The Green

My favorite time of the day is precisely when I get home from school. It’s at this time, for only an hour or so, that every blade of grass, and every leaf appears to be illuminated from the inside. Every  annoying gnat becomes a lantern of warm light bobbing and diving in the air. Squirrels are silhouetted against a liquid blue sky, their tails haloed be a lining of yellow light.  

The lazy breeze stirs the glowing leaves of london plane trees, only slightly. The trees are  solid and wise. They watched the neighborhood grow up around them. They saw every nasty divorce and heard each dirty secret. They watched as every newborn baby came home for the first time, and as each lost dog was returned to it’s owner. The trees saw the crazy guy with the red pickup, beat his mom. They watched something, someone, tear a spine from a dead rabbit, leaving it neatly text to the body, hoping everyone would think it was road kill. The trees did not cringe. They heard the shouts of joy coming from 1118 when a soldier surprised his mother with his return. They let the sound pierce through their bark, and to reverberate within their core, where it would remain forever.

They stand proudly in the neat line that they were once planted as seedlings, knowing more about the block then any human ever will. They grew bigger, as the people grew older. They became wiser as the people become more tired. Their smooth bark holds the scars of past lovers, hearts and initials stretched and distorted by time. It is the mark of hopelessly young couples that only the trees remember. They snicker as they watch me waddle to the bus, burdened by the weight of too many bags, too much work. They are not burdened by schedule; they simply ebb and flow from lush to leafless with the seasons.

They have secrets of their own, too. Somewhere beneath the earth, two adjacent trees intertwine their roots in a secret embrace of love. Nobody knows but them, and the earthworms. In times of wind, it streams their leaves, extracting every piece of gossip they’ve been storing. Their voices join into one whisper of sound, dozens of voices merging into hushed pandemonium. They all know that their world, the earth thats always laid beneath their limbs, is the only thing that matters. They do not yearn to see what lies beyond the horizon.

The grass is different. The grass is not strong, and not wise. They are always young, young when they sprout and young when they die. But unlike the trees, they are full of energy. The blades constantly press together and reach towards the sky, like kids at a concert. Swaying and colliding with the tiniest of breezes. The blades know their life will be short, yet exciting. They glow with morning light, warm and green. Using dew drops at as expensive jewelry, they glimmer. They release the scent, of dirt, of water, and of green stains on denim knees. They push through the soft earth screaming to everybody that spring has arrived, but only the kids and the deer care enough to hear them. They shout with glee as a child flops on their back, letting the grass cradle them. They cool his neck, and he doesn’t care that they are itchy, or wet. The grass cringes, however, when they are crushed beneath the hard bottoms of dress shoes, or savagely pierced by the heel of a pump. They are lucky that those shoes tend to avoid grass at all costs. The grass dies without knowing the secrets of the neighborhood, but only knowing the secrets of that one kid that laid upon them.

The Women of Media

I always thought that the days of sexism were over. We have the same legal rights as men, so we must be equal. Slowly, I started to see that the people that held power in the country were a reflection of the public's view on gender disparities. For women, success is determined by appearance.

Women are used as decor. In game shows like Jeopardy, the stage is laced with women in gowns, solely for the purpose of adding sexual intrigue to the stage. In nearly every music video, performers are surrounded by girls. Most of the time the girls are wearing little to none, and doing nothing but dancing of clinging onto the performer.  The images bring up the age old idea that women are symbols to show wealth and masculinity. In one of his songs, Kanye West inquires, “Do you know how many hot bitches I own?” The sentence is aimed to reinforce the idea that women are property that indicates power, similar to cars, clothes, or real estate. The image is played over and over in a huge range of media.

When women are actually casted as more than decoration, they are usually given little to no intellectual depth. If we focus on movies directed towards males, particularly action and superhero movies, this is even more prevalent. When there are a protagonist women or girl, she does not illustrate characteristics of being a human. In almost every action or superhero movie depicting women, the woman is flawless I her looks, her physical abilities, and her emotions. In the movie ‘Wanted’, Angelina Jolie’s character is very good at showing her butt, and uttering the occasional snappy catch phrase; however, she was not an emotionally functioning human. Woman heroes never show weakness, especially in their emotions. Females I movies are cold, even if they are doing good deeds. The view of women directed towards male audiences claims that the perfect woman is one that is physically perfect, yet mentally blank.

        Women in the TV and Movies are neither capable of immense good, nor evil. The women that play the role of a villain in movies are simply bitter. They are nasty, but they are not at all complex. With true evil also comes the need for great intellectual depth. In the Dark Knight Rises, it’s hard to imagine the Joker, one of the most influential villains of any movie, as a woman, because women are never casted as a complex villain. Villains are always placed a position of power, and they make choices and strategic moves in order to stay in this position; women are not portrayed as having these abilities.

      The views of women will change when the media is brave enough to change them. The show ‘Torchwood’ an action series prominently directed towards men, makes brave choices when it comes to their characters. They casted a blonde and a black guy as braniacs, they casted a ‘not so pretty girl’ as tough heroe, and they casted a gay guy as the most powerful man in the whole world. I watched one episode with my brother that had a particularly graphic gay sex scene. Afterwards, my brother stated that he would never watch the show again, because he found that scene gross. Although the show was overall mediocre, I always had great respect for them. By choosing the characters and scenes that they did, the show knew that they would lose viewers. However, they were brave enough to send a message. If other media chooses to follow in these footsteps, the stereotypes about women will slowly disappear. Media needs to become brave with their character choices, at the risk of losing viewers.