have a hard time believing that a kid growing up in an Amish community who is suddenly thrown into the “English” world doesn’t have any sort of questions or experiences regarding race. There isn’t one single mention of race anywhere in the documentary and actually I don’t think I saw any person of color in the entire film. Emma comes the closest because I suspect people will think she’s mixed American Indian or something but even that’s a huge stretch. The kids didn’t make one sort of comment like “woah, there are all these different kids of people in the world” during the entire filming process? Really?

[From the NetFlix queue]

Completely disturbing, refreshing, brilliant and utterly depressing: Maxed Out

Makes me want to rethink that new digital camera purchase…

“You sound black. Like your voice. Not like, you know, black like that but just your voice in general…it sounds black.” - coworker

Is that this is yet another murder-suicide. WWE won’t say it on their official press release having just put on a three-hour tribute to the man but it doesn’t take a genius to realize that we see yet again another tragedy of a man killing his wife/ex-girlfriend/estranged partner and his children and then killing himself.

Update: I can’t believe people are putting up Benoit tributes everywhere. Well, I can believe it but it’s still some bullshit. I don’t care if the guy was Mr. Spectacular 2007, it’s not as if he died from some accident or got hit by a truck…he murdered his wife and kid and then killed himself. He now deserves a tribute for his life accomplishments? Really?

[Season 3, disc 2]

“You and Christopher are like a poster for Aryan breeding.”

A line like this would be fine if the main characters took even a split second to look at each other and say “did she just say that?” but they don’t. Ugh.

[Oh. And then today I not-so-loudly said “god damnit” after a frustrating case and my office-mate very seriously told me “you can’t say that” and “you’re going to hell.” I seriously thought she was joking but she was not shitting me. She then suggested that I say “F” next time to which I said “you want me to drop the f bomb instead of ‘god damnit’?” to which she replied, no, just say “Efff!”]

I like my co-workers. I really do. With the exception of maybe one or two out of all that i’ve encountered so far, they’ve all been better than I could’ve imagined.

Except when you stumble onto a conversation that starts with that news article on American folks getting shorter (because that would be bad, you know) and then somehow getting into a discussion about “pure” white and black folks and “race mixing” and such. At one point, I heard the phrase “yea, more people are having mixed kids so I guess one of the good things is that it’ll solve racism.”

I guess parts 1 and 2 of the cultural competency training haven’t covered these issues yet. Ugh.

But did I say anything? No. I just waited until they were done with the discussion to change the topic. I think they knew I was a little uncomfortable with what they were saying. But in any case, I am going to wait a while before I say something if anything to my coworkers and/or boss and/or the admin folks.

To be continued.

One of the routine things I do/places I visit as part of going online is checking out Yahoo!’s “Most Popular” page. They highlight the stuff that shouldn’t be popular (Paris Hilton back in jail!), the stuff that’s popular only for the day’s digg-like headline (Dog and Cat in love!) and then the stuff that otherwise sort of gets tucked under the rug.

Most times, that other stuff is of the global context and today is a prime example. Stuff like this really makes me question what i’m doing job-wise, where i’m putting my energy, and most of all, what the hell is wrong with people.

Police smash global pedophile ring.

China slave scandal brings resignation calls.

Those two words pretty much say it all when you’re sitting in a training session with everyone at your workplace and you’re wondering how much they paid for this. The Heads at my job hired a local agency to do “cultural competency” training for our staff. It’s a 4 (or 5?) part series and since I wasn’t hired until after part one, I jumped right into 2 and that was to put it mildly, a really bad way at presenting terrific material and talking about important issues.

The good about the woman (and her agency) that they had speaking to us was that she tried to gear everything very much to the org’s mission. She wasn’t shoveling out general advice or reading some template because she did her homework and she knew what it was that we do and catered (or tried to) the presentation to that. But at the same time, she spoke only in general terms and repeatedly cited herself as an example for all of the “checking yourself” moments when it comes to racism, classism and gender bias (I don’t think she used the word “sexism” once). Actually, the only real interesting part that I got out of it was when she talked about herself because then she was actually being specific. She talked about being a TRA and stereotypes about Asian folks and such and at times, it was informative. The rest was just bland. There’s no point in attempting to do what is in essence anti-racist training when you’re not going to talk extensively about perceptions and reaching out to the communities that you’re trying to build relationships in (AND when the main problem your org has is in it’s perception from different communities). Instead, we had tapioca discussions and small group “workshops” about privilege and yet again “checking yourself” without any sort of real presentation or consult about the culture that created this perception and what we needed to do about it. At moments I felt like this entire thing was meant to just make the staffmembers feel better about themselves and think that they’d really made moves for themselves and the org to be anti-racist.

Each staff member was given a folder of different worksheets, books to check out and, of course, the old “white privilege” handout by our friend Peggy. I was a little stunned that she would just so casually put this in there without any explanation and when I asked a coworker if they’d gone over privilege and white privilege at training one, the answer was “we glossed over it” which to me says it all. Talking about privilege and namely white privilege is something you can spend two academic quarters talking about and you’d still have a ways to go. It’s an emotional topic that deserves more than just the “extra reading material” treatment and it’s pretty irresponsible to just throw it out there during a training without fully getting into it.

For people to stop buying his crap.