Political Acceptance (eBook)

A Millennial Manifesto

Daniel Nowak (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2021 | 1. Auflage
170 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-0983-7373-3 (ISBN)

Infos

I started writing this book as a way to figure somethings out for myself; I was lost. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I wasn't alone. My whole generation seemed lost. Millennials grew up in the best time ever to be a kid. The 90's were infused with a sense of optimism. There was no specter of nuclear war or vast political unrest. The biggest political problem revolved around the president getting a blow job. Our cartoons and TV shows depicted a utopia of post-racialism and an aura of general happiness. The world seemed to be spinning towards bigger and better things. We were Toys R Us Kids - we never wanted to grow up. We always knew it sucked being an adult and we were right. Our naïve '90s childhood was smashed on 9/11. Many of us graduated from college right around the 2008 financial crisis. In our 20s and 30s, we have seen the rise of extreme political polarization and tribalism, racial protests across the country, and the 2020 pandemic. Life comes at you fast. What will become of the millennial generation? Will millennials be able to overcome denial and accept our current political problems for what they are? Can millennials accept getting older and taking charge? Can we grow up, or will we be Toys R Us Kids forever? The purpose of this book is to encourage millennials to reclaim our youthful optimism by confronting the challenging issues of our time: welfare, abortion, guns, climate change, healthcare, and race. It's time for millennials to take command of our political future.

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I started writing this book as a way to figure somethings out for myself; I was lost. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I wasn't alone. My whole generation seemed lost. Millennials grew up in the best time ever to be a kid. The 90's were infused with a sense of optimism. There was no specter of nuclear war or vast political unrest. The biggest political problem revolved around the president getting a blow job. Our cartoons and TV shows depicted a utopia of post-racialism and an aura of general happiness. The world seemed to be spinning towards bigger and better things. We were Toys R Us Kids - we never wanted to grow up. We always knew it sucked being an adult and we were right. Our nave '90s childhood was smashed on 9/11. Many of us graduated from college right around the 2008 financial crisis. In our 20s and 30s, we have seen the rise of extreme political polarization and tribalism, racial protests across the country, and the 2020 pandemic. Life comes at you fast. What will become of the millennial generation? Will millennials be able to overcome denial and accept our current political problems for what they are? Can millennials accept getting older and taking charge? Can we grow up, or will we be Toys R Us Kids forever? The purpose of this book is to encourage millennials to reclaim our youthful optimism by confronting the challenging issues of our time: welfare, abortion, guns, climate change, healthcare, and race. It's time for millennials to take command of our political future.

Textauszug

The Unexpected Facebook Post -
An Essay on Abortion

Accepting Fear

The place I had most success meeting women in high school was called Club Fusion. Club Fusion was an under 21 dance club that ran every Friday night in the late 90’s, early 2000’s. Looking back on it… that place was absurd. The booty shaking contests in particular were insane. The winner was usually the first girl who showed her thong to the crowd. I’m glad no one had smartphones back then because they would have ruined everything. Eventually, Club Fusion was shut down. It was a real loss for the community.

Club Fusion was a classy place – it was located inside a bowling alley. The dance floor was gigantic – three levels, with enough room for a crowd of 150. If I had to guess, there were about 25-50 people regulars who came every week. I never understood why some guys didn’t like to dance. Especially, why they didn’t like to dance with girls from Racine, where I’m from…because girls in Racine knew how to dance. When I first started going to Club Fusion, Juvenile had just released Back That Ass Up, and the number one R&B song was Ginuwine’s Pony. I would describe the dancing style during that time as – “fucking with clothes on.”

One night I met a girl from a different high school from the one I went to. If it hadn’t been for this club, our paths would never have crossed. I’ll call her Amy. We got along great – by which I mean she did a great job rubbing her ass against me in the club. We exchanged phone numbers, and a couple days later, I asked her to be my girlfriend. We were both 14 at the time.

I had been dating Amy for about three weeks when I invited her to come over to my house. I planned for her coming over when I knew both my brother and mom would be gone for the afternoon. Amy and I had previously chatted about having sex and I thought that this might be the moment we both lost our virginity.

I thought I’d better prepare for her arrival and for my first-time having sex. How did I end up preparing? I found the only pair of silk boxes that I had and put them on. They were suuuuuuper sexy. They were shiny and I looked like a Bengal tiger. I was all set to go. Having a condom was nowhere near my radar.

She came over and we quickly moved to my bed. This was it. We started to kiss and she asked if we should go for it. I was paralyzed with fear. I didn’t know what to do… so I called it off and told her I wasn’t ready. She wasn’t too happy about this and things got awkward. I think she was embarrassed. I know I was. A couple days later she broke up with me over the phone.

I wasn’t too mad about it. A week later I found a new girl at Club Fusion. A couple months later, I was talking to a friend of Amy’s and I found out something shocking: Amy was pregnant.

The thought that if I hadn’t backed off at the last minute it might have been me who got her pregnant, was nauseating.

My first question was: Is she going to keep it?

Yes.

I was dumbfounded. Why in God’s name would she keep it??? Why not just go to a doctor’s office and get it taken care of?

At the time, I didn’t have any convictions other than that: Having a kid would ruin your life. That I was sure of. I was terrified of having a kid.

It’s ok to be afraid of having a kid when you are still a kid. The problem is when our childhood fears stay with us into adulthood. I was terrified to have a kid even in my 20s and 30s. Why did the fear of having a baby have such a hold over me? All these years later I look back and wonder, why was I so scared to have a child?

Sex Ed

I couldn’t tell you the names of my high school biology or my geometry teachers to save my life. But for as long as I live, I will never forget my health teacher, Mr. Carel. He was kind of out there. I think if you teach sex ed to a bunch of high school freshmen, you have to have a certain type of personality. One time he put his entire arm in a condom to show the class how durable they were. Then he moved his fingers around as if the condom was a sock puppet. After that, he had us touch the inside of the condom to feel all the spermicide goo. Like I said, Mr. Carel was kind of out there. What students and parents remember most about Mr. Carel was a project he assigned to every class. This project was called “Baby Week.”

Jerry Carel taught or was an administrator in the Racine Unified School District for 40 years. He was recruited from the University of Illinois after finishing a master’s degree in Health with an emphasis on sexual education. In the 70’s, very few people in education had a master’s in that specialty. Mr. Carel was brought in to start a Health Education program for the Racine Unified School District, to include a Sex Education curriculum. I recently sat down with Mr. Carel at River Run Family Restaurant in Racine to discuss Baby Week and to understand why he wanted to do this project.

As you can imagine, Sexual Education is a touchy subject. Parents had many questions and concerns about this new program. What was going to be in the course? Will you teach abstinence? Are you going to teach them about contraception? What about abortion?

There was a lot of discussion on what should be in the curriculum. Mr. Carel worked extensively with the school board on what approaches should be taken. Parents received a survey of 50 questions regarding what should be taught. After many rounds of back and forth, a curriculum was established. The class would emphasize abstinence; however, the students would be taught about birth control and condoms. Abortion was also to be taught and presented in a neutral way. This didn’t sit well with some parents, so they were given the option to pull their kids from the class. Most of them didn’t. Where there was broad agreement was on the need to combat teen pregnancy.

Mr. Carel told me he thought the boys needed to be shown what the responsibility of having a child looked like. “It seemed like all of the burden is on the woman,” he said. “She’s the one who has all the consequences, in terms of graduation, career. What’s the guy’s worst-case scenario? Child support… maybe? The goal was to try and make the guy have a glimpse of what commitment looks like.”

Starting high school is always a scary thing. In middle school, you hear all sorts of horror stories. At the same time, you don’t know what to expect. Park High School had a tradition for incoming freshmen like no other: Health with Mr. Carel.

Baby Week was pretty straightforward: You had to buy a five-pound bag of flour, dress it up like a baby, and then carry your baby everywhere you went for five straight days. At school, at home, at the mall, you had to take your baby everywhere. The idea was, if you carried this heavy bag around, it would give some impression of what it was like to have a baby.

The project sounded easy enough. It was a pain in the ass to carry around a heavy bag all day, sure. My soccer coach making us run around the track with a five-pound bag of flour wasn’t fun. Other than the physical part, there wasn’t much to it, right? Except that another part of the tradition was for the upperclassman to make your life a living hell.

You could never leave your baby unintended. Not for one second. My buddy found this out the hard way. I was sitting in science class. Our teacher had finished the material he wanted to get through and we had a bit of free time before the bell rang. It was 8th hour and everyone was ready to go home. My buddy left the classroom to run to his locker. A couple of guys on the football team were in the hallway and wandered into our room to chat with some of the girls in our class. That’s when they realized there was a flour baby sitting on a table completely unsupervised.

Chaos ensued.

All three guys took turns stabbing the flour baby with pencils, completely destroying it and creating a massive explosion of flour all over the classroom. By the time the teacher saw what was happening, it was already over. The flour baby was dead, and its flour blood was all over the classroom. It was a giant mess.

Normally in a situation like this, the football players would have been reprimanded for destroying someone’s school project. Not in this case. When my buddy came back from the locker, my science teacher chewed him out and made him clean up the mess. It was his fault because he hadn’t been watching the baby.

People in hallways would take pot shots at our babies. Guys would try to punch them out of our hands like a football or stab them with a pencil. To protect against attacks, we would wrap the babies in duct tape. I remember by the second day, I had to rewrap my baby because someone got me good with a jab and my baby was leaking. You always had to be on the lookout for danger. It was panic inducing.

Was Mr. Carel’s goal to scare his students into not having a kid? When I asked him 20 years after my own flour baby experience, he told me the project was supposed to be about responsibility, not a scare tactic. But I’m not sure if he really believed what he was saying. There is something about lugging a five-pound weight around all day that very...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 29.7.2021
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung
• ISBN-10: 1-0983-7373-1 / 1098373731
• ISBN-13: 978-1-0983-7373-3 / 9781098373733