I watched cowboy bebop when I was around 8-10.
Im 30 now.
Re watching Cowboy Bebop as an adult hits different.
When you’re younger, it’s easy to latch onto the cool fights, the jazz, Spike being effortlessly smooth. But coming back to it later, you start feeling the weight of the themes. Loneliness. Regret. People running from their past instead of healing it. Characters stuck in emotional orbit, unable to move on.
Stuff that flew right over our heads as kids suddenly lands hard af.
Honestly, I recommend any older anime fan do this. Revisit the shows you loved growing up. You dont just rewatch them, you re-contextualize them. Your life experience fills in the gaps the story always had waiting for you.
Same anime. Different you.
And somehow… its just better.
Cowboy bebop is a 10/10.
Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.
"Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of another... There are just some kind of men who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results."
~ Harper Lee
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. Except it doesn’t bend on its own—it bends because we pull it in the direction of justice. What keeps me hopeful during times like these is being surrounded by people who are doing just that.
Whenever I feel sad and depressed about the systemic anti-Blackness we face. I read Mother Assata Shakur letter to Black people and it feels like all is okay again. True revolutionaries never die, we carry on their work in our hearts ❤️
“Dreams & reality are opposites. Action synthesizes them.”
“No one is going to give you the education you need to overthrow them. Nobody is going to teach you your true history, teach you your true heroes, if they know that knowledge will help set you free.”
RIP Assata Shakur
"I wasn’t against communism, but i can’t say i was for it either. At first, i viewed it suspiciously, as some kind of white man’s concoction, until i read works by African revolutionaries and studied the African liberation movements. Revolutionaries in Africa understood that the question of African liberation was not just a question of race, that even if they managed to get rid of the white colonialists, if they didn’t rid themselves of the capitalistic economic structure, the white colonialists would simply be replaced by Black neocolonialists. There was not a single liberation movement in Africa that was not fighting for socialism.
The whole thing boiled down to a simple equation: anything that has any kind of value is made, mined, grown, produced, and processed by working people. So why shouldn’t working people collectively own that wealth? Why shouldn’t working people own and control their own resources? Capitalism meant that rich businessmen owned the wealth, while socialism meant that the people who made the wealth owned it.
I got into heated arguments with sisters or brothers who claimed that the oppression of Black people was only a question of race. I argued that there were Black oppressors as well as white ones. That’s why you’ve got Blacks who support Nixon or Reagan or other conservatives. Black folks with money have always tended to support candidates who they believed would protect their financial interests. As far as i was concerned, it didn’t take too much brains to figure out that Black people are oppressed because of class as well as race, because we are poor and because we are Black. …
[Earlier in my life] When someone asked me what communism was, i opened my mouth to answer, then realized i didn’t have the faintest idea. My image of a communist came from a cartoon. It was a spy with a black trench coat and a black hat pulled down over his face, slinking around corners …
I never forgot that day. We’re taught at such an early age to be against the communists, yet most of us don’t have the faintest idea what communism is. Only a fool lets somebody else tell him who his enemy is… It’s got to be one of the most basic principles of living: always decide who your enemies are for yourself, and never let your enemies choose your enemies for you."
OBAMA: It's fair to say that 80% of the world's problems involve old men hanging on who are afraid of death and insignificance, and they won't let go. They build pyramids, and they put their names on everything. They get very anxious about it.