That didn't stop us from deeply considering the past because as the saying goes, someone not well-versed in it is doomed to repeat it, and as working class kids, were just as keen at escaping the purgatories of our family homes as our trapped parents were. It just didn't work, for anyone around them. Through our studies, we put together the pieces we needed to change the world, often by looking at ourselves through our shared histories first. My first love and my best friend became history majors; she, as a female educator in a male-dominated field, and my boyfriend as a failed scientist first (he blamed me for that, of course), until he reached his loudly talkative stride as a history major and legal scholar (yeah, you're welcome, bro).
We had many fascinating discussions, as we filled in the gaps left wide open by our ill-prepared families over many beers and a toke or two, though we were all avidly aware that our wildest partying days ended upon graduation, because each and every one of us almost immediately entered the working worlds of commerce and trade, pairing our academia with the real world so as to fill in the gaps present there, too. It was less welcomed than our friendly community of gifted scholars, artists, writers, and athletes, because almost everyone is threatened by a samurai warrior at first, with good reason. You may suck as a human being, and that pisses off native New Yorkers who've been a happily blended people for centuries. You might not fit in with us, and that happens in societies often, especially during our younger years, as we adjusted to the dysfunctional around us, through intellectual problem-solving in various industries.
Because my crowd was heavy on the history, I parted ways with their deeper explorations as I filled out my curriculum, necessary as it was for us to do as individuals, but I kept pace with any content discussed, because I spent my youth reading, which became part of my vocation, too. One of the more interesting second year 200 levels was an oddly named enticement called "EHIS 232 History of European Witchcraft" (http://www.oneonta.edu/undergradcatalog/ehis-232-history-of-european-witchcraft.asp), which I was delighted to find still on the schedule, today. Well-done, snow-bound freaks! Keeping our cultural interests alive across the years has been challenging, too, because disordered populations often seek to banish from the history books their own checkered pasts, as inconvenient truths they no longer wish to confront or solve.
Not so with our crowd. We wanted to keep the flames of our ancestors lit through the invocation of our co-joined spirits through well-told stories, reflected in the enjoyable classes taught by professors equally passionate and adept at bringing the past back to life, in dark classrooms with brightly-lit screens filled with art history, through images of relics that we wanted to unlock and tell everyone about, sharing our common knowledge with as many minds as we could fill, empty as those containers often are among the common and sick looking to turn away from the lights of enlightenment, as antithetical to our group's ethos as it ever was.
One of the key pieces we put back together was the insulting truth behind our obliterated indigenous pasts, found here at this windswept mountain school, kept alive by torch-bearers from the past. We realized that traditional medicines made from local plants had been wiped away by the voracious greed of invading Europeans who sought only to reap the value from our harvests and leave, laying waste in its' wake. It'd begun a long time ago, with the arrival of exiled wackos from their own countries, infecting our countryside with their fevered cults of delusion, evil and dangerous as ever, free to spread like wildfire across the forests and plains of this land named "The Americas" by Italians who didn't bother to ask the dark people who lived there its name, spreading their diseases at the same time they planted their invasive crops laden with foreign-born vermin.
Their spooks and devils were the same as those in their Old World countries, specters hallucinated in deeply thick woods entered fearfully at night with the exact same psychoses that had their cults exiled by regions afraid of their illnesses, the same falsely-made leper colonies as ever, made from old women casts as witches by the rise of male-dominated European medicine, along with their strong inheritance of herbs and crops, now lost to the ages, to be picked up by those children of theirs adrift in a home world full of foreigners, made expensively strange with their imported medicines and crop-killers.
Today we take it back, as we tell each other again the cures we've always known to be true, activating them out of our very DNA, despite the condescending rich white man's sneers over "folk cures" that actually work, as scared and sick as ever with their typical lusts made out of greed and money, borne through our inflamed bodies aching to heal from the kind touch of a loving mother seeking to ease her infant's cries at night, through expensive salves and ointments sold to her by foreign-born, European-trained doctors who care so little for us that they would rather sell us salves made overseas and shipped here at our expense (loyal to another land and blind to our cries for help), choosing their tribes over our native soil, further impoverishing and bankrupting women and children by sickening them deeper still.
After years of expensive doctor visits with a Jewish/European white woman who bankrupted me to make her and her family wealthy instead, laughing at my concerns with her pad of rich snake oils sold through fancy white male sales reps sitting in her over-heated Brooklyn office, backed by years of continued prescription renewals that only temporarily relieved my eczema; nasty ugly rashes that bled and oozed in the pressure-filled public spaces rife with their sick, pressured by their pounding sickness over our cooling seasons here that they cannot tolerate, causing my body to burst into large red angry rashes by their continued European madness, misplaced as it still is by their relocation here from their ousting elsewhere.
It's time to take a stand against their exile wrongly forced upon us here in the Americas, because not one of them during my many long years of their imposed poverty told me to use oatmeal as a homeopathic cure; not one single corrupt wealthy European-American. Not one link found online through their Internet searches controlled by advertising dollars back by Big Pharma, Big Tobacco, and Big Medicine, searches made at night, using expensive online access that women and children typically cannot well afford, searches made by a million concerned mothers looking to ease their crying babies at night with a simple dollar store cure like an oatmeal bath, with the same kind of poultices applied directly to their delicate skin, ones that cure, cool, and comfort at the same time. Well, you can rest easy. We're home. You can all go home, now. Sooner rather than later.
Cures done at home through common pantry items, by the numbers: http://www.solitaryroad.com/s815.html
Their pricey European/American store-bought versions: http://www.aveeno.com/product/aveeno-+baby+eczema+therapy+soothing+bath+treatment.do
You sick fucks! Baby powder, moms: http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/othercarcinogens/athome/talcum-powder-and-cancer
Addendum: I'd like to add that my eczema has become far worse with age, greatly assisted by: global warming (sweat adds salt to the body where it wouldn't normally be, during normal cooling-off seasons), stress greatly exerted upon me that has been confirmed over the years as purposefully done as a means to detract from my beauty through the application of abusive pressure that would (hopefully) cause sickness in me (as part of the continued oppression of my people that I inhabit in a daily role), and that this Jewish-American doctor I sought out (after two other female doctors moved out of the Park Slope section of Brooklyn) took a Hippocratic oath to heal and not hurt that was put into direct conflict by her continued recommendation of an Israeli-made ointment that she said (defensively) she prescribed to me because I was a female athlete, and therefore I needed a synthetic non-steroidal salve, even though I never needed a test as an amateur athlete, nor do low doses of steroidal salves show up in modern testing.
I should also add that she was extremely hostile and aggressive to me at first, as was her entire office staff (several of whom were fired, like the office women from a previous doctor I saw during my time in Brooklyn), as were the other female practitioners she recommended to me. It should also be noted that the main ingredient listed for this salve is "petrolatum", a petrochemical derivative that's wide usage and distribution is a continued sales boom to fossil fuel manufacturers, and their waste by-products.
Take from that what you will. M
Acadian heads-up: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/26/fashion/26skin.html?_r=0
Colored heads-up: http://www.softeeproducts.com/products/treatments/indian-hemp-hair-and-scalp-treatment/
