fire in the belly

By fightinfilipino

you know, i least expected Ralph Nader of all people to trigger this weird brain renaissance i’m suddenly feeling.  yes, that Ralph Nader, the same guy whose soporific voice and oft-oddball stances inspired…dozens…of voters to head to the polls and hesitate oh so much in marking the checkbox for Barack Obama.  but i had the chance to see Nader speak at a conference in D.C. this last weekend, and aside from guilt tripping all the law students in the room for even considering big firm jobs, he also recognized that the most challenging problem for more civic-minded law students was keeping the drive to do good things in the world.

these last few months, i think i lost that drive without realizing it.  i had been just skimming along in classes, a bit disconnected from the real.  but in D.C., i hung out with a metric tonne of very cool, very amazing folks who are all doing impressive and important work in politics, social work, employee rights, healthcare…you name it.  and as i spoke with these folks, and shared ideas and talked shop with them, and even played a few rounds of pool and Connect Four with them, i began to remember what it was like to actually think and apply outside the classroom, to take all this accumulated legal knowledge and solve actual important problems, not slog through rarefied hypos.  dammit, Darth Nader was right. that was the fire in the belly i needed.

and today, i was already on a good mood streak, but i saw a film at the San Diego Asian Film Festival that really drove the point for me.  the film, 9500 Liberty, was a documentary on the undocumented immigrant debate raging in Manassas County, Virginia.  the film showed a story becoming all too familiar in a lot of US communities: influxes of immigrant populations of color into traditionally-white-and-affluent neighborhoods, and the ensuing fight by locals to push these “darkies” back out.  but if the basic premise is (sadly) one that seems mundane, the documentary was anything but.  the film took things a step further by not only pointing out the myriad parties involved in this struggle, but also the intense conversations and arguments taking place between folks from the community, police, politicians, pundits, business owners, and the whole country.  this was also one of the first documentaries i’d ever seen that took advantage of technologies like youtube to show the conversation developing naturally as the film was shot.  the filmmakers took great pains to eschew the omniscient viewpoint and instead capture the organic and volatile nature of the immigration conflict from first-person perspectives, from the people actually involved.

my views on immigration would take a whole post by itself.  but i think what i realized at the end of it all is that i’ve missed being a part of that tumult, being a voice for others who might not or cannot speak out in the struggle over immigration reform and enforcement.  and i have a clearer idea of how i want to get back in there and be a scrappy fightin’ filipino once again.  i really really need to finish this law school thing first, but my brain is hatching schemes all over the place how even law school will help me get back to the path.

who knows, maybe i’ll actually update this blog more frequently, too