Re: People who live in the US, what schools for the blind are the best?
Canlorn, you hit on something interesting there.
I use Facebook. I have all kinds of fun with YouTube. But I also read articles and do my own research. And a lot of it comes from news sources I don't like. News sources that are right-leaning, where I'm not. I do this very deliberately because the media has a habit of sensationalizing fucking -everything these days. I trust myself to take information from multiple sources and sort of make a picture that's probably semi-accurate; it's very, very rare that I get fully sucked into either side's hyperbolic rhetoric. This is one of the reasons I debate stuff so readily and am willing to have my viewpoints challenged.
Take police brutality in America, for instance. I shared a post yesterday talking about a black man who was stopped for jaywalking, then bodily tackled when he tried to flee. A struggle ensued, and he was shot dead. I was livid, both because it was yet another black person victimized by the cops and because cops routinely get away with this sort of thing, regardless of the victim. If you listen to leftist media, police brutality is pretty much entirely a racial problem. If you listen to right-wing media, black people do far more harm to one another than anyone else, so all this police brutality crap is just overblown. The truth is more nuanced. Police brutality, the excessive use of unwarranted force, is just too common across the board. Non-whites are disproportionately represented, it's true, but it happens to white people as well, and it's wrong no matter who it happens to.
So why am I mentioning this here? Because I see a bit of what I'm going to call "funnel logic" happening regarding blacks in South Africa. By "funnel logic", I mean that you get pushed from multiple angles toward a desired viewpoint by the sources of media you trust; this usually applies most aptly when you get most of your info from either one extreme or another. You get funnelled toward outrage of one form or another because you don't know how to break yourself free of the spin. In your case, RTT, it might be advantageous of you to look up reputable news sources that are more sympathetic toward South African blacks. The situation in your country looks bad from virtually all sides, from my outsider's perspective. Whites are busy hating blacks, blacks are busy hating whites, and it's clear that decades of apartheid are still echoing around, causing mistrust, anger, resentment and feelings of betrayal. This is going to take awhile.
And in the meantime, here's what you do. Rather than focus on how you might get screwed over as a white person, focus on improving yourself as a person, full stop. Get your skills. Improve yourself. Give yourself the best possible shot at success. Maybe this means educating your parents, but maybe it means toughing it out till you can get out on your own. Maybe it means really working on those life skills and finding a reason to feel proud of yourself, instead of painting yourself into a corner where it feels like you're doomed to fail before you even begin. Because here's the deal, dude. You are going to fail. More than once. And probably spectacularly, if you're anything like the rest of us. I bet you most of us have colossally fucked stuff up before. But we figure it out. We learn from it. We become better for it, if for no other reason than that we say to ourselves, "Okay, wow, never doing that again". If you're stuck in one place because you're afraid to fail, you're coming at it bass ackward. You will not succeed, ever, if you don't try. Trying does not necessarily mean fleeing, either. It means confronting your biases (we all have them). It means getting a leg up on the stuff you can improve, putting aside the stuff that is truly out of your reach, and establishing yourself: your perspective, your goals if you have any, your state of mind. And remember, above all else I think, that life is change. If what you believe now turns out to fall apart in three years, and you find you are looking in different places for your success and your inspiration, that's completely natural. You are not locking yourself onto one path, forever and ever, amen. You are trying to find the right first step. And everything after that is just finding that next step, wherever it leads. Don't dream too big. Dream real. You'll get there.
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