DAMIEN RILEY | World Music | HQ Blog

I was 8 in Mission Viejo, CA. Those days consisted of exploring, to every extent of the word. The biggest example was exploring down the creek. We found wonders in mud and pieces of trees that had fallen and broken into branches and driftwood.

In response to The Daily Post’s writing prompt: “The Early Years.”

We’d get into trouble with our mother who many times had to hose us off before we went into the house. We trudged through sludge looking for some hidden cave or passageway we could discover and call our own. We were peaceful kids, never fighting down the creek. There were a couple incidents however I do recall where slightly older kids got into some semi-violent stuff. Some boys who lived on another street had tied up a frog by it’s hind leg and shot it repeatedly with a bee bee gun. Even after it was dead, boys took turns aiming and pelting. We weren’t there but ;ater heard the story and every kid who heard it could verify it by visiting the scene. I was repulsed by this, the same way I cringed when kids would set off firecrackers.

Another group of kids were struggling once, or so I heard, to pull up a metal grate. It must have weighed 100 pounds. The story went that these kids pulled it up and a particularly thrill-seeking type kid went down the underground ladder. They accidentally dropped it on his leg and there was a lot of blood. Days later we would travel to that grate that the police and the paramedics replaced and see the stains that we thought were surely blood. I swear I saw a piece of leg meat. I remember thinking how mean those kids were. We walked back home that day picking up surveying stakes pretending they were daggers. Construction tape and ties were always being laid for new suburban homes. It was a lot like ET if you’ve seen that movie and remember what it looked like.

Information that was, is, and will be is the topic of this post. I think I know a thing or two about it considering all the years I spent in college extracting it from books and computers. Now, as a teacher and blogger, I’m always on the lookout for information, but only good information. There’s the line!

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. If you’d like to learn ore about the prompt or write one yourself, please visit the link.

I spent the last two days at the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance. It was loaded with a ton of information I hadn’t thought about much prior to my visit. Most people are familiar with the Holocaust. Hitler and his Nazis attempted to exterminate the Jewish race. Thankfully, they were not successful. At the museum you learn how they duped a nation into thinking the Jews were the problem causing the depression and all of Germany’s social issues at the time. We learned that Jews made up only 1% of the population in Germany. Hitler gave propaganda to the people which was bad information. It made people vote for him as leader and enabled him to start his plan to destroy the Jews. This photo of an exhibit inside the museum shows a recreation of the two corridors the concentration camp victims were forced to choose from. If they were “Able Bodied” they could work probably 5 more months without starving to death in work camps. If they were women and children, their corridor led directly into the gas chamber. They looked to the sign for bad information. What signs do we look at today leading us to death and hate? More importantly, who is making those signs?

This kind of thing is still happening today. There are white supremacist websites and hate groups. There is even music that has hate-filled lyrics about restoring a perfect race. Along with the good information of the internet, there are tons of sites disseminating bad stuff tat can potentially cause killing and torture through brainwashing. That’s why it’s important to sort through bad information and cast it aside. There are things people can do to hinder hate in our times. If you’ve ever seen candlelight vigils after a hate crime, this is one way. It is like a public shaming against the killer. When Matthew Sheppard was killed for being gay, people came out in droves to a candlelight vigil and it was on all the news stations. It was one way of telling the killers “we don’t agree with you, your information is wrong.” In many ways, all of us are prejudiced but if we stop to recognize that, we may be able to get rid of some of it.

There are many ways to tell if information is bad or good. Sometimes just looking up the source can reveal a lot about it. That’s a positive aspect of the internet. If you publish a blog, be sure and speak out against the information you know to be false. Some people may ask why this applies to me. I will tell you it doesn’t apply to me directly but indirectly I see it does affect me. When someone in the world is killed in a hate crime, they lose their liberty. If one person’s liberty is snuffed out then my can be as well. So, for that reason, I am speaking about liberty for myself just as much as for them. We should do it because it’s the right thing to do of course but also for this reason. We all need to be holding the equivalent of a “candelight vigil” more often when we hear of these atrocities of hate. Always be wary of bad information. It can kill. Good information on the other hand can heal.

Information that was, is, and will be is the topic of this post. I think I know a thing or two about it considering all the years I spent in college extracting it from books and computers. Now, as a teacher and blogger, I’m always on the lookout for information, but only good information. There’s the line!

This post is part of Stream of Consciousness Saturday. If you’d like to learn ore about the prompt or write one yourself, please visit the link.

I spent the last two days at the Los Angeles Museum of Tolerance. It was loaded with a ton of information I hadn’t thought about much prior to my visit. Most people are familiar with the Holocaust. Hitler and his Nazis attempted to exterminate the Jewish race. Thankfully, they were not successful. At the museum you learn how they duped a nation into thinking the Jews were the problem causing the depression and all of Germany’s social issues at the time. We learned that Jews made up only 1% of the population in Germany. Hitler gave propaganda to the people which was bad information. It made people vote for him as leader and enabled him to start his plan to destroy the Jews. This photo of an exhibit inside the museum shows a recreation of the two corridors the concentration camp victims were forced to choose from. If they were “Able Bodied” they could work probably 5 more months without starving to death in work camps. If they were women and children, their corridor led directly into the gas chamber. They looked to the sign for bad information. What signs do we look at today leading us to death and hate? More importantly, who is making those signs?

This kind of thing is still happening today. There are white supremacist websites and hate groups. There is even music that has hate-filled lyrics about restoring a perfect race. Along with the good information of the internet, there are tons of sites disseminating bad stuff tat can potentially cause killing and torture through brainwashing. That’s why it’s important to sort through bad information and cast it aside. There are things people can do to hinder hate in our times. If you’ve ever seen candlelight vigils after a hate crime, this is one way. It is like a public shaming against the killer. When Matthew Sheppard was killed for being gay, people came out in droves to a candlelight vigil and it was on all the news stations. It was one way of telling the killers “we don’t agree with you, your information is wrong.” In many ways, all of us are prejudiced but if we stop to recognize that, we may be able to get rid of some of it.

There are many ways to tell if information is bad or good. Sometimes just looking up the source can reveal a lot about it. That’s a positive aspect of the internet. If you publish a blog, be sure and speak out against the information you know to be false. Some people may ask why this applies to me. I will tell you it doesn’t apply to me directly but indirectly I see it does affect me. When someone in the world is killed in a hate crime, they lose their liberty. If one person’s liberty is snuffed out then my can be as well. So, for that reason, I am speaking about liberty for myself just as much as for them. We should do it because it’s the right thing to do of course but also for this reason. We all need to be holding the equivalent of a “candelight vigil” more often when we hear of these atrocities of hate. Always be wary of bad information. It can kill. Good information on the other hand can heal.