Darts and Laurels: Aug. 7, 2019

Move out day is here. The cardboard boxes clutter your room in a claustrophobic way. You start to see the appeal in minimalism as you cram the umpteenth box with the umpteenth useless piece of junk. The floors are bare. The walls lack personality. It is time to say goodbye to your favorite corner of the apartment where all the spiders hang out. You take one of the Comfort Color T-shirts that now serves you no use and cry into it. After five minutes of bawling your eyes out, you lift your head and look into the shirt. You don’t remember what function you got it from, but the tear stains spell something out...

Darts and Laurels

The Boy Scouts of America has kept a list of known predatory behavior and pedophilia by scoutmasters since 1944. The BSA called the list “ineligible volunteer files,” but it was popularly called “perversion files.” In April, news broke about the list, which revealed more than 7,800 scout leaders were suspected of sexually abusing boys since 1940, and 12,000 survivors were identified. According to the Skimm, this is more than six times the number the BSA told the court in 2012. New allegations from 800 men across the country have come forward with a group of lawyers representing them called “Abused in Scouting.” According to NPR, one of the men filed a suit in Philadelphia on Monday. A laurel goes to the “Abused in Scouting” lawyers who came together to take action against this cover up. 

Award-winning novelist and essayist Toni Morrison died Tuesday. She was 88. Morrison is known for writing about the black experience and identity in America. A laurel goes to her and her memory. In 1993, she became the first African American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. According to The New York Times, her prose mirrored that of the black oral tradition, and “are dreamlike and nonlinear, spooling backward and forward in time as though characters bring the entire weight of history to bear on their every act.” If you want to become a better writer, read her books. If you want to become a better person, read her books. 

Saturday, American professional skateboarder Mitchie Brusco became the first person to ever land a 1260 at the X Games. A laurel goes out to the 22-year-old for his three-and-a-half revolutions in the Big Air competition and landing in the record books. 

North Carolina became the first state in the South to ban state funding for conversion therapy for minors on Friday. A laurel goes to this initiative as it is a step in the right direction to stop this ineffective, manipulative practice. Gov. Roy Cooper signed the executive order. After he signed the order, Cooper tweeted, “Conversion therapy has been shown to pose serious health risks, and we should be protecting all of our children, including those who identify as LGBTQ, instead of subjecting them to a dangerous practice."

The recent internet trend of texting your “number neighbor,” the phone number one off from yours, has us giving a dart to our respective phone number neighbors. Why haven’t you texted? All it takes is adding or subtracting 1 from the last digit of your phone number, and voila: you could be talking to one of us. What gives? We want to post our funny, totally not staged text message conversation on the interweb to get an obscene amount of shares. Come on number neighbor, it's just one digit! Please, send the text. 

And the final laurel of this semester goes to you, the reader. Yeah, we didn’t want to get emotional or meta either, but some things must be done. If you’ve been with us all along, thank you. If it is your first time reading, thank you. Without you, we’d be screaming into a void. So thanks for reading.