Van Jones Speaks for Millions on the Aftermath of America's 2016 Elections

"People have talked about a miracle. I'm hearing about a nightmare. It's hard to be a parent tonight for a lot of us. You tell your kids 'don't be a bully.' You tell your kids 'don't be a bigot.' You tell your kids 'do your homework and be prepared.'

And then you have this outcome. And you have people putting children to bed tonight and they're afraid of breakfast. They're afraid of 'how do I explain this to my children?' I have families of immigrants who are terrified tonight. This was many things... We've talked everything but race tonight. This was a white lash against a changing country. A white lash against a black president, in part. And that's where the pain comes."

Yesterday I was afraid that the election would be close, but mostly optimistic that America consisted mostly of people like Van Jones. Decent, sane, intelligent people who don't buy into conspiracy theories, who can distinguish between truth and lies, who don't blame politicians for their own personal challenges, who can recognize the dangers of media-driven hyperbole and innuendo, who care deeply about inequality, racism, sexual abuse, bigotry in all its disgusting manifestations and not just when it hits the headlines.

That would be because most Americans I know are like that. I was so sure that the land of the free and the home of the brave still described the main part of the country.

Today I have to live with the truth. And worse, the reality that some of the people I called friends voted directly for bigotry. Or took great pride in their independence of mind and voted Gary Johnson. Who siphoned off Hillary Clinton's winning edge in Florida, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and handed the Presidency to Trump. Recklessly visiting disaster on millions, in America and round the world, adding terrifying weight to a growing body of white supremacists, enabling men who think it's okay to abuse those with disabilities, anybody who isn't white, women; empowering businessmen who think it's okay to cheat and steal and stiff your workers; disabling the middle class, giving renewed vigor to the NRA, the military industrial complex and a GOP committed to trickle-up economics, where the poor feed the wealthy.

My heart breaks for Hillary Clinton and her family. And for President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama - great Gods, what a terrible thing for them. And for Joe Biden, and Tim Kaine, and all the Democrat groups and politicians who have worked so hard to uphold values, not just during the Hillary Clinton campaign, but for their whole careers and especially during Barack Obama's presidency, fighting against an intractable Republican Party. For the great minds and great journalists who had the courage to call Trump for what he is.

My heart breaks for every wonderful, courageous Democrat who poured their life into the campaign and who took the trouble to vote and who just got bludgeoned; whose uphill battle against slavish ignorance, prejudice, discrimination, injustice, racism, sexism, inequality, a tilted Supreme Court just became a cliff-face.

I had to ask the question that millions are asking: is America still the land of the free and the home of the brave? 

The answer is an unqualified yes, of course it still is and it always will be. The free and the brave are still in the majority - Hillary Clinton won the popular vote - but they are a threatened group now, so much so that they're almost a minority. One thing we all know about American minorities: they fight through unimaginable obstacles and they never give up. 

US Crossroads: Land of the Free, Home of the Brave? Or land of the Paranoid Bigot?

Paranoia about and cruelty towards immigrants among a certain sector of the US is nothing new. Fred Packer drew the above cartoon in 1939.

On May 13 of that year, the SS St. Louis had sailed from Hamburg for Havana. There were over 900 passengers, most of whom were fleeing the Third Reich. Many were women and children. They had applied for US visas and were planning to stay in Cuba until the visas were granted. They left Hamburg believing they were on a vacation cruise to freedom. Can you imagine the relief, the celebration? What must it have felt like for parents with young children?

They were planning to stay in Cuba until their US visas came through. They were denied entry at Havana and the US visas were never granted. Allegedly a letter they sent to US President Roosevelt begging for refuge was ignored.

The ship hovered off the coast of Florida but eventually had to make its way back. There were protests and many attempts made to save the passengers from the worst fate imaginable. A few passengers got into Cuba and some into safe European countries and the UK. But many were sent back, and of course ended up in concentration camps. Imagine being a parent trying to explain that to your child.

The land of the free, the home of the brave? There's nothing free about rationalizing your fear and cruelty. And there's nothing brave about promoting the kind of hatred and bigotry that supports your rationalization.

America is the land where some people are free and many are tremendously brave. It's not the whole picture, though. It never was. The outcome of this Presidential race will show whether it's the bigger picture or not. It's a time where the free and the brave do as much as they can to preserve decency and humanity, and cling like hell to hope that they're in the majority. #ImWithHer.

Join me on Twitter @JenniferJS_ 

How to be Successful as a Screenwriter

When you’re learning to write a screenplay, or you’re writing your first or your whatever, and you have no experience or contacts in the movie world but you’re passionate about your work and you have a powerful dream, you’re pretty vulnerable. You tend to believe anything anybody tells you so long as they do it convincingly.

You’re easy pickings for self-styled authorities who earn a grand living with books or lectures or seminars on how to write the perfect screenplay, how to avoid the mistakes that amateurs make. Who tell you that unless you write the perfect screenplay you won’t be able to sell it. And they of course know how to identify that perfection and formularize it. They make it sound so cut and dried.

You think – right! All I have to do is do what they tell me and I’ll be able to write the perfect screenplay and I’ll be made. QED, Quite Easily Done, as a mad Maths teacher once told me with a scary giggle. Better get onto that Oscar speech.

The vulnerability of scriptwriters not confident in their own judgment, humble enough and willing to learn and desperate to succeed has made for a giant sector within the movie industry. There’s everything right and nothing wrong with learning from pros, but it’s the gurus who believe they have plumbed the depths of the success formula and who seamlessly forge a connection between what they can teach you at a goodly price – or simply for their ego trip - and you being able to sell your screenplay that gets my goat.

If they’ve so got their finger on the success pulse, why are so many terrible scripts made into films? Here’s the reality: there’s no formula to success in selling your screenplay.

Take this scenario: you write a screenplay, you hand it to an editor. They tell you to throw it in the dumpster, there’s nothing of any value in it. You follow their advice. Well that’s the end of that, isn’t it? The next day you retrieve it and show it to another editor. They think it has merit but you need to change the sex of your protagonist. You don’t want to, so you show it to another editor, who says the sex of the protagonist is fine, but you need to change the storyline and they tell you how.

If you were to follow their advice you’d of course be ghostwriting their screenplay. But you follow it anyway, because you’re a novice and they know what they’re talking about. Or that’s what you believe. Eventually you write something that pleases this editor. You don’t feel as passionately about it as you did your original story. But you get to show it to a producer. Who doesn’t like it, says the story doesn’t feel authentic. You take a risk and say actually it’s not. The producer asks what you mean. You tell them, you originally wrote a different storyline altogether. The producer says what was it? You tell them. They like it.

As it happens, this is a true story. The writer was a South African, the producer from New York. The writer had attended a very prescriptive course and was told unless he changed his screenplay completely he didn’t have a chance in hell of it ever being read by a producer. He’d be lucky if it ever made it to the pile of reading matter in any producer’s toilet.

You can’t formularize why somebody succeeds and somebody doesn’t. You can read screenplays that you think are brilliant – and that probably somebody else thinks are dreadful – and learn what you can from them. You can study the craft, and structure that goes back to Greek plays. You can study people in depth so that your work reflects your insight. But, some people want that in films, some people don’t get it and don’t care. Or you can not understand people at all, and write something childish and shallow. Some will love it, some will hate it. You can please some but you can’t please all, no matter what you do.

Robert de Niro said once about auditioning that it’s pointless trying to impress the director. The best you can do is forget about impressing anybody, but just do the best you can. Be as authentically you as possible, because that’s where your greatest strength lies. I thought it was pretty good advice for any kind of creative enterprise.

Once you’ve done your best with a screenplay, you can show what you’ve written to anybody you want, but how do you know that any suggestions they make will make your work better or more marketable? You don’t. The impact of art in any form is totally subjective; there is no ultimate good or bad, especially with movies. Personally, I think it makes sense to do the best you can, then set about doing the best you can to sell it to a producer. If one says yes, I’ll buy it and here’s the money but I want you to change something, then if you want the money you can say fine, I’ll change it, when the money’s in my bank account.

Otherwise, you’re kind of pissing into the wind by changing things because other people think you should. You could spend your whole life trying to ‘perfect’ one screenplay. Better to write a score of less than perfect and try and sell them, and learn by your own experience how to be more powerful in what you want to say in your writing and in pitching to producers. Whether that power actually creates success or not I can’t say, but I do know it impacts on people. It’s kind of an animal thing.

Here’s what else I know; writing a screenplay is a huge amount of work. I can’t imagine anything worse than spending my whole life writing to try and please somebody else but never pleasing myself. And imagine if I never sold anything anyway. What a total waste of a life that would be.

Humanity Getting its Ducks in a Row

When I was a child my grandmother marvelled at how when she was a child she travelled by ox wagon and now we were sending people to the moon. I wondered then how the world could change in such a way that I'd be marvelling when I was her age. If I ever reached it. It was hard to believe that I ever would, she seemed so ancient. I'm not there yet, but that marvelling time has come already for me. 

There wasn't any internet when I was a kid. Distance communication was by phone, letter or telegram. Arriving by noon train stop pick me up stop don't forget stop I love you stop.

Letters were written by hand, music was played with vinyl, radios were a piece of furniture. I spent 90% of my waking leisure hours outside. We didn't even have a TV. When it came and we finally got a set, we were only allowed to watch one evening a week. And then we could have a coke as well. Bread and milk were delivered to the door. Ice cream cost two pennies, the cost of everything stayed the same from year to year and people stayed in the same job.  

On the surface of things, it was a simple life and a good one. But heaven help you if you were a schizophrenic or depressed or a girl with a sexual appetite, or one who didn't know how to say no. There wasn't a place for you. Where you could feel valuable, that is. There was a place alright; society's garbage bin. Not that it was openly acknowledged. Racism, slavery, abuse of women and children were rampant, but nobody spoke about it. The have-nots were hidden from the pleasant surface of society's fabric. Ah, the good old days.

Now nobody writes anything by hand, radios are either streamed or ugly little boomboxy things. Vinyl isn't dead but mostly it's music by download, books by download. TV on your laptop. 

Conversation happens by tweet or text. Impersonal, no risk, no real connection. Fast, though. Ice cream costs anything from R5 to R20 and the price of everything rises every day. Employees are nomads scrabbling to find work in broken economies. The world is at war; so much of mankind a well-oiled killing machine. Polar ice-caps are melting whilst people still debate if humans are destroying the environment. Women get stoned to death for wearing the wrong clothes and wanting to be educated. Child pornography and the slave trade still flourish around the world. 

Sure we've sent men to the moon and found cures for all sorts of diseases but 'experts' can't explain the outbreak of violence amongst seemingly peaceful communities. And we still don't have anywhere close to an understanding of schizophrenia and depression. Children and adults commit suicide and everybody says 'I had no idea they were depressed'. 

Very few say 'if I'd been a better friend, a better parent, a better sibling, I would have noticed because nobody gets to that final moment of despair without there being plenty of signposts along the way.' 

Has the human race really progressed much since my grandmother was a child? The way it expresses itself has changed, that’s obvious. But the percentages of different types of people are probably still the same. What also hasn’t changed is the human capacity to find joy and pleasure within, no matter what’s going on in your life. That’s a good thing. That’s a remarkable thing. 

And we've identified concepts like entitlement and self esteem. We know - or some of us do - that if those two aspects are fragmented it doesn't matter how talented a person is, they'll never make any progress. If they don't get help. And help is available. We know that we can learn to say no. That we're allowed to pay attention to what we need. That what others think of us matters a whole lot less than what we think of ourselves. That if we want others to treat us with respect we have to treat ourselves with respect. We know a lot more. We haven't necessarily learned how to put it into practise, but that will come.

An even bigger difference between when I was a child and now is that the underbelly has been exposed, that's clear. We haven't been able to keep that lovely smooth surface unruffled by the reality of society's inequalities and injustices. It’s uncomfortable to see but uncomfortable isn't necessarily all bad.

The good thing about it is that the have-nots have finally found their voice. And that makes me marvel as much as my grandmother did. Just learning to get our ducks in a row.

Cyber Criminals Caught and a Young Boy Gets His Mother out of Jail

Sometimes it doesn’t seem as if the human race has much to recommend it. From a certain perspective, it's a dirty, anarchistic world. Countries are trillions in debt but they manage to borrow more money. Politicians lie and cheat the people they're supposed to be representing. Bankers destroy economies and get rewarded for it. Individuals' lives are ruined when they can't make a couple of payments on their mortgage or credit cards. 

A pregnant woman in India gets wrongfully convicted of murder and stuck in jail for 19 years because she couldn't put together the $180 bail money. Hundreds of thousands of people languish in prison for years - some for most of their lives - without being charged. 

Another woman commits a federal crime, is prosecuted and found guilty but escapes prison, gets a new identity, lives a decent life for dozens of years until she's caught but she gets off with a good lawyer. Yet another woman commits a lesser crime but can't afford a clever lawyer and her life is over. It's possible that race has something to do with it, because although on the surface it's coincidence that the one who gets to live the rest of her life as a free woman is white and the other one is black, it's no coincidence that most of the wealth, resources and opportunity have historically been available to whites and not to blacks in that country.

People are tried, condemned and executed on insufficient grounds unless you count the grounds of some DA or police department needing to bump up stats. Corporations that produce arms control politicians who create wars out of nothing and get away with it. 

Upstanding members of a community and various business men who wear suits and who everybody respects get to screw around with a woman's fledgling business, sexually harass her, contribute to the destruction of that business and get away scot free while she picks herself out of the gutter, stumbles and falls, stumbles and falls. This time it's not about race because they're all white. Might be about gender, though. Partly it's about people who don't give a damn but mostly it's just about what they know they can do and what she doesn't know she's allowed to do.

It's not hard to get totally bitter and twisted about the way things are. Yet in the face of such overwhelming evidence that the human race has nothing recommend it, some of us - maybe even most of us - still believe that good conquers evil; that everybody has something within them that nobody can touch or assail. That the darkest hours actually contain the light.

That it's possible to climb out of the gutter even when you don't know how and things look hopeless for you. It's possible to retrieve your life no matter how much anybody's screwed you around, no matter how much the odds seem - and are - stacked against you. 

We believe it's possible to turn your life around when it seems too late, that help is always at hand in reality; that we just have to learn how to see it. Because no matter how bad things look and are in the world people are fighting back. And conquering. Bankers are investigated eventually as are banks for illegal home repossessions. In a world that’s tailor made for the worst kind of criminals, when profits from child pornography and crime to the tune of $6 billion are laundered through shadowy cyber organizations they actually get caught. 

Corrupt systems and rulers fall apart. When you have lousy entitlement and self esteem you can get help and rebuild until you're very clear about what people can and can't do in your presence and to you. 

And in a country with so much poverty it's blinding to the soul, a young boy, Vijai Kumari, who was born in prison and spent his life being shunted around juvenile homes because his mother is unjustly and unnecessarily in prison, grows up straight somehow. Somehow learns a skill and gets a job. Miraculously saves and saves until he has the money to pay for a lawyer to get his mother released. And he succeeds.

Gay Marriage, Racism, Giant Corporate Interest – the Fight Against Injustice

Statistics on gays and lesbians in the US form a very small percentage of the total population. Yet look what they achieve, in spite of the huge and inhuman resistance to them. Treated like animals, spurned by society, laughed at, mocked, hated. Gay politicians fight courageously and are shot for it, like Harvey Milk. That doesn’t stop others from taking up the cause. Brave people. Determined people.

What about African Americans? How hard did they have to fight against crippled minds and psychopathic power?  How many sacrifices did they make, never knowing whether they could succeed or not? How many women and children were raped, never receiving justice, just more of the same? But they didn’t give up.

And now, the right for gays and lesbians to marry is gaining momentum. They will succeed. And although the conservative, intolerant white mentality that supported the KKK and slavery lingers on, sometimes in the most alarming places, despite the racism that underpins all conservative politics in the US, Barack Obama is a twice-elected president.

It only happened because enough people said “it’s enough” while they were demoralized and destitute of spirit; excluded from mainstream society and the benefits that those who are included take for granted. The hardest fight of all. People say it’s easiest to fight when you’ve got nothing to lose. That’s because they’ve never been there. When all you can hold onto is something so minimal it’s invisible to others it’s more precious to you than anything else in the world. To fight knowing you may have to give that up isn’t easy. It crucifies you. But they did it.

How many people, I wonder, have been hurt by the banking crisis? How many lives have been destroyed by the hold giant corporations have on politics? How many people maimed, tortured, killed, because of the power of the military industrial complex?

How many people think banks and bankers should be punished for their crimes and forced to pay where it hurts? I'm sure it's a greater percentage than that of any minority that has fought for its rights and succeeded. Yet Americans seem to remain powerless. Why? Because they don't care enough to actually band together as one and fight and never give up? Because hardliner conservatives continue to be voted into Congress? Because they all use the banks and corporations that are busy destroying them?

It's not just the US, it's western society. Banks and big corporations control the world. But they’re run by people. There are a lot more of us than there are of them. It's time for a world revolution of a completely different sort. No guns, no violence. Just intelligence (as in thinking for ourselves and not letting ourselves be conned by politicians) and persistence. 

Maybe it’s already begun. At the beginning of the fight for gays and lesbians; in the days of slavery and the KKK, it probably looked as though nobody was fighting. But they were. It was just the beginning. It always starts as something internal. That’s where we are with the control that banks and giant corporate interest has over most of us. We're angry, we know it's happening. Pockets of active resistance flare up. We haven't banded together yet but our revolution will gain momentum. Revolutions always do.