A different left vs. right

At war

The left and right sides of my brain have been at war.
They fight over the question: what am I here for?
Did I come to this world to make beats and kick rhymes,
or was I sent here to fight the signs of our times?

I fought the empire and we drew its blood.
The counterattack, vicious, left me covered in mud,
sweat, tears, tar, feathers, others’ projections.
I did everything I could in the realm of elections.

Now I’m selecting a different focus.
A shift within: abandoning hocus pocus.
My self is far more expansive than my voice.
I’m an artist, not just an advocate. That’s a choice.

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At peace

It’s a choice that, in many ways, aims to reclaim agency over my self and my future, while acknowledging the bankruptcy of the political sphere to which I have devoted my life to this point.

Long before organizing direct action to challenge an illegal war, winning a legal battle to stem the tide of money in politics, helping establish marriage equality in the courts, and securing local reforms around the country to restrain police and the surveillance state, I got my earliest taste of struggle at home as an immigrant teen in the Midwest.

Like many immigrant parents, mine were so concerned about my career and financial stability that they discouraged distractions from academics. They saw art, music, and certainly dance as frivolous pursuits that we, as newcomers to the country seeking to establish ourselves, could not afford to indulge.

Many psychologists point to birth order as a critical vector informing personality. My inclination towards self-expression may have been encouraged by simply having grown up as the youngest of four children, or perhaps by the culture that influenced me arguably more than my family since I was still a toddler when we came to the States.

With the distance afforded by time, I see now that creative self-expression may have felt like a luxury to them, as people who had traversed the world—twice—simply to find a safe place to live.

Yet, music played a key role in cracking me out of a social shell. Chorus in middle school led to musical theater in high school and college, which in turn helped cultivate a passion for dance that transcended my time on stage. It found fertile ground in 1990s Chicago, where house music also inspired my MCing and spoken word.

By the time I finally took up DJing in the 2010s, I’d finished a decade-long saga for my undergrad degree, earned my law degree from Stanford, taught law as an assistant to a renowned thought leader, completed a litigation career spanning private practice and prolific impact lawsuits in the nation’s capital, launched programs for multiple national non-profit organizations, and joined another to lead it.

I’d also released a debut album, organized politicized public performance collectives on both coasts, and performed around the world, but my work in advocacy almost always (with the prominent exception of the ShantiSalaam tour in 2006-07) gained more of my attention than expressing my creative voice.

That advocacy work had always been driven by my awareness of my (educational, geographic, cultural, and professional) privilege, as well as the intergenerational horror of continuing colonialism that I was generally spared through my family’s immigration. I spoke, wrote, organized, litigated, and ran for office because I knew others—not only people around the world, but also my forebears, and whoever in the future manages to survive today’s mass extinction crisis and ecocide—lacked my opportunities and desperately needed solidarity.

In some ways, my character assassination in 2020 was the most stressful experience I have ever endured. Beyond racializing me to an even greater extent than the 9/11 attacks and their hateful (continuing) aftermath, it also destroyed my faith in democracy, the press, San Francisco, the future, and the so-called movements that like to call themselves “progressive” and “socialist” while absurdly embodying the Jim Crow South in California.

Time has helped me come to see it, however, as a blessing.

Ending my legal and political career released me to finally go back to my own creative roots. I’ve been working on setting aside my painful awareness of the past and future to instead focus on the here and now within my reach.

That’s much of why I’ve spent the last six months since the 2022 election DJing in & around San Francisco, producing new music, and preparing to launch a new career on which I’ve recently embarked.

Most of my posts have presented analysis of law & policy topics, primarily in the third-person voice. Going forward, they probably still will since I see through a lot of lies that seem to confuse others and can’t keep my mouth shut.

That said, I’d like to start sharing more frequent poetry, and offering my thoughts in other formats (including audio, first-person reports, song lyrics, and perhaps short stories) exploring issues beyond politics, including arts & culture. Would more varied formats and topics interest you more, or less, than essays focused exclusively on politics? I’d welcome your thoughts!

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Paid subscribers can access a poem I wrote in Chicago in the early 90s. It captures a similar theme to the one above, while (for me, eerily) foreshadowing my subsequent experience.