With every hour, a voice is lost,

Life has been moving fast, too fast, in some ways.  I’m trying to keep up.  It’s funny, it’s not the difficulty of the classes by any means, but just the sheer quantity of what I have to get done.  But I plow through, and plow through, and try not to let my procrastinatory tendencies get the better of me. My goal, these days, is to try and stay joined to the world.  To let accidents happen.  To not be embarrassed by screw ups.  During Orientation Week (so long ago, now), I went to join a tour for the Museum of Modern Art.  Only me and one other guy showed up–not even a tour guide or orientation leader joined us.  The old me would have given up in embarrassment, gone home, spent the day watching old Law and Order episodes on my computer.  But screw it: I wanted to go to MOMA, this guy wants to go to MOMA, so we went to MOMA.  Neither of us, it turns out, are the sort who go to art museums on our own.  Neither of us intuitively relate to modern art.  But I had a good time; I’m glad I went, I might never have gone to MOMA otherwise.   Right now, I’m sitting in a panel discussion on racism and white privilege in Brazil, a subject that never ever would have crossed my mind.  Statistics are showing up on the speaker’s Power Point like: seven out of ten Afro-Brazilians live in poverty.  Fewer than 10% of Afro-Brazilians go to college.  Black women have the highest rates of poverty and misery in the country, and the illiteracy rate is three times that of white women.  And suddenly, this struggle that America has, about racism and white privilege, is no longer a uniquely American problem.  Turns out Brazil has also struggled with misogynation and the whitening of its culture, with post-slavery re-integration issues, with class issues, with education issues.  Does America, with all its struggles that are still going on, have something to teach the world?  Does Brazil have something they could teach us?