“The Most Effective Mask Was The Fitted N95. Three-layer Surgical Masks And Cotton Masks, Which Many

reminder that this blog, while not politically focused, supports BLM. bootlickers and racists aren’t welcome here, and never will be.

please stop reblogging sylvia plath poetry 

DO YOU REMEMBER

Do you remember?

reminder that biden wants to:

raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour

scrap past marijuana convictions

make college free for two years

increase the pay for teachers, particularly in underfunded schools

significantly increase taxes on the rich (both direct wealth taxes along with additional taxes on major corporations)

have universal background checks for firearm purchases

get us back into the paris agreement in order to switch to clean energy by 2035 (and his plan has been outlined already and the first few steps have been specified)

end the cocaine sentencing disparity (as it is deeply racist)

abolish the death penalty

support a government mandated 12 weeks of paid family leave for workers

eliminate private prisons

this man fully acknowledges the science behind climate change (unlike trump), wants to work to fix certain racist elements in american society (unlike trump), supports the lower and middle classes (unlike trump), is willing to put his money where his mouth is (unlike trump), and isn’t a full on fascist that ignores the global pandemic and takes the side of neo-nazis and white supremacists (unlike trump). biden is miles better than trump. is he the ideal candidate? no, but he is willing to work towards making the USA a more progressive place and that is the first step we need to take. vote blue.

Representation - Why It Matters

“They look like Ainu people,” my grandma had commented as I showed her Princess Mononoke. I had never heard of the Ainu people before. I asked her who the Ainu are, and she said, “they’re like Japanese Indians,” meaning Native Americans. “Mountain people.” 

After we finished the movie I immediately went to Google to look up the Ainu. My grandma was right, on some level. The pictures I saw of their garments, their houses, their salmon culture, their faces… it all reminded me so much of the tribal culture I grew up around in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest. 

I told my mom what my grandma had said about the Ainu, and my mom said, “oh yeah. Grandma is Ainu.” Whaaaaaaaat? Apparently at one point my grandma had gone back to Hokkaido to visit family, and she brought back all of these unusual souvenirs. Wood carved bears and wood carved bearded people, a mirror with a wood carved woman’s face, and other little things that had always been a part of our household. The little knickknacks that are never questioned, but are some how just kind of always there. I didn’t know that they had come from Japan, and I certainly didn’t know they were Ainu souvenirs. 

Of course, my mom didn’t have the internet at her disposal in the 70s, and at the time misunderstood what it meant to be Ainu. She assumed that Ainu was a general term for people from Hokkaido, as opposed to a specific ethnic group. My grandma denied being Ainu, having grown up Wajin, but my grandpa seemed to suspect otherwise. “Sayuri, I don’t know why you deny your heratige. Of course you’re Ainu, look at your big mountain feet!” my grandpa would tease.

The more I read about the Ainu and their history, and the more I looked into my own family history, the more questions that had always nagged at my family seemed to be answered. The question of why we were always so different.

This whole journey started with a movie. Prince Ashitaka is Emishi, and there’s a lot of complicated history about the relation between Ainu and Emishi, but the point is would I have ever learned learned anything about my family background if this culture had never shown up on screen?

People who see themselves and their culture represented all the time take for granted what that can mean. For some people, it’s literally life changing.