Peace Prize Problems vs. Malala

***UPDATE***

The West has embraced Malala for the same reasons it embraced pacifist civil rights activists: IT IS EXPLOITING HER AND PERVERTING HER MESSAGE.

So while I was writing about Malala, I took a quote from her interview with John Stewart—an interview which troubled me because Stewart asked, jokingly, if he could adopt her. It felt colonialist, but I allowed myself to be gaslighted by colonialist, patriarchal society.

Shortly after I posted about Malala, a friend hit the nail on the head in posting a Huffington Post article about Malala and the white messiah complex. A few poignant exerpts:

This is a story of a native girl being saved by the white man. Flown to the UK, the Western world can feel good about itself as they save the native woman from the savage men of her home nation. It is a historic racist narrative that has been institutionalised.
...
The Western savior complex has hijacked Malala's message. The West has killed more girls than the Taliban have. The West has denied more girls an education via their missiles than the Taliban has by their bullets. The West has done more against education around the world than extremists could ever dream of. 

I should've known. Any time a woman of color is enthusiastically embraced for her social justice work by the predominantly white public, I should get suspicious. But I just couldn't put my finger on it.

Baig of HuffPost, and my friend, are both right. There are a thousand Malalas killed by drone strikes, not the Taliban, who didn't survive to tell her story, who didn't get flown out to a Western country to get intensive medical care. They are not pacifist Dr. Kings—they know that sometimes it's the ballot or the bullet (or in this case, women's education or the bullet). I see pacifism and civil disobedience as debatable means of social change simply because the way oppressors seem to love it makes me uneasy. But even if we agree that pacifism good, that does not equal approval of Western protogenocidal military choices.

Truth is, I'm fundamentally uncomfortable with the notion of a Peace Prize administered by westerners. Isn't it just a means to dictate which types of revolutions are okay?

Malala is wonderful, and so are the non-pacifists in her situation, and so are the thousands of kids killed at the hands of the U.S. government.
***

This is just me nominating Malala Yousafzai for the Nobel Peace Prize. They're announcing it tomorrow and she is the definition of an awesome pacifist.

I can't know the other potential nominees for sure because the Nobel people don't disclose, and while other shoe-in candidates (Denis Mukwege is an incredible human being, about whom I read in Eve Ensler's memoir, In the Body of the World) appeal to me, I can't help but empathize with her as a young person passionate about change. Malala was targeted by the Taliban and ultimately shot in the head at the age of 14, just for being an advocate for womens' education and trying to go to school. She made a miraculous recovery and is now a prominent young feminist pacifist advocate for education. Malala represents, to me, an innate goodness and resistance to oppression in the human soul. In her words...

Influential AND fabulous

"If he comes, what will you do, Malala? Then I replied to myself, 'Malala, just take a shoe and hit him.' But then I said, if you hit a Talib with a shoe, then there will be no difference between you and the Talib—you must not treat others with cruelty and harshness, you must fight others but through peace and through dialogue and through education."

So yeah, if Obama and Al Gore can win it, Malala certainly deserves to. 

Purse Classism vs. Fair Trade

None a dis pls

Image: A really ugly purse with that appropriative fringe design that's supposed to be generically American Indian, a huge peace sign on the front with a rainbow design, and some braided rainbow handles. There's a huge tag on the top that makes it look like it's from a gift shop, and it probably is.

So I guess the whole point of pseudo-VEDA is that I blog even when I'm not feelin' it. And today all I really have to say is that I need a new purse.

I've had Coach purses since the 8th grade which sounds like a lot of fun except that there's no reason for me to have such an expensive purse. Like, yes, I do use my purse a lot, but I also do things like spill nail polish and vitamin C tablets inside, and it also creates this weird cognitive dissonance for me where I'm a social justice activist who carries around this brand-name overpriced probably-not-fair-trade-or-cruelty-free thing.

So in addition to getting these weird stares from kids who are like a) why is she carrying a purse with her backpack and b) why is her purse Coach is she a rich kid (and while I have class privilege, I am not a rich kid), maintenance of said purses also requires a trip out to the Albertville, Minnesota Coach outlet store, which is really far, with my grandma, who is the driver of my serial-purchasing of Coach purses, and also the driver of the car, because I cannot drive.

And I am sick of it and would rather have an activist-purse.

So does anybody know where I could find a purse that is neither exorbitantly expensive nor laden with conflict minerals?

Seriously though, I need a fair-trade, cruelty-free, environmentally responsible dream-tote that zips shut and has both handles and a shoulder strap.

And then I can carry my hippie power everywhere I go!

UR DOIN IT 4 ATTENTIOOONNN!!!!11!!!!1!!

Bigotry's never a cute look.

Image: A 'yahoo answers' response.
"Best Answer - Chosen by Voters
They're weirdos, let them slice themselves lol
9 months ago
100% 1 Vote

So I googled "self harm for attention" to kick off this post because the internet is always an infinite fountain of wonderful things and offensive things.

I googled it because the rebuttal is always, "NO, it's NEVER for attention!" And I feel like there are lots of variations on this for all kinds of oppression. "Being gay is NEVER a choice!" "I'm not a feminist JUST because I'm a woman!"

I just don't get it?? I do things for attention all the time. When I talk about mental illness, it is FOR ATTENTION, to eliminate stigma and communicate to other mental illness kids that they are not alone. When I tell satirical stories about misogynoir*, I do it for attention, because it's funny, and I am coping.

We've created this weird formula as a society: if someone is acting in their own self-interest, it is okay to treat them ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLY. You're just ___ because you're ___. So what?!

Maybe sometimes people do choose to be gay (like Cynthia Nixon), and that's fine, and maybe sometimes people are feminists because they aren't cis-hetero-men, which is cool, and maybe, JUST MAYBE, the kid who is self harming for attention DESERVES ATTENTION, just like he deserves a therapist to help him find better ways to get attention.

You know what's worse than being "self-centered"? BEING UNKIND.

JUST LOVE EACH OTHER GOSHHHH

*misogynoir: a term the internet made up for oppression of Black women

BEDO + Michael Jackson Chamber

Summary of current life feelings:

The Struggle Boat
Image: A group of white people with a dark-skinned tour guide (lol—didn't even notice this until I did the image description) in one of those blow-up-looking water rafts with a bunch of plastic oars, braving some vicious-looking rapids that they shouldn't have even attempted to cross in the first place and looking generally like n00bs.

The plan is to use my blog to ameliorate the afloat-ness. It is COLLEGE APP TIME. Is this blog an asset or a detriment to me for college apps? What if I delete the videos where I talk about White people?

So I'm going to BEDO, which is my version of VEDA. I was going to VEDA and then I lost my "motivaish," in the words of a great Blake math teacher. So BEDO is Blog Every Day in October. Because, you know, October also starts with a vowel.

Naturally, I am already two days behind.

***

THAT BEING SAID, I was wallowing a yester-fortnight and just watching infinite TED talks. And I found one on depression.

Embedding this was hard work and you should praise me for it - the youtube search engine through blogger SUCKS.

A summary of my takeaway from this video would approximately amount to:

1. Something is wrong with the way we treat depression currently.
2. Anti-depressants are great, sometimes, but other times they just uselessly (or harmfully) flood the brain with serotonin or norepinephrine or dopamine and it's a bad, expensive thing. Especially when a placebo works almost as well.

Full disclosure: I've experienced my fair share of negative psychiatric medication side effects.

3. There's this clinical trial in Arizona (where I can't go because I might be mistaken for Latina and racially profiled #4thamendmentfail) where they're putting patients, off their meds, with major depressive disorder, in 145ºF hyperthermia chambers for a series of 2 hour sessions. AND IT'S WORKING. It's working better than the antidepressant and the placebo.

I am having a (hypomanic) hunch about this. I think this is a breakthrough, guys. Especially as Minnesotan, we have heightened rates of depression and suicide, and just from my life experience, this makes so much sense. I know that pathos isn't logos, but the fact that the temperature linkage to depression is even stronger than PROZAC's linkage to depression is huge.

I am convinced that three years from now, there will be a new class of temperature-regulating drugs, and all the naysayers will look back on this TED talk as a piece of history.

So spread the word.