June 2012
“It’s in our nature to want to watch our human frailties played out on a huge, epic canvas. Ancient societies had anthropomorphic gods: a huge pantheon expanding into centuries of dynastic drama: fathers and sons, star-crossed lovers, warring brothers, martyred heroes. Tales that taught us the danger of hubris and the primacy of humility. It’s the everyday stuff of everyman’s life, but it’s writ large, and we love it.”
—Tom Hiddleston (via fyeahhiddles)
Okay new characters that I need to go back and write in
Spiridon and Klavdia Bolotoskiy. Friends of Vasiliy’s mother who take Ilya & Co in after being robbed, gives them the shit they needs and sends them off to Tara. Ilya arranges to stay with them when he takes Pyotr to Omsk and they’re in the process of partying away their wealth before the Bolsheviks can get it. Spiridon offers to get Ilya and Pyotr some hookers and Ilya is like DUDE WTF HE’S FIFTEEN and Spiridon says the boy has to learn sometime. Fuck yeah, moral decay <3
“This will be the saddest Father’s Day I ever had. It won’t be a celebration for me.”
—Tracy Martin, Trayvon’s dad (via think-progress)
Culture matters
Sometimes I hear people say that racism/sexism/etc in culture isn’t important or worth criticizing. ”Oh it’s just a book,” they say. ”It’s just a crappy TV show.” ”It’s just a commercial.”
This argument always baffles me. It’s like if you put poison into a fish-tank and then say “Oh well I didn’t poison the fish, I just poisoned the water.” The fish lives in the water, dumbass; it’s completely submerged in and surrounded by the water. I’m pretty sure that poisoned water is going to affect the fish.
Similarly, we all live constantly immersed in this miasma of information that we call “culture.” People are not born prejudiced. We don’t emerge from the womb knowing that all black men are scary thugs, that all Latinas are spicy sexpots, that all Indians are violent savages, that all women are weepy and frail, that all gay men are depraved pedophiles, and that all people in wheelchairs are objects of pity. We learn these things, usually starting at a very young age, and we often learn them from our culture — the books we read, the movies we watch, and the constant barrage of advertising that we don’t really pay attention to but which still manages to seep into our brains, and which shapes the way we think about the world, for better or for worse.
If you want to save the fish, you need to purify the water.
