135. Poem. I Don't Understand Discrimination Against Difference

I wrote this poem very recently, in response to an undergraduate Chicano Studies Course that revolved around the theme of "Borders." Oscar Flores (my very good video-editing friend) convinced me to tag along with him on a field trip to the Great Wall of Los Angeles (a painting along a relatively dry water duct that we couldn't reach up close, so we had to film far away). In addition, Oscar and his class went on a field trip to Tijuana (where on the way back they saw a dead body on the freeway... it was an older lady trying to cross the freeway with bags of groceries, but oh god, that's beside the point... but man, I saw a dead body before from a motorcycle accident on the way back to Riverside from San Diego, but nothing like blood running, god shxt...). It's funny how the social sciences focuses on the theme of "Borders" more so with countries and races and ethnic backgrounds and for me, I am experiencing the problems of "borders" in terms of academic disciplines and intellectual territorialism. A form of intellectual discrimination to be specialist over generalist-minded. It's been a battle just to maintain my own individual intellectual identity, which I was granted at the College of Creative Studies. But all graduate school has done thus far (not at UCSB) has been to try and take that away from me. Borders exist everywhere, from the hard sciences to the social sciences to humanities. It is now a matter of assessment of whether these borders are tangible realities (like the borders of physics) or are human constructs (departmental politics, ethnic groups) and can be dissolvable.

I spoke with Kyle earlier about Borders and racism, and Kyle said perhaps racism / segregation is more of a construct of social classes, and it's more of the "who to blame," "who done it," and "who should to the dirty work" type of situation. I think intelligence and work ethic should be able to sort out people in a human system. And I don't see class structure. I don't see a dominance hierarchy here. I see teamwork. I see a production company. In the end, we have different job with different roles, but we're all in the end trying to help each other out....