Taking up Japanese as a side project for myself has reminded me of something.
So like a long time ago I had a professor that I absolutely adored. She happened to be Japanese American. She grew up speaking Japanese at home but never really spent a lot of time in Japan. She mostly spoke with other Japanese Americans and read books.
So one day early in her teaching career there’s an exchange student from Japan who’s having a hard time understanding a concept so she explained it to him in Japanese and then he looked absolutely rattled. Like in shock. Pale.
This is how she learned that the way she speaks Japanese makes her sound like a gang member.
Japanese doesn’t exactly have cuss words in the same way as English does but imagine that the nicest professor you’ve ever had pulls your paper over and says “Okay listen here you little piece of shit I’m gonna fucking explain this to you. Violently.”
Times like these I remember that Malcolm X quote about healing and how it requires acknowledging the knife is there. Things like "this isn't who we are" and "this is un-American" and "what are we? [insert another country]??" reveal a deep seated denial of American history and state-sponsored domestic terror that I'm just not gonna entertain anymore from leftists over the age of twenty.
"If you stick a knife nine inches into my back and pull it out three, that is not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, that is not progress. Progress is healing the wound, and they haven't even begun to pull out the knife. They won't even admit the knife is there."
btw if youre young and scared of doing adult things without your parents ive learned that like 90% of the time you can just tell the doctors office or the dmv "haha sorry ive never done this without help before... can you show me how to do this?" the employee will not care. if that means anything to you
People love to say things like “Hiding Anne Frank was illegal, turning her in would have been legal” without like fully grasping the modern implications properly. You have tons of folks like “if WW2 happened today id have __” that do not realize what is happening around them.
We have this idolized AND sanitized version of what happened then, and so we do not recognize it when it happens now.
Resistance fighters assassinated nazis and blew up weapons and infrastructure and destroyed records and forged paperwork and raised secret funds and smuggled people in vehicles and yes, hid them in their homes.
“Well it’s sad he got sent to an ICE camp but he faked his permit :/“
Whoever helped him fake his paperwork did what fighters in ww2 did. People who cut through chain link fences do what fighters in ww2 did, people who blow whistles chasing after ice cars do what fighters in ww2 did, people who destroy arms factories and cop city cranes do what fighters in ww2 did, people unmask agents do what fighters in ww2 did.
People are doing it now! They’ve been doing it now! You keep saying “oh if this happened here__” it HAS! It IS!
What are you doing about it?
