Today, I’m sitting back, listening, watching, and learning about our country, my “friends”, and what people really thing when then sh*t hits the fan. For the most part, people have stepped up with the George Floyd tragedy. As I admitted in my previous post, I am woefully prepared as a teacher, and I did get a response back in my request for information dealing with social justice, racial justice, and anti-racism. If you have suggestions, send me a message (@aniowateacher) or leave a comment.

Today, Deadmau5 (yes, a Wikipedia link, judge me). If you don’t know who this is, don’t worry, I really didn’t know about him much either. However, when I did just a touch of research, I know him because he’s a music producer and DJ of electronic music. That I do recognize!

#deepbassthumping

The reason I’m writing about him is due to those “Master Class” adds that pop up on Facebook and other social media platform. If you live under a rock or don’t click those ads, they are a $99 “class” that you can purchase where a very famous person will “teach” you about a topic. RL Stine, Judy Blume, James Patterson, and many others are part of this site. I’ve been tempted to purchase a class, but never had because, well, it’s $99!! 🙂

I clicked on Deadmau5 because I was watching electronic music videos and this was the ad I had to endure. It’s was an interesting ad (nothing I’d buy), but I was stopped in my tracks by this:

If you can impact one person with your music, it’s pretty much worth it. Sometimes it happens in 5 years, sometimes in 10 years, But it definately is not going to happen if you don’t go out there and try it yourself.  – Deadmous5

#damn

In this time of “wth is going on”, that idea of having to make it happen on our own in fully on display right now. Watching Iowa football players stepping up, talking about the racial injustices they’ve faced in the Hawkeye program, listening to speaker after speaker talking about change can only happen if we keep talking, and watching my own daughter in Iowa City, getting involved in the protests, all of these serve as a reminder that we can’t sit back now. As we are still in the midst of a global pandemic, we need to keep pushing that comfort zone, that “oh, I can do this tomorrow” attitude. And if we fail, if we say the wrong thing, do something stupid, we stop, listen, and learn.

We’ve been working the last three months at our local food pantry, and their favorite saying it, “Try it. You can’t do anything wrong here, and if it is wrong, we’ll fix it.” These are heady words for all of us, making that attempt to be better and do better.

What will do you do? How will you impact that person? That group of people? How will you make a difference?

Heady questions for a heady time, but questions we need to be asking ourselves every single day, because if we quit, what have we learned?

Not one damn thing.