I'm bitching now, yeah, and I want to be positive and say positive things but maybe it's best to be honest. I went for my first sojourn into manhattan since coming back and went to hipsterville east village. I just felt so ill at ease there and so angry and frustrated, and I feel like I have to say something, but it's not nice. I think many of these kids are rich kids and something about the personality of that place is a big turn off. It's turning into another soho, with boutiques and expensive restaurants everywhere. The funky punk shops as well as the residents are being slowly forced out and replaced with tenants who pay ten times the rent. I've heard stories, oh man, of just really viscious things: people being beaten, burned out of their homes, of firemen waving flames to keep fires going, of landlords working in cahoots with robbers......well, it's up to you reader to draw your own conclusions. You can say I'm nuts but I'm just repeating what others have told me. And even more, I am mad at the "left" communities which refuse to take on the issues facing women globally, such as trafficking. THe reason I'm saying this is cause it is happening in places like this. I got an email saying that The Nation, a progressive magazine, is advertising sex tours in southeast asia. From what I've read and heard, women and girls there have been forced into prostitution and the stories are harrowing ones. And naturally many books and magazine articles have been written denying this, in among others activist publications. Well, personally I am convinced that stories of forced prostitution are not an exaggeration and that it is very truly happening. But (for lack of a better term) much of the "left" mainly here in NYC is continually dodging the issue, but it's too complicated to go into here.