J.S. Park 박준

You would have been sixteen today. Miss you everyday, Rosco. ❤️‍🩹🐾

Far from being “trivial,” your art is needed, it is medicine and protest, it is a reminder of what we can be. Every line is a wave pushing against the current. Even if you create while screaming: please keep creating. You remind us why we’re alive. You’re giving life.

Shout-out to every person still creating and writing and drawing and singing and choreographing and building and sculpting and imagining in this anxious and overwhelming time.

I wonder how the good folks at The Onion are doing after they saw the Pantone color of the year, but seriously on top of everything else I’m praying for them right now.

Does anyone else avoid AI videos and click right out of them?

I try to avoid AI videos as much as I avoid scrolling any type of reels feeds because, well I don’t know how to put this exactly, but it just feels wrong for my brain.

My book on grief is on sale today for only 1.99 in ebook. This is the lowest it’s ever been. 🫶❤️‍🩹

www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0CD...

“There’s really no such thing as the ‘voiceless.’ There are only the deliberately silenced, or the preferably unheard.”
— Arundhati Roy

“People who treat other people as less than human must not be surprised when the bread they have cast on the waters comes floating back to them, poisoned.”
— James Baldwin, No Name in the Street (1972)

I’ll never forget reading this the other day:

“Faith without works is dead children.”

😮‍💨😮‍💨😮‍💨💔

“I know the world is bruised and bleeding, and though it is important not to ignore its pain, it is also critical to refuse to succumb to its malevolence.”
— Toni Morrison, The Nation, Mar. 23, 2015

“This is precisely the time when artists go to work. There is no time for despair, no place for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we do language. That is how civilizations heal.”
— Toni Morrison, The Nation, Mar. 23, 2015

I don’t think we need conspiracy theories anymore.

It’s just all out in the open for everyone to see.

We’ve been had, run, and fleeced at every turn.

I just keep seeing distraction after distraction over those already with disproportionate power who have absolutely nothing to lose. But those who do keep being buried under easy-to-make noise.

Insincere outrage is selective, and real outrage is constantly smothered.

It was an easy issue to speak against or for, and it will be big ratings for Kimmel and everyone else talking about it. Meanwhile, Gaza, Epstein files, fired journalists, and k*lled children get less voice.

Ask: Who stands to lose? The profiteers did not.

I’m not a conspiracy theorist but here is my conspiracy theory:

I’m not sure Kimmel was meant to be canceled. It seems like an intentional false flag to “reverse course” and give us enough yield to relax. They know boycotts can be fickle.

“People are afraid to be pried loose from their ignorance.”
— Maya Angelou, “One on One,” interview with Greg Jackson (1983)

I hate that one day I’ll have to explain to my children this entire era of American Christianity and its absolute absurdity and hypocrisy.

I hope I’ll get to explain it in past tense.

I saw this comment recently and it still rings true:

“First they came for the journalists
and I did not speak out
because no one knew what happened.”

You’re not obligated to grieve an abuser, an oppressor, a monster. We can grieve they were a person and a bearer of life. We can grieve what they might have been and what they have taken. And that’s about all I can say on that.

I have been at hundreds of deathbeds and I have never once expected anyone to mourn their abuser. There may be rage, or relief, or a long exhale. But there is zero obligated sorrow for someone who embodied tyranny and suffocation over a family for years, for a lifetime.

After you have wounded me,
I make a choice to keep my humanity
by seeing yours.

I will not allow your desecration of me
to desecrate how I see me or you.

Five years ago I almost started a podcast.

I went to therapy instead.

I still don’t have a podcast.
I made two good decisions. ❤️‍🩹

Idiocracy is when those in charge perfectly overlap between incompetence and malice. Recklessly ignorant and indulgently destructive. Too stupid to know they’re stupid and too malicious to care.

A little off topic but does everyone have a texting friend? For memes and talking wild and being completely unhinged and yourself?

I have a few and it’s seriously therapeutic. Hard to imagine going through a day without them, especially now.

My book on grief is 16 months old and it’s only $1.99 right now in ebook. ❤️‍🩹

www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B0CD...

I saw this in a newspaper comic strip once:

If you don’t learn ̶f̶r̶o̶m̶ ̶h̶i̶s̶t̶o̶r̶y̶
you’re doomed ̶t̶o̶ ̶r̶e̶p̶e̶a̶t̶ ̶i̶t̶

This is one of my favorite poems, by the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, called “Think of Others.”

“I’ve never wished a man dead, but I have read some obituaries with great pleasure.”
— Clarence Darrow, attorney who defended Tennessee teacher in 1925 for teaching on evolution
#JamesDobson

Please take this from me, a hospital chaplain who has sat with hundreds of deathbeds in the last ten years:

In the end,
we really only have each other.
And we really only have
a breath
and then we’re gone.

Life is as fast
as a spoken word,
so be gentle.

This is (not) a hot take:

In any situation where children are harmed,

I will always be on the side of the children.