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ronaultcatalani's comments:
on Addressing Gang Violence
First, my big respect and affection for Rob Ingram. He is simply one solid neighborhood uncle.
Second, continuing on this practical lean, I would suggest parents, teachers, cops, social workers all know that our guys fail their family and school and community expectations at a very predictable time -- that is, when we start looking like idiots in class. At about 13,14, 15 year. No boy can take looking like a dope to the girls.
If you cannot write a good sentence, if you can't do the math, or talk smart about your science homework, why go to class? Better is joining other boys failing.
Of course, this is a complex issue, but here's a simple suggestion: many if not all of our new-Amercan kids, especially rural and refugee camp kids, are not ready for post-modern urban middle or high school. Our schools will fail them, and they will fail their classes. These kids (mostly boys) will populate Portland's next generation of juvenile justice and adult criminal systems.
Why not simply accept that these kids will fail, will join bad kid culture, will not graduate or go to college?
Why not prepare them for good work, for good salaries, for a good family life. Skip our liberal idealism. Without job skills, without a paycheck, as a practical matter, no "good girls" from good families will have a second look at our guys. We cement them into a subculture that gives them the acceptence they need.
Ronault LS (Polo) Catalani, New Portlander Programs, Office of Human Relations.
posted 2 years, 6 months ago
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on Keeping Genocide Stories Alive
i learned only a few years ago, who knows how, that my responsibility to our broken-hearted family, to our broken-boned community, is to repeat and repeat and repeat the story of our elder auntie emi covering big brother and me with her frail little body, taking the fatal garden tool blows of the other ethnic group, our neighbors. I will recall her love for us, her love of our lives -- instead of the brutality of those times.
because while both that love and that ugliness are true, as between the two, love is bigger. Love makes me better. Love makes all those I'm responsible for bigger and better.
Ronault LS (polo) Catalani
From Google mobile mail: rlscatalani@gmail.com
posted 3 years ago
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on Never Again
Portland is now ninth among America's new hometowns for refugees from awful times and places all over our achy little planet. We are made a better city, a bigger us, for those who've survived ethnocide. Great humanity comes with their suffering back there, great optimism comes with their resettlement here.
As a survivor of nascent Indonesia's ethnic cleansing, and now as a neighbor worried about terribly traumatized families from Rwanda, Somalia, Iraq, Burma, Bhutan, trying to do their best in a bewildering new place, in the worst of economic times -- my wish is for Portlanders to embrace our struggling newcomers.
If, as neighbors, we see and hear what holocaust looks and sounds like, if we better understand the antecedents of ethnocide: neglect, poverty and rage -- we can begin a better response to racial violence, in Africa, Asia, Arabia, and in America.
Ending a bad thing starts with our personal experience of it, otherwise we're left to occassional OPB broadcasts on national days of remembering.
Ending our refugee families' struggles likewise requires us embracing their sorrows, opening large our hearts, freeing up a little time, to free them from their nightmares.
Ronault LS (Polo) Catalani, SE Portlander
posted 3 years, 1 month ago
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on Can You Trust Law Enforcement?
Terima kasih (I offer our love), Slakr -- for two things:
1) for making your public broadcaster better at her and his very important work; and
2) for getting down to one of several really big points I believe made during our on-air hour. thank you. A thousand-thousand thank yous from both our families struggling to resettle in their new homes, our City; and on behalf of those Peace Officers working the way they do. Caring for us, the way they do.
-Ronault LS (Polo) Catalani
posted 3 years, 2 months ago
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on Rebroadcast: Virginia Euwer Wolff
Terima kasih to Emily and David and crew for this thoughtful program, and a thousand thanks to Ms.Wolff for teaching well our teens, her kid readers. Pero, I have a concern -- maybe a wish rather than critique.
If only more youth-reader authors were people of color. If only agents, editors, publishers, consumers, trusted nonmainstreamers more with their children.
There's nothing too wrong about an Anglita writing (as Ms. Wolff does) in a voice that maybe taken as an ethnic minority American's. You gotta appreciate the color-blindedness. I was in an MFA program with white folks writing waaay outside their ethnicities. Ogh.
There's an odd world of incongruity between, say, a Mexican man writing in the voice of a Hmong girl, or say: between an Arab woman writing in a teen Latina's voice. No matter how great the writer, or how much the writer admires Rev. Dr. King's oft-quoted aspirational statement about dreaming of his little girls "not being judged by the color of their skin...".
And it is precisely this world of difference that America's mainstream is not so good at acknowledging, understanding, accepting, working.
Anglo American authors, teachers, librarians, bookshop shelvers, are not the best narrators of this national burden, of our racialized society. This is not a matter of bad faith, but simply of in-your-bones experience. In our bones -- bruised bones, joyous bones -- where truth is known.
Better than good intentions is us sweating and grinding our way through the hard stuff. Respect and responsibility becomes of it.
-Ronault LS Catalani
posted 3 years, 4 months ago
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on Cambodia Stories
America is made of so-so many wounded families. And this sorrow, this anger, our fears spread from neighbor to neighbor as fast as the most frightening virus. I am so sorry for your family's losses, still so much in your bones. We are so proud of our Khmer cousins, for stopping their running away from their grief, for not stopping with a PTSD diagnosis and a numbing prescription, and most of all for teaching the rest of us about healing from inside our families and our communities of nurture. Not waiting for medical professionals and populist leaders to understand or acknowledge or rescue.
We should all be grateful to Emily and David and TOL crew for doing what public radio at its best does: talk sincerely, meaningfully, make us a bigger us.
Terima kasih,
Ronault LS (polo) Catalani
posted 3 years, 6 months ago
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on Curbing Gang Violence
Some gang life is economic, about drug distribution. But a lot is not. So much sorrow is made by boys responding so much like all boys, everywhere. Boys needing to be men. But boys from families, in communities, deeply wounded in America.
These boys, especially if armed to kill, are acting out ethnic minority betrayal and rage, acting on white guilt and resentment. Ensuring some more of the same. Kids are leading us, leading adults inside our ethnic enclaves, and leading the relationship between Portland's mainstream and ethnic streams.
Ronaut LS (Polo) Catalani, community activist/awyer
posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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on Curbing Gang Violence
Bishop Wells and Rob Ingram know their families, know their communities. Of course a thousand ideas from a thousand very smart people are out here. But much more can be understood well, and so much more can be done well if we would listen carefully to what these two men know, what they live.
Let's let them lead. So much love and money and time we lose for all the noise.
And two of their foundational foci are: faith and family. About religion: our mainstream must get behind what their ethnic stream believes.
About familia: white America and ethnic minority America must come to terms with of our reciprocating bitterness, our subordination and resentment, rage and guilt. Kids get this. They get it in their bones. Especially boys. Setting off another generation of wounding each other.
Ronault LS (Polo) Catalani
Community lawyer/activist
posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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on Reading Stubborn Twig
We are, as newcomer Portlanders, all deeply indebted to Oregon's Yasui family for their loyal and stubborn resistence to an anxious America, setting aside the United States Constitution.
We so respect Japanese America's long silent suffering for their families' shame, indeed for everyone's humiliation for this fundemental human wrong.
Terima kasih (we offer our love) Professor Kessler, for giving this community voice, for restoring everyone's dignity, for setting this record of recklessness straight.
Ronault LS Catalani, City of Portland, Immigrant & Refugee Affairs
posted 4 years, 1 month ago
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