Hasta La Gadget!

by Priya Arora

When you’re a little kid, and something bad happens–another kid taunts you on the playground, or you fall and scratch your knee while playing outside–the instinct is to run home. There is a sense of safety within the four walls of the place you and your family sleep every night and an unparalleled comfort in the embrace of your mother.

As an adult, there is nowhere I feel safer than in the arms of my partner. Today, I held her close as she shed tears at a vigil in Jackson Heights in honor of the Orlando victims. That safety, too, has been compromised. Today, I feel unsafe, and there is nowhere to turn.

I still remember the first time I went to a gay club. I was living in L.A., and though out to friends, was not out to my parents yet. I lied to be able to go out to Hamburger Mary’s in Long Beach with a female friend and a few of her friends. Later, a little tipsy, we made out for the first time. It was euphoric, not just because I was finally able to kiss my crush. There was something magical about being in a space where, though I had never been there before and only knew a handful of the hundreds of faces around me, I knew I was safe.

Pride month, too, is sacred. My very first pride parade, also in Long Beach many moons ago, was euphoric–seeing others like me, others who were out and proud, and of all ages, sizes, ethnicities, creeds–it was empowering. I remember buying my first rainbow item, a beaded bracelet, as we awaited the parade’s arrival. I was beaming, proud to wear it, and even prouder to be part of a community that finally made me feel like embracing every aspect of who I am was more than okay- it was celebrated.

As marginalized communities, we work endlessly to create safe spaces. We build community centers, places of worship, schools–unspoken rules that dominate social settings are often made more explicit. Don’t make assumptions. Don’t make generalizations. Don’t interrupt others. Treat one another with respect.

For the LGBTQ community, and those who further identify as people of color, creating safe spaces where we are free to be who we are, express ourselves without fear of judgment or ridicule, is sacred practice. We become fluent in the rituals of creating space for one another, often because the real world doesn’t have space for us.

The shooting in Orlando, and it’s specific targeting of LGBT individuals, is a sobering reminder that safety is merely a construct. When we let our guards down in our own homes, or around people we love, this safety protects us and our vulnerabilities.

What the Orlando shooter did, and the mainstream media fails to understand, is violate our safety. The spaces we created for ourselves, safe from a crueler, unwelcoming reality, has been encroached upon.

In a city where I should be able to hold my partner’s hand as we walk down the street, I am scared.

This time last year, during Pride, we were celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision affirming the validity of same-sex marriages. This year, my partner asks me if I feel safe enough to go to Manhattan pride, in the light of Orlando, and knowing that a man with explosives and ammunition was on his way to LA Pride.

I tell her there is no other option. I refuse to live in fear. My whole life, my identity and work, my passion and my calling–is about being out. It’s about visibility. It’s about having found the courage and freedom to be who we are. It’s too late to go back.

The truth is, I don’t know where we go from here. I don’t want prayers and good wishes. I don’t want texts from friends and family telling me to be careful. I don’t want it to take tragedies like this to bring us together. I don’t want to keep debating which bathrooms human beings should be able to use when trans women are being murdered at an alarming rate. I don’t want to keep proving that loving who I love is “normal.”

I don’t know how we’re supposed to find safety again, rebuilding it from scratch, in the shadows of so much pain and violence. It’s not fair.

Maybe tomorrow, my activist self will wake up and take over-marching on, literally, in a fight there seems to be no end to. But yesterday, I held my partner a little closer, no longer able to look her in the eye and say that I promise to keep her safe–that’s not something I know to be true anymore. With more questions than answers, I’m simply tired and heartbroken.

Priya Arora is a queer-identified community activist, writer, and student. Born and raised in California, Priya has found a home in New York City, where she is currently pursuing a Master’s degree in Counseling Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. Priya’s passion and research lies in capturing and fostering the needs and experiences of South Asian American LGBTQ people, with a mental health focus.

This post was originally published on Brown Girl Magazine. Click here to read more!

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A girl’s rubber sandal stood out in the beach wrack, that pile of sexily-reeking sargassum and other decaying sea plants, creatures and things heaved up onto the South Florida shoreline by the restless Atlantic Ocean.

The rainbow canvas foot strap with the SAVIOR patch was frayed and twisted.

Rubber is tough for decades. The sandal bristled all along its warped sides with bright white shells like shark’s teeth. Or an island woman’s shell necklace polished fresh as salon toenails.

Something moved. Aliens! A wet and multi-tentacled mouth slithered out of one of the shells, grabbing, then yanked back in. I tried to focus.

Gooseneck barnacles. I picked up the sandal. Now from a few shells the mouth-tentacle-grabbing-things slithered in and out.

Out in the open ocean, how had they, as babies, one after the other, chosen this floating rubber sandal as their spaceship and why had they only attached to its sides to colonize and grow?

How long had the sandal been walking across the ocean before finally coming to America and stepping onto land?

Had it circled for years in currents, not yet ready?

So much of the Atlantic story is African.

Now, after all that time, it was a matter of one more night before the beach tractor came raking in the morning. Would the goose barnacles succumb and die overnight, or later in the trash? Some were already still.

On what shore had the sandal first stepped into the water? Waves grab.

What young girl’s life was behind it? She was cute and kind of thick, right? Maybe 11 or 12 years old?

Had she been a young girl running through the Shell oil fields of the Nigerian Delta?

Had she lost her sandal in the Haiti earthquake of January 2010 that killed more than 220,000 people, injured 300,000 and left 1.5 million homeless?

People say Dominicans and Haitians don’t like each other but after the quake I saw a “Con Amor Haiti” mural go up quickly in the Dominican hood of Barrio Obrero in south San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Maybe she had come from Gabon, where the beaches are still so wild that hippos swag down to the beach to surf.

I doubt she came from the Bahamas; that’s only a day’s bike ride away – if you could bike on water – and she’d clearly been out there a long time. Years.

I wondered about her house. Was her house made of concrete block? Plywood? Did she have a banana tree outside her house with big splaying green leaves?

Maybe her family had been wealthy and lived in a stately house high on a hill with wrought iron and brightly painted walls and a storm had simply caught her sandal.

Did she and her girlfriends have a favorite place to run to and play while giggling and talking about boys? I imagine the footprints their sandals or bare feet left in the dusty or dirt streets.

I think she had a bright white smile and painted toenails and her Ma braided her hair nice.

And how often had she gone down to the beach and looked out over the ocean toward America and pictured herself here? Thoughts of … What is it like? Would she be safe? Would people love her in America, be nice to her? TV made it seem so much danger, but exciting and full of so much too.

Out in the ocean, on that long journey, those years – what moments?

Taking a break, the sandal surely paused in a patch of floating sargassum, good company, in the legendary Sargasso Sea where yellow, blue and green-lit dolphinfish aka dorado aka mahi mahi hung out, waiting for the next run of flying fish like in The Life of Pi.

At night, what swam below as it bobbed in black water under the moon, stars and Mars?

What were the attached gooseneck barnacles thinking all those years as they stuck their slithering mouths out to catch and eat passing little sea creatures and grow?

How many open ocean storms had slammed the sandal up and down 2-story high swells, and it wasn’t anything to the barnacles?

My ass surely would have puked.

The rainbow-colored foot strap with the SAVIOR patch.

The young girl back then probably had no idea that on these shores those colors symbolized lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender pride and rights. Where, recently, 223 miles north of the sandal’s first contact with America, a man got punctured by evil in the inland city of Orlando and shot 102 people at a gay night club with an easily-purchased military assault rifle, slaughtering 49 of them, wounding the rest.

It was just a pretty sandal.

A week after mass murder in Orlando, the 91-year old Freedom Tower in Downtown Miami stayed lit in rainbow colors for a brief while longer.

Fear & Loving: Where Sea Level Meets the Deep is a funder-supported literary blogstory by writer Jarid Manos chronicling life at sea level and in the oceans before climate change hits hard.

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Right now, many teachers are thinking about summer.

No, I don’t mean they’re dreaming of days on the beach or at the pool; they’re searching for ways to help students retain the knowledge they worked so hard to acquire during the school year.

As a former teacher of more than 30 years, I always worried about my students as summer approached. Of course, I hoped that these children would have the kind of summer fun that all kids should have. But for many of my students, especially those in families who were struggling financially, my worry was that on too many summer days there would not be a nutritious meal or a meaningful learning experience, and they would find it difficult to keep up when they returned to school.

It is estimated that every summer, children in low-income families lose approximately two to three months of reading skills while their middle-income peers make some gains. Over time, these summer learning losses add up and the academic achievement gap widens. Educators know that children being able to read at grade level by third grade is critically important. Summer learning is essential to keep children on track not only for that milestone, but also for others–including high school graduation and college enrollment.

What can you do to help your child continue to learn over the summer? Here are some ideas:

Read books daily. Research shows that books that are “just right” for children (those that aren’t frustratingly hard or super-easy) make the best learning experiences.

Talk with your child about what he or she experiences each day. Give your child time to draw and caption a picture about their day, or write about it if they are older.

Choose a fun and engaging weekly read-aloud book that you can read as a family. Read a chapter aloud every night with different family members taking turns.

• Encourage your child to use his imagination when reading the story aloud, making mental pictures and then discussing differences between your mental pictures.

• With younger children, point out letters in the book and tell your child the letter names and sounds. For slightly older children, point out sight words.

• Point out rhyming words in the book, or words that begin with the same letter.

• Discuss the book’s characters: their names, what they look like, what they are wearing, and what they do. Describing and categorizing are important skills in both reading and math.

• After reading a story, discuss the setting, the plot, and the main idea.

• Ask questions about what is happening as the story is being read. Comprehension of the text is a very important skill for children to learn.

Use your local public library to help develop a love of reading and learning. There are so many resources at a library: books, technology access, research areas, fun learning activities, and read-alouds.

Take advantage of any free summer programs that fit into your schedule. Many communities have free summer concerts, parks and recreation events, or farmer’s markets. These are all experiences that your children can talk about or write about to develop their language skills.

Make every outing with your child a learning opportunity. Even your grocery store can be a world of wonder filled with colors, shapes, words, and numbers. Provide questions and other opportunities for your child to learn from the world around her. For example, when you’re at a park you can encourage your child to

• Look at and discuss the different colors of flowers, shrubs, trees, or other plants.
• Look for geometric shapes in the park, like the square of a concrete sidewalk, or letters “hidden” in the park, like the letter “U” in a park swing.
• Study the shapes of the leaves and sort them according to similarities. If the children are older, they can research the types of plants at the park and read about them.

Allow your child to use age-appropriate technology and high-quality digital learning content, such as top-rated educational apps, on a computer, smartphone, or tablet. Digital books and games can provide excellent learning opportunities for young children if used properly. But keep in mind that time on a device should be managed based on the child’s age and should not replace the above activities.

For more wonderful summertime learning suggestions, visit the website for Reading Rockets, a national multimedia literacy initiative. This free website has a wonderful selection of resources and a calendar for families as well as a summer book list. Go to www.readingrockets.org/calendar/summer.

Summer doesn’t have to mean learning loss. It can be a time of powerful learning for children if we ensure that there are many learning activities to engage them in. The ideas I’ve shared above are simple yet important experiences that can lead to a love of learning and a growing vocabulary, both crucial for academic success.

Just imagine–if every book that your child opens provides an exciting field trip, this summer you can take your child to the moon and beyond, below the oceans and through a coral reef, and deep into the past or far into the future.

Take it from me: the time and thought that you invest in summer learning will repay itself many times over, not just at the beginning of the next school year, but in all the school years after that.

Rebecca A. Palacios, Ph.D., is a Senior Curriculum Advisor for Age of Learning, Inc., the company that produces the ABCmouse.com website and ABCmouse mobile apps.

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