The big news is the conviction of Chauvin. That’s what everyone’s talking about. That’s what has been driving journalists, bloggers, and everyone with a keyboard to… well, their keyboards. It’s good news. Sort of. A man is dead, and 64 people have died at the hands of the police during the trial proceedings. I visited my mom before the verdict, and on my way out, she casually joked about possible rioting after the reading. She mentioned that the statehouse had actually put up barriers around their perimeter. That they felt the need to set up protection for the duration of the trial. It seems the only sane option was a guilty verdict. Now, the world is awaiting the sentence, and in the meantime it feels like hundreds of articles are being churned out, both for and against the decision of the jury. How much of it is produced by bots? How much of it is inflated politicking or trolling or some other form of monetization?

The news seems more and more to be a function of generating clicks more than expanding a population’s understanding of their world. There were literally over 100 articles written within the last 24 hours that mention Chauvin. And the way in which we get our news, even, is now produced so heavily by algorithms and marketing measures that I can’t help but wonder how much Chauvin’s death put into the pockets of people telling the “news.” I don’t know if monetization is the name of the game internationally, but one of the top watched broadcasts, Fox, is defending their biggest earner by stating he can’t be taken seriously. Access to information has never been more abundant, and the visibility of information has never been more obscure. How do you choose what you should know? Most of the research I do is through Google Scholar, the sourcing at the bottom of wikipedia pages, and asking the nearest expert willing to talk to me. Information is easier to find and harder to parse, and it leaves me feeling like every tragedy, celebration, and occurence in our lives is reducible to a dollar amount.

Yesterday was April twentieth.

That’s big news for some, and a passing joke for others. It meant deals! It meant celebration! And for me it mostly meant finals. 420, and weed in general, is a great example of a subject that inspires pictographs. Paraphernalia, coded phrases, and subtle smiles follow this habit all over our country.

Now I didn’t celebrate, personally. I’ve never been taken by the desire to pursue recreational drugs. I barely drink. But I absolutely love the passion and creativity that comes out of the ongoing debate on legalization and general use. If it were up to me, it’d be legal. Not because it’d give me a reason to partake, but because alcohol being legal is significantly worse for people, and the ban on weed mostly just enlarges the gap between the privileged and underprivileged.

Most people first encounter pot in school. Specifically, high school. By the time kids are eighteen, more than a third have tried pot, and ten percent are frequent users. They roll out of English, and roll up a blunt. And the real issue here is that punitive action is separated by color. Black and white people use at roughly the same rate, but between 2001 and 2010, blacks had nearly four times the arrest rate for possession. 

And when you incorporate school discipline into the equation, I’m left wondering how much marijuana is used in the continuation of the school to prison pipeline? Kids are more likely to use again when suspended from school for using to begin with.