Jeff Scott > Recent Status Updates

I spent my life thinking about people who were not there. People who were not with me, people who were no longer in this world. I never felt entitled to speak of the absent to those who were there, even to my own family. I could not alleviate the weight of my memories of those who were absent by speaking of them. I did not want to betray my own secrets.

The waves roared.
I stood alone in the darkness.
Light does not illuminate.
It only looks for things to illuminate. And I had never been found by the light. I would always be in darkness—

All of them – the team leader Eunsil, Kang Hyesu and the victims standing with them – wanted for this case to be resolved soon so that they could go back to their lives. While offenders were in fear of losing a small part of their privilege, the victims were running the risk of losing everything.

The most demoralising answer came from the department head himself: ‘Companies find smart women taxing. Like now – you’re being very taxing, you know?’

What do you want from us? The dumb girls are too dumb, the smart girls are too smart, and the average girls are too unexceptional?

“Historians said there’d been dark ages before. It all came out in the wash, because eventually, if you were patient, enlightenment arrived and then a wide array of Apple devices.”

“The thickness of my body, its excessive power, can only bring combat to the minds of others, can only bring battle, war, violence, and death. My body accuses my body. But why is it that my body’s bulk and its excessive power can’t also mean peace, tranquility, and calm?”

“You don’t drag your more-than-brother into temporary madness, into a place where a crowned crane couldn’t last an instant, into a battlefield where not even the smallest plant can grow...as if thousands of locusts have been gorging themselves, without rest, month after month. A field sowed with thousands of tiny metallic seeds of war that produce no harvest. A scarred battlefield made for carnivores.”

“Temporary madness, in war, is bravery’s sister.
But when you seem crazy all the time, continuously, without stopping, that’s when you make people afraid, even your war brothers. And that’s when you stop being the brave one, the death-defier, and become instead the true friend of death, its accomplice, its more-than-brother.”

I've always been clear about what I want. And I still have the power and freedom to choose whom to devote myself and my soul to, and hopefully always will. I know I'm complicated, but I'm also lucid. I feel things deeply but my desire is like a pure crystal. This is the rarest, most beautiful part of me, that sparkles brightly in the crowd.

We migrate because we want something better... But no matter where we go, we're victims of segregation, redlining, and racial discrimination. We're separated from other family members, separated from our stories, separated from our belief systems, separated from our lineages and our very identity...

The word soul began to mean "emotional fervor" in the 1940s when black jazz artists, disillusioned because their white counterparts were getting better-paying gigs, infused their music with black church styles from the rural South to make their music something the whites couldn't imitate.

“To a watching world,” wrote The Guardian, “the absence of a fair, affordable US healthcare system, the cut-throat contest between American states for scarce medical supplies, the disproportionate death toll among ethnic minorities, chaotic social distancing rules, and a lack of centralised coordination are reminiscent of a poor, developing country, not the most powerful, influential nation on earth.”

Democrats expend energy and weaken their power pining for the die-hard voters of their opponents, the homecoming queens of the electorate, while taking for granted the majority that they already have.”

“Democrats constitute a diffuse majority of the electorate, but seem at times lukewarm toward a base that the party has often lectured to or taken for granted, chided if ever there is lower-than-expected turnout despite voter suppression, sadly buying into caste assumptions rather than bolstering their most loyal voters as do the Republicans with theirs.”

“Caste is more than rank, it is a state of mind that holds everyone captive, the dominant imprisoned in an illusion of their own entitlement, the subordinate trapped in the purgatory of someone else’s definition of who they are and who they should be.”

“It is much harder to look into the darkness in the hearts of ordinary people with unquiet minds, needing someone to feel better than, whose cheers and votes allow despots anywhere in the world to rise to power in the first place. ... Because it means the enemy, the threat, is not one man, it is us, all of us, lurking in humanity itself.”

“This was the thievery of caste, stealing the time and psychic resources of the marginalized, draining energy in an already uphill competition. They were not, like me, frozen and disoriented, trying to make sense of a public violation that seemed all the more menacing now that I could see it in full. The quiet mundanity of that terror has never left me, the scars outliving the cut.”

“A certain kind of violence was part of an unspoken curriculum for generations of children in the dominant caste. “White culture desensitized children to racial violence,” wrote the historian Kristina DuRocher, “so they could perpetuate it themselves one day.”

“You know that there are no black people in Africa,” she said.
...
“Africans are not black,” she said. “They are Igbo and Yoruba, Ewe, Akan, Ndebele. They are not black. They are just themselves. They are humans on the land. That is how they see themselves, and that is who they are.”

“A caste system endures because it is often justified as divine will, originating from sacred text or the presumed laws of nature, reinforced throughout the culture and passed down through the generations.”

“A caste system is an artificial construction, a fixed and embedded ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups on the basis of ancestry and often immutable traits, traits that would be neutral in the abstract but are ascribed life-and-death meaning in a hierarchy favoring the dominant caste whose forebears designed it.”

“She wanted to know that her child and her grandchildren were safe, but of course, Ruth would never know that. You never know that. You demanded answers, but the universe refused. Comfort and safety were just an illusion. Money meant nothing. All that meant anything was this—people, in the same place, together. This was what was left to them.”

Millions of Americans huddled at home in the dark, but only thousands of them heard these noises, and comforted children and one another, and wondered just what they were. Some people got sick, because that was just their constitution. Others listened and realized how little they understood about the world.”

“Lemmings were not suicidal, they were driven to migrate and overconfident about their ability. The leader of the pack was not to blame. They all plunged into the sea, thinking it easy to traverse as a puddle; so human an instinct in a bunch of rodents.

“The pace of things used to be slower. Now a nut didn’t have to shoot an archduke; every day was a jumble of near-simultaneous oddity.”

“I suspect it’s terrorism. But that’s not what scares me. Terrorists are dumb hicks. That’s how you convince them to incinerate themselves for God. They’re patsies. But what comes next?” ... “Let’s say something happens in New York City. Do you think this president will do the right thing about it?” This kind of thing used to sound like paranoia, but now it was just pragmatism.”

“Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that. There was no real structure to prevent chaos, there was only a collective faith in order.”

It’s funny when something irrefutably terrible happens and people say, “How can such a thing happen? This is absurd. It’s against the law.” But evil flows where it flows. Through gaps and loop holes and human beings. Indifferent to laws legislations policies.
Nothing halts it, except,
sometimes, a sacrifice.

“I am an Africanfuturist and an Africanjujuist.
Africanfuturism is a sub-category of science fiction. Africanjujuism is a subcategory of fantasy that respectfully acknowledges the seamless blend of true existing African spiritualities and cosmologies with the imaginative.”

The president who oversaw the creation of the camps is today a respected elder statesman, appearing on daytime TV shows and
peddling portraits of the soldiers he sent to be maimed in an illegal war. There is no reckoning, no conciliation, no acknowledgment.