Kenneth Xu's Blog, page 5
February 27, 2017
Dear Nicholas: You Proved My Point
Nicholas,
Just as I was leaving English class today, I scrolled through my Facebook and saw that you had launched a massive attack on me and my Student Government candidacy on the 2,000-strong Davidson College class page. Forgive me for the late response – I needed time to gather myself, and most of all, the time to answer the people who have reached out to me, asked me how I’m doing, and showed their support for me – both in your comments section, and privately in a message to me. I’m grateful to them for everything they have done for me.
First of all, I’m flattered that because of a set of political opinions that I have, you are so bent on attacking me that you would comb through months and months of my Wall and strip quotes from a couple, moderately read articles that I wrote just to take a cheap shot against me in the middle of a Student Government Election that you have no stake in, whose bylaws you broke. You seemed so intent on landing a big punch on me that you ignored SGA rules, Davidson College Community practices, and basic human decency to do it. You’re risking a lot on that punch, brother.
You see, Nick, your post – on our college’s Facebook page, spawning a firestorm of comments before it was taken down – proves exactly the point that I’ve been trying to get across for the past year. About Davidson. About college. About how conservatives are, through a variety of strategies and sting tactics from people like you, silenced from speaking their minds on campus. You see, I’m wired a little differently from most people. I can take it when you decide to go full berserk on me simply because I publish political views – views that in no way, shape or form harm you, views that have no bearing on your life, views that I express simply because I want to. But some can’t. Many fear expressing themselves on campus. Many see the vitriolic backlash that greets way too many conservatives who dare post on social media and the chilling effect occurs: they feel discouraged from posting anything remotely conservative themselves, knowing it is likely they would get personally attacked and insulted for the things that they put on Facebook.
I anger you. I get it. I anger you because I post what I want and I don’t conform to that norm. But I’ve never insulted you. I’ve never questioned your character on social media. I never tried to undermine your candidacy for anything.
I’ll tell you what I did do: one time, and I have footage of it in the comments, you posted an article about abortion, supporting a pro-choice standpoint. I commented, supporting a pro-life viewpoint. It was the only time I ever commented on anything you ever sent. You deleted my comment. You deleted my comment and then you messaged me and you said you deleted it because “it really wasn’t worth [your] time or effort” to engage with it. That’s up to you. You have the right to curate your Facebook as you please. That’s fine.
The next thing I messaged to you was asking you whether you would like to have a lunch sometime to discuss this issue. You said maybe. I replied, asking you to set up a time (“Maybe next week”). You never got back to me. That’s fine too. You have a right to reject my invitation.
But my point is, you never made any effort to get to know me. I know a guy, an avowed liberal, who sat down with me at Summit Coffee the other day to discuss conservatism. Did I turn him into a conservative? Not necessarily. But I helped him to understand my viewpoint – and he helped me understand his. He and I found that we were similar on some things that you wouldn’t have thought. We helped each other. Now? We’re friends. He reached out and opened his mind. You stayed on Facebook and closed your heart.
I was careful to not make my candidacy about politics. I believe the radical thing that a conservative can still represent one-fifth of the Sophomore student body honorably and with passion for your causes. Even after what you said, so directly and crudely, against me, I still want to hear you out. Your voice matters to me greatly. Even if mine doesn’t matter to you.
I still want to extend to you that invitation today. Perhaps a lunch, or a coffee sometime? Or better yet, why don’t you come to a YAF general body meeting one of these days? I think you’d be surprised at the depth of discussion that we have there of conservatives of all stripes. Some days, our debates get so testy we’re yelling from one side of the room to another. But I’m most proud of this: no one ever calls each other names. Everyone listens to each other. And at the end, we always get together for pizza and fist-bumps.
I want it to be the same way between you and me.
But I understand if you want to close yourself off from me. From “the other side.” In that case, I can’t stop you from continue to go on your diatribes, attacking conservatives like me, scoring points with your friends and dismissing out of contempt the people who have different opinions than you.
The invitation is there, Nicholas. Please, for God’s sake, take it.
Sincerely,
Kenny Xu
P.S: I also want to highlight a couple defenses that were particularly important for these times. These people may agree nothing with me politics-wise, but they each contributed valuable points that helped better frame the conversation in a way that I personally can’t.
[image error] Pablo Zevallos’ and Bristow Richards’ defense, from a liberal perspective.
https://www.facebook.com/thekennethxu/
Life is More than Politics – by Kenny Xu
“It’s easy for me to just go on and on and on about politics. In politics, you don’t need personal vulnerability; a blunt focus and a quick tongue will suffice. In the age of 140 characters, who needs a face-to-face conversation anymore, after all…”
February 12, 2017
So You Like that Girl in Your Church Service
So you’ve been going to church since you were a little fetus in your mom’s belly. When you were negative four and a half months old, you hear the organ rumble through that tummy and feel God splash around in you in the key of E major. Ever since that low groan of divine cacophony, you never look back. You grow up fearing and loving the Lord, popping Bible verses to go with your morning Lucky Charms. You study – God, you study! – C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity until its margins were blacker than the ink on the pages, and then when you were done with that, you read Francis Chan and become an Evangelical, taking it all up for the cross. You sail through True Love Waits with flying colors, not only learning but internalizing your boundaries, vowing never even to touch a girl’s breasts until marriage. When you find a girl, that is.
You wait for that girl. Your high school is full of a bunch of hookups and lurid rendezvous; yet, you sit in single silence in your bedroom, praying that God would find you a girl that you wouldn’t meet under a drunken stupor. God makes you wait – makes you wait past both your proms – makes you wait past your graduations, and the craziness that ensues afterwards, even though you have a decent body and a cute stubble down your chin, even though you made sure to protect the temple of God by working out three times a week (no cardio – bro, please) and drinking only water and guava juice. You start to wonder if God has designated you to be one of those “called to be single” people, which scares the living shiz out of your testosterone-filled, hormonally-infused senior year self. You pray for “Your will to be done, Lord,” and then qualify it with “but please give me a girlfriend, man!”
And then in your first year of college, you attend Grace Baptist Church with your friend Javier. You remember that day clearly. Beautiful skies, fall leaves falling at your feet. You are leaving the service, excited about the preacher but somewhat hesitant to commit to the church on the first day you come there. You begin to look at the leaves that you are scrunching under your shoes, only to nearly run into a pair of brown Uggs. You gasp and look up.
She is wearing a thick sunhat with a bow at the top. Her long, dark curls extend down her shoulders and bob along her baby blue cotton dress, zipped up high and straight and pretty like a crooning bluebird. A belt, thick and taut, slips across her waist like the purity ring you once received in eighth grade, its buckle the crowning gem. She – her cerulean eyes – give one glance in your direction and pulverize you on the spot, reducing you a sack of flour, so inane and insipid you can barely stutter, “excuse me.”
“So coming again next week?” Javier asks on the way back.
“Am I!” You breathe, heart pounding in five different directions.
The next Sunday, you’re dressed up in your ironed-out flannel, slicked-back hair and polished black shoes. You search for her at the service, to no avail. The preacher preaches about God’s will and His control over the way of the world. Javier asks you why you are so twitchy. You claim it’s because you’re so mesmerized by the preaching that you have to take it all in. Oh, you’re mesmerized all right.
Outside of the building, Javier stops and talks with an older couple, and you embark on a journey to find her. She is sitting at the ledge alone, her legs rocking back and forth, their gait so comely you could find a passage in Song of Solomon to compliment it. But you don’t. You say a little prayer, asking God to give you courage, praying you don’t mess this up. Then you walk up to the ledge, arms swinging in rhythm with her legs, face covered in glee.
“Hey!” you say, trying to hold all your excitement, all your nervousness in. She looks up and smiles, a smile that you believe could imprint the hearts of every generation from Melchidezek to Jesus. “Hi,” she says, her voice low and even, like silken curtains drifting gently in the wind.
“I’m new here,” you say, doing your best to play the victim card, “and I don’t see a lot of people my age at this church. What’s your name?”
“Oh!” she laughs, her laugh like a peal of angels descending upon Jerusalem in heavenly embrace. “I’m glad you came! I’m Lily.”
She is lovely.
“Lily,” you breathe, possibly holding out the vowel a little too long. “Like the flowers in the pond in the back?”
“The very same!” she exclaims, and your vision begins to melt, and there’s the pond in blurred, watery colors like a Monet painting, and there’s her, in sharp focus, beaming and allowing you to fall for her like a blubbering idiot. “You’re right,” she continues, “not a lot of people my age come to this church.”
Please be single, please be single, please be single
“I really like this church,” you say, “I think I might stay. Are you from Dennison College?”
“Oh no, I’m not that smart,” she says, and you are enthralled by her modesty, utterly caught up in the fact that you’ve stumbled upon the kind of girl that Paul proudly says is worth getting married to. “I go to the local community college.” She is looking directly in your eyes. You feel like Hallie’s Comet, racing at a million miles per second amidst the glorious unknown.
Javier is waiting behind her, hands on his hips and chuckling silently. You tell her, “that’s my friend. Javier.” She turns, but as she turns, her hair twirls in a dollop of delightfulness, and your heart is seared with excitement. “Oh, do you have to go?” she asks, her voice flat. You are happy that her voice his flat, for that means that she is sad to see you go. You come in for the kill.
“Yeah,” you say, outwardly reluctant but inwardly determined, “Javier is calling me. But I’d love to talk to you about… this church. Can I… uh, can I text you about it?”
And then the faintest hint of a coy smile drops from her lips. “Yeah… sure!” she says, but flavorfully, her voice dripping with inflection, oh beautiful inflection, whisking its way into your soul the same way the organs did before you were even born.
It’s like a dream as you pull out your phone and hand it to her. Lily types in her ten digits as you watch wide-eyed, barely able to contain the sweet, sweet exuberance of seeing her face ease into a Southern smile. “Here,” she says, and you look twice at the number, as if to make it all the realer. “What is your name?”
It’s dark, nine o’ clock in the evening. You’re in bed, looking at your phone, looking at her number yet again, wondering how blessed you are to have this number, to have the power to hear her pretty voice. You type up a lame excuse for a message: “Hi Lily. I was thinking about the message today – on divine Providence. I was wondering what you thought about it. It’s pretty different from what I learned in my old church.” You think this text will show off your Christian bona fides while also delivering a cute opening into a deep conversation. You think so, but you know girls are fickle. You know the last time you forced yourself into a text, the last girl didn’t end up responding. But you also know that that girl no longer is important in your life, because she is not Lily. Because she is not meant for you. But Lily is, you are convinced. Lily is the girl God has provided for you.
And so you say a little prayer, bowing your head before the God you love, and worship, and concede your life to. “Oh Lord,” you murmur in the still silence of your dorm room, “I just ask that you bless Lily. That you help me, wherever this goes, to stay strong in the faith. To do everything for Your glory.” You think about ending it there, but you realize it would be dishonest towards the all-knowing God to not lay bare how you really feel. So you swallow and say, under your breath, “You know I want this.”
And then you open your eyes, and there is your phone, set to iMessage, your text still unsent, your heart stilled by a reverence for God, and the knowing that He provides, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but always at the right time, when you put your heart to Him.
You send the text.
You stare as it delivers, the first bubble of words in a hopeful sea of white space.
Then you see her typing back.
Hey guys, if you enjoy and/or are challenged by my work, I hope you can support me by liking my page!
https://www.facebook.com/thekennethxu/
Part 1: So You Like that Girl in Your English Class
January 7, 2017
Why My Hall Counselor Called Me White
It was one of those hall bonding meetings, intended to bring the halls together and foster community between the all-boys and all-girls floor. Innocent enough, right? Except that as part of our bonding, my hall counselor asked everyone to bring three objects that told a story about our culture and our background. It was like a first grade show and tell, but we weren’t in first grade. We were in college, and God forbid if this “sharing and caring” session didn’t have some ulterior motive to it.
Nevertheless, I came, and came prepared. Our hall counselor went around the room, asking people to share their objects. One of my friends shared his Ramen noodles. Another shared his Bible. I loved both, obviously, but I had something different prepared. The first thing I pulled out was my Redskins cap, signed by future Hall of Famer cornerback Josh Norman. “I wanted to share with you this cap because football is a huge part of my identity,” I said. “The Redskins are in my blood.”
Wooooord.“Interesting,” my hall counselor said. “Do you feel that the name should be changed?”
“No. Not at all. There’s a that says 9 out of 10 Native Americans are fine with the name.”
She seemed rather unamused, but I continued anyway. The second thing I shared was one of the paper targets that I had shot at the local shooting range. “I love shooting,” I said. “The rednecks at the range, they are some of the friendliest people I know.”
Then she cut me off. “Rednecks? Friendly? Ha.” Now everyone in the room could tell she was not enjoying this presentation of my ‘culture’. But I kept rolling anyways. The last object I had was a Constitution. “This is my pocket Constitution,” I said. “It represents my identity as an American, and the country that I love. This is the greatest country in the world, and I’m proud of it.”
This was the moment my hall counselor lost her cool. “I think we all need to have a discussion,” she said in an extremely passive-aggressive tone of voice, “about the intersection of race and American values, which is basically White values, and how the POC (People of Color) experience may not align so much with this belief in American greatness.”
“Hold on,” I said. “American values are not White values. I’m an Asian-American, and I believe as much in American principles as any White man in this country.”
“Well, there’s a discussion worth having about some people thinking that Asian-Americans being White, and…”
What?
What?
Guys, this is an actual conversation spoken by actual people. I’m not making this up. You can ask anyone who was there. My point was that, as an Asian-American, I believe in America just as much as any White person, and her conclusion – elegantly put in the “some people think” disclaimer to avoid attaching herself to it – was that therefore I must be White.
I also duly acknowledge that I had guessed the nature of the event even before it started, and wanted to do something different, to buck the stereotype of Asian people. But nothing I showed was a lie. I do love the Redskins to my core. And I really identify with gun culture. And I am proud to be an American. They were perfectly legitimate objects to show in a presentation about background and culture – and she should’ve responded with due approbation. Rather, she responded with contempt.
Since that incident, I’ve taken a lot of thought to her comment about me being, for her purposes, White. It’s why I’ve waited nearly two months to publicly comment on it. But the key word you should recognize here is the term “for her purposes”.
What you should understand is that in her narrative, I have to be White.
The POC identity narrative, as propagated in college campuses all over the nation, is founded upon the premise that there are two sides, White people, and POC people, and that they are mutually exclusive. White people hold a set of beliefs about America, such as that America is exceptional, guns are great, and that the Redskins name is not offensive, while POC people believe America is deeply flawed, guns are devices for White supremacy, and the Redskins name has more triggers my pastor’s gun closet. But in order for this narrative to exist, everyone has to fall in line. So when an Asian-American (or Hispanic-American, or African-American, etc.) declares that he or she (zhe?) loves America, they must be White, or infected with Whiteness. They must have grown up in privilege with White people smiling at them. Therefore, they are nothing more than a caddy for the White agenda. This makes them, effectively, White.
As some of y’all may have read, I have myself experienced a deep and personal struggle with the desire to be White. So when I decided to embrace my Asian-ness and be proud of who I am as a yellow man, I’m not looking to go back to trying to be ‘White’ again. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have my principles. Or that I still love football. And shooting things.
I’m not offended. I’m not even fake offended. I understand how critical it is in her worldview for me to necessarily be White, to the point where she can convince herself that I, essentially, am. But make no mistake: if you don’t think the POC narrative has just as much, if not more, of racist stereotyping and typecasting and tokenizing as liberals claim the Trumpian narrative has, then you’re living in delusion. We need an alternative to both. Our obsession with the privilege/oppression framework is not the answer to the reality of a heterogenous society. In fact, it’s the problem.
Hey guys, if you enjoy and/or are challenged by my work, I hope you can support me by liking my page!
https://www.facebook.com/thekennethxu/
December 26, 2016
Spider-Man 2, NOT The Dark Knight, is the Best Superhero Movie Ever
Part of a series on some of my “unpopular” opinions.
***
I’ve watched every Marvel movie barring Ant-Man and almost every DC Comics movie since Batman Begins. I’ve interacted with every kind of comic-book junkie you can imagine. And I’ve spent hours of my life ranking each superhero movie on a list, from best to Green Lantern. And after eleven years, hundreds of hours behind the big screen, and a lot of (LOT of) Internet trolls, I have come to one conclusion.
Spider-Man 2 is the Best Superhero Movie of All-Time.
Okay, maybe you don’t share my sentiments entirely.B-bbbbbbut what about BATMAN? is what typically follows my audacious earth-shattering body slam roundoff back handspring of an opinion every time I get the balls to say it. What about Christian Bale? What about Heath Ledger as Joker? What about Harvey Dent? What about Rachel? Yeah, yeah, I get it. Calm your pants down, lovers of all things darkness and gloom. The Dark Knight is excellent – if you’re looking for a noir gangster thriller. But as a superhero movie? The movie very well challenges the idea that you can even have superheroes, that such things, even if they exist, can truly act upon the burdens a society might give them. Bruce Wayne, billionaire playboy loverboy crime-fighter, tries and strives to untie the knot of chaos that the excellently-cast Joker (not played by the lead singer of Thirty Seconds to Mars) entangles Gotham City in. But what is the end result? Rachel dies. Harvey Dent goes mad. A lot of people die – despite Batman’s promise of no killing. And the Batman legacy lives on a lie that the hero is actually the villain. The Joker says, in a critical scene, “Batman… you complete me.” In that sense, The Joker wouldn’t exist – or at least get his fun – without the hero. Which makes me wonder if Gotham ever really needed “the hero” in the first place. The Dark Knight a great movie, but it lacks ideals – it lacks something to believe in. That’s why, as a superhero movie, it falters. There is no moral transcendence, only nihilistic bemoaning.
The Joker emblemizes the triumph of chaos over heroism. (imdb)This moral transcendence is where Spider-Man 2 rises to the occasion better than any other modern superhero movie in history. Think back to good ol’ boy Peter Parker – played by the better-than-you-think Tobey Maguire (don’t remember him only for Spider-Man 3, please). The juggling between his job and his girlfriend – well, friend (cringe!) – and his Aunt May and his college and then being Spider-Man takes a toll on him, such a personal toll that he quits being Spider-Man for good midway through the movie. During this phase, his personal satisfaction with life grows – his grades improve, he rekindles his relationship with Mary Jane, and he maintains the semblance of “normality” he desires. No superhero movie handles romantic tension better, by the way, than this one. After saving a girl from a burning house, Peter is asked the next day by his “friend” Mary Jane if he loves her. But, in a stunning turning point, Peter makes the ultimate sacrifice – telling her no. Even though he does love her. Like… what??? Bro, that was your chance to get out of the freaking friendzone! I shout into the screen. But Peter knows that by expressing how he truly feels about Mary Jane, he exposes her to all of his enemies and risks her life. Because he truly loves her, he tells her that he doesn’t. He understands, right then, that his powers bequeath upon him a responsibility to the people – even at the cost of his own personal satisfaction. This is the ultimate show of moral transcendence.
But let’s talk about the villain. It’s rare in today’s superhero’s movies, to see the hero go through any kind of character transformation, much less the villain. But Spider-Man 2 does both by creating what critics hail as one of the most layered villains of all time, Doctor Octopus. Blinded by ambition, brilliant physicist Doctor Octopus (or Doc Ock, as seasoned Spidey fans will call him) is on the verge of discovering nuclear fusion when an electrical accident destroys his nerve centers. As a result, his four robotic tentacles, programmed to follow his orders, instead take control of his mind and throw away any sense of ethical willpower. He goes to terrible lengths to retrieve the material necessary to finish his uncontrollable nuclear fusion experiment. And yet, at the end, Doc Ock, under the convincing of Spider-Man, realizes the error of his ways, and as his experiment threatens to destroy to city, summons the moral courage to destroy his raging ball of fire by drowning it – along with himself – into the ocean. “I will not die a monster,” he says, as his last words. Both hero and villain experience profound moral challenges – but both transcend them through will and belief.
Doc Ock wages a war for control of his mind… and wins.It’s a fair question to ask: Kenny – bro – why are you so hung up on moral transcendence blah blah blah ethics etc. But think about the nature of the superhero. The first Western formulation of the superhero comes from Jesus Christ – a man with extraordinary ability but also with extraordinary responsibility. (Sound familiar?) Then Freidrich Nietzsche comes in with his “Overman” idea, the man who, through sheer force of will, transcends all laws. The superhero is a man who must fulfill his great responsibility through moral transcendence. The effectiveness of this depiction is the scale by which superhero movies are judged. And Spider-Man 2 nails it. There is no superhero more complex, so mired in adolescent weakness, than Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man. It’s why we can relate to him more than any other jacked-up dude churned out by Marvel – because we see ourselves in those puppy-dog eyes, experiencing romantic frustration and academic helplessness, and we therefore admire the man who willingly chooses to embrace that life for the sake of responsibility. By vicariously attaching our struggles to his struggle, we get catharsis when Peter Parker does, at last, transcend his moral paralysis. We wade out of the muck with him. That’s what makes this movie great – greater than the rest. It’s great because its hero is great.
Hey guys, if you enjoy and/or are challenged by my work, I hope you can support me by liking my page!
https://www.facebook.com/thekennethxu/
November 7, 2016
Life Is About More than Politics
It’s easy for me to just go on and on and on about politics. In politics, you don’t need personal vulnerability; a blunt focus and a quick tongue will suffice. In the age of 140 characters, who needs a face-to-face conversation anymore, after all? Yet, after all the arguing and spilling of blood is done, after all the campaigning and endorsing and detailing laying out of your political position is overwrought to the last drop of the udder, there is a certain sense of hollowness, an incompleteness that lingers on like the aftertaste of coffee. After a particularly gruesome political brawl online the other day, I felt this hollowness come before me, this need to continue the argument without really needing to know why. It is this effect that has taken stranglehold of our nation and of the millennial body. We feel the need to constantly push like a pregnant woman for a baby that won’t ever be born. The ennui of “XXXX replied to your comment” begins to break in and we respond, listlessly, because we are angry for no reason. We grow exhausted of this election cycle because of its force-feeding of utterly useless stimulation; this contentless election has produced smoke and mirrors but nothing behind it. We hate Donald Trump because he’s Donald Trump, but when Hillary Clinton inevitably gets into office we wish upon her the greatest restriction possible to make her the least effective president ever. Or alternatively, we embrace Donald Trump because he represents a backlash against the status quo; what we attempt to hide from ourselves is the absurdity of his backlash, the meaningless void of his campaign. Or alternatively, we embrace Hillary Clinton, a product of the very government we hate, in a fatalistic surrender to the powers that we can’t change and that we can’t move. Politics drains us; it strips us of our moral vitality; when followed to its bitter end, it locks us into a stifling box of meaninglessness. Ultimately, as 1 Corinthians laments, “if I fought wild beasts in Ephesus with no more than human hopes, what have I gained? If the dead are not raised, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.”” That becomes the world where politics is supreme over our life. Even our gain is shorn of its gainliness.
Fortunately that is not the world we live in. We live in a world capable of real joy, of true grace, and of flirtations with the sublime. We are endowed spirits, which rise above the morass and, in flickers of faith and romantic leaps of the imagination, act and do and believe, passionately and without hesitation. We are gifted the opportunity to make real change, to impact lives in a real and honest and earnest way. I love politics, but it is on days like this, when people are biting their nails in agony over the election, when I believe that we need to be reminded of the things that have fueled our lives forward. (Hint: none of them involve Clinton or Trump.)
Life is meeting your roommate in person for the first time, and being so charmed by his smile that you give him a bro-hug even though we ain’t even bros yet.
Life is watching the Redskins play the Eagles in a division-clinching matchup on a computer screen hosting an illegal stream, and then watching the Redskins win. And then walking into class the next day telling your token Cowboys fan friend who ‘dem boys really are.
Life is running six miles down the shore of Oak Island, SC, soaking up the breeze and the pigeons and the view, cliffside, of the mighty ocean. Life is watching as the waves lap the shore like the coy touching of the shoulders of a flirting couple.
Life is strumming four chords on your acoustic guitar alone at night in the middle of the lounge when everyone’s already asleep but you’re not, you’re just trying to get over getting rejected again by reminding yourself that at least you still got the goods on your love machine.
Life is dropping your tray in the middle of the cafeteria and having everyone clap over your contribution to the planet.
Life is sitting outside in chilly weather on a bench in the middle of a park with no one in sight, and yet feeling as safe as you’ve ever been.
Life is winning a ball at a county fair for throwing a football through a net, and then naming the ball “My Dignity,” and then having that ball be repeatedly stolen from you just so your friends can claim that they’ve each stolen your dignity.
Life is camping out 12 hours in front of the grand opening of a Chick-fil-a so you could win 52 free sandwiches, because you’re just THAT obsessed with Chick-fil-a.
Life is falling to your knees on a hard wood floor praying that God would hear you through the static of all your sins and wondering how much love a God must have to bother hearing you even after you’ve fallen short day after day after day.
Life is regretting that you asked her out, but also applauding the fact that you at least were man enough to do so. There’s nothing in life worse than paralysis.
Life is having a bro do your hair for the first time, and feeling very awkward about it, until you realize that he’s doing a far better job than you ever did, and then just kind of being chill about it, like, “yeah that looks fine,” even though it’s the best hairstyle you’ve seen on yourself in five years.
Life is finally getting her number, after all the crap that you had to pull through, after brainstorming for like five hours about how to approach her with the most legitimate excuse possible to get her number but Hallelujah! It’s finally done!
Life is late-night Ramen noodles and jam sessions, Friday night flicks and country roads, talking on the phone with your best friend from high school, and realizing that they haven’t changed at all.
https://www.facebook.com/thekennethxu/
October 18, 2016
Lockwood Courtyard
Lockwood Courtyard was a large square outpost one-hundred meters long by one hundred meters wide, flanked on four sides by four stone buildings that represented four different departments of the university. The courtyard was completely bare, containing no trees, no shrubbery, no pond, no statue, only a large patch of grass and dandelions. Utterly unambitious and seemingly purposeless, it was never frequented by anyone in the university other than its monthly mowing; it sat as the canvas on which the surrounding buildings’ cast their shadows, nothing more. It often brought an architect consternation over why the centerpiece of our university was a screed of useless tufts of domestic fauna. So avoided was this large, flat patch of grass, that one student ventured out to the middle of the courtyard and placed a single wooden chair in its very center; to this day, that chair still stands, weather-beaten and moldy, but nevertheless taking on ironic form as the physical centroid of our university.
It was as I was passing by this courtyard on my way to my lecture that I had begun to notice, in the eyes of my classmates, a look of dread draped onto each and every eyelid, beasts of despair clawing and scratching their ways out of hollow walking eggshells. Every back was arched into carrying the weight of veritable mountains of books; every shirt sweat-stained with nerves and caffeine and niggling nothings-turned-ends of the world. Almost everyone walking against my direction had their heads sagged and trained on the floor. Yet, of those few men and women whose eyes met mine, I saw in them weary pleas, each to varying levels of exhaustion, but each pining for the very same thing – respite.
Immediately after this recognition I could not look at my classmates the same, nor my professors, for each and every one of this school bore this same look smeared on their collective faces – a slow-cooked anxiety threatening to boil over into personal meltdown. The creases on their foreheads were forty years foreshadowing. When a paper was in their hands, it was as if it was a forty-pound boulder. Not only their wrists but the entirety of their arms began to shake. I could liken two-hundred-thirty-two students in a lecture hall to two-hundred-thirty-two miniature tremors along a fault line that only I had suddenly become aware of.
Surrounded by the pitter-patter of the restless, I felt the air in this room suddenly hot, and cloying, even though it was November and crisp outside. I desired to leave at once. At first opportunity, I burst for the restroom, for fear that even another minute in that atmosphere would either effect a stroke upon me, or regress me back to the blithe unawareness that has so afflicted my peers that they could no longer perceive the dread or despair sunk into their own eyes.
Now retreated into the pallid walls of the boys’ latrine, stewing in the fumes of urine, I finally managed to look at my reflection once again. What I saw startled me. Laid plain in the mirror, I realized that I too had the look of my passerbys; moreover, when my fingers came to my chest, I realized I had their irregular, skittish heartbeat. I had become a foreign object, utterly devolved from my inner being. Access to myself was clouded by the smoky irises in my expression, the folded creases in my face, the raveled muscle-knots gripping the spiritual sores in my body. In the process of absorbing these walls, these tests, these peers, I had fallen in line with them. I had become a facsimile of everyone around me, and in the process, had buried myself beneath the lines of my forehead into sad hibernation.
At once I desired to rid myself of this malaise, to seek a place to shed this affliction. It was then when I turned my head to Lockwood Courtyard, to the single, unused, wooden chair in the center of that field. Before this day, I had glanced only askance at the object, and then away, somewhat embarrassed for its neglect. But now, amidst the internal turmoil that I had felt rather strongly at the moment, a pulse within me dictated that I move to it. And like a blindfolded man led only by a series of handclaps, I dared not question my navigator. I followed as a man in a trance, unaware of my classmates’ startled glances as I put both feet into the open field, then began treading still farther in. I might as well have been walking on water. The surrealism of the moment only started to take hold once I was ten feet into the courtyard, as more of my peers stopped and gazed, some murmuring to themselves incantations of disbelief. But exposed as I was to the overcast day and quizzical glares, I could only transcend still further; each step I had drawn drew me another. Civilization faded away. In this field I was left among the savage life.
Encased as I was by four grave stone buildings, I distinctly felt outside their grip. Lectures and facts simply slipped from my head and disappeared into the liminality. And yet, even as my head was disposing of my understanding, I began to feel fuller, a waxing moon revealing more of its essence with each iteration of itself. Every step I took towards that chair I was a new iteration, and each iteration led to more shedding of the anxious cloth I had worn all these years of my life.
Finally I reached the chair. It was mahogany, about four feet tall, a stolen gem from the Physics department, never returned. From the outskirts of Lockwood courtyard, it stood painfully isolated from everything around it, but now up close, I could see that even as it seemed so neglected, it was actually perfectly content amongst the bees and grass. Cast into the wild, what was once so ordinary and mundane had become overlord.
I reached out to touch it. Its surface had been smitten by rain and bugs, but the cool, damp wood felt as sturdy as ever. Unbothered, unprocessed by the weight of nagging interests, the chair had grown a lean skin. Its wood had become tough and rich. It was in every way superior to every other pampered piece of furniture of its race.
In the overcast day, a breeze gently feathering my face, I could not resist but to sit down in that stately chair, tentatively at first, for fearing of breaking it, but then realizing that it was taut and tougher than ever, reinforced rather than weathered by its roost. There were gawkers, but they were so far away, their calls so distant and ignorable that I paid more attention to the peals of the clouds drifting in the sky than their chatter. And as soon as I set my back to the chair I felt all my burdens suddenly loosed; an entirely new peace swept up my spirit and carried it away.
Such a peace had never been planted in me in all my life as a civilized man. It was the peace of every trouble of mine suddenly drawn to scale with the universe. It was the peace of the disintegration of everything that was in fact nothing, and the restoration of order into its true place. When I sat in the moss-covered chair and looked up into the sky and all of its majesty, I became keenly aware of the presence of God. Behind four walls, caught up in the pipe of civilized life, I could not see God in the clouds, but now, my eyes turned skyward, my mind renewed, God came to me not just through the clouds but through the grass, through the soil on my feet and the air on my nose, majesty pouring into me through the immensity of creation. In the rooms with tables and figures I was a crusty skeptic; in the chair in the field, I was held by God in awed captivity. It did not matter that a small crowd was forming at the edges of Lockwood Courtyard; they were as far from my mind as the Orient. It only mattered that in these moments, having recognized the scam of society, I had divested myself of my worldly desires and became observer of all things, a simple wanderer of God’s creation, as Adam was in Eden.
I sat for hours. In no minute of those hours did I grow weary or tired. As the afternoon slipped into evening, I saw a great shift in the horizon. In deference to the will of the master, the clouds parted and Apollo’s sun in all its glory made its name known in robes of light. The colored hues of the evening spilled into the chair before me. I shuddered as a broad ray stroked my face. Ah, the nurturing light of Heaven! How sufficient it is, and yet, how we ignore its sufficiency!
Now darkness came over Lockwood Courtyard like a soothing instrument, and the colors evaporated back into the sun from which it came. For the first time, I felt as if I was truly fed. All these years racing, all these days wasted in the pursuit of philosophy! And yet true meaning was locked into my soul from the very beginning, and Nature was its key.
I am now returned to my chamber in order that I may write down these fascinating exploits, so that others may walk in that light, the dew of sweet solace. I send this message: Lo, the Truth has always been, and always will be, inside your mind; everything else is distortion. All of civilization is distortion. Only by walking inward may one unlock what I have unlocked. I write these words down tonight so that they may be shared tomorrow, among generations of needy men, who desire the peace that was wrought unto me today. They may read and disbelieve me. No matter! Tomorrow, I know where I will be, early in the morning, before even the breakfast-bell rings: I will be sitting in the chair in the middle of Lockwood Courtyard, gazing at the sky.
https://www.facebook.com/thekennethxu/
Special thanks to Randy Nelson, English Professor, for his help with the short story.
Read more of my stories:
August 18, 2016
Social Media Needs A Disruption
I’m a massive daydreamer. I’m also a compulsive pacer. It’s a bad combination.
This summer, I would randomly get an idea at work, stand up, and begin to pace around the entire office, much to the fascination of my coworkers. One dude asked me what I was constantly thinking about. “Work?” he asked.
Was I going to tell him I was thinking about how the Redskins were going to go 12-4 this season and head to the Super Bowl? Was I going to tell him I was thinking about a story that I wanted to write about a guy meeting a gal in a rain-drenched parking lot in the middle of Chicago? Was I going to tell him my mind was on the seventeenth business idea I had that summer, this one about a replacement for toilet paper? (Don’t ask.)
“Work,” I replied nonchalantly, and smiled back.
We live in a society that encourages conventionality above all else. Social media accounts are carefully controlled. Bad Insta pics are deleted; unflattering Facebook tags are untagged. All to keep within this thin veneer of “normalcy” that has become the dominant personality structure across the Internet. Crawl a herd of Facebook accounts, and you’ll find conformity and inoffensiveness resonant above all else.
But we’re not all the same. There are 16 Myers-Briggs Personality Type Combinations. I’m an INTJ (“The Architect”). On the four temperaments scale, I’m Choleric – goal-oriented, charismatic, but prone of outbursts of passion. We’re all very different human beings – just don’t ask Facebook. We all look the same on Facebook.
Where has all the fun gone on Facebook?I used to think my most passionate moments were my sunspots; that they were embarrassing and that should be hidden from public view. In eighth grade, I was set to deliver the opening speech to the new members of the public speaking team. I wrote a story about a robber who was stopped by a cop, and then, after a scuffle, accidentally shot him. (This was not in any way political, I promise!) After I read the speech in front of some boggled eyes, my English teacher told me to come outside. She told me I wrote a really beautiful story. She also told me my story was incredibly offensive (including calling cops “fuzz” and graphically depicting violence) and that she was suspending me three days of school. Consequently, I fixated on the offensive nature of my speech for four years of my life, seeing the speech as a humiliating moment, never to be repeated again.
I’m not saying what I did wasn’t wrong. But recently, I’ve been exploring the other side of the coin… that she also said that what I wrote was beautiful. Indeed, in creating a provocative, even offensive, work of art, I created something that had a kind of power that elevated it above the others.
The Digital Art class I took last semester highly influenced this switch in mindset. In the class, my professor encouraged us to make “subversive” artworks that challenged not only our thinking, but also the unconscious processes and assumptions that form the foundation for our thinking. In Beautiful Trouble, an art-philosophy critique we read together, author and digital artist Andrew Boyd talks about Détournement, French for “culture hijacking.” Détournement refers to the use of art for disruptive purposes, intended to challenge or undermine a conception or assumption people have in society. The foundational idea of his book is that disruption in itself is a kind of beauty. A kind of aesthetic that makes a work of art all the stronger. Oftentimes the impact of art is not just in an appeal to logic and rationalism; there is often a greater spirit infused inside, a spirit of what some call “jackassery.”
Back in the 20th and early 21st century, these “jackasses” were often extreme men with extreme visions. They were the artists who dared replace the stars of several American flags with corporate logos. They were the artists that hacked into several multinational banking websites and redid their home pages. They were people like Chris Burden, who literally shot himself and recorded it on video. Yes, this was called art. Armed with only their creative instincts, they disarmed the mental framework of a nation.
But back then, there was no social media, and artists needed to be a bit extreme to get noticed. These days, it’s the opposite. Due to social media, it’s easy to put your work out there to be consumed by the general public. Yet, also due to social media, conformity has also become so entrenched in our world, so assumed as a fact of social survival, that any kind of disruption on the net, extreme or not, is met with an irrational hostility and even fear. One could argue that the current oversensitivity of the millennial generation can be directly linked back to increasing reliance on social media, which makes its money off of affirming exactly who we are, showing us only the things we want to be shown.
The end result of such a culture of rigidity is a fake, inaccurate portrayal of who we are as humans. And sure, one might argue, fakery is forgivable offense. But social media (especially Facebook) has become worse than fake. It has become boring. And that’s unforgivable.
Nowhere do I see less innovation and intellectual engagement than on Facebook. I see carefully manicured statuses that are stylistic carbon copies of each other, utterly detestable “@W has a secret crush on you!” slogans, and the same mind-numbing political pandering that has oversimplified complex discourse into several turns of phrase. Social media has become less of an interest, more of a chore, a necessary evil to “keep up with the Joneses.”
In this cloying blandness, the air is ripe for dropping a couple ground-shaking bombs. There needs to be a revolution in the way we write and produce on social media. To work within the confines of the machine is to sacrifice our authenticity. Instead of acquiescing, relegating ourselves to simpleminded cogs, we need to learn to take the wheel.
We need to learn not to simply produce content to gain likes, but to produce content that redefines what it means to “like” something. Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, said it best:
“Some people say, “Give the customers what they want.” But that’s not my approach. Out job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, “If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, ‘A faster horse!'” People don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
That’s innovation. That’s the direction we need to steer social media.
And we need to encourage creativity by radically restructuring one of our most treasured habits: the “like” button. (Or the heart, or the retweet, or whatever the heck is out there these days) We need to learn to reward creative thinkers with “likes” independent of their political views, their relationships, or the quality of their profile pictures. We need to develop a respect for innovation over conformity. What do we tell the machine? Do we want it to reward mental stimulation or obliteration? The future of social media is in our hands.
This summer, I decided that I was no longer going to suppress my individuality – to suppress the fact that I’m Choleric, an INTJ, a daydreamer and a pacer. I decided, like Ulysses, to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield – especially on social media, the ultimate case study in inhibiting, suppressing, hiding, and yielding. I decided, in effect, to be a disruptor. It’s not only good for me, ever a Holden Caulfield, but it’s good for social media. And as social media slowly eats away at humanity, it’s good for humanity.
https://www.facebook.com/thekennethxu/
With thanks to Keelan Scharbach, Davidson College Class of 2019, for her contributions and editing.
Cover image credit: techviral.com
Related:
August 15, 2016
Escaping the Fratzone
UPDATE: Names of organizations have been changed from a previous post, due to resemblances to current real-life organizations. The contents of this story are for humorous intent and hence entirely fictional.
***
My door slams open at 5:06 am and I jerk awake in horror. They’re here.
I was tipped off yesterday by happening to be in the vicinity of a couple Phi Chi Kappa brothers, huddled together but not bothering to hide the relish in their voices as they eagerly discussed plans to jump the freshmen at 5 o’ clock in the morning of Monday. One bro bragged about the deal he struck with the hall counselors to get the master key to all the dorms. No freshman pledging Phi Chi Kappa was safe.
I was pledging Phi Chi Kappa.
“Freshmen are so fucked!” Bro #1 said out loud.
“Freshmen are so fucked!” The bro-chorus repeated.
Not me.
The night before, I asked to stay over with my friend Mac, who wasn’t part of a frat. Surely, the bros couldn’t find me here. “Don’t worry man,” Mac said. “You’re safe with me.”
Now, Mac is standing at the door, propping it open for Bro #1, 2, and 4, staring at me greedily.
“Dude!” I cry.
“I’m sorry Noah,” Mac shrugs. “Everyone’s gotta do it.”
“That was clever of you to hide away!” Bro #2 exclaims, licking his lips like a dog finding the source of the scent. “Yeah!” Bro #4 agrees. “But not as clever as us!”
“I don’t wanna…” I start.
“C’mon man, everyone’s gotta do it. No judgment. Just c’mere.” Bro #1 opens his arms. “Time to go.”
I don’t wanna… I don’t wanna… then I see the window.
“What are you doing…” And a collective gasp as I edge towards the window and open it.
“Dude,” Bro #4 says. “That’s three floors.”
“Don’t – Noah!”
I tumble down the window and feel the scratches of the tree branches as I try to hang on to whatever I got, the leaves burning my face and hands. Still, I knew that the tree would save my fall, and, with a bloody cheek, I hop down, branch by branch, until I find the floor. I liked Mac, but I had my suspicions about him. That’s why I slept with my car keys in my pocket. Now, I only need to get to my car. Then I could drive away and get out of this fratzone once and for all.
“Hey!”
I swivel around just to meet Bro #3, who was keeping guard.
“You thought you could get away, did you,” he said, grinning. Bro #3 was a burly dude. He scared me out of my wits. “C’mon man, it’s just pledging.”
“Fuck you!” I scream and kick him in the knee. “WAAAAAAAAH!” as I duck under the tree and start kicking it for the parking lot on the other side of the residence hall complex. Something whizzes by me and clatters onto the brick path ahead. It’s a fucking tranquilizer dart! Holy fuck! I had no fucking clue I would be getting into this kind of shit just to get out of a frat pledge!
I keep low to avoid the swishing darts and spot an officer with a flashlight, keeping guard to make sure nothing utterly shitty happens during frat pledging. I wave to him. “Officer! Officer!” I cry. “You really let the frat bros keep tranquilizer darts? Please protect me! I don’t want to be a part of this!”
“Really? Come here boy! Is that true!”
“Yes! They’re trying to track me down. Please…” and I come up towards him.
Then he grabbed my arm.
“Everyone does it,” the officer mouthed in my ear. “Why do you have to be so difficult? Now you come with me.” Even the officers are in cahoots? I’m in such deep shit. Then I see him getting out the handcuffs. Then I see his pepper spray. With my free arm I grab the can from his belt and right before he can clasp me I apply the spray directly into his left eye. “AAAAAAAH!” he cries, and lets me go. I scramble away, not to be caught by the middle-aged donut officer. “Freshman on the loose!” I hear him yell into his walkie-talkie. “Coming up on the parking lot!”
I buckle down and run. My car is in sight. But on the road, coming towards me from the back, I see two cars rumbling. It’s the frat car patrol. They speed up as I get closer to my car. They’re going to reach it faster than I can! I see them closing in on my back. But, a second before they pass me, I run up and jump onto the windshield. “Holy Shit!” he cries, and brakes, launching my beat-up body at least ten feet into the air. I hit the asphalt like a piece of turd but manage to roll out of any broken bones, right next to my car. I pick myself up and stumble into my car. “God,” I say, reaching into my pockets to-
-pull out nothing.
“No,” I mumble, as cars of all shapes and sizes speed towards me, as a helicopter shines its light on my image. “No.” I lost my car keys.
As the cars and copters converge on me, and the frat bros in their dark sunglasses hold up their array of tranquilizer darts, Bro #1 steps out of his Chevy Impala and looks me in the eye.
“Dude,” he says, “Mad respect. Mad respect.”
“Mad respect!” the chorus repeats.
“You came pretty damn close. But there’s one rule every frat bro knows by heart, that you’re about to learn – once you get in the fratzone, you can never get out.”
“Never get out!” the chorus repeats.
“So what’s it gonna be, Noah? Any last words?” Bro #1 said, flexing his muscles for his fellow bros to nod approvingly.
I sighed and dropped my head to stare at the ground. “At least can we just be friends?”
“Friends!” Bro #1 exclaimed. “We’re gonna be the best of friends, Noah. The best of friends.” But then his mouth curled open wide. “It’s just tonight, you’re my bitch.”
Follow me:
https://www.facebook.com/thekennethxu/
Read:
August 8, 2016
Only Conservatism Can Save the Poor Black Community
Baltimore
A Baltimore ghetto.I walk the streets of Baltimore on a sunny Monday afternoon, taking in the draught of two worlds violently enmeshed together in this city of simultaneous, and often paradoxical, eminence and decay. Only one look upwards at the old steeples and pastel rowhouses reminds me of the city’s richness, the city of Poe and Fitzgerald and the newly beautified Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose 2015 book Between the World and Me launched him into the upper echelon of Black American voices. It is this man who I’m thinking of when I look down at the cracked roads, at the Black nomads dragging their things down the crumbling sidewalks with blank looks starved on their faces.
“One cannot, at once, claim to be superhuman and then plead mortal error,” Coates writes in his bestseller. “I propose to take our countrymen’s claims of American exceptionalism seriously, which is to say I propose subjecting our country to an exceptional moral standard.”
Judging by his exceptional moral standard, judging by the grand churches that line the skyline of Inner Baltimore, and then seeing the paralyzed Black folk on these city streets, I can see why many have come to conclude that the American ideal has failed her most vulnerable citizens. For all our talk of our specialness, our cocky confidence in ourselves, many of the poor Black people in the Baltimore streets have seen more bark than bite.
Ta-Nehisi Coates and I may be on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, but where we do agree: the Black body has been in a consistent state of violation since it was supposedly set free. But who to blame? So many choices. Coates, in his Case for Reparations article for The Atlantic, puts it on the shoulders of the institutions benefiting White society for the past 200 years, the government, the churches, the community norms that strangled the Black populace so cruelly since slavery. “America begins in Black plunder and White democracy,” he writes, his bitter snarl firmly etched onto the page, as evidently pronounced as the words themselves. It is in this reading of history where he pronounces reparations as the only solution to the Black community. It is this reading of history that modern conservatism, as it has sometimes failed to do, must at least acknowledge – mere ignorance or dodging of the issues is not what the Black race deserves. They deserve action.
We owe the Black community reparations. But modern liberalism has all too often translated those reparations into a lump sum of money, or masochistic self-guilt that in reality functions only as lip service and does nothing to address the issues today in the heavily concentrated ghettos of places like Baltimore. This reading of reparations not even Coates defends: “Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely,” he says, denying that it means, specifically, welfare, or entitlements, or things that the liberal narrative would seek to push forward. In reality, the Black community deserves better than that. It deserves a return to conservatism.
Smithville
A house in the Smithville neighborhood. Credit: Google25 minutes north of Charlotte, NC, I walk the weed-ingrown streets of Smithville, a predominantly Black small town nestled between two White communities like a sunspot. I’m joined by a committee of friends, all who’ve devoted tens of hours here for one purpose and one purpose only: to hear and retain the voices of the whole neighborhood. And to fight on its behalf.
Smithville would be considered a middle-class neighborhood, with the majority of the adults interviewed either working or retired. The houses are not large, the lawns unkempt, but you go around and ask everyone what they think of their community, and the response is immediate and enthusiastic – they love it. Why? The answer I get over and over and over again: the people here are like family. Everyone knows each other. They hold themselves in community accountability. And I realize that this community is rich beyond richness. Not because they are materially rich, but because they love each other, they treat each other like brothers and sisters in Christ. Compared to the national divorce rate, Smithville’s is extremely low. Kids are normally raised in two-parent homes, and neighbors help each other. It is in many ways an idyllic vision for the Black community today.
Today, 72 percent of Black babies are born out-of-wedlock. Coates points out that that is perhaps due to married women having less kids, but I’m not focused on the parents. I’m focused on the kids. Hundreds of studies have only confirmed what I can only emphasize again and again, to the chagrin of some liberals everywhere: two-parent homes with a mother and a present father are the single best structure to raise children, and every other structure is deficient. I will cite and cite and cite until this becomes as clear as the back of our hands. When liberals hear the word “family,” they think some grave preacher telling them what do with their sex lives. When poor Blacks think “family,” they think of one of the few opportunities they have to move up the social ladder into middle-class stability. Marriage among Black people is a minority within a minority, but it is a privileged one at that – one that needs to be expanded and encouraged by our governments and social institutions.
Smithville has a lot of problems, but it has the one thing it needs to get right, right – family is the essential value here. The two-parent family – a fundamentally conservative ideal – needs to be at the center and forefront of any discussion of social mobility and well-being for the Black community.
Charlotte, New Orleans
The logo of one of the most polarizing school districts in the nation.
A story of two cites. Charlotte is a city that I lived in the entirety of my summer, one with which I am imminently familiar. New Orleans is a city in which I’ve never been.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools is the 2nd largest public school district in the entire nation. 135,600 students roam its halls, many oblivious to the fact that it was at the center of massive national controversy in the 70s over integration and forced busing. In the landmark Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools case, the Supreme Court held that forced busing was an appropriate way to solve for the need to integrate the city’s schools. CMS caught on surprisingly quickly, busing Black kids in White neighborhoods and White kids into Black neighborhoods as a regular feature of its public education through the 80s. Through this experiment in racial integration, CMS rose near the top of many educational standards such as test scores and class equality. Black students overachieved their educational goals by a significant margin during this time period.
One might think this is a clear victory for the liberals. But there’s only one problem: everyone hated it. And by everyone I do mean everyone. The White folk didn’t like it, the Black folk didn’t like it, the business folk didn’t like it; no one liked it. As Newsweek’s Sam Fulwood III writes, “Unpopular court orders led to busing plans for school desegregation” that undermined “neighborhood schools” and made “Black kids like me [bear] the brunt of long bus rides across the county.” Even today, both White and Black mothers largely refuse to support forced integration efforts like what happened in CMS, before the 2000 ruling that relaxing those restrictions on busing.
What this tension and controversy over CMS reveals today is twofold: one, that Black students benefit from going to mixed-race schools with strong educational credibility (which should never be a surprise, to liberals or conservatives), and that forced integration is a pretty awful way to achieve that goal.
Enter New Orleans.
When Katrina devastated the New Orleans’ landscape back in 2005, it brought with it a silver lining – an opportunity to completely flip the script on New Orleans’ failing public schools (90 percent Black, 70 percent free/reduced lunch). In the aftermath of the city’s flooded and completely useless school buildings, the city council voted to do more than just rebuild the buildings with the same old tired model that was failing their Black citizens. They built a completely new model of education based on the free market principles of charter schools, local autonomy, and school choice.
Schools that were all normally run under the ballooning, overextended Orleans Parish School Board were now assigned to local organizations. Charter schools moved in, scooped up the worst performing schools, and became the primary source of education within the New Orleans community. Attendance zones were eliminated, meaning that as long as the school had capacity, any student from within the Orleans Parish could attend any other school in the city. It was a true free market revolution in education based on conservative principles of choice and private sector development.
Five years after the conservative reforms were enacted, student performance in this heavily Black district has increased dramatically. In 2005, 64 percent of New Orleans schools were deemed “academically unacceptable.” In 2009, in just four years, the number had dropped to 42 percent. Test scores have gone up dramatically in both the 4th grade and the 8th grade LEAP tests since the enactment of these reforms. Pushing local autonomy in schools has led to an upsurge in educational innovation. And school choice – the creation of charter schools to compete with the public schools, and the ability for parents to choose within a marketplace of schools in which they could send their child (without being forced to, as CMS busing made sure) – has fostered Black gains like no other.
Robert Garda Jr., New Orleans College of Law, writes:
“Before Katrina, only thirty-two percent of African-American students scored basic or above on state exams, which was well below the state average. Now, fifty eight percent score basic or above, which exceeds the state average for African-Americans. In fact, black students in New Orleans are outperforming their counterparts in other parts of the state for the first time.”
Conservatives have always embraced charter schools. Now, with the well-being of the Black community at stake, we have to embrace them even more and launch an education revolution in every city, based in choice rather than force, based in local autonomy rather than the bloated empires of education like CMS. When Black parents are given the autonomy to choose their schools, the ones that desire better schooling for their sons and daughters now have that option – at least in New Orleans. When schools are given the autonomy to have their own hiring practices, they can innovate and make the lives of its students better. And if they don’t? Then the free market kicks them out. It’s how education should work.
Richmond
Richmond Outreach Center exterior.I lived in Richmond, VA for a large part of the first 15 years of my life. In my 13th year, I went on a 30-hour fast with my church, which including partnering with a large inner-city church called The Richmond Outreach Center (The ROC) to serve the neglected Black community. I loaded into the church bus and took a trip downtown, into a poor neighborhood in the middle of downtown. I knocked on the doors and saw the joyful eyes of the young children who immediately pounced on me, ready to play with me and worship God back at The ROC. With us, they got in their daily exercise, so they got hungry. In hour 27 of my 30 hour fast, I was assigned to make them free sandwiches for lunch. Boy, did I want to eat them myself. But I remembered that each of these would go to someone who maybe didn’t have anything to eat over dinnertime. That day, I began to understand churches as more than just vessels to lift up prayers to God. To these people, they were second homes. Sometimes even first homes.
70 percent of Black women and 57 percent of Black men attend church at least once a month. Christianity is, and has always been, the source, the vitality, and the strength of the Black community. It is the nerve center of social life, the harbinger of moral values, and the respite for those in tough situations. Even James Baldwin, who had a radical relationship with his Pentecostalism, made his hometown church the thematic center and primary setting of his seminal coming-of-age novel Go Tell it on the Mountain. Baldwin understood that the Christian church and Black society are inextricably linked.
It is here where my bromance with Ta-Nehisi Coates must unfortunately break. When he came to speak at Davidson College (my college), and then hold a private Q&A for English majors, I snuck in unsolicited and asked him this question:
“The Black literary canon is made up almost universally of writers who have a deep experience with the Christian faith. Toni Morrison, Zora Neal Hurston, James Baldwin, come to mind. You are an atheist without much of a relationship with the church. How can you claim to accurately portray the Black experience without such a critical facet?”
His answer was a long-winded way of saying: “Richard Wright was an atheist too.” In any case, it was hardly satisfactory.
Coates doesn’t understand the hope, joy, and social support that Christianity brings to Black folk. Hopefully our nation knows better.
Unfortunately, in the past 30 or so years, it has become apparent that our nation doesn’t know better. First of all, in the liberal mythos of the “Black church.” Liberals believe that Black churches are homogeneous entities that work and vote as a group, when in reality, Black churches are heavily decentralized, locally grown, and fiercely independent. Barbara Savage, Professor of History at UPenn, argues: “Black churches, like their other American Protestant counterparts, are among the most local, the most decentralized, and the most idiosyncratic of all social organizations. ” Sure, there are Black churches one would deem “progressive.” But the majority of Black churches are very traditional – even more than White churches – in questions of ethics and morals – and the movement is only growing. The liberal misstep is in taking for granted the social values of an increasingly Evangelical, increasingly conservative bloc of the Black churches by pushing a radical social agenda that has alienated Black pastors and infringed upon the values held by their congregations. Look at HB2, which galvanized the support of Black pastors, who were passed over in the national conversation. Look at the battles over religious liberty in workplace waged by Obama, often at the behest of his Black constituency. Liberalism uses Black votes to pass laws antithetical to many long-held Black values.
Our government policies should instead serve to protect the religious liberty of these independent-minded churches that form the foundation of Black society. In a community so rich, so steeped in the Christian tradition, trust in the church comes way before trust in the government. Any unilateral government attempt to dictate to these churches what marriage means to them, or what religious ethics means to them, or what gender means to them, will backfire quickly. The Black community, with its trust in the government already shaken, will not take an assault on their churches very lightly.
Trenton
Bridge over troubled water. Credit: what-when-how.comAs I meander along I-95 in my 2014 Chevy Cruze, I pass by Trenton, New Jersey, a sobering reminder of what Black America could be and isn’t. Perhaps the most stark example of this dissonance is a steel bridge over the Delaware River that leads into the city proper, a once proud bridge furbished in 1935 with these words plastered on its exterior:
TRENTON MAKES THE WORLD TAKES
One can’t help but exhale as this rusty bridge stands in need of all kinds of cosmetic upheaval, the kind that one of the most banged-up cities in America can’t afford to give. The last time I went into the city proper, I served at a soup kitchen called TASK (Trenton Area Soup Kitchen) and while the experience was enlightening, it was also saddening, to see all these old Black folk in a rotting inner city core with seemingly no place to go but here, on food stamps and government welfare, for their daily meals.
For the Black community, this vicious cycle of poverty is exacerbated by a government safety net designed, intentionally or unintentionally, to keep and trap poor Blacks within its payroll. Welfare today is structured in such a way that disincentives marriage, disincentives getting a low-paying job, and disincentives getting out of it. Before LBJ’s “War on Poverty” through massive government spending on welfare, about two-thirds of the bottom 20 percent in income of the population had a job. Today, only one-third has a job. In the heavily Black inner cities, even fewer do. Considering the majority of bottom-level earners are Black people (and possibly Hispanics), we can say with certainty that the Welfare State has failed the Black inner cities. Liberal economic ethics, as it did with the New Deal, as it did with the Great Society, and now as it does today, has failed the Black inner cities.
But this has long been old news – we have long known that liberal social programs hurt the very people they try to protect. The real question is: is conservative policy any better?
Well… yes.
In 1995, The Harvard Business Review’s Michael E. Porter published a seminal article called “The Competitive Advantage of the Inner City” with the founding observation that urban revitalization (especially for poor Black communities) is inexorably linked to the proliferation of inner-city jobs. The conservative argument is very simple: Jobs change things. Government safety nets – don’t. Therefore, the focus of government funding should go not into welfare and entitlements but job-creating initiatives in the inner cities, which provide the stable family incomes non-dependent on government funding.
Porter contrasts the “Old Model” based on government safety nets, low emphasis on business development, and redistribution of wealth with the “New Model,” based on attracting profitable, job-creating businesses specialized in specific industries, engagement of experienced and skilled minorities to come in and work in the inner cities, and integration of the private sector with the needs of the local Black community. He points to Boston, which, even as a liberal bastion, implemented these conservative reforms and grew its inner city economic sector to the point where the urban populace had about as much spending power as its suburban counterparts.
And remember that this article was published in 1995. Since then, Porter’s New Model has worked wonders for urban planners interacting with these heavily Black inner cities. We can look to inner city revitalizations in Houston, L.A., and Brooklyn in recent years as the most striking of many great examples. All were transformed from nearly unlivable into thriving places for Black communities based on free-market reforms and strong commitments to the private sector – conservative principles that are at the heart of any successful economic plan.
Unfortunately, Trenton’s outdated reliance on government (20,000 state workers flood in every day from the suburbs) has led to a far different fate for the city’s Black population, one that continues to foster dependence and regressive thinking in an age where that simply cannot happen. Until it changes, expect ever-longer lines of discouraged Black folk at soup kitchens all over the city.
Black Lives Matter
I’m in a darkened room at a Christian camp in New York, filled with Black boys and girls who could only come on this weeklong trip thanks to the generosity of anonymous donors. The preacher is preaching the Gospel to these new friends of mine, preaching grace and love and things they may have never even heard of in their broken families, in their broken social conditions. My White friend and room leader of some of these girls told me one of these girls had been sexually assaulted as a kid. Another has lived without a father. Another has an abusive boyfriend. So when the preacher gave the altar call, you could see the awe in these Black bodies’ eyes. You could see their desperation, but in that desperation, you could see flickers of hope rise up within them. Some of them began to cry as they babbled about Jesus, about His coming, about His salvation. That night so many of them entrusted their lives to the Lord, I couldn’t believe it. It was a miracle.
Today, many of those same Black youth I met and befriended at camp still feel like they need a miracle. They’ve been forced into a system that tells them they have no control over their lives. They feel powerless. And you can only go through a conversion experience once.
Powerlessness is the central struggle of the modern Black person today. For so long, America’s liberal government has failed to treat Black people as autonomous humans. Modern liberalism’s cornerstone is the wretched belief that Black people have no control, that they can’t take of themselves, that their institutions and principles are somehow weaker than that of the government. Therefore, they need to be nursed in welfare, nursed in entitlements, nursed in schooling, nursed in values.
All this “nursing” is really creating a trap whereby the Black body loses his autonomy to function outside the government due to his dependency on it. The irony is that even as liberalism embraces the chant: “Black Lives Matter!” its policies and principles are anything but faithful to it.
One of my friends works at a summer enrichment program that serves mostly underprivileged Black kids. She tells me about that time the supervisor, a graduate from my college, sought to educate these kids about their status as oppressed victims rather than as autonomous moral agents. She tells me about the bitterness towards White people, and White culture, propagated at that school. She tells me about how the kids are left to believe in one thing – that they are still slaves. Out of all the things I heard from that school, this one was the one that made me most sick.
Modern liberalism has become a Molotov cocktail of constricting Black communities into government dependency, and then teaching them that dependency is all there is.
I believe Black lives deserve better.
They deserve a nation that will support, rather than discourage, Black upward mobility and healthy children through the institution of marriage and family.
They deserve a nation that will give them the freedom to choose where to send their kids to school, a freedom entrusted by the free market, rather than the government.
They deserve a nation that respects their most cherished churches, that does not attempt to infringe upon the values of what they hold to be the most important institution and source of strength in their lives.
They deserve a nation that treats them with dignity by giving them opportunities to contribute to the national labor force, rather than buries them in a cycle of government handouts.
Most of all, they deserve to be told that even while structural imbalances persist, that they are still moral agents whose decisions will define not only them but the trajectory of their race. Victim thinking gets us nowhere. Only the thinking of a fully realized autonomous agent can bring about change. And only a commitment to conservatism can truly turn a poor Black man in a Chicago ghetto into someone with the financial, intellectual, and moral independence to rise above his chains and embody the potential of his race.
I know some will accuse me of having a “White Savior” complex. (Even though I am not White.) To this I say: conservatism has never been popular with Black folk. I admit it. I’d describe conservatism as a Dark Knight of the Black community: a silent guardian, a watchful protector, an ideology that works even as it is reviled and shamed. But the evidence is there. I’ll trade White Savior barbs for real impact any day.
Even though only conservatism can save the Black community, it doesn’t mean it will. No ideology can totally plow through all the problems of an entire race, but only one can give that race the full and total freedom to become who it wants to be. Indeed, if conservatism is followed through, the burden is now on the Black community to exercise that freedom to make the right choices, choices that will define their posterity. But I believe in them, like I believe in Baltimore, Smithville, Charlotte, New Orleans, Richmond, and Trenton. I believe in them like I believe God himself has endowed us all with a ceaseless human spirit that dare not be tempered by government and regressive thinking. It is that belief in the human spirit that has led me to conservatism in the first place.
https://www.facebook.com/thekennethxu/
Twitter: @kennymxu
With thanks to Sam Weaver, Davidson College Class of 2019, for his contributions and editing. Check out his blog here: radicalcapitalist.wordpress.com
July 28, 2016
The Introvert’s Guide to Love
It was a Psychology class trip – our reward for completing the midterm. It actually wasn’t supposed to happen, but our professor, Dr. Roberts, had allocated funds to bring in Susan Cain, who abruptly canceled on us to attend personal matters. Seeing that the money didn’t go to waste, he decided to take us all on a day trip to Carol Cove, an ice skating rink, instead. When he asked for a volunteer to do student check-in, I didn’t raise my hand. But no one else did, so I peeped from the back of the room: “I’ll do it.” The bus ride was about twenty-five minutes, then we all unloaded and I started wordlessly handing out wristbands.
It all went pretty smoothly I got down to a couple names. When I called Rebecca’s name out, no one answered. “Rebecca?” I was getting anxious; I didn’t want to call her name out again and disturb this chatting crowd. In the hot summer heat, I even began to sweat. But this Rebecca girl simply wouldn’t answer. Finally, the hotness and anxiety overwhelmed even my hesitation, and I sputtered out, much, much, louder than I intended, “Rebecca!”
That turned some heads. I felt the glower of the crowd on me. I cracked an awkward smile, wishing I had never volunteered, wishing I would’ve simply holed up back in that seat as someone more comfortable with barking orders took the job.
Then a guy in the back spoke up: “she’s taking out the luggage from the bus.”
I softened, exhaling deeply to lessen the color on my face. As everyone resumed conversation, I waded past them and made my way to the back of the bus, where, indeed, Rebecca, plugged into a pair of earphones, was unloading the various backpacks, jackets, and paraphernalia from the cramped trunk of the charter bus onto the dirt road. When she saw me she took out her earphones and gave me a small smile. She had a round face with curly dark hair combed around it. She moved at a leisurely pace; her eyes undulated, rather than darted, from bag to bag. She seemed unconcerned with the crowd before her, unconcerned with the mingling and mixing just feet from her; she was in her own little world. I hated to break her vibe and I almost didn’t; I almost walked away. But eventually responsibility hit me and I said to her, almost hoping she wouldn’t notice, “Rebecca?”
She looked up again and we made eye contact. She had bashful blue eyes and high cheekbones. She didn’t answer me verbally, but gave me a nod, the slow-boiling, approachable, kind of nod that gave me the confidence to speak.
“I have your wristband.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t hear”-
“Don’t worry ‘bout it – You’re getting our bags right now – That’s more important.”
I stumbled over the cadence, but the words still came out somewhat like a chime, three short stabs at sentences strung together in one breath.
“Thanks for coming here. I do appreciate that. Means a lot to me,” she said, very intentionally, with exactly the same rhythm and syllabification as I did. Then I realized we had both made Haikus.
“You just – you just”-
She bit her tongue coyly. “I couldn’t resist, it was funny… I mean…” but she cooled off, tilting her head back to her work. Briefly I got a little hot again. “You mean?” I said, prodding her.
“I mean you may not have found it funny,” she replied, looking back at it. “I’m just a nerd that way. Sorry…”
“I thought it was really clever,” I broke in. “Most people wouldn’t notice that. Are you a Music major?”
Rebecca paused for a moment. “How’d you know?”
“Shirt.”
Her eyes flickered over to her “Music Matters!” tee and she laughed out loud. “Oh yeah… I thought you were doing some kind of psychoanalysis on me…”
“ZACH!”
The call came from Dr. Roberts, whose porky form appeared right behind me. I muttered “speaking of not supposed to be here…” as he lay a paw on my right shoulder. “There are still two guys waiting on their tickets! What are doing here?”
“Dr. Roberts. I’m sorry. I got distracted.”
“By what? Nothing to look at here!” And Dr. Roberts opened his hands to the bags, where Rebecca was, slogging away at the luggage. My brow furrowed. Clearly, he didn’t appear to notice Rebecca, who was before him working on the bags silently. But I didn’t say anything.
“Yes sir. Sorry sir.” I dashed back to the crowd and passed out the rest of the wristbands as quickly as I could. “Everyone have their wristbands?” Dr. Roberts called out. No one objected, so the crowd started making its way to the SkateNation rink. I huddled with the crowd at first, but feeling a pang of guilt, I looked back. Rebecca was a little ways behind us, strolling leisurely alone with her earphones on. Subtly I slowed down, let the pack get in front of me. After I slipped through the back, I turned around and waited for her.
“Did Dr. Roberts just not notice you? You were clearly unloading everyone’s stuff. It’s just seems like he was being really unappreciative. Sorry, I should’ve stood up for you. I really should’ve.” But I realized she was smiling and shut up.
“It’s okay, I don’t mind… I actually prefer it that way.”
“You’d rather not be noticed?”
“Nah. I’m comfortable alone.”
“Are you an introvert?”
“You could say that.”
I found my own voice dropping when I responded. “I mean I’m an introvert too I”-
“Yeah, right.”
“What?!” Briefly I got defensive. “You don’t think I’m an introvert?”
“You, yelling out everyone’s names like an army commando?”
“Yes me, feeling very uncomfortable doing it.” My voice tightened.
“What kind of Introvert is that?”
Suddenly I was rattled. Who was this chick to question what I’ve known all my life? Who was she to be all judgmental of who I believed myself to be? I felt a rising in my stomach, an anger welling up deep within me.
“Hey,” Rebecca said from, it seemed, miles away. Her voice shook me. I didn’t want to hear it. I wanted to block it out. I wanted to leave her to be all alone and content by herself because that’s all she wants in life, clearly.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to offend you.”
She could tell it in my face, in the stiffness in my body, in the dryness of my lips. She could tell it like she could tell the tone from the timbre of a musical note. She was attending to me, caring for me even when no word was begin spoken. It was that attention that released my own tension. I turned to her again. This was the same girl that gladly kept to the back and unloaded our bags with no need for attention, with no need for praise. She was pure. She was different. And she was trustworthy.
I took a deep breath.
“I’m sorry I just…”
“No. Don’t apologize. Can I tell you something?”
“Is it about your introversion?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s the kind that lives in an extrovert’s world,” I added, abruptly, and then continued, because I could. “The kind that gets up in the morning to the sound of other people’s demands, other’s people schedules. The kind that wants to be by himself, but can’t. The kind that wishes for a place where he could just stow away, but then receives ten text messages with eighteen different obligations. The kind that has adjusted himself, piece by piece, to every single social network out there because he needs it to socially survive. The kind that wants respect, but knows he can’t get it without stepping up and being the big guy.”
I looked back at Rebecca, who was still staring at me with those deep blue eyes.
“You know what I mean?”
“Yeah…” she answered. “I think it’s… it’s brave of you to do that. I could never…”
“No.” I shook my head. “Don’t romanticize it. It’s literally just insecurity. I feel like I have to keep up with everyone else to have a life. But – I spend all my time doing that, and never learn to appreciate my own.”
As we got our wristbands checked, and ducked into the rink with our skating blades in tow, Rebecca turned to me.
“Did you know that I skate?”
“You skate?” I didn’t know. But then again, she wasn’t exactly the type to broadcast it around the world.
“Yeah,” Rebecca stuck her green socks into her skates. “Skating is an introvert’s sport.”
“Really?” I said. “Why is that?”
The ice sizzled under her feet as she skated with compass-like precision, passing me for the umpteenth time and leaving a wake of cold-blowing air to descend upon my spine. When she hit the rink, she sailed, smooth like a five-star schooner gliding across the ocean. With one move, she covered more ground than I could with five lurches. I dug my blades into the ice and took off jaggedly to catch up to her, but she giggled and kept ahead of me with a simple push off. She didn’t waver; she didn’t stumble. She was in her element. The rink was hers.
I was in awe. I could only watch reverently as she roved around on her nine-inch blades completely unfettered from the crowd. In this rink, she was unlike that girl who unstacked everyone’s packs from the back of the bus. Or maybe… or maybe she was exactly like her.
Rebecca, disjoined but unconstrained from the crowd, would gladly stick to the back of the pack, taking thankless work without complaint or need for social acceptance. But in the same way, she would rise above the crowd in these skates, totally above everyone in grace and form. She didn’t need anyone to tell her she was great. She knew it already.
It was in seeing that power, that enrapturing devotion to her craft, uninhibited by the crowd, when I realized two fundamental truths at the exact same time:
One. I mistook her introversion for weakness, for something that needed to be protected and pitied. Rather, she had strength like no other. Strength that I didn’t have – the strength to be totally, freely, herself.
Two. She was beautiful.
When we were all done, and she was cleaning her skates at the bench, I stood behind her dark curls, where she couldn’t notice me, wondering if I should, if I shouldn’t…
“Zach?” she said without looking back. I blushed. Of course she’d notice. I thought about making some excuse and leaving. But something took over me then that made me instead move closer, at dire risk of making a fool of myself, but one that I nevertheless threw myself into with absolutely no insurance to cover me if I fell.
“I know you told me before I was brave,” I said. “And I don’t mean to tell you you’re wrong, but the way I see it, you’re the brave one,” I said. “You don’t – you don’t cave to this or that. You’re you, and fully you. You’re not only brave,” I said, with such an undignified air that there could be no question now about how I felt for her, no question now about how I wanted her, “but you’re kind. You’re observant. You’re patient. Everything anyone would ever want, but you’re fully your own. It bothered me at first, but now I realize the reason why it bothered me was because in you I see what I could be – what I’ve always wanted to be.”
Instantly I regretted it. It was too soon, too much, too forward. I braced myself to be let down easy, to leave this rink emptyhanded, to have her not understand a thing I’m saying and have it go completely over her head. Briefly I turned away. But I heard nothing. Two seconds passed, then five. Then ten.
Finally I looked back at her, most undoubtedly failing to hide the pained expression in my eyes. But then she turned around, her curls gently swaying back, and looked at me. In that moment, I saw only her, nothing else. She was so gorgeous in that understated way, her dark curls just far enough over her eyes so as to draw me into her mystery, her enigma. Her blue eyes were Dentyne mint blue, Swiss peaks blue, electric blue. They dazzled me.
“You understand me,” she said.
And when she spoke, in that misty, reflective voice of hers, she reminded me of waking up and looking out at a still lake during sunrise, grass glistening from the morning dew.
In that space, a silence came over us, not a cold one, but one warm and rich and crackling with electricity. A silence only people like Rebecca and I could understand. A silence neither of us wanted to break.
I’m always grateful for people who show their support for my artistic endeavors by liking my page on Facebook.
https://www.facebook.com/thekennethxu/
With thanks to Bethany Kirkpatrick, Davidson College Class of 2019, for editing.
Read: Song of Solomon
![[image error]](https://i2.wp.com/kennethxu.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Nick1Final.jpg){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://i2.wp.com/kennethxu.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/NickAbortion4.png){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://i0.wp.com/kennethxu.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Nick3-Final.png){kind=link}
![[image error]](https://i0.wp.com/kennethxu.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/IMG_1252.jpg){kind=link}