The Paw Print

A news publication created by Baruch's College Now high school journalism class

Commentary

Summer Heat

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With the summer heat killing everyone, all you want to do is cool off in a pool and stay there all day. Those who can’t go to the pool, go to the nearest fire hydrant that is open. Walking past seeing the kids play and get soaked looks refreshing.

The only problem is the people cooling themselves don’t know that they are wasting water that could be used to put out a fire. If a house is on fire the day after a fire hydrant was open pouring thousands of gallons of water out, when the firefighters come and open the fire hydrants, the possibility of little water coming out is high. Opening a fire hydrant without asking a firefighter is illegal and is called uncapping. People who do this could receive a fine of $1,000 or 30 days in jail.

Uncapping fire hydrants, started with the “Great Heat Wave of 1896,” which lasted 10 days, according to 6sqft. The hydrants were opened to cool down the streets and help wash away the garbage piling up. Kids enjoyed playing and people continued uncapping fire hydrants more often, but later on many complained that water was being wasted.. After this uncapping was no longer legal throughout the twentieth century. In the late 1950s, six city agencies met up to come up with a solution to uncapping fire hydrants illegally. They agreed to distribute free spray caps which released only 25 to 28 gallons per minute versus as much as 1700 gallons per minute without the cap. This is better for the community as it saves water in case there is ever an emergency.

The uncapping of fire hydrants is tolerated by the city when temperatures climb above 90 degrees, because not all pools can take everyone. It benefits people because hydrants are much closer to their house and they don’t have to wait in line. During the heatwave in NYC that lasted for three days July 19-21 allowed the uncapping of fire hydrants. The temperature was above 95 degrees, but it felt like 107 according to a New York Times article.

Uncapping mostly happens in large neighborhoods with a higher percentage of people living on lower incomes. Hell’s Kitchen, the Lower East Side, the SouthSide of Williamsburg, Bushwick, BedStuy, Jackson Heights, and Woodhaven are among the city’s uncapping hotspots according to 6sqft.

In Corona, Queens five fire hydrants were opened all day on July 20. Kids were playing, getting all soaked and the parents were talking to their neighbors. “The kids are having fun and running around, it’s good, especially with this type of weather,” said a mom who was sitting outside her building while her two kids were enjoying themselves with the water. Another mom added “It’s better than being inside with the kids on their phones and tablets all day.”

Now spray caps are not being used, the problem of overflowing water is back. Gallons of water are being released and wasted because people don’t know that if you go to a local fire station, a fireman will install or lend you a spray cap.

 

Effects of social media on young people

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Do you use social media, apps or Youtube? Life seems easier with phones in our hands where we can communicate with whoever we want and when we want. But is social media safe for young people?

With new studies and reports raising questions about mental health and vulnerabilities that affect young people, there have been a lot of worries about adolescents and social media in the past couple of years.  But are there more bad than good?

Adolescents are very curious and with phones in their hands, nothing can stop them from learning and having new experiences and learning about different aspects of life.

Young people get support by using social media, according to Andrea K.Mcdaniel, an author of an article in the ELAnews. She pointed out that some research has found that social media can be a resource for teens to find social support when they are struggling with life issues and that they can use the different online platforms to express themselves.

A poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research of teens aged 13 to 17 found that most teens value the feeling of connection with friends and family that social media provides. Social media is not just useful for passing time when they’re bored time as others might say, but is used to connect families and friends around the world.

Many risky behaviors have dropped sharply among teens. Cigarette smoking among teens is at a historic low since peaking in the mid 1990s, along with alcohol use, teen driving fatalities and teens pregnancy rates. All these changes are due to the reliance by teens on social media which keeps them occupied and out of it.

It may look as though teens are wasting a lot of their time hanging out with their new media, whether it’s texting or watching videos.”But their participation is giving them the technological skills and literacy they need to succeed in the contemporary world. They’re learning how to get along with others, how to manage a public identity, how to create a home page,” according to the New York Times.

Some people might say that social media hurts young people more than it helps. But that’s not the case at all. For example, a 2012 study conducted by psychologists at the University of California at Berkeley found that sending and receiving text messages boosted texters’ moods when they were feeling upset or lonely.

As long as it’s used in a healthy way, social media is helpful for young people and help them emotionally as well as mentally.

 

How social media isn’t social.

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“Wait, so how do you think you did on that math test? I thought it was kinda easy. I’m sure I did ok, and you?” I asked. Absolute silence…. crickets chirping.  I asked again, “How do you think you did?” After a long silence, my friend replied without looking up, “What? . . . Oh, um that was easy. I think I did fine. Sorry I wasn’t listening.”  

I sighed and turned on my own phone. It’s better to stare at a screen for the next 58 minutes than talk to a tech addict. This is but one example of the daily “interactions” I have with friends. 

Over the past year, I’ve noticed people prefer phones to friends. I see them everywhere with their eyes glued to their screens and headphones dangling around their necks. Heads down and rapid-fire typing, they send text messages and Snaps while scrolling through Instagram feeds.  

 Lately, parents and researchers noticed an alarming trend. Daily phone usage was rapidly increasing among Americans, especially teenagers. The most common use for cell-phones among teenagers is social media and the average teenager checks their phones 150 times a day, according to KPCB Internet Trends Report.

Lately, teens have become more aware of their increased cell-phone usage. They even began to admit that they are addicted to their smartphones and prefer the online world to the real world.

 According to a Pew research study, 52% of teenagers attempted have cut back on their phone usage and 57% have tried to cut back on social media usage. Unfortunately, for these teenagers, turning off their phones for an hour doesn’t lead to feeling relaxed and happy. Teens who turn off their cellphones report feeling anxious, lonely or upset when separated from their device. 

For any teenagers, including me, not being able to check social media for an hour sounds horrifying. I get bored easily and I’m afraid that I’ll miss a new and hilarious Snapchat story, since those are only visible for 24 hours and can be deleted as quickly as they are posted. 

Fortunately, there are ways you can begin decreasing your screen-time. One easy way to cut down is by leaving your phone in another room before you go to bed. The blue light from your screen won’t convince your brain it’s daytime when it is in another room 

A method I used to cut down my screen-time is turning off all notifications on my phone. When you’re not bombarded with flashing alerts telling you to reply to this email or to that Snapchat, then you will feel less pressured to check your phone every few seconds. When notifications are off, you will be forced to dedicate all of your attention to your work or current task. You won’t fall down a rabbit-hole of distractions. When you’re done, it’s perfectly ok to resume scrolling. 

Decreasing my screen-time is not easy for me. I have tried turning off notifications, but found that it makes me more eager to check my phone, since I could be missing something important and not even know it. I also still charge my phone next to my bed at night, which leads me to losing sleep from staring at my screen. 

My best trick for decreasing screen-time is to turn off my cellualar data when I am not home. If I use too much data when I am out, then I will run out of data, leaving me with no way to check the internet for two weeks until it is turned on. I’m forced to pick my head up and interact with the people I am with. I also do not want to overuse my data because I might not have any for emergencies. 

To step away from unsocial media, try turning off cellular data. It won’t be easy, but eventually you’ll see that face-to-face friends are incredibly rare and valuable, and a lot more exciting than a cold, flat screen. Real people are more fun than pixels.

 

The unjust justice system

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The problem with the justice system is that its name is inaccurate. For centuries, many innocent individuals have been locked behind the bars of prison cells for crimes they didn’t commit. American prosecutors are so fixated on solving crimes and keeping the streets safe that it is no longer relevant if those who serve time are actually guilty. Prosecutors must be held accountable. 

Recently, Netflix released a four-episode series by Ava DuVernay, When They See Us. It shares the stories of the men known as the “Central Park Five” and surrounds an event that took place in April 1989. A white female jogger, Trisha Meili, was raped in Central Park and five teenagers—Kevin Richardson, Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise—were arrested and convicted for the attack.

The five boys, who are black or Hispanic, pled not guilty. At the time, they were between the ages of 14 and 16 and there was no evidence linking them to the case. The American justice system cost each of them 7 to 12 years in prison. 

For more than a decade, the nation felt comfortable with these boys being punished. One of the boys, Korey Wise, was tried as an adult at the age of 16 and spent 12 years in various prisons, including time in solitary confinement at Rikers Island. In 2002, the man who raped Meili, Matias Reyes, confessed to the crime. The five men were exonerated.

“The system broke a lot of things that can’t be fixed,” Antron McCray, 45, said in an interview with Oprah on Netflix.

The stories of these men are not isolated or unique. According to Prison Fellowship, “Since 1989, the United States has used DNA testing to exonerate 225 innocent people after they have spent years in captivity,” which is likely only a fraction of those wrongfully convicted.

Many prosecutors in the nation focus their attention on increasing their conviction rates to create a successful image for themselves, which often leads to wrongful convictions. 

According to the Innocence Project, in April 1999, Stanley Mozee and Dennis Allen, who are both people of color, were found guilty of the murder of Reverend Jesse Borns Jr., and were sentenced to life in prison. Eventually, the case was re-investigated and “ultimately turned up substantial additional evidence proving the two men’s innocence. Much of that evidence was in the trial prosecutor’s own files, but was hidden from the defense until the district attorney’s office adopted an ‘open file’ policy years after Mozee and Allen’s trials,” the Innocence Project says. 

There was no evidence linking either man to the case. The American justice system cost each of them 15 years in prison. 

Despite policies dictating that prosecutors must reveal evidence that could help defendants, many prosecutors fail to do so, often due to racial bias or blind ambition. As a result, innocent people have their lives stolen from them while the real culprits remain free.

We live in a nation where innocent people are locked away while the guilty walk free. We live in a nation where prosecutorial misconduct takes place constantly and is ignored. We live in a nation where our biased justice system fails the people.

While it may never be fixed, it can slowly be mended. State bar organizations throughout the nation are responsible for investigating claims of wrongful conviction and disciplining prosecutors who commit misconduct. However, most misconduct is ignored.

According to Jeff Adachi and Peter Calloway from The Appeal, “One study found that in California, from 1997 to 2009, there were 707 instances where a judge found that a prosecutor committed misconduct. Only six of those—less than 1 percent—resulted in a public sanction by the state bar.” Misconduct claims must be taken seriously and investigated. The state bar organizations in the U.S. must do their job.

Lives are at stake.

Homelessness can not be ignored

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It’s summer time right now and everyone is going to the park, the beach, or out of state. When I go to the park to eat during my break, I see many homeless people sitting on the benches. When I go home on the train I see them begging for some change so they can eat or feed their children.

The number of homeless people in NYC has been gradually increasing, and not many shelters can house them, because they are full of people. To solve this, the city should create more shelters. 

According to the organization Coalition for the Homeless, homelessness in NYC has reached the highest levels since the Great Depression of the 1930s. In May 2019, there were 61,129 homeless people, including 14,674 homeless families with 21,372 homeless children sleeping each night in the New York City municipal shelter system. Many people become homeless due to evictions, job loss, domestic violence, or overcrowded housing. Homeless shelters are overcrowded and full of people, the majority of them families. 

Even though there are homeless shelters, thousands of homeless people sleep on NYC streets, in the subway system and in other public places. African-American and Latino New Yorkers make up the majority of homeless people. There have to be enough shelters for everyone to live in because the people who cannot stay in shelters that are overloaded are living on the streets. 

The problem is that some of the homeless, may have run away from their house because they don’t want to live with their parents or their parents kicked them out. 

Most of the homeless people have mental health problems and they need to get help, but there is no one to help them because they live in the streets and no one pays attention to them. Many homeless people don’t know how to deal with their problems and turn to alcohol and drugs, and become addicted to it. 

I personally do not know anyone who has been homeless, but my mom has heard that a family friend is living on the streets because he has alcohol problems. The family is trying to look for him so they could help him, but can’t find him. It broke my mom’s heart hearing about this and that night she prayed, hoping the man was safe wherever he was.

The number of shelters needs to increase. According to a 2015 assessment by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 564,708 people were homeless on a given night in the United States. At a minimum,140,000 or 25 percent of these people were seriously mentally ill, and 250,000 or 45 percent had any mental illness. There should be medical employees who can examine the people and get them the treatment that they need. Homelessness is not something that can be ignored-not when you see many of these people on every corner.

 

Opinion: In order to solve climate change, we need to take on wealthy corporations

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It’s the middle of summer, and the temperature has been reaching almost 100 degrees. But as carbon emissions continue to rise, the planet is only going to keep getting hotter. With many attempts to prevent climate disaster being blocked or repealed, it seems what needs to be changed is not just how we treat individual corporations, but the way the economy and the system as a whole function.

 

A New York Times analysis of the policy changes under the current Trump Administration reveals that 83 different regulations have been rolled back or are in the process of being rolled back, with 22 of them being related to air pollution. This is during a time when levels of carbon dioxide in the air are at “unprecedented levels” according to a study by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. According to Erika Spanger-Siegfried, a lead climate analyst at the Union of Concerned Scientists, temperatures by 2050 could reach levels that “[make] it difficult for human bodies to cool themselves and could be deadly.”

 

To pin this problem solely on the Trump administration, however, would be false. An article by researchers from both the U.S. and China published in Nature reveals that more than half of future carbon emissions are expected to come from China, the U.S, and the European Union, the three highest predicted sources of emissions. Although China is the highest by a large margin, expected to emit 41% of the carbon, the US and EU are expected to make up 9% and 7% respectively, which is still a large amount. Climate change is a global problem, but the ones responsible are a few wealthy industrial nations.

 

Yet despite some of the wealthiest countries being the main causes of climate change, the ones that are being hit hardest by it are those that are less fortunate. According to a study by researchers at Stanford University in California, the wealth gap between the richest and poorest countries is 25% higher than it would be without climate change. Not only are the choices that the U.S, Europe, and China are making going to cause disaster for their citizens in a few decades, those choices are also disastrous for the most vulnerable countries right now.

 

So why is climate change still an issue? Why do we have a government that is reversing policies that would prevent climate change? The answer to these questions, it seems, is money. Think Tanks such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which spends a large number of its resources on promoting climate change denial, receive funding from a variety of wealthy corporations.

 

The CEI is funded not only by the Charles Koch Institute and the American Fuel and Petrochemicals Manufacturers, which are known for lobbying against the regulation of fossil fuels, but also by larger companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, according to the New York Times. This is because the CEI, as an Amazon spokeswoman said, “will help advance policy objectives aligned with [Amazon’s] interests.”

 

The reason these corporations fund the same organizations as fossil fuel lobbyists is that despite how much Amazon or Google may claim to oppose the fossil fuel industry, they both have the same top priority: promoting a pro-corporation, anti-regulation agenda. In the case of the CEI, their beliefs, aside from man-made climate change not being an issue, include opposing a $15 minimum wage and wanting to repeal antitrust laws, both of which are in the interests of large companies that probably would become trusts if they were legally allowed to. They may sign a declaration in support of global climate agreements, but they will still be naturally allied with the AFPM, as will nearly every for-profit corporation.

 

The fossil fuel companies themselves also have far too much influence. In Oklahoma, a state agency funded mainly by oil companies creates classroom materials and teacher training, according to the Washington Post. The goal of these classroom materials is, to downplay climate change and promote the usage of oil.

 

We cannot trust corporations to solve climate change for us. A permanent end to rising temperatures and carbon dioxide levels requires a permanent end to, or at least a drastic reduction of, the fossil fuel industry and our usage of fossil fuels. If we are acknowledging and tackling the threat that the fossil fuel industry poses, then we also need to acknowledge that in this struggle, corporations are an obstacle.

 

A system that promotes corporate interests and enables companies to be as powerful as Microsoft or Google, and that enables oil companies to have power even in our classrooms is not a system that will let us solve climate change. It is a system that promotes and perpetuates climate change, causing the summers to get hotter, the poorer countries to get poorer, and the time we have left before our planet becomes unlivable shorter.

Killing Creativity

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“He who marches out of step hears his own drum.” 

-Ken Kesey

Ken Kesey and his merry band of Pranksters boarded a bus called Further in 1964 to spread their message of nonconformity, preaching individuality and creativity. Drugs ruined this message, so it was not able to break through to mainstream society. That does not mean that what Kesey was saying was bad, it just got lost in translation. 

It is our job to finish what Kesey started and make sure this message breaks through. We need to save individuality to progress as a society. Schools are partly responsible for the conformist society we live in today.

Conformity can be as mundane as lining up for lunch, sitting in rows, and being told when to talk and when to stay quiet or it can be as grand as grading every student on the same rubric. 

A rubric’s main job is to assess students and their work by giving a clear set of criteria for them to follow. This sounds good in theory, but nowadays, schools have rubrics for everything: group work, peer discussion, Socratic seminars, papers, essays, projects, and participation. Thus, rubrics in all of their glorious uses are partly responsible for society holding blind conformity as gospel by grading every aspect of life inside the classroom and only rewarding perfection or anything close to it. That’s not to say that we should just throw away every rubric. It is important to set some standards but schools have taken it too far.

Firstly, rubrics raise the issue of whether or not kids sitting in AP and honors classes are actually smart or if they are good at memorizing criteria. There is a difference between students who can memorize standards and students who are smart and creative. Innovation cannot be measured with a checklist, so it is rarely rewarded in our school system. To do well in school, you have to conform.

Secondly, these rubrics are extended to teacher performance so much so that lecture classes are frowned upon. I understand the school’s desire for us as a student body to collaborate, but this does not allow teachers to do their jobs: teach. According to etale.org, “[Rubrics] risk turning the role of the teacher into that of a grader, leaving less room for the teacher to be an authentic ‘reader’ of student work.” This is perpetuating a reward system that values teamwork and meeting requirements more than understanding the content and deep thought, thus creating busy work that does not allow students to form their own opinions.  

Furthermore, rubrics teach students the value of perfection which is unrealistic in the real world. Matt Suarez from Penn State commented on this saying that a student who gets two questions wrong on a 10 question quiz would receive a C; which for a lot of students is not ideal. “Nobody is perfect, so to expect that from people who are going through potentially the most stressful times of their lives is not the best way to go,” Suarez says. Rubrics put young people on a scale that punishes imperfection which is ridiculous. 

Finally, rubrics discourage creativity. According to Conformity and Learning from BBN Times, “Conformity – by its very nature – relies on reapplying solutions from the past, but with more careful control and greater intensity. What we really need is the unleashing of the creative genius that makes us human. Not the direction we have been taking as we have succeeded in quashing it, almost to extinction.” Society can not move towards innovation without creativity. Rubrics are flawed because they look for a cookie cutter work and that’s what they reward.

It does not make sense for schools to accustom young minds to follow a checklist. That is not say that structure is bad, it is to say that you can not find innovation in the walls of a rubric. Grading students this way sets them up to be followers, not leaders or innovators. 

Not everyone will be the next big tech genius or artist but everyone should have the opportunity to step out of march to hear how their drum beats.

Do you hear your own drum?

Why Choosing The Right College Is Important

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By Nathaly Angamarca August 12 at 10:08 am

 

Every year at the start of school, high school seniors begin the challenging and stressful process of college picking. Attending college is the next big step after graduating high school, but can picking the right college affect your career job possibilities in the future?

“You might think that junior year is hard, but let me tell you this, senior year is even more,”James said as he was shuffling his last year’s college acceptance letters.

When some student do their college search they focus on the four major things; location, population, price and there career major while others focus on the name and the history of the school.

Ivy league schools are some of the oldest schools located on the east coast of the United States. All eight have gained a good reputation over the centuries and also a prominent status. Although these schools are very pricey, their background history and famous alumni like President John F. Kennedy and Michelle Obama builds up the schools status.

 

If a Harvard graduate and a BMCC[ Borough of Manhattan Community College] graduate student applies to the same job position there is a bigger possibility that the student who attended a prestige school would get the job. Not just that according the the website nerdwallet.com salary statistics shows that a graduate student who attended a private school gains 10,000 dollars a year more than of a student who attended a public university.

Only 50 percent of the students who graduated from a public university were able to find an employment right after college and 24 percent continued their studies in a graduate school. If a student graduates from a private school 59 percent of the graduating class were able to find a job and 36 percent attended graduate school.

Getting into private school or a prestigious school can be even more harder than getting into a community college. Acceptance rate run from 3 percent to 24 percent. The University of Pennsylvania acceptance rate has lowered these past years, making it not impossible but harder to get in.

 

Joshua Anderson, a former student from York college said “I remember once I graduated from York college it probably took me like 4-5 months to find a job on the major I studied in college, while one of my friend’s brother who attended Cornell University was able to find a job in less than a month.”

Doing well in high school is very important. This means that maintaining a high GPA and being involved in after school activities or outside of school can help you stand out out of the other applicants. When the time comes to choosing colleges go for the colleges you know you will get in, But always keep in mind the school’s history and its value, it may or may not help you now but it could definitely impact you in the future.

 

 

Why Robocalls Keep Ringing

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“Hello?”

 

All it takes is an eerie silence at the other end of the call to make you speak, but you quickly realize you’ve been robbed of time when a robotic voice says you owe money to the government.

 

Picking up the phone has become a gamble— people don’t know if they will be speaking to a real person or an automated message.

 

Robocalls have been plaguing the devices we rely on, and the number of victims has only been increasing in recent months. According to YouMail, the developer of a robocall blocking software, “4.1 billion robocalls were placed nationwide in June 2018, equaling roughly 12.7 calls per person affected.”

 

Robokiller, another service that claims to block these unwanted calls, can separate robocalls from other scam or telemarketing calls because they are “auto-dialed from a computer and deliver a pre-recorded message.” The app’s website reports that political robocalls are legal, but “most robocalls are either illegal, fraudulent, or both.”

 

During the election season, political robocalls aim to sway voters or seek donations. They were approved by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which has been working to find the origins of robocallers. The FCC has considered creating an authentication system to distinguish real phone calls from fraudulent ones. The system focuses on harmful robocalls that evade call-blocking systems by hiding their original phone numbers behind fake caller IDs, which makes them harder to trace.

 

However, defining problematic calls threaten some businesses. They argued that without the convenience of automated messages, they risk losing communication with their customers. In April, the Consumer Bankers Association (CBA) submitted a letter to a Senate committee explaining that consumers benefit from calls and texts “ranging from low balance notifications to repayment counseling, among other important notices and alerts,” according to the CBA website.

 

The recent flood of scam calls has swallowed important messages reminding users of their medical appointments or notifying them of canceled flights. People are hesitant to answer their phones as fraudulent calls distract them from vital information or daily life. Though some robocalls are important, the everyday cell phone user would be much more at ease if auto-dialed calls were filtered out altogether.

 

The New York Times reported that New Jersey doctor Gary Pess gets so many calls that “mimic his area code and the first three digits of his phone number” that he stopped answering them, which led him to ignore a call from an emergency room doctor about a patient who needed his attention.

 

He had grown to expect unwanted calls, and so missed one that was real and legitimate. Many more people could fall into the same habit and risk missing important calls.

 

A recent outbreak of robocalls targeted at Chinese immigrants has spread to users regardless of their national origin. According to National Public Radio (NPR), these robocall messages claim to come from the Chinese consulate and warn immigrants of a document that may affect their status in the United States. To discuss how these documents must be picked up, the call connects people to live scammers. These scammers present themselves as police officers, telling the victim the case will be resolved if money is sent to a Hong Kong bank account.

 

Queens resident Jane Rivkin was pestered by around seven of these calls. She claimed her spouse had also been disrupted by the many calls from their local area code.

 

Though Rivkin and her spouse quickly hung up because they could not understand the calls, Mandarin speakers have fallen victim to the telephone scams. NPR reported an estimated “$3 million has been stolen from [New York City’s] residents.” The NYPD, along with security experts “say they think the calls are originating in mainland China.”

 

Since robocall scammers have found ways to slip by filters and appear convincing enough to swamp legal messages, businesses would be more productive if they cut down on auto-dialer services completely. Recipients may be more inclined to receive notices or reminders through text message. Businesses would lift the worry of distinguishing good robocalls from bad ones if they limited their use. OneReach, a telecommunications service provider that offers companies custom voice and text solutions, claimed “77% of consumers aged 18-34 and 64% of all consumers are likely to have a positive perception of any company that offers texting.”

 

NPR suggested putting phone numbers on the National Do Not Call Registry in order to “cut down on unwanted calls.” Robocall blocking services are also available, but scammers quickly learn to evade them.

 

With 4.1 billion reported robocalls, how many moments have been robbed from us?

James Gunn Firing

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The recent firing of Guardians of the Galaxy movie director James Gunn had fans, the actors for the movies themselves and Hollywood in a shock. James Gunn had a history of film making in the past with him producing the live action movie for Scooby Doo in 2004, and the reboot for Dawn of the Dead in 2007.

Then a few years later he joined Disney working with Marvel in his upcoming two movies for Guardians of the Galaxy, which became a huge hit for the fans of marvel and another entry in the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) that would mix with the timeline before their encounter with a former member of the Avengers in Avengers: Infinity War.

But with a good life as a director on one of the biggest production companies ever to be seen, heard and talked about lies many consequences. James Gunn had his Twitter account timeline filled with jokes, yes jokes, about pedophilia and rape in the year 2007 and 2008. This was found by Right-Wing conspiracy theorist Mike Cernovich who found them and sent them to Disney as soon as possible. Cernovich also had his timeline filled with “jokes” of pedophilia and rape in his account which stated, “Have you guys ever tried ‘raping’ a girl without using force? Try it. It’s basically impossible.”

Gunn apologized for his mistake and even called his past self a “provocateur.” “Even these many years later, I take full responsibility for the way I conducted myself then. All I can do now, beyond offering my sincere and heartfelt regret, is to be the best human being I can be: accepting, understanding, committed to equality, and far more thoughtful about my public statements and my obligations to our public discourse. To everyone inside my industry and beyond, I again offer my deepest apologies,” Gunn stated as an apology.

The main actors for Guardians of the Galaxy that includes Chris Pratt (Peter Quill/Star Lord), Zoe Saldana (Gamora), Dave Bautista (Drax), Bradley Cooper (Rocket Raccoon) and Vin Diesel (Groot) were in sadness as their long known director and friend has parted ways with them. Recent tweets from the actors break the silence upon his firing: “Understand this, my dear brothers and sisters. Let every person be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger,” Chris Pratt stated.

Zoe Saldana stated, “It’s been a challenging weekend I’m not gonna lie. I’m pausing myself to take everything in before I speak out of term. I just want everyone to know I love ALL members of my GOTG (Guardians of the Galaxy) family. Always will.”

“I will have more to say but for right now all I will say is this..@JamesGunn is one of the most loving, caring, good natured people I have ever met. He’s gentle and kind and cares deeply for people and animals. He’s made mistakes. We all have. I’m NOT ok with what’s happening to him,” Dave Bautista said.

Fans also took it upon themselves to encourage Disney to “bring him back” with a petition in which 300,000 fans already signed and are prepared to send out to Disney. The real downside is that the petition won’t do anything to change their minds over it, although it was a really good effort for everyone that supports Gunn. It was his role that made the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Guardians of the Galaxy a real treat to watch. I agree to that effort since I do enjoy a good movie and watching those movies made me laugh, cry, and just have a good time in general.