Youth Radio - Topic: anniversary

College Students Reflect On 30 Years Of HIV/AIDS

brett — Fri, 03 Jun 2011 14:48:04 -0500

This story was broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered on 6/3/2011, and was originally published on Turnstyle News..

A lot has changed since the 80’s. Or so I’m told. I wasn’t born until 1991 – the same year Magic Johnson announced that he had HIV. I’m 19 now, and I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people joke that Magic Johnson discovered the cure to AIDS…money.

Katherine Hood knows the same joke. She’s a senior at UC Berkeley and has grown up knowing about the disease her whole life. Regardless of the jokes, we both know HIV is still deadly serious. “I think it’s interesting because while I don’t think it’s the same sort of death sentence mentality,” says Hood, “To me if I actually stop and think about it, it still seems like a horrifying thought.”

Hood and lots of kids we talked to say their school Sex Ed classes were pretty good. Thanks to my school’s health classes, I had seen a condom by the 7th grade and knew what it was for. My mom even bought me a book called Deal With It. I remember my friends coming over after school to giggle about stick figure illustrations of sexual positions.

Sex and STDs weren’t a mystery for me, but that’s not the experience had by some students, like UC Berkeley senior Tori Partridge. She explains, “I went to this little private Catholic school and our Sex Ed was basically ‘Hey these are the diseases you can get. Don’t have sex.’ So I just sort of went into this world unprepared.”

The benefit of being in my generation is that we can turn to Google for answers. But no amount of research can prepare a person to ask their sexual partner if they’ve been tested. Nicki Ghafari is sitting at a food court in downtown Berkeley with friends. They graduated from a local Catholic high school just last Sunday, and are headed to college this fall. Ghafari knows they’re supposed to ask about their partner’s sexual heath, but the idea still makes her uncomfortable. “If you ask someone, it’s like they’re dirty in a way, like they’re gross,” she says, “personally I feel like whoever you’re with, you should ask.”

At Laney College in downtown Oakland, junior Salvador Lopez has a little more experience with this situation. He says he wasn’t afraid to have the conversation with his sexual partner, “It wasn’t awkward. They just shot the question right back, and I was like ‘I’m good.’ These are questions you still have to ask, no matter how comfortable you are with one another, just to be safe.”

My friend Elizabeth Welsh, a junior at Mills College wants to be safe, but she feels like the talk around prevention never includes her. Welsh is a lesbian who isn’t embarrassed to admit that she has, “a lot of unprotected sex.” She says, “I talk about aids and I’m informed, but at the same time I’m not using a condom in my sex. So what am I going to do? You think about it and the fears there are but how do you get passed that.” Welsh thinks prevention is mainly geared towards straight people and gay men.

No matter who you are, the saddest part about getting tested for HIV today, is that you’re not only worried about your test results, but you’re still terrified about what people might say, as least that the case for me. David Villamarina, a student at Laney College, agrees. “People get made fun of for having an STD or STI. People are judged.”

While treatments have progressed dramatically in the last 30 years, Villamarina says that society is hung up on wrong things. “We will want to be more focused on what we can do to stop it, instead of who has it. It’s not about the people who already got it. The people who already got it, they got it.”

That’s today anyway. My hope is that 30 years from now, people who “got it,” won’t have it forever.

Weight Falls On Youth To Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki

rgee — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 18:28:48 -0500

You would expect the biggest explosion in all of humanity’s history to be remembered with an explosion of ceremony. However, this is the first year, since the end of World War II in 1945, that the U. S. has sent a representative to join in commemorating the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in Japan.

Today marks the 65th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, Japan - the horrific event that killed 60,000 - 80,000 people in the first two months of the bombing. Friday, August, 6, marked the 65th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Japan - where 90,000 - 166,000 people lost their lives in the first two months.

Some say that the significance of this event is lost on today’s youth in America, and that many of them couldn’t tell you why August 6th is important, while in Hiroshima, people are reminded of the bombings constanty. In an article from The Globe and Mail, 23-year-old Kaori Sasaki, from Hiroshima, says, “In Tokyo and other cities, they are passive and they never think about real things in the world such as war. But here, it’s in front of our eyes. Everybody has relatives who suffered from the atomic bombing. So we really think about how to change the world. We like ‘love and peace, love and peace.’”

The article also articulates a fear that the generation of Japanese who remember the bombings and are active in the peace movement, will die out, and the country will revert back to being militaristic. An excerpt from the article describes how the older and younger generations remembered the day in Hiroshima:

Children passed out flowers to senior citizens, while the Japanese version of neo-hippy teenagers and buskers in their 20s and 30s played spiritual music on homemade instruments or made speeches against war. And for the first time Friday, a U.S. official was among the 74 international representatives at the official memorial.
Bolstered by streams of foreign tourists making the pilgrimage to Hiroshima on the bullet train, the Hiroshima youth seem to revel in the attention given their city, which otherwise lacks the celebrity scene and creative industries of Osaka and Tokyo, more than 800 kilometres to the east.
“I wasn't here when it happened, but we kids have a long life ahead of us. We can't let this happen again.”— Anna Yanagida, age 11
Unlike their parents and grandparents, Ms. Sasaki’s generation is much more open about talking about the bombing of Hiroshima. “My grandparents wanted to forget everything. It was such a terrible experience for them,” says Ms. Sasaki, showing a foreign visitor around the park. “They never told us about the war. It was as if it never happened.”

Honolulu, Hawaii is Hiroshima’s sister city, and has been since 1959. On Saturday, August 7th, Christopher Takita, presented a youth message at the 2010 Hiroshima Commemoration and Peace Service. He said, “My generation has the technology and information to continue on this path [of peace]... Let peace return to all the people.” Watch his speech here.

Oakland Parks and Recreation Department Celebrates 100 Years

lsykes — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:19:19 -0500

This past Saturday, the Oakland Parks and Recreation department celebrated its 100 year anniversary at DeFremery Park. I work at DeFremery Pool, right behind the park, so we were also part of the celebration. We opened the pool for six hours for free, offered a variety of games all day, and had me in a dunk tank.

Improving community relations is one of the main missions of the pool. We allow people to come in, see what we are offering, and have them use our services. My main reason for working at the pool is to help keep the youth off the streets, to give them a place to call a home away from home. Seeing our pool full of people, to near capacity, was a good feeling. A lot of our swim team kids were there enjoying their time, especially after coming off a huge win earlier in the day during a swim meet.

To many, the 100 year anniversary of OPR—as we call it—was just a day. For the staff and kids, it meant 100 years of promises kept -- of keeping true to an option for a better life than what some are actually given.

Previously:

Legacy Of Change: Gaming After Columbine

noah — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 01:56:31 -0500

In the hours and days that followed Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold’s deadly spree at Columbine High the nation, stunned by the seeming randomness of the massacre, sought answers. Why had two boys gone from geeks to gunmen? Could this happen at my kid’s school? What drove their violent impulses? Could the shocking music of Marilyn Manson or the ultra-bloody first person shooters the boys enjoyed have been the catalyst of their rage?

“Everyone can point their finger to violent images that they’ve seen in some form of media, and so it seems to be the answer,” says Dr. Karen Sternheimer, a professor of Sociology at USC and the author of “It’s Not the Media: The Truth About Pop Culture’s Influence on Children.” Her research centers on trends in youth behavior as it relates to popular culture. She’s seen that the impulse to scapegoat violence in video games hasn’t faded in the ten years since Columbine.

“Two years ago when the Virginia Tech situation happened,” she recalls, “before they even had a name or an identity on the shooter there were already people on cable news shows talking about video games. Which was amazing, and of course it turned out that this guy didn’t play video games much.”

It is a scenario similar to the one John Davison-- founder of What They Play, the family guide to video games-- remembers playing out after the tragedy in Littleton. In the case of Klebold and Harris, “there was a lot of attention on the fact that they played a lot of Duke Nukem. Which at the time was really big, and for some people it was an easy thing to blame.”

Davison, whose work centers on helping parents understand the content of the games their kids crave, knows the impulse to link children’s behavior with what they see is “an easy argue to make with video games. Even though it’s not particularly credible that it’s a direct causality thing, it’s ‘Well you’re doing things in a video game that are violent so therefore it’s going to make you have more of a propensity to be violent.’”

Bonus Video: John Davison on one of the other lessons of Columbine.

Brooks Brown, mentioned by John in the video, is the student at Columbine High who was warned away by Eric Harris on the day of the shootings.

PERCEPTION VS. REALITY

Yet conventional wisdom is often demolished by raw data.

“What we’ve found is that violent crime has decreased dramatically starting in 1996 while video games sales have soared. More than doubling last year,” said Dan Hewitt, a spokesman for the Entertainment Software Association the trade association for the video game industry. He cites a report that contrasts the Department of Justice numbers on violent crime and sales figures for games. Hewitt contends that “if there was some type of causal connection between video games and real life violence that the rate of real life violence would actually be going up, but actually the opposite is true.”

Dr. Sternheimer, like Davison, says that because a game is “interactive it seems like logically that it could cause some kind of casual effect.” She notes that the decline in the rate of violence “is most notable in youth, especially juveniles.” While the data and the perceived connection don’t agree, the perception remains “compelling because it’s really easy for us to understand.” The professor points to Dave Cullen’s recent book on Columbine that paints a picture of Klebold and Harris as “not just everyday kids who played video games, and just kind of became crazy from too many video games. These were seriously disturbed individuals. We make a really big mistake when we overlook issues like that.”

In many ways what happened at Columbine High is a kind of prologue to the wave of violence that has shocked the country in recent weeks. A wave that adds weight to Professor Sternheimer’s assertion that “we don’t just have a health care crisis-- we have a mental health care crisis in this country.”

MEDIA SCAPEGOATS AND THE NEW FACE OF GAMES

“When a tragedy occurs it touches off an understandable wave of soul searching as we try and comprehend how such horrific events could occur,” says Hewitt of the ESA. “Unfortunately that search also touches off a wave of finger pointing and scapegoating, and what we’ve seen in the past is that people point to comic books and to movies and to music and it's really generational. The generations that don’t understand the contemporary entertainment medium blaming [the new medium]. Today it's computer and video games, but 10 or 20 years from now we’re not going to be having these conversations.”

Yet the shift in perception may come sooner than that. John Davison points to the broadening market for games: “Honestly a big part of the rationalization of thought about video games, I think we can thank Nintendo over the last couple of years. Getting a Wii into so many homes that previously didn’t have a video game system in them. Or getting a Wii or a DS into the living room or kitchen or the back of the car or whatever.

“Previously it was always in the boy's bedroom and mom and dad knew nothing about it. The Wii has become kinda the friendly face of video games.”

As the generation that grew up playing games comes into adulthood (according to the ESA the average age of video game players is 35) and are becoming parents themselves the rush to link games and real life violence is likely to fade.

“We’ve seen kind of a few years into people coming of age playing video games and again we’re seeing crime decline,” says Dr. Sternheimer. “So there is, I think, definitely a greater realization that ‘Huh, maybe video games are not exactly the magic bullet that if we can just get rid of those we can deal with these crime problems.’"

MORE: What They Play Podcast with Columbine survivor Brooks Brown.

New Pictures of Dr. King's Assassination

denise — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 16:38:12 -0500

It’s been 41 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., and now, new images of that night that have been released.

Time Life’s photographer Henry Groskinsky and writer Mike Silva were on assignment April 4, 1968 in Alabama when they heard the tragic story and rushed to Memphis.
“We got there about three hours after the shooting,” said Groskinsky, now 75. “I was shocked that blood was still there.”

Among the pictures that Life released last Friday included shots of workers cleaning up the blood, the balcony where Dr. King delivered his last speech "I've Been to the Mountaintop", and also of his associates huddled in Dr. King’s motel room. Groskinsky said he felt like an intruder. “I spoke to the people. They were very gracious, no problem at all. I was very respectful of their feelings and I didn’t take too many pictures.” Groskinsky felt that King’s associates knew it was a significant moment, and seemed to want coverage.

In these pictures we get a much closer look at the last moments of the leader of the American civil rights movement. But now that these pictures have made it to the public eye, people are wondering, why now? A lot of people are leaving comments on different sites like this one, from Thembonez.blogspot, “That Life magazine could hold such important photo history for so very long is testament to how truth gets twisted. Did any agency of our government coerce suppression of this photo evidence?” Even though there may not be an answer to that question, Groskinsky says, “I don’t own the film, they have control over it. I didn’t think they would ever be released after almost 41 years but was happy those pictures were able to see the light.”

Dr. King’s legacy still remains as one of the most powerful and innovative civil rights leaders, and even though these new pictures captured one of the saddest moments in American history, it reminds us that history lives on.

“I don’t even know how to explain it. I was there and I documented it and it’s interesting how I became part of that history through my pictures. The down part is being part of something so sad like that,” Groskinsky said.