the reality tunnel

If I ever need to check my tendency towards being a know-it-all or talking over people, I’m just going to watch this video.

The gender dynamic is insane as well.  I can’t imagine getting talked down to in this way by a colleague, especially when I was well researched, seemed to share the same political stance, and was, umm, correct.  Re-reading the sentence that I just wrote, the fact that I can’t imagine this is pretty telling as I’m sure it’s a reality that many women face on a daily basis, and not just at FOX News.  Frankly, it’s embarrassing to think about all the times I felt like I had to assert myself as an authority, even when I didn’t know what I was talking about and the mildly conflicting point of view was articulated politely and clearly.   I take this as proof that the cultural expectancies that tie gender to authority, and intelligence and the ways one can express them are making us all less intelligent.

Towards the end of brunch at Mary’s Corinna and Riley showed up with a copy of the NY Times.  As the year comes to a close, I was once again reminded of how there seems to be a crazy consciousness of “prison issues” in the media in the last year.  I don’t quite understand it, and I can only attribute it to the reality that so many people are incarcerated in the US that it’s something that has come to touch many people’s lives and cannot be ignored.

The Right Has a Jailhouse Conversion

For Young Offenders, Justice as Impoverished as Africa

I made a couple of posts to the blog at pagestoprisoners.org about media that I came across or that Megan e-mailed to me from spring break:

• Powerful Video on Incarcerated Immigrants
• Iowa’s Residency Rules Drive Sex Offenders Underground
• Boot camp death not natural, second autopsy finds