Personally, I've been tired a lot this year so far but I try to balance out a lot of rest with a lot of work at the job and activity at home. I've been reading a lot and listening to a lot of music. I discovered Bach cantatas and I found a correlation between Bach's cantatas and Mozart's opera work, its downright fascinating. I've also been tuned in to Small's jazz club in Greenwich Village NYC, tuning into a lot of live performance music as well as their nightly jams. There's a community online there and we chat and talk a lot about music, everything from straight ahead jazz to avant garde jazz to classical and sometimes even rock. There was a funny moment during Christmas where a random jammer at Smalls went viral for having a breakdown and cursing out the other jammers. It went to the heart of how people that have breakdowns in public often get made fun of and criticized even though it could happen to anyone, and that we need to be more understanding of others. Other people thought he was rude and probably on drugs. The incident went viral and lots of youtubers made response videos about it. Yeah, that was a interesting phenomena during Christmas.
In addition, it wasn't really that the guy was terrible. However, he brought an acoustic guitar to the jazz jam, which is a no-no, but he said in a interview video he's been struggling financially and doesn't have money for a regular electric guitar, which goes to him struggling mentally and apparently even being homeless for a while. I would agree that the hardcore jazz elite who shamed this guy publicly on YouTube got it wrong, and that we should be more understanding of this guy and his problems. He wasn't really that good at jamming, and he's not really a 'jazz guitarist,' and he doesn't know the songs per se, but his rhythm comping to the tunes and under the soloists was decent enough to be there onstage and I thought a lot of the jazz elite were publicly shaming him, to their own detriment. I think, even as hardcore musical afinados, we should be more understanding of different musicians and their ability to play the music, especially jazz, because not every jazz musician is a Charlie Parker or a Wes Montgomery. I've seen high caliber jazz fusion musicians perform at The Baked Potato in Studio City, LA, and a lot of times even their playing was uninspired and mediocre albeit tuneful and tasty.
Moving on, more importantly, everyone I know who has a heart has been disgusted by the murder-killing of Rene Good by an Ice Officer. What can I say about this? It's an outrage and should be denounced by our government but of course with Trump and the Trump administration he has decided to double down and say that Rene Good was in the wrong and that the Ice Officer did the right thing to do what he did. Compare the way the Trump Administration is treating Rene Good with the way they treated Charlie Kirk, that pretty much sums up the divide between the so-called woke far-left and the maga Trump republicans. But the way its being talked about through the media is that this is left-wing versus right-wing but the truth of the matter is that its more about the way American citizens are treated by Ice Officers and those in law enforcement like cops. It's more like a George Floyd killing than anything particularly political, but the media has us all divided on the issue as if it matters that she was a left-winger. I suppose in a way, it does matter, but for me personally, I see Rene Good's killing as like a George Floyd killing, for white people.
In addition, I think race matters here in this context because I believe white people think that they have certain rights when it comes to law enforcement. Well, this incident rebukes the whole idea that white people have rights when it comes to law enforcement, because we see in this particular incident that Rene Good didn't have rights and that she was seen as something 'less than human,' and this particular Ice Official decided it was in his best interests and that it was okay for him to deny her her human rights, and kill her, murder her.
Downright chilling stuff. Her story should chill us and warn us that we're not in Kansas anymore. This shows us Americans that Ice has been politized and policed against us as Americans and that if you or anyone is on their list you are in for a lot of trouble. We're probably too far already down the Maga Republican rabbit hole to get out of this deep backwater that we're in. What's the answer to this? I guess the Democrats would have to come to up with some deep strategy to win and take back control in 2028. But there are lots of problems with voting such as the fact that most voters aren't even politically aware or smart enough to make decisions that would be in their own best interests. One man's vote has to equal one man's education and without that, the system develops an outsider character like Trump to somehow win the White House for the second time after being convicted of rape and being two times impeached. And don't forget about the Epstein files.
Lastly, there's a lot going on and it's hard to follow if you're just one person trying to live your life, provide for yourself and your family, and to be a productive intelligent member of American society. After all, if you're too busy struggling to make money at a job, providing for yourself and your family, and don't have enough time to dedicate to learning and educating yourself, then there's no way you can actually think about how things are so bad in America right now. You have to sort of have some kind of privilege to be able to read the news everyday, learn more about what's really going on in society, read books, educate yourself, these are things that not everybody really has time or space for. In fact, you'll find other people my age are spending their time playing video games, working nonstop at their 9-5 jobs, maybe they drink and/or smoke weed, they gamble, they're doing stocks, they're doing crypto/bitcoin, but most of them aren't politically aware or class conscious to the fact that things are going south very fast, probably faster than I can keep up to even write about in these blogs. Let me rephrase that, they're politically aware, but they're struggling so much that they can't do anything to change the System from within. Even from the last post I wrote, a lot has happened.
In conclusion, there's a lot we can do but most people are going to be too busy trying to survive and maintain and cope with the life they've been given. We as young people are struggling to maintain the lives we've created for ourselves and our families. Not everybody can sit around and write blog posts about their thoughts or even read the news daily. And this ends up working in the bad guys' favor, because we have developed into an uneducated underclass that is too busy playing video games, gambling, and too busy working all the time in order to survive, that if you even think about the idea of questioning the status quo or the government, or the system itself, you will looked upon as like some kind of weirdo. "Is that a conspiracy too?" You tell me.
