antique millennial here to talk ๐ฉ | reformed maneater/active manhater | identifies as problematic | ๐ฆ NCCU grad๐ born n raised in the Bull City | ๐ต๐ธ๐ญ๐น๐จ๐บ
One thing that I really appreciate about going outside and touching grass is that you get to see firsthand that life really does find a way. Try as you might to swat away the pesky little things they always come back. I find that so inspiring. ๐ฑ
@Mr_Husky1 Itโs not the size of the dog in the fight. Itโs the size of the fight in the dog. Lil Chiquita Mama clearly got that dawg in her! You go Glen Coco!
You got beef with my friend? You did them dirty? Donโt come in my face like shit is sweet. Iโm not one of those people who play both sides. Those of you who engage in that kind of behavior like itโs cool are just disloyal weirdos idc.
In May of 1965, a 28-year-old teacher walked into a fourth-grade classroom in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston and did something that would change the course of his life โ and eventually, the lives of millions.
His name was Jonathan Kozol. He had graduated from Harvard with highest honors. He had studied at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. He could have chosen almost any path. Instead, he chose a crumbling public school in one of Boston's poorest neighborhoods, where the textbooks were two decades old, the heating system didn't work through winter, and a new student walked out the door โ or simply disappeared โ almost every single week.
That morning, he read his class of African-American nine-year-olds a poem by Langston Hughes. It was called The Ballad of the Landlord โ a poem about a Black tenant standing up to a white landlord over an apartment falling apart at the seams, and what happened to him when he dared to speak up. It was not on the Boston Public Schools' approved reading list.
The next morning, Kozol was handed a dismissal letter.
The official reason: he had read material that wasn't in the approved curriculum, without permission from a superior. There had also been complaints from parents who had heard about the poem.
He had been teaching for seven months.
Another man might have accepted the verdict and walked away. Kozol did the opposite. He sat down and wrote. He documented everything โ the broken heaters, the outdated books, the overcrowded rooms, the letter that ended his career over a poem about justice. He called the book Death at an Early Age.
Houghton Mifflin published it in October of 1967. Five months later, it won the National Book Award. Over the following decades, it sold more than two million copies.
But Kozol didn't stop there. He spent the next sixty years going back โ back to the classrooms, back to the neighborhoods, back to the families that the system kept failing. He wrote about homeless children sleeping in welfare hotels. He wrote about the staggering gap between what wealthy school districts spent on each child and what poor ones could afford. He wrote about the Bronx, about segregation, about the America that existed just a few miles from the America most people saw.
He turned 89 in September of 2025. He is still writing.
All of it began on a May morning in 1965, when a young teacher decided that nine-year-olds in a cold, underfunded classroom deserved to hear a poem about what it felt like when the world wasn't fair.
He read it to them. And they fired him for it.
He made sure the whole world heard it anyway.
A Justice Department lawyer just signed a memo saying disabled Americans have no right to live in their own homes. In the same document, she admits no court in the country agrees with her.
Read that again. A government official wrote down, in black and white, that her own argument is wrong by every legal standard of the last thirty years, and she made it anyway.
Here is what it means in plain terms.
Right now, 8.4 million people get help that lets them stay in their own homes. Aides who help them dress. Care that lets them work, see friends, raise their kids, sleep in their own beds at night.
This memo tells states they can cut all of it.
And if they cut it, where do those people go? Into nursing homes. Into institutions. Into facilities where someone else decides when you wake up, what you eat, who your roommate is, whether you go outside today.
A lawyer who has visited people locked in these places said their whole world shrinks to one hallway. That is the future this memo is opening the door to.
Keeping people in their own homes is cheaper. In one case, home care cost under $7,500 a year. The nursing home would have cost close to $50,000. The cruel option is also the expensive one. They want to spend more money to make people's lives worse.
So why?
Because last summer Trump signed an order to deal with homelessness by force, by sweeping people off the streets and committing them. He said it out loud during the campaign: the mentally ill belong back in institutions.
The only thing standing in the way was the law that says people deserve to live in their own communities.
This memo is how they get around it. And it landed the same week Republicans slashed Medicaid, giving every cash-strapped state the perfect excuse to start cutting.
A think tank drew up the plan. A lawyer wrote the memo. A president signed the order. Three signatures, and millions of people could lose the right to their own front door.
We are about to spend the summer celebrating 250 years of American freedom.
Some Americans are about to find out it doesn't include them.
Do not let others projection of shame, mockery or guilt affect you because you are starting over at your big big age.
Having a fresh start is excellent feng shui for your life, after decluttering and sifting out the BS situations, BS folks and BS circumstances, cycles and behaviors out of your life.
Start over wherever you are in life, its better than being stuck in a rut, or not not seeing a way out.๐ป
The ironic part about every compliment weโve gotten about the World Cup is what the guests are falling in love with is Diversity. Itโs the thing that actually makes this place worth staying in and why we canโt allow it to be destroyed.