Congratulations, Graduate!

On Monday, I completed my last day as an MMLIS graduate student, and I’m still ready to do the work. In the two days since submitting the final assessment for my capstone project, I have continued to research concepts that I wish that I explored in greater detail. I think that this devotion to continue working is how everything was supposed to work.

The blog post preceding the one I now write is about the last remaining day in California’s 2025 Special Election. Lately, I’ve been fascinated with California history. A curiosity about the term Great Basin led me to conduct some research on John C Frémont which led me to learn about Kit Carson, and then I started reading about the Governors of California before 1850 and Governors of California after 1850. Additionally, I’ve been enjoying my efforts to understand this context in relationship to Visions Toward Tomorrow: The History of the East Bay Afro-American Community 1852-1977 (1989, Feb. 6) by Lawrence P. Crouchett, Lonnie G. Bunch, III, and Martha Kendall Winnacker.

With that amount of scope, certain other things make more sense.

“The Men Who Built America: Frontiersmen” spans a formative period of history featuring the first 75 volatile years of the United States – from the Revolution through the California Gold Rush – where Daniel Boone, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, John Frémont, Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson set forth across uncharted land with determination and self-reliance.” (This video’s abstract).

I will likely write a lot more about this song and singer, but for now, I will simply state that this song inspired the title of James Baldwin’s 1964 documentary in which he interviewed Black people living in San Francisco, California.

What reminded me of this documentary was the statement, “I give you your problem back” (Baldwin, 1964). What a powerful statement and so conceptually cohesive. “Take this hammer, and carry it to the captain.”

Applying Erik Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages of Development to my life story, I understand that my transition from school age (6 to 12 years old) to adolescence (12 to 18 years old) featured a grappling with the realities of my environment. Without being too specific, I will say that I went to middle school with one of the interviewed gun violence victims in this documentary.

There’s a graffitti artist or crew in Oakland that goes by “Oakland’s Worst Problem” or “OWP.” And as of late, I’ve noticed Oakland gain national attention for videos of Oakland’s heavily painted USPS trucks.

Painting USPS trucks is a controversial topic in which I prefer to not disclose my personal opinion about the phenomena.

I have no problem saying that homelessness in Oakland is probably our city, state, and country’s most urgent and important issue to address.

And I’ll add this recently published video about Meta while I’m here, because I think Meta’s impact on both children and adults is part of the problem that we need to solve.