Until I Figure This Out

Justice requires we repay our debts whenever possible. If I borrow your lawnmower, I can’t just keep it. If I find your wallet somewhere, I have to return it.

There’s not a lot of room for excuses. It doesn’t matter if I want to keep your wallet. It doesn’t matter if I didn’t ask to find your wallet. It doesn’t matter if somebody else stole your wallet and gave it to me. It doesn’t even matter if I think I can legally get away with keeping your wallet. And you definitely can’t be willfully ignorant about whether the wallet, by rights, is somebody else’s who probably wants it back. (I earned this!) I have to return your wallet, unless I want to be a failure as a human being.

The only real exception is if I’m literally starving–and maybe then we have to do what we have to do to survive. But even then, I’ve got a big debt to repay down the road.

Inheriting the fruit of a history of unjust conduct is a lot like finding a wallet. It’s on you to make things right, even if you don’t want to. (C.f. Failure as a Human Being, supra.)

The thing is, your taxes aren’t all that high in comparison with lots of other countries … And none of those countries are trying to run a global empire with HALF the world’s military spending all on its own.

Can you please come to Congress and give a speech insisting the U.S. has to keep fighting the war on drugs forever, so that way we can get rid of it?

James Baldwin, “A Report from Occupied Territory" (1966)

Senate Bill 277 does not specifically address the religious exemption. But if passed as now drafted, the bill would end all “personal belief exemptions,” including religious exemptions, said Sen. Richard Pan, a Sacramento Democrat and pediatrician who co-authored the bill with Sen. Ben Allen, D-Redondo Beach.

This is a good look from California lawmakers. Mandating vaccinations for kids going to schools and day cares makes perfect sense to me. There will be plenty of people up in arms over this, but my hope is that elected officials will hear from people who agree with them that things like public health can and do trump an individual’s right to believe whatever nonsense (s)he might want to believe about vaccines or about the sacrosanct nature of our rights:

Keith Howe, 59, a San Jose chiropractor, has long opposed efforts to impose vaccinations requirements. He said when Pan introduced his legislation in 2012, “I sent him a scathing letter saying this is not Communist China and he is not Mao Zedong. He is violating the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.”

This extreme hyperbole needs to be countered by people who recognize that protecting the public health through vaccination isn’t jack-booted tyranny.

It’s true that the law removes personal and religion exemptions — and this is, in no small part, what has anti-vaxxers up in arms. But these exemptions have gone through the roof in California: “From 2000 to 2014, the rate of parents seeking exemptions tripled, from 0.77 percent to 2.5 percent — or one in every 40 kids.” And there’s no reason for us to assume a) that these exemptions are based on anything more than one’s person erroneous and anti-scientific beliefs or b) that there’s anything wrong with eliminating even a religious exemption in the case of vaccination.

In my estimation, even under the strictest interpretation, removing even a religious exemption in this instance is permissible. The law doesn’t target a particular religion and it’s narrowly tailored to serve a compelling governmental interest. It’s impermissible for someone to argue that freedom of religion gives them a trump card when it comes to public health. No one has the religious freedom to put someone else’s children at risk of contracting a deadly and entirely preventable illness.

Later this month, the Nebraska legislature’s judiciary committee will consider the question of whether or not my fellow citizens can shoot at one another and claim self-defense even if they’re not actually defending themselves.

This shiny new Stand Your Ground bill is impressive in its ridiculousness. But here’s the part that’s the most obviously dangerous and horrible:

The actor may be wrong in the estimation of the danger or the force necessary to repel the danger as long as there is a reasonable basis for the belief of the actor and the actor acts reasonably in the response to that belief.

That’s actual language taken from the actual bill as introduced by actual state senator Bill Kintner, who has his name attached to something like a half dozen gun-related bills in this legislative session.

In Bill Kintner’s Nebraska, it’ll be a whole lot easier to shoot someone. Just say you believed you were in danger. You won’t have to prove that you actually were or that any number of things short of shooting the person would have put an end to the danger you might or might not have been in.

“There aren’t a lot of you out there”: What? Let’s fix our female Asian-American writer blind spot now

Who says Asian American women aren’t writing fiction? “We are everywhere if you only look!”

"This summer, I traveled around the U.S. to promote my debut novel, “Everything I Never Told You.”  At one university where I’d been invited to speak, I asked the professor hosting me how he’d found me. He admitted he’d needed an Asian American woman fiction writer to balance his speaker lineup. “There aren’t a lot of you out there,” he said, with evident embarrassment.

Many universities and events deliberately try to select diverse speakers, and I think it’s a fine way to expose audiences to writers of different backgrounds. But I was startled to hear there weren’t many Asian American women fiction writers.  Off the top of my head, I could think of several dozen.

Early on, 2014 was designated the “Year of Reading Women.” Partly inspired by the annual VIDA count — which for four straight years has shown a huge gender disparity in major literary publications — the #ReadWomen2014 movement encouraged readers to do just that.

In May, Book Expo America was widely criticized when the initial lineup for BookCon, its public event, contained virtually no women and virtually no people of color.  The#WeNeedDiverseBooks Campaign arose in response, to promote greater diversity in children’s and YA literature. (Full disclosure: I took part in a BookCon panel myself, in the awkward position of a woman of color who had actually been invited months before the controversy.)

In other words, in 2014, we might have expected awareness of women writers and writers of color to be on the rise.  And I still hope it is, on the whole.  Yet there it was, that statement I heard surprisingly often: “There just aren’t many Asian American women writers.”

Several years ago, frustrated by similar remarks about authors of color, the writer and critic Roxane Gay compiled a list of them, aptly titled “We Are Many. We Are Everywhere.” Inspired by Gay’s list, I put out a call on Twitter for names of Asian American women writers. Within hours, I was deluged with suggestions.  Even after I narrowed the focus to authors who had published a book of fiction — the type of speaker most venues seek — the list swelled into the hundreds.”

And the part that’s really weird to me is that the Libertarians get upset about this and then vote for people who support keeping Guantanamo open.