For the next year or so, I’m going to be doing news posts on Monday. I’m sure once election things start really ramping up, there will be a lot of politics involved. I’ll try to keep Tuesday through Friday as light as possible, though. 🙂

Why did George Clooney go to jail?

While I’m pretty sure that everybody in the free world knows that George Clooney was arrested Friday. Most people know that it was as a result of his protest of the situation in Sudan. What is the situation in Sudan, you may ask? Well, most people think that the ethnic cleansing that was taking place in Darfur, which started in 2003, is over. Unfortunately this is not the case. Sudanese who are deemed as not “Arab” are still being raped, tortured and murdered by the government and food aid is being blocked by the government. Why? In a word, oil. The government, run by President Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir  (pictured) is terrorizing people with an eye on their land.  Here is a link to George Clooney talking about the situation before he was arrested.

Trayvon Martin (1995-2012)

In the past two weeks, a photo or two has been popping up on my Twitter, on Facebook, and in different news outlets. I put off reading the article for a couple of days because I knew that when I found out what happened to the child in those photos, I was going to be upset. The state of Florida was involved. You know, the state where the Rosewood massacre, in which an entire black town was wiped off of the map because of a rape that never happened, and also the state where despite overwhelming evidence of state and local police involvement in said massacre (some of which was proudly flaunted by those charged to uphold the law), an apology was issued while not admitting any wrongdoing, which is not a real apology at all. I’m sorry, but I did nothing wrong? See? But, back to the present.

Trayvon Martin,17,  has been described by one of his teachers as an honors student who never got into a fight in his life. He and his father were visiting a family friend in Sanford, Florida. Trayvon went to get some snacks before the basketball game that night (skittles and iced tea). George Zimmerman, a 28-year old latino male called 911 to report the unarmed Martin and at some point, despite the dispatcher’s advice not to engage him, wound up shooting him with a 9mm handgun. (I am feeling generous today. I won’t even go there with the fact that his father wrote a letter to the press that he was a latino and had a mixed family and therefore was not possibly a racist. No side eyes or rolling eyes. 🙂 ) Zimmerman has an assault charge against a police officer and numerous 911 calls about “suspicious black men” to his credit, but the police of Sanford are really quick to declare it self-defense. Self-defense against what? Skittles and iced tea? I know I like to speak out against high fructose corn syrup, but somehow, I never considered gun play as a solution.