Feature Writing

Trump proposes to remove Loan and Financial Aid options for College Students and plans to cut out jobs for many professors, teachers, and faculty and staff at state universities as well.

As such, my story might include quotes or statements from teachers or students who face threats as it relates to their academic endeavors, and if they have any plans or actions that they intend to take in order to minimize any potential injuries that Trump’s policies may have for their lives.

Last but not least it may be worth it to put out statements or quotes from any teachers or students who believe that there will be improvements in their academic universe after Trump’s election as well.

So that way thoughts or discussions from both sides may apply (but only if it is possible for me to secure the necessary sources for all sides of this issue)

I will interview Mandeep Singh from Richmond Hill about his experiences growing up.

-It is difficult to interview the older generation because they feel uncomfortable talking about and their attitude is to accept discrimination as a part of life.

News peg: 5-time marathon runner was harassed during the NY marathon this month.

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I want to write about ongoing discrimination of Sikhs due to people confusing them with Muslims in the U.S. and their long history of being discriminated against (i.e. genocide in 1984 and even famous figures like Gandhi unwillingness to accept them) and how it led up to present day. I would talk about Sikhs and their unique identity, independent from the Islamic States.

There are many people I can interview in the Sikh Temples as everyone has had history of discrimination in the U.S. post-9/11.

Nassau Coliseum has been Long Island’s home arena since 1972. A lot of New Yorkers have described the venue as a dump and with the arrival of the Barclay Center in Brooklyn and Madison Square Garden’s billion dollar transformation debuting in 2013, many questioned if this would be the end of the Nassau Coliseum. The New York Islanders relocating from Long Island to play hockey in Brooklyn has been the driving downhill force of the coliseum. Luckily for Long Islanders, it recently underwent a long overdue $130 million renovation and will open with Billy Joel followed by the Harlem Globetrotters in April of 2017.

I hope to interview someone involved in the renovation. I also have contact with people that work for Madison Square Garden and Barclay Center and look to see how they feel about the venues reemergence. Billy Joel does perform at the Garden for his 80th show on November 21st and I will be around the arena to ask some of his staff what to look forward to when they head to Billy Joel’s home arena in April. Lastly, I’ll interview people from my hometown in Long Island to see how they feel about the recent transformation.

 

Casey Marie Mollón

Feature Writing

Assignment 3: Op-Ed

11.14.16

 

1641. Massachusetts is the first British Colony to legalize slavery.

1773. One hundred and thirty-two years later, to no prevail, these slaves in Massachusetts petition the government for their freedom.

1957. The first nine black students enroll in a formerly all-white school in Arkansas, three years after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregated public schools unconstitutional.

2008. The first African American President, Barack Obama, is elected into the White House. Keep in mind this is merely 51 years after the first black student set foot into a public school in the United States.

It appears as though we, as a nation, have progressed leagues, right? Wrong. Let’s set our calendars back to a time when black children were afraid to walk the streets, when Muslim women were too scared to wear their hijab in public (in the US, was this ever a time?), when Mexican people were called rapists and drug smugglers and when women were thought of as less than. When was this deplorable period of history? It’s actually our present. Wait, did I say present or president? Does it matter? This is 2016.

Less than one week ago, we found out that our President-elect is Donald J. Trump. This week was quickly filled with “incidents,” let’s call them. I cautiously decide on the term, “incidents” because some have been comments, some have been acts of animosity, some have crossed the line into bullying and then there are those that have been downright hate crimes. Whether or not President-elect Donald J. Trump intended for his cult of followers to use his name and presence as a platform on which to express their racism, misogyny, bigotry, homophobia and blatant intolerance for human variety is irrelevant; they are already doing so.

On November 10^th, two days after the election, a gay gentleman was riding the 6 train downtown and as three adolescent white boys got off the train, they called the gay man a “faggot” hidden in a sentence chock full of expletives. The gay man, Ray, 43, was too afraid to provide his last name, when he expressed his fear for not only himself, but for the entire LGBT community in this country.

“Is it the first time I’ve been called a faggot? No. Will it be the last? Probably not. That doesn’t scare me. What scares me is is that we were moving in one direction and making such progress and two days ago we took a thousand steps backwards,” Ray said in a short interview on the train.

On a larger scale, we are seeing hate being spread throughout college campuses as well. Last week there were swastikas drawn on dorm doors in The New School’s Kerrey Hall. The Jewish students who live in the dorms were left shaken Fanny Wandel, a 23-year-old Parsons, New School student, said. Wandel is a photography student who selected to join The New School community because she said the school’s liberal views and open mind aligned with hers.

“Honestly, I’m realizing more and more this week what a liberal bubble I’ve lived in being in NYC since I was a kid,” Wandel said in an interview about the swastika drawings in Kerrey Hall. “I mean in one of my classes, the professor had us all go around and tell everyone the pronoun by which we’d like to be referred,” she said of the open minded nature of the school. “I’m appalled and I feel horrible for the people who walked home to that racist crap this week.”

The University of Pennsylvania is just another university where racist acts of hate have been expressed. Black freshman students were added to a group called, “N—– Lynchers,” in which the white students suggested daily lynchings and created specific “lynching” events that the black students were invited to.

“This is only day three and I am terrified for what will happen after the inauguration,” Brianna Grant, 19-year-old U Penn student, said in an interview about the horrific events at her school. “I don’t know how to live on a campus, nonetheless a country like this. I feel helpless and afraid.”

There are people who are terrified to walk around and believe that they belong in this country with a man like our President Elect, Trump, running it. How is that our 33^rd President of the United States, elected in 1945, Harry S. Truman believed in, “[an] America built on courage, on imagination and an unbeatable determination to do the job at hand,” and yet our current, 2016 President Elect is inspiring hate and animosity among the young people who are the future of this country?

“People say it’ll be okay but I really have trouble believing that as a Black woman with relatives and friends of various marginalized identities that we will all be okay,” Grant said.

If you’re in shock by such atrocity stemming from young people, how about a high school in Northern California? A male student at Shasta High School in Redding, California handed out fake deportation letters to his minority classmates one day after Trump was elected into the White House.

Sophia Love, 22-year-old former Shasta High School student, said she is disgusted by the supposed cruel joke. She admitted that there was no way to be 100% certain that the election and this male student’s behavior were directly and undoubtedly related, “it would be an extremely difficult case to argue against the direct relationship. I just don’t think there is any way to argue against it,” Love said in an interview about her former school.

On the flip side, John Papachristou, 75-year-old conservative New Yorker, said that he is not 100% convinced of the relationship among the increased hate crimes and Trump’s election. “I’m not saying it’s not extremely compelling and I would even say that I do believe the fake deportation letters are absolutely related, but I think people are also using this election as cause to write about all of the bad things people have been doing every day anyway,” Papachristou said.

1641. Massachusetts is the first British Colony to legalize slavery.

2016. Black University of Pennsylvania students get invited to a “Lynching” group on social media.

This is our present. And our President.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For my article I would like to interview several different New Yorkers, who have all different types of jobs and daily experiences to see how stressful their days are, what types of stress are they under, how they cope with the stress, and how they feel their mental health is doing from all of this. I would like the main idea of the article to show how the grass may not be greener on the other side. Sometimes we think if we had a different job our lives would be so much easier but that may not actually be the truth.

Interviews:

1. Student – Sabrina Mendizabal
2. Bartender – David Winters
3. Investment banker- Ben Goodkind
4. Personal trainer – Ariel Comeau
5. Musician- Nathan Finochio
6. Actress- Hannah Hasseloy
7. Homeless person

• CNNMoney ranked the most stressed out cities and named New York City the number 1
• The brains of people living in cities operate differently from those in rural areas, according to a brain-scanning study. Scientists found that two regions, involved in the regulation of emotion and anxiety, become overactive in city-dwellers when they are stressed and argue that the differences could account for the increased rates of mental health problems seen in urban areas.
  • (https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/jun/22/city-living-afffects-brain)

 

For this magazine feature article, I would like to write about the profession of Journalism. I would mainly like to focus on investigative journalism, where many journalists have put their lives at risk. There are many ways in which journalists are threatened by powerful people to manipulate the information they aim to publish. In other countries such as Mexico, Venezuela, Cuba and Afghanistan, things are more critical in the media and journalism is no longer serving the citizens as it should be. Many journalists have been murdered and threatened, others have been tortured and kidnapped because they have published information that exposed powerful people including the government. In this article I would like to focus in countries such as the ones mentioned above where freedom of press has disappeared and where crimes against journalists go unpunished. I hope to speak to some journalist who can speak about their personal experiences.

The rise of building developments have redefined the image of several neighborhoods throughout all five boroughs. Recently, Queens has been impacted by the rise in building developments. A trip on the 7 train alone would reveal the number of buildings rising in Long Island City where factories and icons such as 5 Pointz used to stand. According to 6sqft, there are 30 building in development in Long Island City alone. Thus, the image of Queens is undergoing change.

However, this transformation is concerning to residents who wish to preserve their community’s look. Last week, Community Board 2 in Sunnyside voted on building a new middle school at the location of a vacant building built in the 1920s. Many argued that the building had historical significance due to it’s architecture, which fit in with the rest of the community. Overall, the community overwhelmingly voted on preserving the building or building a structure similar to the image of Sunnyside Gardens. The School Construction Authority, which had presented the project, stated many communities often requested the preservation of buildings or incorporating the original design into projects in order to keep the image of the neighborhood.

Therefore, I would like to look into how preservation groups are working to conserve their neighborhood’s architectural image as building developments move towards neighborhoods in Queens. In particular, I plan to interview a member of the Sunnyside Gardens Preservation Alliance, the Greater Astoria Historical Alliance, and the Long Island City Cultural Alliance. In addition, I plan to interview community members to learn whether they welcome the image change or prefer maintaining it.

After a nation wide prisoner strike many people were stunned at the conditions of the prisoners and the corporations that were involved. This interest continued with the release of the Netflix documentary The 13th. It documents american prison populations by decade and presidential administrations, and the impact the thirteenth amendment had on prison labor.

I would like to do my long form story on the policies that allow prisoners to do free work for corporations. I would like to find out how the government benefits from this arrangement as well if anything has been proposed to provide rights for inmates.

 

Venezuela’s Emergency 

 

Venezuela was once one of the most prosperous nation due to its valuable natural resource: oil but, it is now struggling from a myriad of issues. It has one of the world’s highest violent crime rates, and is suffering of tremendous poverty due to inflation. The poor decisions taken by ex- president, Hugo Chavez are having a domino effect in Venezuela and things are only getting worse. Coming from a humble background of farmers, Chavez made many promises to the people of Venezuela to bring equality to their nation. However, his strategies and decisions have only done the opposite for the country and its people.

With Chavez’s death in March 2013, Nicolas Maduro became the new president and terror grew more amongst the people. Maduro’s background in politics has proven to be very limited, his education is also limited to only a few years of high school. Venezuela has a scarce amount of resources that has lead many people to buy basic necessities such as food and medicine from the black market, which is considered to be illegal by the government. If it was not for the private food and beer company, Empresas Polar, obtaining food would be almost impossible and things would be more critical. People wait in line the entire day in hopes to buy basic things, and even waiting does not guarantee they will find anything in stock.

President Maduro and those working under his power are aware of the situation that is affecting the entire nation of Venezuela and nothing is being done to improve the situation. Records and statistics of the reality are being hidden and manipulated by the government. Disease outbreaks are increasing everyday. In 1961, Venezuela was the first country to be declared free of Malaria. Today, it has over 100, 000 cases per year, amongst many cases of malnutrition, diphtheria and plagues. The people of Venezuela have the right to have access to these records, and the government has the duty to provide them.

Not only is the government hiding these records, but they are also doing anything in their power to make sure they stay hidden. There are only very few independent dailies in Venezuela because the government has put many roadblocks that has lead many to end business. It is more than evident that the government has taken away many rights from the people of Venezuela and it is not doing its job to serve the people. It has been almost two decades of a violation of rights, poor leadership that had lead to extreme poverty, very limited medical assistance, and an immense increase in violence.

Chavez declined international help multiple times and has strictly kept Cuba with similar political socialist ideas, as a great ally. However, this alliance was not a very strategic one since he provided oil for this nation for a very low price and in return, Cuba sent doctors to improve Venezuela’s health care system. The United States offered to help Venezuela from turning into a complete political and social disaster, however, all forms of help were declined by Chavez and he even expressed great dislike against American referring to it as “an assassin” and “a violent invader”. As much as international help was declined, many Venezuelans are fleeing the country and coming to the the United States. Venezuela must accept international help in order to save its nation and its people. The current strategies have proven to only be failing the country, and if intervention does not occur, it will only keep going downhill. Not only is international intervention needed to stop this but, to rebuild this nation who has proven to be capable of great success.

According to Pew Research Center, the population of Venezuelans in the United States has quadrupled in the last two decades.

“I graduated as an engineer in Venezuela, but when Chavez came into power, having a college education even from the best Universities was useless,” Marcos Diaz, 45 says. “We gave up everything we had so I can come to New York and try to get my family out of that misery they are living in.”

Diaz migrated to the United States a year ago, and experienced first hand Venezuela’s tremendous collapse. He also believes that Venezuela has an emergency and Maduro needs to go. Diaz as well as most of Venezuela hope to elect a new president through the recall referendum which requires more than the amount Maduro received to be elected president in 2013.

“One thing is to hear about it in the news, and the other is to actually see people dying of starvation or lack of medical assistance. Or waking up at 5 a.m. to be the first in line so you can get food, only to get robbed by the criminals who took the wrong path trying to survive. I work hard everyday because I need to get my family out of Venezuela but, it gets harder every time I call and all your children tell you is how hungry and afraid of their country they are,” Diaz says as he quickly wipes a tear falling down his eye.

My dream publication to write for would be Mother Jones. I learned about them through their writer, Shane Bauer, doing an interview for his undercover reporting from a private prison. They do investigating reporting sometimes undercover and for long periods of time. Bauer went undercover as a corrections officer for four months in a private prison. He witnessed extreme violence and neglect during this time in order to tell the story of an otherwise cut off population. Their audience has to be a very intentional demographic of people. The magazine has a diverse range of topics but I’m not sure how many people read them.