Categories
Alex Politics

On Radden Keefe’s ‘Say Nothing’ and my childhood in Belfast

1. Slieve Mish

I spent part of my childhood living in Lisburn, a small city just outside of Belfast (the capital of Northern Ireland). While I was too young to remember any of my first stint there, the latter took place when I was between the ages of 11 and 13. I remember those years fondly: we had a large but cold house, and I spent my school holidays hiking in the Mourne mountains, attending Ice Hockey games—Belfast (still!) have the best team in the UK—and shopping at Hollister. But if I came to understand anything from my time in the North, it was precisely how little I, or British people in general, truly understand about our little, yet historically and politically tumultuous, territory across the Irish Sea.

Even some fifteen years after the Good Friday Agreement officially ended the Troubles—Northern Ireland’s thirty-year civil war—its ominous memory continued to hang over my experience. I lived in a military encampment, and it just so happened that my house was next to the perimeter of the base; from my bedroom window, I could just about peer over the towering walls of concrete, corrugated metal, and razor wire, bristling with CCTV cameras, into the civilian neighbourhood beyond. These glimpses were most of what I saw of the place: I was required to flash my ID at guards equipped with full body armour, submachine guns, and attack dogs to even leave my neighbourhood. Once out in public, I was placed under strict orders of clandestineness: speak in a low voice, wear no clothing with the words “England” clearly on it—even my football socks from the 2012 Euros campaign were expressly banned—and do not, under any circumstances, tell anyone what your dad does for work.

Outside of the personal level, too, I encountered the realities of a country still wholly run by deeply-rooted sectarianism. Friend groups, schools, and entire neighbourhoods were wholly split on Protestant and Catholic lines; unsurprisingly, being an Army kid, the youth camps I went to during the summers were entirely attended by the former group. So divided were the cultures that you could generally tell someone’s background from their name alone, or even from looking at their houses: the stereotype suggests that Protestants almost always have blinds in their windows, while Catholics have lace curtains. Speaking to people from the North more recently, I learned an even more ridiculous dividing line: while Catholics tend to keep their toasters on the counter in their kitchens, Protestants would store them in the cupboard (admittedly, I am still unaware of the reasoning behind this particular quirk). A brilliant scene from Derry Girls highlights just how strongly these divides still express themselves in Northern Irish culture—and, indeed, just about how out-of-place I felt as an English boy deposited in this environment.

As a tween, I didn’t really question such peculiarities, many of which now seem absurd when I recount them to Brits my age—as a military brat, you grow used to obediently adapting to new environments. But while I didn’t properly comprehend the full historical context that led to my circumstances, I think what stuck with me was the collective sense of trauma and suppressed violent tendencies that still pervaded Belfast: the uneasy calm of a former warzone at peace for now, but which could rapidly spark again given the right circumstances. That’s the Northern Ireland I knew. It felt like standing atop a dormant volcano.

My father, my brother and I in the Mourne Mountains. 2014.

2. Tales of the Troubles

Now, I hardly blame anyone my age from Britain (note: as opposed to the UK) for not knowing much about the Troubles, or, indeed, about Ireland itself. The national History curriculum, or at least what I was taught, relatively conveniently circumvents any and all mention of the UK’s violent, crime-ridden colonial past. Even dealing with colonies such as India and Africa seemed to be relatively taboo, never mind approaching something as recent, as painful, and as outright criminal as many of the UK government’s actions in Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s; going further back, events such as the Potato Famine or the War of Independence were almost wholly ignored, the latter even when I studied World War I and the interwar period in the UK and Europe. The most mention Belfast ever got was for its role in building the Titanic a century ago. On a broader level, such deliberate educational oversight provides a decent explanation, and a worrying precedent, for Westminster politicians’ pervasive lack of knowledge of and attention paid to Northern Ireland (see Brexit, for an emphatic example). It is a history both incredibly relevant to our own country, and which has the capacity to teach us valuable lessons about similar struggles in the world today. Equally, though, I used to think that one could read all the history books on the North and still not quite resonate with it on a personal level; at least, not in the way that I feel I somewhat can after having lived there.

Recent events have changed this view somewhat. In February, my friend Mira came across from the US to stay with me in Edinburgh; having just been in Ireland, she’d picked up an interesting-looking book to give me as a thanks. The book in question was Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing, an account of the Troubles and the so-called Provisional IRA’s role in them. In short, I was blown away. The thing I think this book executes so masterfully is its choice of tone and structure: rather than merely being a factual history book, Radden Keefe chooses to write in narrative non-fiction. The result is an account of the conflict from the point of view of the complex, nuanced, and fundamentally human people who lived through it. There’s Dolours Price, the daughter of an IRA veteran who moves from peaceful protesting to more radical means. Or Brendan Hughes, the gritty ground commander who sacrifices his marriage and, at times, his morals, for a cause he believes to be unstoppable and fundamentally just. Or Gerry Adams, the later-famous Sinn Fein President who had a murky and contested career in the field. Many more such characters come into the fray (you’ll have to read it yourself to learn about them), but the real narrative hook of the story focuses on the family of Jean McConville, the widowed mother of ten in a mixed Protestant-Catholic family who, one evening in 1972, was suddenly kidnapped by her neighbours and never seen again. Radden Keefe focuses on recounting McConville’s broken family’s story over the following decades, and perhaps unturning some further stones in the mystery of her fate. Using this to provide a centrepoint for the book is an excellent tool for exploring the Troubles’ impact, as well as their memory and how it’s presented, on Belfast’s unwitting and innocent inhabitants.

Now, there is only so much which can be covered without turning into a history textbook: Say Nothing pays little attention to the conflict outside of Belfast and the crimes of loyalist insurgents such as the Ulster Defence Force, while a broader account of how the peace process came to light was also slightly lacking. But the point of this isn’t an accurate historical overview of the conflict: for that, you can go to a textbook or Wikipedia. The book’s aim, instead, is to transport the reader into Troubles-era Belfast by placing them into the stories of the people who lived through it. Aside from this direction allowing the book to provide an account which is riveting and undeniably human—so much so that I tore through the book in two days—it also helps to encapsulate and communicate to the reader that same feeling of division and unease that I often felt when I lived in Belfast (which, incidentally, is the same time that the book was written). That, in itself, makes Say Nothing an absolute landmark. Indeed, I reckon that UK politics would be in a much better position were all politicians—or even everyone—mandatorily forced to read it.

If that doesn’t come as enough of a recommendation, I don’t know what would.

My copy of Say Nothing. 2024.

3. An addendum on Ireland and Palestine

In terms of the lessons we might apply from the Troubles to the modern day, a particular line from Say Nothing really stuck with me. The following is written on p. 259 (in my version):

“Part of the reason that such a process [as truth and reconciliation] was feasible in South Africa was that in the aftermath of apartheid, there was an obvious winner. The Troubles, by contrast, concluded in stalemate”.

Now, I’ve stated several times in the past year that I’m not in the business of presenting concrete solutions to the conflict and occupation in Israel and Palestine: many more qualified and informed people than me have attempted it, and all have failed. But having previously put a lot of weight on South Africa as the best template we’ve got in terms of where on earth to start with a peace process, reading this book gave me a lot of cause for reconsideration. The Troubles, after all, have a lot in common with what we see in Gaza today: an embittered battle between a modernised, Western state army and a generational, rag-tag paramilitary organisation, ostensibly in the name of an oppressed group’s liberation from a foreign force on one hand, and the violent cessation of the rebels’ existence on the other. Neither goal is easily achieved even if it is realistic; war crimes abound on both sides. Crucially, though, outside of the total annexation of Palestine by Israel—an outcome that worryingly seems more and more possible by the day—I don’t see this conflict ending in anything other than a ceasefire and a stalemate. As the Provos knew then and Hamas knows now, overcoming the occupier is impossible; meanwhile, as the UK knew and Israel knows, crushing a rebel movement by force is impossible (though I can say for a fact that this is not the true aim of at least some members of Netanyahu’s cabinet). The issue is, of course, far more complex than this vague outline suggests. But the similarities may render the Troubles one of the best templates we’ve got for working out some sort of just resolution.

As the book details, the Good Friday Agreement was far from perfect. Many victims of the Troubles felt betrayed by its existence, and its terms and spirit have been largely defiled in the subsequent years (cough cough Brexit cough cough). But in providing an adequate political solution focused on amnesty and peacebuilding from both sides, it achieved far more than 30 further years of violence ever could have. Now, I’m not informed enough to offer more of a deep dive into the intricacies of each peace agreement; there are far better resources on that out there. But what I do know is that while the Belfast I knew was divided, tense, and fundamentally haunted by the spectre of its past, at least it wasn’t a bloody warzone. That is the least that kids in Gaza, Kibbutz Be’eri, and beyond deserve right now. Someday, I hope that their stories are told with the same care, and their humanity is as well conveyed, as Radden Keefe has done here.

Now, if anyone has any good book recommendations about potatoes, I’d best get reading…

Buy Say Nothing at the Lighthouse here, or through your local independent bookshop.

Categories
Featured Politics

Nine common misconceptions about my views on Palestine and anti-Zionism

My Keffiyeh at home. Edinburgh, October 2023.

The past two months have been incredibly difficult, both for my friends linked to the area and politically engaged people in the North Atlantic. I sincerely hope you’re all feeling safe.

However, in that time, I have both engaged in conversations and seen others online in which several things are suggested about me and others who share similar stances which are patently untrue. I thought it appropriate to outline a few of them in order to make my views clear.

NB. I’m not going to hyperlink to all of the facts here, but all are things I’ve previously read and can try and dig up for you if you really want to see them.

1. You don’t care about Palestinians, you just hate Jews, Anti-Zionism is antisemitism, etc.

Let me start by making clear the difference here. When I talk about Jewish people, I mean the ethnic group; when I talk about Zionists, I mean the political movement. The two have a lot of overlap, yes, however not all Jewish people are Zionists, nor are all Zionists Jewish. Look at the millions of Zionists in the West loudly supporting Israel and its actions—many of them are not Jewish. Look at Arthur James Balfour, the creator of the eponymous declaration and thus a critical supporter of Zionism, who was not only not Jewish but was also an avowed antisemite (he referred to them as “alien and even hostile” in 1919). In a political sense, I oppose all of these Zionist individuals and groups, and support the many Jewish people (including my friends in the UK and US, as well as organisers for Jewish Voice for Peace and similar organisations) who share my views.

Equally, I acknowledge and am abhorred by rising antisemitism in the West today, and stand unequivocally with the Jewish community in opposing it. Under no circumstances should they be associated with the actions of Israel, or face hatred or discrimination of any kind.

2. There are genocides and war crimes happening all over the world—why do you only seem to care about Israel and Palestine (heavy implication of antisemitism)?

I care about the others, too—I wrote a piece about the Uighur genocide in China a few years ago, which I largely stand by (though my views on the Falun Gong cult have been emphatically enlightened since). What is important about Palestine is both the speed at which people are dying, as well as the emphatic indifference and outright support of governments that claim to represent me and the values I hold dear towards it. The governments of the UK and US are explicitly allied with Israel, and largely support its military-industrial complex—they have the power to change its policies. Moreover, the UK helped to start this mess in the first place: we have a disproportionate responsibility to help fix it. As citizens, we, too, need to pressure our governments to change their tack before it is too late (if it isn’t already, or wasn’t a month, two months, or several decades ago).

3. When you refer to Israel, do you blame all of the citizens of the country for its government’s actions (heavy implication of antisemitism)?

Okay, this one is honestly a bit weird, but I’ve actually had it thrown at me quite a few times. The answer is obviously not, and I am really not sure where you get that idea from. When I accuse China of genocide, I don’t implicate my Chinese friends in that definition; when I accuse the US or the UK of war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, I don’t implicate myself, my friends or, indeed, my own family (several of whom were sent there). I am referring to the states and their government, not the citizens: when I say “Israel”, I mean the state and government of Israel, not the citizens of Israel (or Jewish people anywhere for that matter). I hope that’s clear.

Scaffolding on the Royal Mile. Edinburgh, November 2023.

4. Majority states of other religions and ethnicities exist everywhere—why do you oppose the existence of Israel, the only Jewish one, and not others (heavy implication of antisemitism)?

There is a difference between countries happening to have a majority of one religion largely due to historical and ethnographic reasons, and one which enforces it as a part of government policy (I know it’s not in the constitution, but look seriously at their actions). Israel’s current population is created as part of a campaign to form a gerrymandered ethno-state, and this comes at the direct expense of Palestinians. The easiest example of this direction being enacted is the international Jewish diaspora being given the “right of return” to Israel, but indigenous Palestinians not being allowed to enter at all, even if they were born there. What else could explain this?

In a broader sense, I don’t think that biblical or genetic lineage denotes some sort of rightful claim to a land (because if so, Palestinians have just as much right if not more to the place, and I can claim a swathe of land in Kenya, where humanity is believed to have emerged from, and claim my rightful home is there). However, what I do believe is in free movement, freedom from persecution, and the fact that many Jewish people feel a cultural and religious affinity with the area. For all of those reasons, Jewish people should be allowed a home in Israel/Palestine should they so desire it. But that home cannot be forced to be only for Jewish people at the direct expense of indigenous Palestinians, who have the exact same rights (and are being denied all three by Israel at present).

So, I don’t oppose the right of Jewish people to live in the area at all; what I oppose, however, is the creation of an exclusive and exclusionary Jewish state on land they had no right to take in the first place.

5. Why don’t you care about the hostages (heavy implication of not caring about innocent Jewish people ie. antisemitism)?

To reiterate my stance: the hostages should come home. But two major things need addressing here. Firstly, why aren’t we talking about the thousands of innocent Palestinians held in Israeli jails without charge, in a breach of international law, who have been for years (though there are more now than ever), and who regularly report facing torture while incarcerated? And secondly, you should be asking that of Netanyahu’s government, who have been carpet-bombing Gaza over the past two months despite having no knowledge of where the hostages currently are. I’m not an expert military strategist, but I know enough to be sure that their actions do not indicate a primary desire to get those people home—if it was what they wanted, they wouldn’t put a single extra one of them at risk. Many of the hostages’ families have criticised the Israeli government along the same lines.

6. “From the river to the sea” (and other common cries for Palestinian liberation) call for the eradication of all Jewish people (explicit accusation of antisemitism)!!!

Wording in Politics is tricky, because there will always be someone who attempts to twist what you say the wrong way (as I’ve seen from the responses to my recent article in the DP). To be clear: some of those who use that phrase do truly desire that (just as antisemites such as Balfour wanted to get rid of Jewish people by sending them to Israel). But calls for liberation do not necessarily indicate the negation of the rights of others. To use what is a tired metaphor by this point, “Black Lives Matter” never meant to say that white ones didn’t, too: its point was that black lives were treated as somehow lesser than others. In a similar vein, Israelis are afforded the right to live in freedom across the area (and even illegally in Palestinian territory), whereas Palestinians from East Jerusalem, where they are annexed by Israel but not afforded citizenship, to Gaza, where they have lived under a decades-long blockade and now a brutal siege, are not. Calls for Palestinian liberation are rooted in a desire for them to be able to live freely in their ancestral homeland: that doesn’t mean that Jewish people can’t, too. The original charter of Likud, meanwhile, explicitly calls for the entire area to be under total Jewish control.

The Lighthouse bookshop. Edinburgh, November 2023.

7. But the Palestinians elected Hamas (implying they deserve this)! Hamas is bad!

Elections last occurred in 2006. Given that almost half of Gaza’s population are children, it’s safe to say that a decided minority of them were able to vote at that point. There is also extensive evidence that Netanyahu’s government has deliberately propped up the organisation for years in a facet of its “divide and conquer” strategy.

I don’t believe in collective punishment (not least because it’s a war crime), and especially not for the actions of a government most of the people did not elect and do nothing to support.

Moreover, Hamas’ violence is not justifiable under any circumstances, but I don’t realistically understand what else you could possibly expect to happen when you limit Gaza’s movement, electricity, food, water, building supplies, etc. while your army can continue to bomb them whenever they want with impunity. It’s a vicious and hugely complex cycle of violence, perpetrated by both sides. However, it’s one that Israel, with its hilariously larger military and financial power as well as its purported democratic values, has the ability and the responsibility to fix. We should hold our allies to a higher standard.

8. Israel is just defending itself (also implying I don’t believe it should be able to)!

I’m sorry, but I can’t take you seriously if you honestly believe that killing 5,500+ children constitutes self-defence. It is, to put it lightly, retaliatory offence. There are other ways of eliminating a threat, such as targeted military raids, that don’t put literal millions of civilians at risk. I grew up in a military family stretching back at least four generations on both sides, and I don’t know a single honourable soldier who wouldn’t risk their own life to save innocent children, no matter where they come from: that’s why they join up in the first place. I wish the Israeli military were the same, rather than explicitly stating the opposite in their policies and actions.

9. This issue is too complex for you to understand: you’re just naïve (and antisemitic) to think you’re informed enough to speak out about it!

I’ve been reading about this issue and following it for several years—I didn’t suddenly start caring on October 7th, and I get my information from academic books and journalists on the ground, not TikTok (as I’ve been accused of doing; I don’t even use TikTok). With that said, I’m nothing even approaching an expert: many parts of it, such as finding an enduring solution to this trauma-embedded and deeply contested area, are indeed incredibly complex. Statespeople of far better standing than I will ever achieve have tried and failed to solve it.

Some things, however, are emphatically black and white: the ones I have attempted to outline here are a few of them.

—

There is always more to learn about this—on an experiential and academic level, I am far from the most informed on it, and I haven’t covered everything here, but I know enough to tell you that what is going on currently must stop.

I hope you find this useful. Message or email me with any thoughts and responses, and keep having the important conversations with those around you about this. The only way we meaningfully change anything is by uniting together to sway hearts and minds.

Take care of yourselves ❤

—AB, 28/11/23

A student-run protest for Palestinian liberation. Edinburgh, October 2023.

All photos used in this article are taken and owned by me.

Categories
Alex Politics

On Anti-Zionism

This is a piece I wrote for the DP in November last year, but never made it out due to Kanye opening his mouth (for the record, I haven’t listened to a Kanye track since). In light of recent events, I thought it best to publish it here now. —AB ❤

Image by me

“Last month, several Zionist groups raised outcry at an incident on Northwestern campus, in which a student op-ed on Jewish pride was posted around campus with the phrase “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” painted on it in prominent red letters. The Jerusalem Post accused it of being a “use of hateful rhetoric and [a] public, targeted attack on Jewish identity”: in other words, yet another example of unsolicited antisemitic violence from pro-Palestinian activists on an American University campus.

Two important and problematic claims require unpacking here: first, that this public statement was an uncalled-for escalation, and secondly (in a very linked point) that the phrase itself is inherently antisemitic.

The first claim falls apart with a reading of the original article. The piece itself is a beautiful expression of the author’s Jewish pride, and her refusal to meter it in a world that ever seeks to silence and oppress it. It ends with an attempt to reach over the table: to invite those who may oppose her to engage with her, and even to come to a Shabbat dinner with her to better understand her point of view. Especially as a student coming from a country where Jewish culture is much less pronounced, I especially have felt lucky to be able to come to a place like Penn and be able to understand that culture better, and truly appreciate those like her who are willing to let me into their world.

However, her article contains a key caveat, which her Zionist supporters seized on: she calls out the phrase “From the River to the Sea” as “a rallying cry to destroy the entire State of Israel and all of its Jewish inhabitants”. This is the phrase that pro-Palestine activists had emphasised in their response, but an aspect of her piece that had been emphatically ignored by the articles that came out condemning the response to it.

The second claim, which the author also made in her piece, is a much more contentious one that requires deeper scrutiny. Nonetheless, I believe that it mistakenly mischaracterises the entire Palestinian movement and its allies in a manner which aims to paint them as hateful antisemites. The truth is far from this narrative.

The Anti-Defamation League, an organisation which has been increasingly accused of bullying Anti-Zionist groups and wrongfully accusing them of white supremacy, defines “From the River to the Sea” as a phrase defined by most of its proponents as a call for the destruction of Israel and its people. They provide essentially no evidence for this claim. Now, while I’m sure that far too many examples in which individuals have twisted the phrase into this horrible meaning—the Anti-Zionist movement in my own country has faced deep issues with antisemitism very recently—to define this entire movement in this fashion is strongly mischaracterising it. The phrase itself has existed since long before its sub-group of antisemitic adopters. In itself, it calls for a Palestine made whole again: free from the settler-colonialist violence that plagues it and has already killed almost 150 this year, and continues to create and enforce illegal settlements in violation of international law. That Palestine need not be exclusive of Jewish people. Quite the opposite: I believe as much in their right to settle in their ancestral homeland as much as I support Palestinians’ right to return to theirs. But today’s Palestine is characterised by an enforced partition that keeps its citizens from their families, their religious sites and their ancestral homes, and most of all keeps everyone from any sort of lasting, mutual peace. At best, Palestinian ideas of peace requiring throwing Israelis into the sea are outdated; at worst, they have been created and perpetuated by Israeli media.

I’m not attempting to claim that things would be perfect if the roles were reversed and Palestine held all of the power. I’m sure, in fact, that the result could easily involve as intense, if not worse, discrimination against Jewish people. But such caveats cannot permit the current state of unbalanced violence that exists today: not standing up against it would be a betrayal of our morals and our activism.

This mischaracterisation stretches to Penn, too: a Jewish friend of mine told me lately how she had to explain to a passerby that the display of a Palestinian flag on campus was not, in fact, a flagrant display of antisemitism. For a campus and community that stands so strongly for progressive values, it saddens and angers me that were able to be blinded by such naivety over an issue that is so pressing and so lopsided.

I am not Jewish. Nor am I Palestinian. Yet due to this precedent, I feel scared to use my voice in support of Palestine, for fear of my words and my character being twisted into something that I stand as much against as I do Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinian people. My stance against Zionism in its current state is unequivocally exclusive from my absolute opposition to antisemitism in its increasingly prevalent, multi-faceted and vicious forms. I am tired of the two being convoluted.

That said, I am deeply committed to open dialogue on this incredibly important issue. Please send me an email, a DM, or an invitation to dinner—over my table or especially over yours. Resolution and peace are built over an approach built on understanding, not on division. If you’ve read this far, then I thank you for lending me your ear. Now please let me lend you mine.”

—27/11/2022 – 19/10/2023

Categories
Archive

Archive: We are all visitors

My final piece and “Farewell Column” at the DP! Original: https://www.thedp.com/article/2023/05/alex-baxter-farewell-column-2023

“A year is a long time.”

That’s a phrase that my friends often echo back at me when I bring it up mid-conversation. As my exchange year at Penn comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting a lot on the experience of being here for what is proportionally a very short period, but what to me has simultaneously felt like both a lifetime and an instant. But what I’ve realised is that by the time we reach the end of what is, for everyone, a relatively fleeting visit to Penn, most of us feel the exact same way.

When I was a first-year back in Edinburgh, my friend sent me this article by the late Marina Keegan, which she wrote upon leaving Yale shortly before her tragic death (and which you should absolutely read). She describes the sense of belonging she felt on campus as “the opposite of loneliness”, for lack of a better word. While I thought the article was beautiful and loved the concept, it wasn’t something I quite understood on an emotional level at the time.

Little did I know that that was exactly what I was subconsciously looking for when I applied to attend Penn almost two years ago. I understand now that what always drew me to American college was how the experience is so centred around community. We (or you, I suppose?) have a real pride in our institution, conveyed through school spirit events, excessive merch-wearing, sports fanaticism and more, which doesn’t exist at all in the UK aside from at Oxford or Cambridge. I wanted to feel like I was a part of that: the emphasis of my application essays was on making my mark here just as much as any normal student would.

But what I was worried about was that I would be limited by my temporary status as a “visitor,” and I wouldn’t be able to truly fit in with everyone who goes here full-time. Nonetheless, I soon realised that I needn’t have worried at all: just like all of my first-year and transfer compatriots, the Penn community has accepted me with open arms. The DP, specifically, has been a source of so many incredible memories: from the thrill of seeing my articles in print, to donning a press pass to skip the lines and cover events, to simply debating issues on campus with the incredibly well-informed and diverse group of perspectives in the Opinion department. Between here and all of the friendships, classes and clubs I’ve been lucky to be involved with across campus, I truly feel that I’ve found my place here. All of us have. It’s been everything I’d hoped for.

Now, less than a year later, I get to experience the flipside to joining with the new students: wrapping up and preparing to leave alongside the graduating seniors. It’s a deeply bittersweet experience: final GBMs, new execs and senior send-offs, outgoing parties. Your final lecture. Your final paper or exam. Your last stroll down Locust Walk.

More than reflecting on my final interactions with what I’ve spent months or years taking for granted, I’ve found the oddest experience to be Quaker Days. Watching the fresh-faced class of 2027 come in and gaze in wonder at our campus, many of them for the first time, served as a stark reminder that my Penn experience is ending just as theirs begins, and that our paths here will never really cross. 

Leaving Penn is equal parts daunting and exhilarating. But having spent so much time and effort cementing my place here, it’s disconcerting to me that come August, it’s simply going to move on without me. Nothing has ever made me feel more like a visitor than that.

Coming to terms with that process, though, has reminded me of just how much this place means to me. I wish I could argue to Marina Keegan now that to me, there is a word for the opposite of loneliness: connectedness. That’s what I’ve found, what we all find, at Penn. And no, I don’t just mean connections on LinkedIn: I mean that community which stretches far beyond our physical and temporal presence on campus (even if I don’t get to officially become an alumnus). It’ll be there every time we put on our P-sweaters or our Penn caps, every time we return for homecoming or with our families, every time we reminisce with our former peers, and every time we cheer when Princeton loses. It’s a tattoo on my heart that I will wear with pride wherever I go.

Everyone’s time to leave Penn eventually arrives, whether it’s after one year or four. But what’s truly important is that Penn doesn’t leave us: though our names may become forgotten on campus after a while, the memories that we forge, that feeling of connectedness that we find, persists forever. Though my year here has been more like an instant in the grand scheme, it’s the impact it’s had on me that will be sure to last a lifetime. 

To the class of 2023, my class of 2024, and all those who come after: cherish your, our, connectedness. It will be the greatest and most enduring part of your visit here. 

Thank you for sharing it with me.

Categories
Archive

Archive: Students First, Adults Second: the difficulties of outgrowing the Penn bubble

My most successful piece at the DP! Original: https://www.thedp.com/article/2023/02/students-first-adults-second-penn-responsibility-bubble-privilege

As an exchange student here at Penn, I’m often asked by people here and at home about the differences between the UK and the US. While I could get into a million minute details, my prime example is the so-called “bubble” which arches over Dunning-Cohen Champions’ Field at Penn Park, where I train with the Ultimate club twice a week. Penn’s capacity to put up such a structure for its students demonstrates the incredible calibre of the facilities here, the likes of which we simply don’t have in the UK. When I sent my family videos of the inside, they were astounded.

That aside, one question I’ve never been able to answer properly is what I think about living in Philadelphia. The reality, I have to tell people, is that I live at Penn, not in the city. Like the one above Dunning-Cohen, there is a similar, societal bubble which arches over Locust, cutting us off, to an extent, from the outside community. While the extent to which we’re catered for here massively simplifies our lives, the consequences of that treatment at Penn and beyond may be more far-reaching than we realise.

Coming from Edinburgh, specifically, this concept of an entirely centralised campus area was a very new one to me. My university at home is spread throughout the entire city, with four campuses and classrooms, sports facilities, libraries and more dotted around in-between: while you could get across the entirety of Penn’s campus in a 15-minute stroll across the length of Locust Walk, getting from one end of Edinburgh’s to the other takes about 20 minutes in a car, or 40 on the bus (which, at least, are free for students). We don’t have a university-owned housing requirement. Instead, students live in apartments alongside Edinburgh’s other residents, dotted all around the city. I never even took out a dining plan, though my cooking abilities remain questionable.

As a friend here put it to me lately, the result of this style of living, which is far more decoupled from one’s university, means that people attending university in Edinburgh and across Europe are “adults first, and students second.” Here, it feels like the reverse is true. While it exists through no fault of our own, the Penn bubble doesn’t just separate us from the outer community—it stops us from having to exist as functioning adults, too. When you think about it, all of us live within a roughly 10-block space where everything is catered for: gyms and sports facilities, supermarkets, dining halls and restaurants, bars and even a brand-new Target on the way. And besides, if we can’t find something within those few blocks, we can always order it to the Amazon lockers by the next day.

While the convenience allows me to get so much more work done at Penn, I ultimately have to do very little for myself. I feel like a high schooler again: able to be busy all day between classes and clubs and coffee chats, yet never having any sort of need to leave the University City area and integrate into Philadelphia itself. I enjoy the comfort of campus life, but being thrust into reality (while more than slightly underprepared) in my freshman year at Edinburgh taught me so many valuable lessons about motivation and independence. Whether it was learning to fix all sorts of household items when they break since I didn’t have maintenance to complain to, balancing my class schedule with a grocery run 20 minutes from home, or getting a bar job, not to bolster my LinkedIn, but because I had bills to pay. Learning how to handle yourself as an adult is a key part of the college transition, and of our personal development, that the Penn bubble effectively stifles.

Beyond the fact that I just think it’s a shame, the fear I have is that this same sheltering persists beyond our time here. When we choose careers with companies that similarly cater for our transport, meals, and even gym and spa memberships, we carry along that fundamental disconnect from the common experience that we have on campus. And when I see my classmates, as I’m sure I will, in positions of power and influence some 30 years from now, I worry that the decisions they make will be formed from a superficial, rather than a truly experiential, understanding of how our neighbours from West Philadelphia and beyond live. That sense of empathy for those around us will make us better leaders and should, ideally, be instilled in us through our time living here in the city. Penn’s isolation from the outside, though, renders that much less likely to happen. That sets a worrying precedent, and one that all of us need to contend with.The Dunning-Cohen bubble supports itself due to the air pressure within being markedly higher than the outside. This makes entering and exiting through the airlocks a relatively jarring experience—every time, my ears pop. I’ll never get used to it. This, too, is how it sometimes feels entering Penn’s societal bubble: a weird, pressurised space, totally sheltered from the winds outside. While being inside is easier—throwing a “flying disc” in a winter storm is ill-advised, after all—I always feel relieved when I step out into the crisp, evening air after practice, ear popping aside. Though I adore living here, I’m glad to be cognizant of just how strange and unlike the adult world it is. While the bubble’s all-encompassing nature makes it hard to burst while we’re in it, it’s that awareness that is the first step to outgrowing it.

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Archive

Archive: The Queen’s death is cause for Penn to consider its own troubled past

My first ever piece for the DP! Original: https://www.thedp.com/article/2022/10/the-queens-death-and-upenn

When the news of Queen Elizabeth II’s death broke I, along with Brits everywhere and seemingly half of the rest of the world, was rendered suddenly and surprisingly silent. The pre-planned obituaries and messages rolled out, sure, but in the moment most of us were left stumped as we considered for the last time what our Queen really meant to us. The truth is, she represented so much more than a face on a throne. Present on everyone’s TVs in her annual Christmas day speech all the way down to the few pound coins I still carry around in my pocket (just in case I’ll need them — you never know), she was an untouchable leader and global icon.

But while the Queen is someone that I was proud to have representing me, her death has once again led me to reconsider my feelings on the royals as a whole. Unfortunately, while they’re the cultural and diplomatic faces of the country, our ruling family is ultimately a deeply problematic institution that continues to represent the UK’s past of abuse of power both domestically and abroad. There are, of course, the scandals, which are far too pervasive to ignore: There’s Prince Philip (the Queen’s late husband)’s well-documented racist and sexist remarks, or Prince Andrew (her son)’s all-but-admitted grooming of seventeen-year-old girls (did I mention one of his best friends being a certain Jeffery Epstein?), and of course Princess Diana, a woman who was manipulated into falling in love with the whole family before being tossed aside with no remark on her convenient death once she’d produced an heir – even after she had become more adored than the rest of them put together.

But while what they do can be a serious issue, it’s more what they represent that’s the problem. They were, after all, once called the “Imperial Family” — their continued rule over much of the Commonwealth serves less as a signal of friendship and more as a reminder of who used to be the colonisers versus the colonised. The worldwide power and renown they’ve gained is far from a product of Elizabeth’s good grace and manners; rather, it is a legacy of an empire which brutally oppressed millions over hundreds of years (many Irish and fellow Scots would argue that that continues to this day, but I digress). That past is something that we have to atone for, but that the Windsors’ dominion only serves to perpetuate. The protests surrounding Will and Kate’s recent visit to Jamaica showed that their so-called “subjects” are growing less and less patient with their presence. With Elizabeth’s death bringing her less-than-popular son Charles to the throne, I think that it’s time our country had a serious reckoning with who we want to be and how we want to present ourselves to the world. 

These reflections aren’t unique to the UK, however; I knew I’d be encountering a similar sense of a problematic institutional past long before I actually got to Penn. A few months after I got my place here, a good friend of mine sent me an Instagram page called @segregation_by_design (which you should absolutely check out if you’re interested). They were doing a series on the forced upheaval of Black Bottom, the thriving 78% Black neighbourhood which Penn worked with the authorities to label as a “slum” and clear out to make space for University City — our campus stands on the ruins of that 10,000-strong community. 

The legacy of this societal damage sadly continues today with the UC townhomes, one of the last remnants of Black Bottom, as residents are once again being forced out of their homes with little notice and nowhere else to go. The University, meanwhile, which has billions of dollars in wealth and continues to benefit from that community’s dismantling, is silently sitting and watching. Penn has been given the chance to come to terms with and begin to fix the historic wrongs on which it was established by stepping in and saving the townhomes, stopping the past from repeating itself; unlike my Royal Family, who I know full well to be incapable of such fundamental change, I hope the choice that our university makes is the right one.

Just as the UK owes atonement to the rest of the Commonwealth, Penn owes the UC townhomes to its community in West Philadelphia. We both have an opportunity to choose the type of institutions we want to be: ones that ignore and in so doing perpetuate the sins of our past, or ones that work with those we’ve wronged to build a better future. Though I loved Elizabeth in many ways, I doubt the latter is what she would have wanted, but I know that it is what Diana would have. I’m sure you can guess who the Queen of my heart truly was.

Cover Image by Samuel Regan-Asante

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Archive

Archive: Penn’s Accountability Deficit Needs Addressing

Op-ed from the Daily Pennsylvanian. Original: https://www.thedp.com/article/2022/10/penns-accountability-deficit-needs-addressing

In January this year, M. Liz Magill was unanimously selected to be the President of Penn by the board of trustees. In her acceptance message, she talked about building on a legacy of “making a difference” through “pragmatism, creativity, and humanity” and expressed her desire to work with the whole Penn community to achieve that. The issue is, though, that that community isn’t who she answers to — instead, the only ones with any power over her are the board themselves, a detached group of alumni and bureaucrats who most of us will never get to see or meet.

The President functions much like a politician: She makes decisions about what goes on in the University and represents us to the outside world. The key thing about (democratic) politicians, though, is that we can hold them accountable — when they let us down, we don’t vote for them, and they lose their jobs. The issue with the Penn administration is that they don’t grant us that mechanism. Sure, there’s the Undergraduate Assembly, which does some great work to improve our campus, but even that can only make recommendations to the administration. They have no reason to take those recommendations on board and no reason to engage with any other student bodies. So, they don’t. 

For instance, they’ve been threatening and intimidating the Fossil Free Penn encampment on College Green since its inception but have yet to be reported as meeting with them about their demands. So much for working with “faculty, students, staff, alumni, and community members” as Magill pledged to do when she got the job.

I’m sure that you can see what I’m getting at — there is a serious accountability deficit here. On one hand, it makes sense — it’s not like we can realistically threaten Penn with dropping out en masse if they ignore our demands. But when the University repeatedly avoids talking to student advocacy groups and takes eight months to respond to issues such as the UC Townhomes sale (which also has widespread faculty support), they’re demonstrating a blatant and deliberate disregard for anything the Penn community cares about that might be inconvenient for them. 

And while we can’t threaten any staff’s positions directly, I find their cavalier attitude to be unwise: For an institution that relies on alumni donations, they’re doing an awfully bad job at making current students want to give back. Regardless of what the reality is, we’re meant to be members of a community, not customers of a business — we deserve a legitimate voice.

Now, Penn’s administration doesn’t have to enact every last desire of its students, no matter how socially prescient — if it did, I doubt an endowment even as big as the one it has would last very long. While I absolutely believe that the University should divest from fossil fuels (a move made by most other Ivies thus far), help the townhomes, and make its vast wealth work to benefit the West Philadelphia community which it has so damaged, I don’t believe that I should be able to force it to. 

What we should expect, though, is for our opinions to at least be respected — students shouldn’t have to interrupt convocation, stage protests, or occupy the field outside Magill’s office in order to open any sort of dialogue with her (in terms of pragmatism and creativity, at least, they’re definitely winning). 

But they’re left without much choice. When they try through official means, they get sidelined and palmed off. Can you really blame the activists for taking over College Green? Our President may try to avoid it, but she can hear their voice loud and clear — what she doesn’t seem to understand is that the more that she ignores it, the louder it will get. If she wants to represent this community in the way that she claims she does, she should listen to it. We are Penn — the students, the faculty, the staff, and the West Philadelphia community, too. The board of trustees is not.

We choose to attend institutions like Penn, I hope, because we believe that we will be well represented by the values that they stand for, both in our time here and in our future lives. But it’s equally important that those values grow and change to represent us, too. It’s time that those who claim to lead the Penn community respect the fact that they answer to more than a board of invisible bureaucrats. They can’t ignore us forever; in the meantime, I’m sure, our friends over on College Green won’t be going anywhere.

Cover Image By Teutonia25 – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=58286684

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Alex Featured

Why I (still) love “Love Actually”

Love Actually seems to be, at this point, a nationwide Christmas tradition. The evenings draw in, the trees and the wreaths and the lights go up, families reunite, and everyone manages to, at some point, get through two hours of festive-ish metropolitan romance (even pushing it into the top 10 on Netflix in the week coming up to the 25th). It’s a film with its fair share of critics and poorly-aged story beats (unnecessary fat jokes, a sprinkle of patriarchy, hints of adultery, an unfortunate lack of diversity especially for a film set in the UK’s least white city), but it remains one that I hold immensely close to my heart.

Hugh Grant as Prime Minister David and Martine McCutcheon as common girl Natalie.

Richard Curtis’ classic is a love letter to London and, to an extent, humanity itself. He masterfully weaves an interconnected series of stories following various residents of the capital, played by what is essentially a who’s-who of British actors at the time, and their pursuit of, well, love. Hugh Grant is a single Prime Minister who falls helplessly (as he so effectively does in most movies he’s in) for his Catering Manager, Liam Neeson is a widower who helps his stepson Thomas Brodie-Sangster (who, fun fact, also voices Ferb) chase his primary school crush, Colin Firth is a writer who, after being cheated on by his wife and running away to France, becomes enamoured with his Portuguese cleaner despite the fact that they understand almost nothing that one another says; the list goes on. Special mention must go to Bill Nighy’s performance as a lewd, aged rocker going for Christmas number one—he is an omnipresent and utterly hysterical presence, marking one of the best outings of one of my favourite actors. As the movie progresses, we slowly see the links between each character grow into a complex web of relationships, adding a sense of unity and connectedness to the whole experience.

Bill Nighy as rockstar and all-around sex icon Billy Mack.

The result is a sort of highlight reel of romance: the first dates, the proposals and the heartbreaks, with the rest of the story having to be left to us to fill in. Love Actually’s wide scope means that unlike most other rom-coms, in which we tend to focus on the exploration and development of one or two relationships, the unlikely couples this movie homes in on get significantly less time and thus tend to be labelled surface-level and incredible by some of Love Actually’s detractors. That’s not how I see it, though: I think its breadth allows the film to cover a whole range of diverse love stories in one tight package. While we aren’t shown the growth of relationships in full, it’s not some compilation of people running into each other, having sex, then suddenly finding happily ever after—although sure, we don’t necessarily see the full build-up of each and every character’s relationships, that doesn’t make them any less believable. Rather than a deep dive into the complications of relationships, then, this film is about expressions of love: I don’t think that comparisons to most other rom-coms really do it justice.

Much like other Curtis screenplays such as Four Weddings and a Funeral, Love Actually’s beauty lies in its honesty. Not all of its stories are perfect—many of them don’t even end happily (which, for a rom-com, is a bold move)—but neither does love in real life. Some explore different types of love to your classic girl-meets-boy: love between friends, siblings, families. The interplay between these and romantic love, often ending in tough and seemingly impossible choices in which our characters have to sacrifice one kind of love for another, leaves us with several bitter, painful and seemingly unjust conclusions interspersed with our feel-good heartwarmers. The thing is, this story doesn’t try to sell you some sort of wildly romantic, intercontinental epic built on impossible coincidences and indescribably instant connections like other seasonal movies might—instead, it tries to provide you a brief window into genuine, human relationships, flawed, raw and dashing though they may be. Yes, there’s cheating and jealousy and death and pain and heartbreak, and the film doesn’t try to hide that from you: those moments of despair are essential elements of its narrative. Above all, though, what Love Actually wants to show us is the scene at its beginning and end, in Arrivals at Heathrow Airport—the joy of seeing those families, friends and loved ones reuniting reminds us that despite all the hardship the world may throw at us, we are all greeted by those same beaming faces once we come home. All of us are loved.

Emma Thompson as long-suffering wife Karen and Alan Rickman as would-be cheater Harry.
Emma Thompson as supportive mate Karen and Liam Neeson as grieving widower Daniel.

Love, life, isn’t perfect. But that’s what makes it worth living—we need to get through the tough times to reach the good ones. Though Love Actually doesn’t mince its words, its overall message is one of hope: that if we look hard enough, love really is everywhere. Christmas is all about reminding us of that, I think, and few pieces of art are able to express it better. That’s why I come back to it every year—I absolutely adore this film, and I’ll tire of it once I tire of life itself.

For some actual critics who I used as negative references for this piece, look at these:
https://www.vox.com/culture/22189822/love-actually-review-overrated-hugh-grant-liam-neeson-keira-knightley-christmas-holiday-movie
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/12/-em-love-actually-em-still-awful/282273/
https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2003/nov/23/features.review137

Image sources in order of use:
https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2019/12/hugh-grant-dance-scene-love-actually
https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/bill-nighy-says-love-actually-22103915
https://www.today.com/popculture/emma-thompson-won-t-be-love-actually-sequel-very-sad-t108553
https://www.independent.ie/life/christmas/bairbre-power-ive-only-just-recently-realised-the-hidden-clue-in-love-actually-37642383.html

Categories
Alex

What I Read This Summer

Summer is always the part of the year where I really get the time to sit down and tear through some books. This time, though, I thought I’d do something a bit different, and get you lot involved in the process; so, I made an Instagram story asking for recommendations. I was honestly blown away by the response—I got about 60 different people with suggestions of what to pick up (Images below). It has made it even more clear to me how much books matter to people; after the response, I wanted to share my very quick thoughts on what I did get through in June and July here (and might start doing this kind of thing a bit more in future). It’s in order of when I read and there are a lot of words here, so just click over to what you’re interested in. As for the ones I haven’t got to yet, I haven’t forgotten you; a guy can only get through so many books at a time. Watch this space. If anyone else has or wants any recommendations, get in touch!
–AB, 1/9/2021 x

Full list of reviews:

Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Frank Barat: “On Palestine”
Khaled Hosseini: “The Kite Runner”
Patrick Ness: “A Monster Calls”
Adam Kay: “This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor”
Stieg Larsson: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”
Haruki Murakami- “Norwegian Wood”
Madeleine Miller- “The Song of Achilles”
Claudia Rankine- “Citizen”

Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé, Frank Barat: “On Palestine”


In May, the world’s headlines (and everyone’s Instagram stories) blew up once again with displays of the atrocities committed by Israel against the Palestinian people. This was one of those issues that I was aware of at the periphery, but had not fully explored, so I decided to educate myself; I came across this on a visit to Lighthouse Books in Edinburgh, and having wanted to read some Chomsky for a while, picked it up.
Chomsky is one of the most important thinkers of our time, with work covering Linguistics, History and Philosophy, while Pappé is an Israeli historian who is extremely critical of the state and its occupation of Palestine. This book was an incredibly interesting read as, though it was written in 2014, gave me massive insight into the situation today (as, honestly, not very much has changed). The book consists of a conversation between the two, led by activist Frank Barat, which covers the past, present and potential future of the Israeli state’s occupation and abuse of Palestine and its people, as well as various articles and speeches by both figures from other sources at the end. It is obviously very biased against Israel (who wants to support a violent settler/colonialist state anyway?) but has provided me with a decent starting point to learn more about the topic. If you want to actually look into and understand the context of one of the most crucial and important conflicts of our time, this is an excellent place to start.

Buy “On Palestine” at Lighthouse Books on West Nicolson Street in Edinburgh or here:
https://lighthousebookshop.com/book/9780241973523

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Khaled Hosseini: “The Kite Runner”

When I put up my Instagram poll in June, this was one of the most popular recommendations I got. I managed to find it on a bookshelf at home, and got to work.
The best way I could describe this story is one of humanity. The human that the story follows Amir, a child growing up in 1970s Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan, as well as his life as a refugee in the USA after the Soviet occupation sent the country spiralling into decline. Amir is a deeply flawed protagonist; much of the story is driven by his mistakes as much as his successes. This means that you both root for and sometimes hate the narrator of the book—but ultimately, that’s the same as any person. Amir’s sort of reverse foil is his best friend and servant, Hassan; an innocent, pure yet fearlessly loyal sidekick. The story follows their relationship as it is tested and changed by time. The book is likely heavily inspired by the author’s own experience—Hosseini himself fled from Afghanistan from the USA at the same time—but it is this detail that gives the it its riveting authenticity; its descriptions of a prospering Kabul, free of the unbearable heat, violence, and poverty of today, are vivid and captivating—it’s a world I wish I could never leave. This window into the beauty of the past only makes it more heartbreaking as we watch, through Amir’s eyes, the city we have come to love be corrupted and destroyed by people who are, in many ways, as flawed and scared as our imperfect narrator. While this story shows humanities at its best and its worst, its most important takeaway is a glimmer of hope—that of redemption. This is one of my favourite books ever; please read it.
I read and wrote this in June, but I am adding an addendum now given all that’s happened in Afghanistan since. Above all, this book is a love letter by the author to his home: a country he once knew so well but would barely recognise now. The Afghan people have endured forty years of pain and suffering, watching the community, culture and country they love be repeatedly ripped to shreds by insurgents hellbent on destroying it; this book passed onto me the tiniest piece of their immense longing. They deserve a chance to find that home again; I will support them in any way I can.

Buy “The Kite Runner” at Lighthouse Books on West Nicolson Street in Edinburgh or here:
https://lighthousebookshop.com/book/9781526604743

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Patrick Ness: “A Monster Calls”

Despite adoring the movie and owning several other Patrick Ness books, I don’t think I’d ever actually read this in the past. I got through it in a single sitting (it’s only 250 or so pages) and, though I knew how it would end all along, still teared up a bit by the time I’d finished. This book was actually originally a concept by the author Siobhan Dowd that she never got to write before her death; it was posthumously given to Ness to write. I think he did a fantastic job.
The story follows Conor O’Malley, a thirteen-year-old boy living alone with his terminally-ill mother. In the night, he is visited by a monster who emerges from the yew tree outside his window and arrives to tell him stories. It’s hard to talk about this book without spoiling it too much, but the result is a gut-wrenching tale of a boy trying to find peace in the inevitable and, ultimately, with himself. I find Conor so enthralling as a protagonist because of how much of oneself I think you can see in him; deep down, I think we sometimes all feel like a hurt, confused and lost thirteen-year-old, and Ness captures this sense of hopeless immaturity beautifully. This book didn’t win the Carnegie medal for nothing.

Buy “A Monster Calls” at Topping and Co. on Blenheim Place in Edinburgh or here:
https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/books/patrick-ness-and-siobhan-dowd/a-monster-calls/9781406339345/

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Adam Kay: “This is Going to Hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor”

I’d known about this book for a while now; my parents read it a few years ago, and I always see posters for Kay’s sold-out show on the Fringe. We had this lying around at home, so I picked it up.
Speaking to my friend who’s applying for a medicine degree, I was told that everyone even dreaming of being a medic has read this book. Having read half of the book at this point, I went on to ask why on earth they still wanted to apply, knowing full well the world they were signing up for; they replied that the scariest and most important part about is that despite the fact that they all read this book, they still choose the degree anyway.
This book is a red flag: it is a warning sign to those who dare follow its path, and an SOS to everyone else, who will never truly understand what our friends are going through. It consists of an edited eight-year diary of Kay’s daily life as he worked as a Junior Doctor—the highs and the many lows that come with the job. He guides us through a pain of hundreds of unpaid hours and ridiculous bureaucracy and the joy of saving lives, as well as the toll taken on his personal life and relationships as a result of it all. All of this is delivered with Kay’s touch of sarcastic brilliance, explaining away impossible-sounding medical terms and the intricacies of the NHS’ system with quips ranging from fiddling priests to Ryman’s stationery to Lego Star Wars. You never know whether to cry at a tragedy or to laugh at Kay’s hilarious jokes about it—regardless, I could read Kay’s entries forever (though I doubt he’d like to go back to the NHS in order to make them). The main thing I’ve taken away, though, is never to underestimate a doctor—they’ve been through more than you know.

Buy “This is Going to Hurt” at Lighthouse Books on West Nicolson Street in Edinburgh or here:
https://lighthousebookshop.com/book/9781509858637

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Stieg Larsson: “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”

This was another one recommended to me from my Instagram; it’s in about every charity shop ever, so I picked up a copy in Rugeley, where I was living at the start of summer. Everyone knows what the deal is with this one, and most of you have probably read it already.
Ignoring the fact that this world is literally just the author creating a projected reality in which he is a master journalist/detective and all women have an inexplicable urge to have sex with him, this was a really good read. The book follows Mikael Blomkvist, a disgraced journalist who is hired to investigate a 40-year-old murder case, and how, along with the enigmatic investigator Lisbeth Salander, his ghost hunt uncovers armies of skeletons in the closet of his employer’s family. It is equal parts mystery and thriller, and has a million aces up its sleeve; as soon as you think you’ve solved one of its mysteries, another twist leaps out at you. This story thrives on the contrast between its uncertainty and intrigue, its gore and violence, and its occasionally profound emotional depth. Its characters are as human as they are unrealistic, its world as understandable as it is complex, and its conclusion is both predictable and shocking. Several times while reading this, I genuinely sat up and shouted “What?!?!”, which should probably tell you enough about how invested I was in the story. At over 500 pages, this isn’t a mild undertaking, but this book lived up to its reputation. I determined I’d read the second in the trilogy as soon as I came across it.

Buy “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” at almost any charity shop (apparently), at Topping and Co. on Blenheim Place in Edinburgh or here:
https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/books/stieg-larsson/the-girl-with-the-dragon-tattoo/9780857054036/

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Haruki Murakami- “Norwegian Wood”

After being told to read this book by about the whole world (I got recommended Murakami by no less than seven different people on Instagram) I borrowed this one off of my friend, who herself had been trying to get me to read this for ages (although she does prefer the Wind-up Bird Chronicle. Maybe I’ll hit that next?)
I think my favourite stories aren’t ones that focus on superhuman power, flawless heroes and battles to save the world, but the ones about emotions, imperfect protagonists and battles to save themselves (usually from problems of their own causing). There’s beauty in simplicity and relatability, and while a superhero or an apocalypse is great every now and again, the stories that stay with me are those that are seen through the eyes of normal people in our very normal world—a snapshot of the human experience. That’s what Norwegian Wood represents, to me; it’s a tale of love, loss, and growing up that grabs you by the heart and refuses to let go. It follows Toru Watanabe, a university student who has just moved from Kobe (near Osaka in central Japan) to Tokyo in search of a new life, and his relationship with Naoko, his best friend’s girlfriend from home who represents everything from his past that he is trying to escape. Murakami has this beautiful way of writing, too; the indifferent flair to his narration vividly reflects both Watanabe and the world of 1960s Japan, lending the story an irresistible character that I couldn’t put down. This is one of those books where you can see the conclusion coming from a mile away, I think, yet still find impossible to pray that the inevitable won’t happen; it’s utterly immersive and gut-wrenching, and makes you nostalgic for a youth, country and time that you have never experienced yet come to fall in love with. What’s good enough for Harry Styles, Andrew Yang and half of my Instagram followers (apparently) is more than good enough for me; I believe the hype on this one.

Buy “Norwegian Wood” at Lighthouse Books on West Nicolson Street in Edinburgh or here:
https://lighthousebookshop.com/book/9780099448822

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Madeleine Miller- “The Song of Achilles”

This is another one that got recommended to me a good few times, so I grabbed it while down in Bath at the lovely Topping and Co. outpost there (there’s also one in Edinburgh, just on Leith Walk, which you must visit if you haven’t).
Quite the opposite from Norwegian Wood, The Song of Achilles is the story of the mythical hero, told through the lens of his close friend and eventual lover, Patroclus. This is a world of legend; Gods walk among men, mighty kingdoms with lauded leaders wage war and settle for peace, and homosexuality is even mostly accepted (Maybe things were better in 2000BC after all?). Our protagonist Patroclus is an exiled prince who, after being taken under the wing of Achilles’ father, Peleus, develops a lifelong relationship with the boy, following him from the palace of Phthia to the gates of Troy. Despite the far-flung setting, the lens that is provided by Patroclus, a weak, clumsy and decidedly non-legendary man, grounds the story and allows us to feel, through him, at home in this land of Gods and Kings. Miller masterfully reinterprets and bends the legend of Achilles, relying heavily on Homer’s Iliad, into a tale that feels exciting, fresh and poignant, while still remaining faithful to the source material. Making Achilles and Patroclus openly gay, too, is something I have to touch on entirely because of how natural it feels; not only does it fit with the story, but the addition of this profound emotional relationship with his canonical best friend provides a level of depth and humanity to Achilles that no other version of him properly manages to provide. That’s serious testament to this story, and Miller’s telling of it. Though this book didn’t touch me emotionally in a way that many of the other ones I’ve read have, I am still really glad I picked it up; if you liked Percy Jackson, especially, I think this pulls off what that tries to do far better.

Buy “The Song of Achilles” at Topping and Co. on Blenheim Place in Edinburgh or here:
https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/books/madeline-miller/the-song-of-achilles/9781408891384/

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Claudia Rankine- “Citizen”

A year ago, affected especially by the death of George Floyd, I, like just about everyone else, read a copy of Reni Eddo-Lodge’s “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race”. That book is an incredibly common choice for a reason; it offers a comprehensive introduction to the academic side of modern racial inequality in the UK, from slavery, to education, and with some intersectionality thrown in there as well. It actually set me up for my study of Politics at university much more than I ever expected, and had a decided impact on my worldview today.
Citizen, though, takes a very different lens to the problem—Rankine here attempts to convey the emotional side of the Black female experience, how it feels rather than what it objectively is. This essentially takes shape as a long-form poem, split up into several sections, each covering a certain part of the “othering” faced by people of colour in the West, how they are constantly made to feel like they don’t belong by people who barely seem to realise or care about the fact that they’re doing it—as she puts it, a stark reminder of being coloured person against a white background. At about 200 usually half-empty pages, this was a super quick read, which only leads me to recommend this even more. I am never quite sure how to react to books such as this; it was something that I absolutely adored reading, yes, but the issues that it covers are so incredibly unjust that it almost feels wrong to say that I loved this as a whole. I did, though; this does an incredible job at capturing this facet of humanity, as unfair and horrible as it is—it is an extremely powerful read. Though as a white person living in a white world, the experiences Rankine outlines so impactfully here are ones that I won’t ever be able to fully understand, I now feel that I am that slight bit closer. This is one of those books that I think almost anyone should read (in fact, I gave it to my Mum almost immediately after finishing it). This is one of the most impactful books I have read in a long time, and I wish I could write with the raw yet sophisticated emotional efficacy that Rankine has.

Buy “Citizen” at Topping and Co. on Blenheim Place in Edinburgh or here:
https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/books/claudia-rankine/citizen/9780141981772/

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Categories
Featured Politics

On Sovereignty

The Euros start this week, so I wanted to talk a bit about football, and what it means to the people who support it. Let me start with a sweeping and possibly controversial statement—I genuinely believe that one of humanity’s greatest achievements is the Football World Cup.

It’s a phenomenon that you can’t really put your finger on; for a month or so in the middle of the year, this electric atmosphere buzzes around everyday life as the whole world becomes enthralled in this high-skill, high-stakes stage of a game so simple that almost anyone could play it. The differences between countries are both intensified and nigh-on forgotten as our heroic foot-warriors jostle with, shoot at, dive from, leap over, and blatantly foul each other to the shouts, jumps and cries of the millions watching, proudly bearing the same jerseys as the ones plastered on the big screens. The competitive yet unifying energy of it is something genuinely like no other, and is an incredible feat. I think human progress is at its best when it brings us all together; when done right, that is exactly what the World Cup (and, by extension, the Euros) is about—appreciating and embracing diversity.

But why is this so different to normal club games? After all, it’s the same sport, just with different jerseys, new teams, and a fancy, if sometimes utterly irrational, location (I’m looking at you, Qatar). What changes in the World Cup, though, is this element of national identity; those odd labels that merely represent the place that you’re from, yet somehow have the ability to turn a game of football into a worldwide spectacle. The thing is, nationality isn’t just a passport, or a flag in your Instagram bio; much of the time it is an indicator that we use as the very definition of who we are. There is serious power to that. This sense of identity and belonging is what drives that World Cup fever, I think; rather than looking at any football game and thinking that we could probably do it ourselves, having these players represent our country, and by extension us, on this global stage makes us feel that we really are somehow involved in it—that we are more than mere spectators. This connection is uplifting, captivating and inspiring; international sports simply wouldn’t be the same without it.

Fans at the 2018 FIFA World Cup. Moscow, July 2018.

The extent that nationality matters to people bleeds pretty heavily into many aspects of life; from sports to immigrant communities down to the very lines along which our country’s borders are drawn. It’s more or less this last aspect that I want to focus on—nationality, and its importance, is something that I think is blindingly obvious yet not appreciated nearly enough in political conversation. Ultimately, it holds a compelling power over people that, when properly harnessed, is almost impossible to convince them away from. This has the power to turn politics from a rational debate to an all-out clash of ideology and identity, with the power to cause war, break apart countries, or both. This has been specifically evident in the UK, with the division of Ireland some hundred years ago and the now hot-button topic of Scottish independence. Nationality plays a central role, I think, in why Scotland wants to be independent in the first place, and why the UK government’s attempts to get rid of the debate won’t work.

People who know me will know full well that I never stop going on about being Scottish; my dad’s family is originally from here, and my parents met in Edinburgh (I qualify for SAAS, alright?). But despite how much I jokingly go on about it, I really am Scottish in name only; my dad’s job has meant I have never actually lived here, and I grew up in the South of England, far away from even the faintest whisper of bagpipes or a trace of Haggis on supermarket shelves. What this distance means is that while I’m “Scottish”, I lack the Scottish experience; that intimate relationship with this country, gained from growing up and spending one’s life in it, that makes it an irreversible element of your identity. At the end of the day, no amount of ranting about education fees can provide that. It’s taken coming to university here, though, and actually interacting with people who do have this experience for me to realise its importance and how much I’m lying to myself when I call myself “Scottish”; if we’re honest, I don’t really have the full picture. I think that this means that I fail to properly understand the issue of Scottish independence, because like my Scottishness itself, I view it as much more of a title and less of a part of who I am; for someone truly Scottish, though, it is all about the latter.

Edinburgh, from Arthur’s Seat. 14th May, 2021.

I think that democratic politics is, in a way, a lot like football: people have this desire to see a reflection of themselves when looking at their representatives on the political stage. But much like the difference between club games and the World Cup, this reflection is not just about looking at government and thinking we could take over and make it better ourselves (which, let’s be honest, most of us do), but it’s about feeling that we are already doing so through the people we elect. And though that sense of involvement isn’t displayed as clearly as by those matching national uniforms, it’s every bit as important to the people’s participation in the process.
This is directly relevant to independence; ultimately, for a large part of the Scottish population, British politics is no longer a game they want to play. They don’t feel that the people they are watching truly represent them; Westminster for them is full of people who, much like me, claim to understand Scotland but have no real conception of the true Scottish experience. And though these people should be easily democratically replaced with better ones, Scotland is currently still a (relatively small) part of the UK—they can’t just vote in a whole new Westminster Parliament by themselves. Now, if the Scottish people were still fully invested in preserving the Union as a whole, this would be fine by them—but the point is that they’ve had enough. Scots have found that who they are no longer matches up with the rest of Britain; their left-wing, internationalist yet distinctly Scottish outlook is ever more starkly contrasted with England’s Brexit-fuelled separatist Tory government (even if a cabinet more similar to Scotland’s won a general election, though, I think that the damage has been done). The current system denies them the chance for that sovereignty that they so desperately want—breaking free of that is what independence is fundamentally about. I don’t think that such a dramatic ideological rift can be easily closed once it has formed, and the one between Scotland and England is widening at an alarming rate.

Those in power at Westminster, though, appear to have taken an interesting strategy to tackle the problem—namely, just ignoring it entirely. Obviously, Covid has thrown domestic politics into disarray, providing a convenient excuse to dance around the issue, but the Scottish elections in May especially has driven it right to the forefront; all the while, the UK government has barely spoken out on it at all. This refusal to directly address independence head-on has been going on for years now—from devolution, to the “once-in-a-lifetime vote” rhetoric from 2014’s referendum, to this year suggesting the SNP would require an outright majority at Holyrood before another referendum is even considered. When they do mention it, they proffer flimsy narratives in response of impracticality and economic instability that only seem to delay a vote rather than truly convincing anyone away from independence as a concept. But this childish plan of debate-dodging won’t last; issues of identity, especially those as deep-rooted as this, only grow stronger if not dealt with. If anything, it only proves how out of touch the English government truly is; if they don’t face this argument that has gripped Scottish politics for over a decade, how can they hope to truly represent it? It either shows a lack of understanding or a lack of democratic competence—honestly, I’m not sure which is worse.

Party leaders debate ahead of the May 2021 Scottish Parliamentary election. Edinburgh, 4th May, 2021.

A lot of this was playing on my mind last month as I voted for the first time ever in the Scottish Parliamentary elections, and watched the SNP narrowly fall short of that essential majority at Holyrood. Boris Johnson, yet again, will surely take this as a sign that he can continue to reject Nicola Sturgeon’s requests for another independence referendum. But Westminster has already been trying that for too long, and I can promise that it won’t work much longer. To be fair, much unlike the World Cup, I don’t think anybody wants a referendum every four years—by now, we’re all pretty tired of this worn-out debate. But what I’m arguing is that another vote is inevitable. People’s identity, and genuinely feeling that they have sovereignty over their own affairs, rather than being controlled by a government from a distant English metropolis who doesn’t understand them, matters. That feeling of fundamental disconnection is not one that any amount of delaying and sidelining can have any long-term effect on—the argument of Scottish independence is as prevalent as it is permanent, no matter how much Westminster may pray that it might disappear if they ignore it enough.

Much like the beautiful game, Politics’ value comes from the fact that anyone can get involved and make a difference on the pitch. Remove that appeal, though, and people stop wanting to play—it ends up becoming a bit more like polo than football. If the people don’t believe in Britain, British politics simply won’t work anymore; even if it means trading the money and security of a stadium for the familiarity and chaos of a playpark, people would rather play a game they have control of. Scotland may have decided that the UK simply doesn’t provide that; no matter how much you deny, delay, or argue against it, we may have come too far for that schism ever to be healed. After all, football has never been about how many trophies the team wins, but about their genuine connection with the fans; for that, I know which match I’ll be watching on Monday.

The Scotland Football team beat Serbia to qualify for the Euros for the first time in 23 years. Belgrade, 12th November, 2020.

References
Most of this one was done from my own experiences having spent a year (already!!) at university in Scotland. This article is a sort of tribute to that. I’d like to take this chance to thank everyone I’ve met along the way; I’ve learnt a lot, not just about Scottish independence, from the people I’ve met and the interactions I’ve had.
However, I picked up George Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism for £1 from Lighthouse lately, which was incredibly interesting and quite influential towards my writing of this piece (even if he takes a very different view on Nationalism and even sports throughout). You can pick it up in-store or from here (for a quid):
https://lighthousebookshop.com/book/9780241339565

Image references (in order of use):
https://www.mos.ru/en/news/item/58750073/
Taken and owned by me
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-56986718
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/football/54853402

Categories
Featured Politics

On Equality

Almost one year ago, a 46-year old man walked into a store in Minneapolis and, while attempting to pay, was accused of using a counterfeit $20 bill. The police were called, and the man was arrested; 8 minutes and 46 seconds later, a full two minutes after he had become unresponsive, he was dead. Last week, the person who was kneeling on his neck faced trial.

Meanwhile, the UK has been ripped apart by the fallout from the release of the Sewell report on racial disparity; in case you (somehow) missed it, it controversially concluded that “we no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities”. To many, this was an affirmation of what they’d believed for a long time; that structural racial discrimination in the UK no longer exists, and that those who claim it does are selfishly inventing an issue where one doesn’t exist. To me, though, this report was the most direct possible highlight of everything that I think people fail to understand about the structural and institutional racism that pervades our lives.

Contrary to the investigation’s suggestions, I believe that in the West, racial equality is a myth—structural racism penetrates deep into our society and continues to have huge effects today, regardless of how far we’ve come in alleviating it. This piece is my attempt to back up that idea (from the point of view of a white guy who has benefited from the exact systems it outlines).

Tony Sewell, chair of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. London, April 1st, 2021.

Institutional racism is a deeply multifaceted issue, and getting into its full extent would take somebody who knows a lot more than me a lot more time than just one article. So, in the interest of brevity and providing an example of where the report goes wrong, let’s talk about one issue the investigation brings up: education and success.

Over summer, a friend of mine recommended a book to me called “Outliers”, by Malcolm Gladwell; it’s a book that aims to explore the factors behind successful people, well, becoming successful. I really recommend reading it, but I’ll save you the time by cutting to its main finding: that success is about opportunity. More specifically, the only way that anybody ends up good at anything is by getting the opportunity to practice and become good at it. Across the book, Gladwell uses examples from Canadian ice hockey players to Bill Gates himself to show that the success of all of them was not determined by talent, but the opportunities they were provided from a young age. As he states in the conclusion to the book, success is “is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky”. The truth is that we don’t live in an egalitarian society; life is made incredibly easy for some (myself included) and incredibly difficult for others based on factors over which they have absolutely no control. This is a principle that I think can be applied across the human experience—the truth is, many of the things that you’ll be able to achieve are predetermined long before the day you are born.

Most of the people who maintain the idea that racial inequalities do not exist seem to parrot the exact same alternative narrative—that success is solely a result of hard work, and that if anyone works hard enough, their dreams are guaranteed. They laud figures such as Denzel Washington, who preaches that “hard work, works”*. They then extrapolate this to suggest that just because one person from a particular background can make it out and achieve amazing things, so can every single person from that background—and, according to them, those who fail to “make it” do so because they simply aren’t working hard enough.

  • Malcolm Gladwell gives a speech at an OZY Fest in Central Park. New York, NY, July 23rd, 2016.
  • Denzel Washington gives the Dillard University graduation commencement speech. New Orleans, LA, May 9th, 2015.

Listen: in a lot of ways, this isn’t incorrect. Success definitively requires hard work; nobody with any number of ideal opportunities is going to get anywhere without putting pretty significant effort in. But how much work you actually have to put in, and how conducive that work is going to be to actual achievement, varies heavily depending on your individual situation. To harness that hard work, you need the right opportunities—who gets which opportunities, then, depends majorly on your background. It is true that in today’s UK, you’d be lying if you suggested that it were absolutely impossible for someone to do anything based upon their ethnicity (though we’re still waiting on a non-white Prime Minster; we’ll get there.) But think of it like a running race, in which some contestants start 50 metres ahead while others start behind, with hurdles and obstacles in their way—those who start behind could win, say, if those in front walk really slowly, but it’s going to be tough work. No matter how much you grind, life is still more or less a game of luck—succeeding isn’t guaranteed. And what is important is that for a middle-class white kid like me, the amount of better-quality advantages you receive in life (which you can harness to eventually become successful) is going to be so much more than the average kid from an ethnic minority background**—we start out in front, and the course is much more clear. For others, the opportunities they receive are more likely to be fewer and further between; this means they can still do well, sure, but the odds are much more heavily stacked against them.

“But isn’t all of this more or less determined by class, not race?”, you might, pretty fairly, ask. Class definitely comes into it; indeed, regardless of race, the more money you have, the better your schooling, tech, extracurricular help, and even basic food provision can afford to be. Indeed, I reckon that most of the differences that I’ve outlined above can be put down to variation in class, not race (though other more subtle racial ones definitely do exist). But even if you ignore the other factors that affect education and futures and assume (pretty tenuously) that disparities in eventual affluence are totally explained by your socioeconomic position growing up, the blaring issue still stands that race is not accurately represented across classes. In the UK, white British people are easily the least likely ethnic group of all to be in the poorest income brackets, while the most likely to be in the richest:

UK Income distribution by ethnicity (after housing costs), April 2016-March 2019. Source: UK Government https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-benefits/pay-and-income/income-distribution/latest#by-ethnicity-after-housing-costs

People of colour are far more likely to be in those lower income brackets, receiving worse opportunities and therefore being set up to do less well than their white counterparts**. White people are more likely to live in richer areas with better schools (or just be able to pay for better schools), to have affluent parents with powerful contacts, and to get tutoring, internships, extracurricular funding, summer schools, textbooks, and everything in between. This social, economic and cultural safety net consists of the exact advantages that Gladwell is on about (and many of the ones that I have benefited from myself)—sure, you can be absolutely fine without them, but you’re going to need a hell of a lot of luck. I think that many people fail to recognise this key difference between the possibility and probability of success; just because we could, in theory, all achieve something, doesn’t make us all equally likely of being able to achieve it, and doesn’t make it fair (think back to my running race analogy from before).

Being poorer, as ethnic minorities are more likely to be, doesn’t make success impossible, just as being rich doesn’t guarantee it; we’ve all heard stories of rags to riches and spectacular falls from grace. But just because one person bucks the trend created by this disparity doesn’t mean that all of them can—the truth is, most of them don’t. And as the gaps between socioeconomic classes increase due to this biased system (which they definitively are; inequality is not getting any lesser in the UK), so do the gaps between races as disadvantaged people fight harder to get less far. This is just one single, very focused example of how our society is ruthlessly rigged against ethnic minorities; I haven’t even touched on other broad issues like policing, health, or even employment (though the latter is very linked to what I have explored). Nor have I gotten into how discrimination expresses itself within classes and schools, through indirect biases such as how students of ethnic minority backgrounds can be hit with disproportionate rates of disciplinary punishment—these are incredibly pressing issues that the government’s “landmark” investigation fails to properly investigate.

For its part, the Sewell report acknowledges the issues that affect educational achievement, including parental income levels and education, geography, and family structure, while asserting that socioeconomic status by far correlates the most strongly with attainment. I more or less agree with this breakdown of the issue; what the report then suggests to solve this, though, is simply the improvement of early-age state schooling. I think that this could definitely make up a lot of ground, but at the end of the day equalising your first few years of school simply isn’t enough to deal with structural societal inequalities. This solution only addresses what happens within the classroom, and ignores the fact that most of the difference expresses itself without, through background, extra support, etc. It also doesn’t get into the massive advantage that mostly-white private schools provide.

They’ve pretty much admitted that the root of the problem is socioeconomic status, and the misrepresentation of races in this respect. So, why aren’t we dealing with that? Why are we focusing on early-age education while upholding this inadequate hierarchy when we could be working to change that system as a whole? This rationale is more or less, I think, reflected across the entire report; though in many cases, it identifies the problems we’re facing with surprising lucidity, its recommendations of solutions repeatedly fall short of what is necessary. The thing is, until we start addressing the deep racial disparities that are actually behind all of the issues we’re debating, those issues will never really go away. Many hoped that the Sewell report would start addressing that by actually beginning to confront these problems; I, for one, was incredibly disappointed to see that it didn’t.

Students at Eton College. Eton, Windsor, February 7th, 2012.

For me, the death of George Floyd was a wake-up call to facing issues that, as a privileged white kid, I had never been privy to in the past—more than anything, it was a reminder of just how different others’ lives are to mine, and just how much I have left to learn and to understand. That’s what I’ve spent the last year attempting to do, and I’m still trying. I’m nowhere near fully getting it now (and I never will be), but I know that I’m a lot closer than I was. What worries me, though, is that there are still so many people who don’t try: who are happy to be complacent and deny just how rigged our society is, to pretend that the reason that individuals pass or fail, work the trading floor or the streets, and receive a warning or a knee to the neck is because of their own faults, and not because of a system that is structurally stacked against them.

Though the conviction of Floyd’s murderer might bring his family peace, it won’t truly bring him justice; he won’t receive that until we finally create a world in which no innocent person like him dies in the first place. What pains me is that with the way things seem right now, that reality is still a long way off.

A memorial pays its respects to George Floyd, one week after his murder at the hands of a police officer. Minneapolis, MN, May 31st, 2020.


* I don’t at all think that Denzel doesn’t understand the issue, but I think that he is often misquoted and his ideas bent to fit a certain agenda.

** I am grouping all ethnic minorities together here as they are all at a disadvantage, but I want to make it clear that the difficulties that ethnic groups face are by no means homogenous and should not be unnecessarily generalised. Every individual’s, and every group’s, experience is complex and unique and should be treated entirely as such.

References
A lot of this one was again fuelled by my own thought, along with hours of conversations on the issue with people in-person and over the internet; this piece is my best attempt to put my point of view on it forwards in the most comprehensive way possible. This is the article I wish I could have read aged sixteen (when I really didn’t get it at all).
However, here are a couple books I’ve read that really influenced my thinking here (from Edinburgh-based independent bookstores, of course):
Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell:
https://www.toppingbooks.co.uk/books/malcolm-gladwell/outliers/9780141036250/
(This is also a good criticism of Gladwell’s writing that is important to bear in mind: https://medium.com/@tomnew/how-malcolm-gladwell-writes-12960d83575c)
Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge (a really important read even if you disagree with me and everything this book stands for, as it explains this side of the argument really well):
https://lighthousebookshop.com/products/9781408870587?_pos=1&_sid=7ce713792&_ss=r
I’ll also repost the UK Government statistics page from which I took the graph above:
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-benefits/pay-and-income/income-distribution/latest#by-ethnicity-after-housing-costs

Image sources (in order of use):
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/anger-slave-claims-race-review-bame-equality-wlpsk6hgv
https://medium.com/@tomnew/how-malcolm-gladwell-writes-12960d83575c
https://www.fearlessmotivation.com/2018/09/23/denzel-washington-speech/
https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/work-pay-and-benefits/pay-and-income/income-distribution/latest#by-ethnicity-after-housing-costs
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/britains-poshest-school-eton-paying-147911
https://www.forbes.com/sites/nadjasayej/2020/06/04/the-story-behind-the-mural-at-the-george-floyd-memorial/?sh=1ed3976827f1
None of these images are owned by me, and I make no financial gain from their use. All credit goes to their original owners.

Categories
Alex Featured

19

Today, I turn nineteen.

It isn’t a particularly important age for most people, I imagine; the afterburn of an eighteenth year full of change, from school to the real world (or halfway there, at least), from a child to something resembling an adult. I guess that turning this age also holds a lot of that for me—more than anything, Covid has led to this year being an even harsher cacophony of ups and downs, often in quick succession, and my birthday marks nearly a year since it all started. In my case, though, nineteen holds a certain significance. To explain that, I’ll need to tell a story about a friend of mine.

Lyon House, 12/02/2019.

A lot of you will know his name, but that’s not important: for the purposes of this, I’ll just call him J. By all means, I never actually knew J very well; when I joined my senior school aged thirteen, he was in his final year there. He seemed to have everything: he was Head Boy, captain of the school’s first-ever undefeated rugby team, and a living legend around campus. But what always stuck out to me was how despite all of his achievements, he was incredibly humble and down-to-earth—seeing him daily in our close-knit boarding house, he would never look down on us, the youngest in school (as most older kids, out of pride or perhaps insecurity, tended to). Sure, we never felt like equals, exactly, but more importantly he made us feel like we mattered; knowing he’d been at the forefront of pushing greater mental health awareness in school over the years, we all knew that if we ever had a problem, he would always be there to listen.

My memories of the guy are mostly pretty positive: I remember watching him charge down the rugby pitch in the final match of the season, fearlessly acting as an Eastern European maid in our house play (though the cast’s abilities were questionable, you will never see as many penis jokes in a single 90 minutes in your entire life) and screaming at the latest twist on Game of Thrones on a Monday night. As a kid, I never really got to see the other side of him: I am not sure that many did (though looking back, most of our house, at least, seemed to somewhat know). Hearing about his death, then, came to me as an incredible shock.

It’s as if it were last week, or maybe a month ago: the afternoon remains crystal clear, imprinted in my mind. It had been announced in the morning that the whole school was meant to meet later in the day: which, for a Thursday, happened to be pretty odd. I knew it was serious, obviously (this kind of thing hasn’t occurred before or since), but had absolutely no idea what was coming. At athletics that afternoon, I discussed the affair with my mates while (pretending to be) training our triple jump in the lazy, English summer sun: we decided another friend of ours had probably been busted for drugs (he’d been searched that morning and, turns out, had somehow managed to get away with it). Nonetheless, we thought, a whole school meeting would be a bit overkill, and so nobody was really sure what was going on—we should have taken the news that one of his teachers had been seen in tears that morning as a warning sign.

An ominous mood hung over the school as the Headmaster stood up to speak. He kept it brief: he announced that earlier that morning, he had heard of J’s death while on a gap year in Vietnam. He didn’t tell us how it happened: my naïve, fifteen-year-old mind wouldn’t fill that bit in until later. While I don’t recall his exact words, I can still feel the punch to the gut that I sensed the whole room, especially our house, most of whom had been living with him less than a year before, take as the news hit us; I remember the eerily silent, ten-minute walk back to our boarding house, as sixty boys tried to come to terms with their friend’s death; and I remember us getting back, collapsing onto the various benches that had been assembled outside to greet us, and crying, unable to believe that someone we looked up to and cared about like a brother could be so suddenly and unexpectedly gone.

He was nineteen years old.

Lyon House, 27/5/2016.

I mentioned before that me and J didn’t have a very close relationship. Given our ages, that was inevitable, really; while being in his house meant I knew him better than most, it’s not like we were best mates. What he did represent for me, though, was a role model. When he was at my school and in the years after he left, I looked up to him immensely; when I was that age, I thought, I wanted to be something like him. Sure, I never made Head Boy, and I was nowhere near captaining any rugby teams (never mind an undefeated season). But before and especially after what happened I was always determined to, if nothing else, try to live up to the way he inspired me, and instil that same inspiration in the kids who came after me. Because more tragic than the fact that I knew he would never be able to play another game of rugby, or see the end of Game of Thrones (although that was almost definitely for the best), was the fact that his memory would one day fade. I wanted to be a part of keeping it alive somehow, even if indirectly.

Looking up at J aged thirteen, I saw someone with the world at his feet. At nineteen, I feel just about as directionless now as I did then and I’m sure he felt nearly 4 years ago. But what’s changed is that we finally are, in a way, equals; today will be as close as I’ll ever get to seeing the world through his eyes. And in that respect, I think that my vision of his story, too, needs to change. After all, I’ve grown out of my school: my time at university has already had a huge effect on me, and starting to grow up has given me the chance to take a new perspective on the childhood I’ve left behind. Maybe now, the best way to keep his memory alive is not within some tiny country school, but beyond, in the world, by trying to change what led to his tragedy in the first place. By encouraging conversations about mental health. By deconstructing the toxic masculinity behind the struggles of him and those close to him in accepting his sexuality. By reminding people that any life, especially one as bright and inspirational as his, never deserves to be thrown away. While that’s a big ask, one I could dedicate my entire life to and still not achieve, making a difference starts with the small things; I guess that this piece is one of those.

Today I turn nineteen, and as I grow older, I realise that his is a story that I don’t need to hide behind anymore (people who have known me long enough are sick and tired of it, at this point). Nineteen is where his story ended. But mine hasn’t: I am determined to make it a force for good, in the memory of him and so many, too many, other victims of male suicide. Being a man is more than simply masculinity: looking back, I see that J carried that message, from the rugby field to the boarding house to the stage and beyond, and if nothing else, he passed it on to me. I intend to live by it. If you’ve made it this far, the most important step that any of us can take is simply to check on your mates. We, I, don’t do it enough; it’s always “what’s going on?” and never really “how are you?” And even if they’re fine, I promise that even being asked can make a world of difference—knowing someone cares about your problems does so much to lighten their load. Again, it starts with the small things; but if we can change even one person’s day for the better, every day, it stacks up. When you feel totally alone in the world, the reminder that even one other person is there with you can be all that you need.

Like all of us, J faced many challenges in his life; though he responded to all of them valiantly, in the end it was the battles inside of him that became too much to bear. I can never fully understand, but today marks the closest I’ll ever get to it—I want his memory to help me make change, however small. And I know that if I, or you, can make a difference in at least one story like his, he will be looking down with pride.

Lyon House, 10/06/2016.

“If”

If you can keep your head when all about you   

    Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,   

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

    But make allowance for their doubting too;   

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

    Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,

Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

    And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise:

If you can dream—and not make dreams your master;   

    If you can think—and not make thoughts your aim;   

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

    And treat those two impostors just the same;   

If you can bear to hear the truth you’ve spoken

    Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,

    And stoop and build ’em up with worn-out tools:

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

    And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

    And never breathe a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

    To serve your turn long after they are gone,   

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

    Except the Will which says to them: ‘Hold on!’

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,   

    Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,

    If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

    With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,   

Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,   

    And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!

-Rudyard Kipling

Images
All images used are from the King’s Bruton Flickr, where they can still be accessed:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/kingsbruton/
Though they feature my likeness (go have a look if you missed me), they are not owned by me. All credit goes to King’s, their rightful owner.

Categories
Featured Politics

America- Divided Against Itself

Abraham Lincoln famously quipped that “A House divided against itself, cannot stand”. Though these words were addressed to an 1800s America on the brink of Civil War, their message is applicable all across history: a timeless reminder that fundamental differences between allies can destroy even the most valiant institutions and movements from within.

A poignant example of this is the Spanish Civil War, which raged from 1936 through until 1939, ending just as the rest of Europe erupted into chaos with the outbreak of World War II. Spain, since the exile of its king in 1931, had become a democratic republic: it championed values such as suffrage, divorce, gender equality, and freedom of religion, all of which were controversially progressive issues for a country that even today is still deeply devoted to its traditional Catholic roots. Even these five years, then, were plagued by bitter political battles between the progressive left and the traditionalist right, as well as spats within each camp between those in support of republic and people wanting to tear it down, whether that be Christian monarchists or radical anarchists. This period of tension, subterfuge and backstabbing eventually concluded with the army’s right-wing generals launching an invasion of southern Spain, plunging the country into a Civil War.

The lines of this war were quickly and decisively drawn. There were “Nationalists”, people in support of the rebels’ leader, General Francisco Franco, and his fascist invading forces, and “Republicans”, which were pretty much everyone else: an alliance of everyone from moderates who simply preferred democracy to fascism, to socialists, to all-out anarchists, who just hated Franco more than they disliked the moderate Republic. While this uneasy alliance, borne out of hatred of their shared enemy, lasted about a year, by 1937 in-fighting began: extremists and moderates began to attack each other in the infamous “May days”, leaving the entire alliance vulnerable to the more unified, aggressive and focused Nationalist forces, who took advantage of the chaos to gain the upper hand in the war. The Republicans never recovered, and lost their stronghold of Madrid in March 1939, letting in nearly forty years of brutal dictatorship.

Francisco Franco celebrates his victory in the Spanish Civil War. Madrid, March 28th, 1939.

I think there are important lessons we can learn from this example, many of which are particularly relevant in today’s US. The truth is, like the (Spanish) Republicans, the current American Democratic party is an incredibly unlikely alliance: for the past 4 years, it has shown surprising cohesion as the “anything but Donald Trump” wing of the American political spectrum. Trump himself, on the other hand, is no match for Franco’s extremism and brutality—nonetheless, his recent denial of the legitimate results of the 2020 Presidential election only reinforces his long-standing opposition to democracy if it does not work in his favour, much like the 1930s Spanish right wing. And while, like in Spain, this shared enemy of democracy may temporarily unite two disparate viewpoints to oppose it, I think that the party, and President Joe Biden at the head of it, are going to face the mounting challenge of keeping the organisation together as time drags on.

Kamala Harris and Joe Biden celebrate their victory in the 2020 US Presidential Election. Wilmington, Delaware, November 7th, 2020.

Over 81 million Americans voted for Joe Biden: more than in any other election in the nation’s history. This, in itself, is a staggering figure which only highlights the importance of last year’s election. In the world’s most diverse nation, this group obviously consisted of a wide range of demographics: people of all ages, genders, races and backgrounds stepped up to vote, many for the first time. The victory they achieved was massive both in terms of sheer numbers and significance, and pushed Biden over his first hurdle to become the 46th President of the US. However, it only represented the first of his many challenges: more than anything now, it emphasises the weight of the unique hopes of those millions of individuals, all of which now rest on his shoulders.

Biden has already taken further steps by winning a majority in the US Senate. Unlike the UK, where the Prime Minister is simply appointed by the biggest party in Parliament, which is elected at once, America has separate elections for both the Senate and the House (think of these as almost like the House of Commons and the House of Lords, but both have important powers) as well as an entirely different one for the President, which is what we saw in November. While the approval of all three is needed to pass major legislation, it is possible for a President to have control of only one of these or even to have neither, as Obama faced later on in his Presidency—this means their opponents can stop almost anything they do. The good news is that while the world was watching Trump-supporting extremists storm the Capitol a week ago, the Democrats quietly won two Senate seats back from Republicans in special elections in Georgia, securing (barely) a majority for Biden when he is inaugurated on top of his control of the House; this means the President will actually be able to effectively pass laws through the Houses without the Republicans entirely blocking everything.

Joe Biden campaigning with Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the two recently-elected Senators from Georgia. Atlanta, January 4th, 2021.

However, the battle nowhere near done—the new President still faces the crucial issue of keeping his party together, on top of running a whole country, down the line. Even after the races in Georgia, the Senate will be perfectly split 50-50 (with the Vice-President having the deciding vote): if even one Democrat decides to vote against him, he won’t be able to pass anything into law. In his new autobiography, “A Promised Land” (which I really recommend if you want to learn about American politics; it’s teaching me a lot), Barack Obama highlights the difficulties of this situation. The knife-edge majority grants every Democratic Senator a huge amount of bargaining power, allowing them to force any law Biden tries to pass to change, stopping it in its tracks by voting against it if he doesn’t listen to their demands. This presented huge issues for Obama who, even though he had a bigger majority than Biden does now, had to bend over backwards to ridiculous personal requests in order to pass anything at all, taking huge shortcuts such as extra billion-dollar projects in Louisiana to deliver his landmark healthcare bill, for example. The new President will face all of the same issues that Obama did: even so, I think that the fallout from having to concede to these demands may be greater than ever, effectively threatening to divide the party in two.

Americans gather around a radio at the Lincoln Memorial to listen as Barack Obama wins his first Presidential election (Obama remarks in “A Promised Land” that this is his favourite image from the night). Washington, D.C., November 4th, 2008.

The Democratic Party is split between two blocs: “moderates”, who are less harsh right-wingers looking to keep continuity in the US (think UK Tories but mixed with Lib Dems), and “progressives”, who push for greater government investment and change (more like Labour). This important rift, while having been swept under the rug for years in order to deal with Trump, is once again beginning to rear its head now that the Democrats once again have control of government. Biden and his future Vice-President, Kamala Harris, mostly fall into the former camp, while figures such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are more prominent leaders of the latter. Progressives, though, were instrumental in securing Biden’s win—led by Bernie after his defeat and young campaigners on social media, they began a mighty push to “settle for Biden”, throwing their support behind him solely in order to kick out Trump—Biden, too, rose to their demands, for example on cancelling student loan debt, knowing that he had to count on their support to win. And, he has: but now that aim has been achieved, the atmosphere amongst progressives is beginning to change from support to suspicion. Biden’s cabinet nominations are showing many more play-it-safe moderate figures than progressive torchbearers, causing many voters to be disappointed, indicating that there may already be a marked difference between Biden’s agenda and that which many progressives, both voters and politicians, were hoping for. The cracks, then, may already be beginning to show.

What does any of this mean? I am worried that like in 1930s Spain, the differences between the Democrats could spell disaster for them. The fact that any of the fifty Democratic senators could single-handedly stop a law from passing will mean that any of them could make pretty much any request they wanted: but what happens when a moderate makes a demand that progressives don’t like? Or vice versa? Such arguments are bound to happen, and I think they may well tear the party apart, causing either half to entirely veto legislation made by their own official allies. Meanwhile, the Republicans will surely be waiting on the sidelines, spying weaknesses to exploit during future elections in 2022 and 2024. If the Democrats can’t reconcile their differences, I don’t see their grip on power lasting long.

Mark Twain, Lincoln’s contemporary, told us that “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”. The Spanish Civil War was fought over 80 years ago and in entirely different circumstances, but the principles at stake were mostly the same as in modern America: those who are driven to defend democracy pushing back those who are desperate to bend it to their will. And while we might think that if anywhere, democracy is safe in the Land of the Free, the 6th of January taught us that we should take nothing for granted (especially when the police and even the President support the aggressors). Joe Biden may yet face some of the toughest challenges of any President in recent memory: we will all be counting on him to overcome them.

Rioters storm the US Government at Capitol Hill in protest of the results of the 2020 Presidential Election. Washington, D.C., January 6th, 2021.

References
Most of this piece was done from my own knowledge, but there are a few articles out there touching on similar themes:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/nov/15/democrats-divided-joe-biden-election-party
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/09/us/politics/democratic-party-joe-biden.html
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-issues-that-divide-people-within-each-party/
Also, if any of this interested you at all, read A Promised Land. Even if you don’t like Obama (I’m hardly his hugest fan), it offers an illuminating account into American and world politics from someone who was at the centre of it all (and actually knew what was going on, unlike more recent Presidents). Here is a link to it from my favourite independent bookshop here in Edinburgh, because fuck Amazon:
https://lighthousebookshop.com/products/a-promised-land-obama?_pos=1&_sid=c9c3f1d91&_ss=r

Image sources, in order of appearance (all credit goes to their rightful owners):
https://twitter.com/cfr_org/status/714464591384821760
https://www.ocregister.com/2020/11/07/ap-says-joe-biden-has-won-presidential-race-as-trump-continues-challenges/
https://www.wsbtv.com/news/politics/president-elect-biden-congratulates-warnock-ossoff-record-turnout-georgia/4IGI3R3P6FHLXABG3FGD3SP62Q/
https://mattmendelsohnphotography.pic-time.com/art/mattmendelsohnartgallery/5f5283602405c10b4473d61e
https://www.rappler.com/world/us-canada/summary-trump-statements-inviting-supporters-join-rally-united-states-capitol-january-2021

Categories
Featured Politics

Uighur crisis- Déjà Vu

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Categories
Politics

For Posterity: some thoughts on the morning after

The White House, Washington, D.C. 2022. Photo by me.

Just to clarify what I meant here, a day later: I don’t think Trump is on the level of genocidal maniac that Hitler was. Nonetheless, my point is that while last time was survivable, I fear the instability and suffering that he will be able to cause as a result of his increased unaccountability, in the US and across the world, will be palpable.
—07/11

About six years ago in History class, I studied the fall of a thriving and progressive democracy. One that faced troubles with economic management (which, to be fair, were far worse) which, alongside conservative pushback, led to the rise of a charismatic right-wing populist. A man who staged abortive coups, who baselessly used vulnerable and minority groups as scapegoats for the world’s ills, who promised simple, violent solutions (including economic autarky) to complex problems. A man who infiltrated a right-wing establishment which, after initial rebuke, spinelessly embraced and uplifted him as their leader, fearing for the sake of their political livelihoods that they had no choice but to do so.

Now, comparisons between Trump and Hitler are at least eight years out of date at this point (ask JD Vance). But waking up after five hours of sleep this morning, I wonder if the same mood of listless, confused fear that spirals around my head now was the same that my ancestors felt in 1933. I wonder if my undocumented, queer, and trans friends in the US feel the same disbelief young Jewish Germans felt at their own generation’s brazen sacrifice of their wellbeing in the polls, the same unabashed dread they once felt when they were told they would be disenfranchised, deported, decimated. I wonder if the children of Ukraine and Gaza resonate with the children of Austria, Ethiopia, Manchuria, Poland, when they were told their homes would be conquered, carved up, cleansed.

America today is not Germany in 1933. The latter was a country that was economically destitute and multilaterally sanctioned; the former is the most powerful economy and military in the world. Comparisons, nonetheless, abound. Both have their supporting casts: von Schleicher and Vance the hypocritical lackeys, Hindenburg and McConnell (or even Biden) the cowardly kingmakers. In each case, the stage is now set: far more so than in 2016, any remnants of checks and balances are now eroded. And in the case of Germany, which was fundamentally a far less significant power, it took twelve years to slaughter millions and fundamentally reshape the structure of the world. I’m not saying that we’re necessarily headed in the same direction, but I can’t now say with any certainty that we’re not.

I don’t know where we go from here; I could study two more Politics degrees and still be unable to tell you. But I don’t know how anyone deals with the problem of an unchecked fascist at the head of the most powerful country in the world. We learned from the futility of appeasing Hitler with Putin in Ukraine; with our chief ally, though, my government has already had no choice but to bend the knee. Now, there’s a strong chance here that I’m in a severe spiral and that everything will have the chance to flip back to normal in four years’ time; there’s also a chance that the “normal” I’ve lived my life in will never return again. I can no longer rely on the former. Regardless, History will judge us for our actions and inaction today the same way it has judged our 1930s contemporaries.

All in all, this is either just a bad day or the beginning of the end. Nonetheless, Australia is about the only Western country without a significant fascist movement right now; I remember Sydney as being beautiful around this time of year…

In the meantime, look after each other. We all we got.
—A x
06/11/24

Categories
Alex Archive

Archive: Exchange at Penn: A Glass Half Full

My first Correspondent blog post for Penn Abroad. Original: https://global.upenn.edu/pennabroad/blog/exchange-penn-glass-half-full

Coming back to Penn for my second and final semester was weirder, in some ways, than joining for my first. I was lucky enough to get the chance to go home for Winter Break; after a 24-hour trip through New York, Boston and London, getting back to my parents’ in (Old) York, the familiarity of being back in the UK after having spent four months on this incredible whirlwind journey across the Atlantic was jarring, to say the least. Nonetheless, it was lovely to be home again; after rediscovering both the Tesco meal deal as well as the Nando’s Sunset burger (if you know, you know), taking a trip back to Edinburgh to see my friends, and decking my family out in fresh Penn merch, I felt refreshed and ready to get the most out of the rest of my time here.

As I wrote in my recent article for the Daily Pennsylvanian, though, the cultural reset of returning to the Penn Bubble takes a minute to adjust to. More than anything, a lot of things were set to change in my life here: I had a new room in Gutmann College House and new roommates along with it, new classes to start and clubs to join, as well as having to readjust my social life after a lot of my closest friends either went back home having finished their exchange here, or had left Penn to go on their own adventures abroad.

However, it was super exciting to see the rest of my friends again, and getting back into the exciting business of life here never takes very long: I absolutely adore my roommates, I’ve already made so many new friends, and my schedule new schedule is very solid, though I do seem to spend about half of my time studying with friends in the Williams Café. On catching up with people after a few weeks apart, one question I seem to be asked a lot is how I feel about being halfway through my exchange, with less than a semester to go at Penn. Initially, having been so preoccupied with reorientating myself on coming back, this wasn’t something I’d really given much thought to and so wasn’t really sure how to answer.

At first, the thought of already being halfway through my time here was more than a little terrifying. I’d had the absolute time of my life in my first semester: I’d fallen in love with the enhanced sense campus community, incredible sporting and academic facilities, and much more personal teaching style delivered at Penn. As much as I absolutely adore Edinburgh and couldn’t wait to go home next year, I didn’t want my time here to end. And while that end didn’t feel quite imminent yet, I’d be lying if I claimed that my first reminder of its distant existence didn’t shake me a bit.

Equally, though, the more I’ve thought about it, the more my perspective has changed on the time I have left, limited though it is. Thinking back to all I’ve been through since I arrived last August, I’ve already accomplished and experienced so much: from blaring my pride for my newfound community on Homecoming weekend, to the chaos of running a conference for 500 people in downtown Philadelphia with the International Affairs Association, one of the clubs I’m in here, even down to the times I’ve simply smiled to myself while hurrying to class down Locust Walk, taking a second to marvel at and appreciate that I’d actually managed to make it to this beautiful and exhilarating place.

With all of that context in mind, looking forward to the end of my time here from the midway point suddenly became a lot less daunting. Yes, I do only have a few months left, but if those few were going to be anything like the ones preceding them, then I know I’ll be in for the time of my life. Rather than fearing the end, I’ve determined, I am going to make sure I enjoy and appreciate every second of my Penn journey while it lasts. That, I think, is what an exchange should be all about.

Categories
Archive

Archive: Patagonia Privilege: The On-Campus Housing Rip-off

Original: https://www.thedp.com/article/2023/02/patagonia-privilege-gutmann-rodin-penn-college-house-inequality

The day I was accepted into Penn remains one of the most exciting days of my life: the culmination of years of work aimed at getting an exchange offer at one of the best schools in the United States and, indeed, the world. But while the thrill of coming here was incredible, the sobering financial reality of studying here quickly began to set in. I was soon having to explain to my parents that unlike my friends going to other US schools, who could live in private accommodation, I had no choice but to pay almost $12,000 (about $1300 a month) for Penn housing. The average rent at home sits at less than half of that. And what was worse, there was a chance I’d have to share a bedroom, something that students rarely have to do in the UK.

Penn’s housing system requires that all first-year, sophomore, transfer, and exchange students live on campus, while other students are given the option to stay or leave. While Penn’s website suggests an open choice of college house, the reality is that rooms are allocated via a lottery in which students are randomly given a time slot to choose rooms. The living situation of literally thousands of students is left up to pure chance, leaving many of them dissatisfied and miserable. Now, were all of Penn’s living locations of roughly equal quality, this system could at least be argued to be equitable. The reality, though, is that some lucky students live in luxurious, brand-new housing while others live in buildings which are frankly run-down and outdated. 

As for me, my chances at this lottery turned out to be even worse than I’d imagined. Exchange students don’t even get to apply for rooms until June, many months after full-time students choose theirs. The result was that we were left with the rooms that nobody else wanted. So though I had obviously put the then-called New College House West as my top choice in the hopes of getting my own bedroom, I ended up in a tiny, two-person, shared-bedroom apartment in Rodin. 

While Rodin was average but tolerable, it wasn’t until I visited some of my friends’ apartments in the newly-named Gutmann that I truly understood the extent to which I was being ripped off. They were living in a beautiful, brand-new building with single bedrooms, spacious living areas, study rooms, and an exercise suite to boot; meanwhile, my shared room barely had space to breathe in, never mind any semblance of privacy, and my shower took about a minute to heat up every morning. 

My experience, though, was far from unique and certainly not the worst: recent deteriorations in Penn housing have only served to demonstrate and exacerbate how great its inequalities are. In just the past few weeks, there have been reports of a huge increase of rodent sightings in KCECH and of several residents of Harrison having to vacate their rooms entirely due to extensive flooding; the Quad, meanwhile, has long been infested with mould. In the same time period, Gutmann had a lavish official opening ceremony attended by its ex-President namesake, in which she announced that every single resident of the new house would be gifted a free sweater—from Patagonia, no less—with the building’s name embroidered on the sleeve. Residents of other college houses are rewarded for their perseverance in seriously adverse conditions with printed t-shirts as house merch. The staggering contrast would be hilarious if it weren’t so unjust.

The worst part of all of this, though, is that those living outside of Gutmann, most of whom are given no alternative to living on campus and got their rooms through a random lottery, have to pay the exact same rent price for what is an unequivocally far worse experience. While I’ve been lucky enough to move to Gutmann this semester, I’ve seen the same bewilderment I once felt on the faces of incoming exchange students when they walked into my room for the first time, questioning how on earth I’d managed to score a place there. After all, if Penn could afford to give me such luxury, why weren’t they receiving the same treatment for the same price?

It is clear that there is a serious inequity here that results in many students feeling rightfully screwed over. The prognosis is simple: Penn cannot continue to force their students to pay extremely high rent prices for clearly inadequate facilities without any sort of opportunity to move off-campus. Either lower the rent for those in the clearly worse accommodations–and no, that doesn’t mean raising prices by 20% for nicer accommodations, as they did with the Radian (see here)–or allow students to move off-campus. 

Failing to do either is a blatant abuse of monopoly power which demonstrates both greed and a serious disregard for their students’ wellbeing. For one of the world’s best economics and business schools, which claims to be a place which cares about its community, you’d think they’d be above such inconsiderate inefficiency. So while I love my new fleece, putting it on only serves as a reminder of the undeserved privilege I receive for winning Penn’s housing lottery, and the unfair treatment the “losers” have to face.

Categories
Archive

Archive: Subversive Transparence: Why Ben Shapiro is wrong about “Glass Onion”

Original: https://www.34st.com/article/2023/02/glass-onion-ben-shapiro-murder-mystery

One of my favorite introductions to a film is that of Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds (which, if you haven’t seen, you should go and watch immediately before I explain its plot). In it, a Nazi Colonel (Christoph Waltz) visits a French farmer’s (Denis Ménochet) house, responding to rumors that someone in the area is clandestinely sheltering a Jewish family from the Holocaust. The first ten minutes play out, slowly building tension as the audience attempts to piece together which character knows something that the other does not. Then, as the farmer details the ages and features of the family’s children, the camera slowly pans down to reveal them quietly hiding beneath the floorboards.

This is utterly brilliant, and will forever go down as one of the greatest opening scenes in cinematic history. Tarantino masterfully uses the tool of information limitation to lead the audience exactly where he wants them to go: once the presence of the targeted characters literally inches away is laid bare, our perspective on the previous ten minutes as well as the excruciating remaining nine transforms from one of confused curiosity to soul-gripping panic as we watch the dreaded inevitable slowly turn into reality.

Another film that, as the name suggests, similarly aims to manipulate its audience is Rian Johnson’s second murder mystery, Glass Onion. While less of a smash hit than its predecessor, Knives Out, Glass Onion received positive reviews and decent commercial success. However, the film was not without its critics; among them, the one who caused the greatest stir was none other than extreme neo-right political commentator Ben Shapiro (who, funnily enough, doesn’t like Tarantino much, either).

Shapiro took to twitter to launch a multifaceted attack on the movie’s plot, which he called “actively bad” for a variety of reasons. While both the views/likes ratio as well as mocking responses to his tweets emphatically demonstrated that his views were far from widely-held, it’s important to deconstruct his attacks on Johnson’s writing to reveal the misunderstandings behind them.

Most of Shapiro’s lambasting of the plot of Glass Onion has been ripped from this review by Chris Lambert (which, to be fair to Shapiro, he does credit, and to be fair to Lambert, you should read, as he makes some interesting points). They both call out the first hour or so of the film for containing flawed and fundamentally lazy writing. During this section, Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig), world-class detective and our main protagonist, appears at billionaire Miles Bron’s (Ed Norton) mid–Covid Greek island getaway under mysterious pretenses. Subsequently, an odd series of events leads up to multiple deaths including  “Andi” (Janelle Monae), Bron’s business partner turned bitter rival who inexplicably accepts his vacation invitation, being shot on the mansion’s steps.

The criticism, though, comes due to the start of the second act, where we are presented with a twist that flips these events entirely on their heads. It is revealed that Andi’s sister, Helen, had actually come to Blanc days before and requested his help in investigating her mysterious and sudden death. As a result, they hatch a plan in which Helen impersonates her dead sister and takes her invite to Bron’s island, Blanc turns up feigning innocence, and they secretly solve the murder together while pretending to be strangers. What’s more, Helen’s dramatic shooting at the climax of the first act is revealed to be non-fatal, another ruse designed to buy her time to hunt clues.

The presentation of events in the first act, then, is completely overturned immediately after its conclusion. This misdirection sends Shapiro into a fury, leading him to call it “an hour of wasted time.” However, his assessment that this represents laziness within the story shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what makes a great screenplay. In reality, just like the opening of Inglourious Basterds, the first act of Glass Onion is a masterclass in how the presentation of scenes can entirely change an audience’s perspective on them.

What comes next is a recontextualization of everything we have just seen, but this time with much better knowledge of why they are occurring. Many of the oddities from the plot’s first section are answered: Blanc’s unexpected appearance, the mysterious behavior of him and “Andi” throughout and even her apparent death. Yes, this makes the first act an exercise in deception, but the complete flipping of the audience’s interpretation of events using old clues and newfound information is part of what makes whodunnits entertaining, not “lazy.”

The other grand reveal that Glass Onion pulls off is by far its boldest (though, unsurprisingly, Shapiro hates it too). It takes the form of the story’s main conclusion: that it is not some elaborate mystery, but instead that that every plot point has the most mind-numbingly obvious explanation possible. The series of murders in the film were not carried out by some master criminal outwitting our protagonists, but actually by Bron himself, the clear main suspect, killing in cold blood and desperation. As Blanc states in the movie, it’s all dumb: all of us expected some Poirot-style mystery, but the truth was right in front of everyone the entire time.

The concept is almost as brazen as Bron’s killing spree, and would be every bit as ineffectual as Shapiro alleges if this obvious ending didn’t work to entirely subvert the audience’s expectations. Just like its title, the whole film is a “glass onion”: the audience is tricked into peeling back its layers in search of some complex and satisfying solution, but the answer to the mystery is actually utterly transparent. Not even the landmark political mind that is Benjamin Aaron Shapiro (absolutely no sarcasm intended), never mind the rest of us, could or does claim to have anticipated the reveal, obvious though it is. Though that may feel like an insult to the “intelligence” of those with desperately fragile egos, pulling off such a bold trick requires not boring laziness, but genius screenwriting. Ironically, though Shapiro seems to think the plot’s commentary is targeted specifically at Elon Musk, his out-of-touch rant demonstrates that it’s just as much about him: the image and ego of a so-called “genius” being shattered (literally, in the case of Miles Bron’s mansion) by their actual stupidity. And as Johnson himself tacitly suggested on twitter, it’s clear that the joke isn’t lost on him, either.

Design Credit: Lilian Liu, https://www.34st.com/staff/lilian-liu

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Archive: Style versus substance: Finding identity at Penn and beyond

Original: https://www.thedp.com/article/2023/04/identity-style-club-company-affiliation-penn

As an exchange student from the UK, something that American students often mention to me, especially those who have visited Europe, is how impressed they are with our (or their, post-Brexit?) sense of style. We dress so much more fashionably, I’m told, with such a stronger sense of individuality—though they never say this about my style, which I’m attempting not to take personally. This wasn’t something I instantly noticed upon coming here: Europeans hardly dress for the runway, but we don’t exactly turn up to lectures in our pyjamas either. An interesting difference that I have picked up on, though, is that European students wear far less university, club, and employer merch. That small distinction is representative of a significant cultural gap.

One of the key features I’ve found of the Penn experience is how deeply it’s centred around finding a sense of belonging. Much of our identity is founded upon the things we’re a part of: Greek life, clubs such as the DP, down even to the sense of pride we have in being at Penn in itself. I have been absolutely swept up in it. Half of my wardrobe is now branded merch, and I will unashamedly admit to having bought P-sweaters in both colourways. Walking down Locust on any given day, a significant portion of the outfits you come across are emblazoned with university, sports team, social organisation and college house logos. We aim to convey who we are through our outfits and, by extension, our social circles and the list of commitments displayed on our LinkedIn profiles.

I’m not meaning to criticise anyone for this—we have every right to take pride in the groups we choose to invest our time in. The more engaged and better-funded nature of clubs at Penn means that they are, generally, a bigger part of our lives compared to ones in Europe. But this feeling of belonging is also partly manufactured by the validation and exclusivity of the cutthroat recruitment process, which was initially very blindsiding to me: at home, you just turn up to a GBM and you’re in. The culture that creates for both our relationships with our peers and our personal perceptions can turn worryingly toxic.

Meeting people socially here is often prefaced by a list of the things they’re involved in. There’s an instinctive desire, conscious or not, to judge people’s social standing based on this: how “cool” their frat or sorority is considered to be, the “clout” their clubs have, and so on and so forth. This factors into our future careers, too: I’ve seen the demeanour of people entirely change mid-conversation when a friend casually drops in their job offer at some big-shot investment bank or consulting firm (you know exactly which ones I mean). 

What this generates is a culture of extremely superficial and transactional views of who people are. Students here, it seems to me, can tend to care more about an acquaintance as a networking opportunity or an “in” to a party than someone whose wellbeing they are genuinely interested in. Maybe I’m not being cynical enough and being too critical of Penn in believing that classmate and colleague relationships are ever built around more than that—though the phenomenon is stronger here, it exists at home, too. Nonetheless, I’ve never felt that sense of objectification more than since coming here.

This also translates into our senses of selves and how we display them. The obsession with getting into these in-groups can mean that we don’t spend enough time forging an identity outside of them. Coming into the latter stages of junior year, I’ve found several friends going through an identity crisis of sorts: though they’re constantly busy with academia and extracurriculars, they don’t feel like they have any unique hobbies beyond campus and pre-professional life. While those things are important, forging who we are wholly based on others’ validation is an extremely unhealthy way to live. Our personal style has become a display of commitments that others care about, rather than interests that we value. Maybe Europeans’ decreased emphasis on that is what makes their fashion sense seem so much more defined and individual.

Our clubs and future careers may make us interesting to others, but they’re very unlikely to make us unique. I’m not saying that Europeans are free from falling into that trap: I have plenty of friends at home who have high positions in similar clubs and graduate jobs at the exact same firms. But unlike here, that isn’t the first thing you notice upon meeting them; if their outfits are anything to go by, anyway, they may be closer to moving beyond it. Our personal and social identities should not be founded on a generic laundry list of commitments. We are all genuine, individual personalities. Instead, that is what we should aim to express.

Image Credit: https://www.upenn.edu/services/retail