This World and Me

Two young children are playing. "Hey Jack! I found a stick! Check it out." "Cool! Let's play Harry Potter with it! Jacob, pretend the stick is a wand." "Okay! Avada Kedavra! " At this point, Jacob, who has the stick, sharply spins and thrusts it as if he were casting a spell. However, he ends up forcefully jabbing Jack in the face with the stick. "Ow! Hey! That hurt! I'm gonna tell the teacher you hit me!" "No, don't! I'm sorry! I didn't mean to hit you!" Jacob's right. He didn't mean to hit Jack. It happened accidentally. However, this doesn't change the fact that he hurt Jack. The question is: does it matter if Jacob meant for it to happen? Should the teacher punish Jacob, or should Jack forgive Jacob and forget the incident ever happened? Does  intention  matter? We see similar questions in far less humorous circumstances. Murder, in the simplest terms, is the intentional killing of a human b...

The overwhelming majority of my life thus far has been consumed by the primary and secondary education systems of the United States. Being so close to the end of high school, I often find it sobering to pause and look back on the whole journey. Nostalgic at times, longwinded at others, there isn't a singular direction I'm aiming for with these posts. When you get to the end, you might wonder what the point of the post was. When writing to this blog, I usually start with a main idea then let the post write itself. The idea for these posts is pure reflection. At the forefront, they're a collection of memories—kind of like a memoir. They're about me, and what makes me who I am. They're mostly for  me too. Perhaps years down the line, I'll look back at these posts and chuckle nostalgically at them. I'll call them School .

Today, outside Secretary of State Jon Husted's office, we protested . We demonstrated that seventeen-year-olds do not live up to their stereotype of being apathetic and uninformed. We demonstrated that the most fundamental right of democracy—the right to vote—could not be denied to us on a technicality.  Ohio law is clear : if a person is or will be eighteen years of age on the day of the next general election, then they are entitled  to cast a ballot at the primary election, provided they are affiliated with the political party whose primary election they desire to vote in. All citizens must have an equal say in the nomination of candidates just as much as the election of candidates, and the ultimate goal of the presidential primary is  to decide the nomination of candidates. And today, the Court agreed. At about 4:30 pm on Friday, March 11, 2016, Judge Richard Frye of the Court of Common Pleas for Franklin County, Ohio, made a decision in the case of  Rachel...

RSVP to our Facebook event. Hello friends. You are invited to participate in this opportunity to take direct action in support of a cause. This is a unique experience – please carefully consider the issues and help us protect our right to have a say in presidential nominations. In Ohio, it is legal for seventeen-year-olds to cast ballots in primary elections, provided they will be eighteen on the day of the next general election. This entitlement is stated in the Ohio Revised Code as section 3503.011, titled “Qualifications of electors for primary elections” : At a primary election every qualified elector who is or will be on the day of the next general election eighteen or more years of age, and who is a member of or is affiliated with the political party whose primary election ballot he desires to vote, shall be entitled to vote such ballot at the primary election. (ORC 3503.011) This law, enacted in 1981, has led young Ohioans to believe that they were entitled to a full ballot...

It started when I was 11. I was a fifth grader, or—as I had put it—a “senior” in elementary school. High school and college felt eons away, and middle school seemed merely an opportunity for renewed excitement. All of us were acutely aware that in middle school, there would be no recess, so we savored each day on the playground—each minute, each second. In the midst of this bustling playfulness, however, fear was lurking—a pervasive, subtle horror that guided the decision-making of nearly all children: the fear of being left out. It was amid this atmosphere when I started fencing. I suppose my path to fencing really started, then, before I was born. My parents are Chinese; they immigrated to the United States around four years before they had me. I often attempt to imagine what it might have been like for them. Everything that they knew—their people, their culture, their society, their language—all of it was gone. Truly, they must have felt alone, or perhaps left out. Yet somehow—an...