World AIDS Day

And I wouldn't even have known it except that I went inside the SSB today and saw the signs posted up. If you are looking for a modern day display of hopelessness, then this is definitely one of the big ones. Still, even though the whole continent of Africa is dying out because of this virus, that's NO excuse not to help. How about there are three types of people in the world: those who don't care about anything outside their own little world, those who do care, and those who care and who do something about it. May we all be in or moving towards the last category.

Wilco, oh Wilco. They've got a great gargle of very quotable quotes in their superstar album, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. And as for the music, the most beautiful parts occur right before they move from dizzying, orchestrated composition to jarring, repetitive noise. This one's on the fridge right now:

I would like to salute
the ashes of american flags

Rev. David Cassidy, in his message last night, pulled out a sticky quote by George Bernard Shaw, his "favorite atheist."

"Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people."

In the spirit of youthfulness: if nothing else at all, let me one of the unreasonable.

And lastly, but certainly not leastly, here is a link to the famous video I watched in my sociology class today about the power and destructiveness of discrimination. What kind of world do we live in? This lady is extremely unreasonable. She made grown ups cry in a two-hour simulation showing how black kids are treated every day of their life. It truly left an impression on me.

Wikipedia:
"Elliott's method for exploring racism in the context of an all-white classroom consisted of dividing her students into two groups on the basis of eye color, blue or brown (those with other eye colors were excluded from direct participation in the exercise.)

On the first day, Elliott told her students that possessing blue eyes indicated superiority in intelligence and conferred extra classroom privileges while having brown eyes indicated inferiority. Quickly, the students of the "superior" color began to oppress those of the "inferior" color, while those of the "inferior" color exhibited negative feelings of self-loathing and fear."

In another class, we also watched another Frontline video on fad diets- bottom line, they don't work and if we do not adopt a change of lifestyle, the future generations will roll, not walk. Not good!

And how many times have you heard this one? "There are kids starving in Africa and you won't eat the rest of your ____." Well guess what, cleaning your plate won't help all those starving kids, it'll just make you fat!