Founding a clothing company for the sole & soul purpose(s) of funding the daily activities of The GoodBrain Project's basic love and service wasn't by design. When funding for NYC Public School renewal dwindled and vanished in the years from 2013-2016, I knew it wasn't personal. One devastating banishment after another by educators from both the private and public, rural and urban sectors, who I thought were my best friends weren't personal--but/and they showed me that the "broken systems" and "charity waters" that affluent people throw parties to protect live in the mind, and remain acceptable as some version of a "free-market" where almost no one I have ever met, is free.
So let's be--personal, and personally, free.
Drugs aren't personal--just like healthcare failures aren't personal; just like death isn't personal. Not even success is personal-- the better we do in public service, the fewer opportunities there are to serve anywhere where children are being used as fuel for a terrifying future we must, right now, choose to lose as a habit of our own demise. If we continue to depersonalize--the whole world goes blind and deaf and dumb. We are people; this is personal. People are "free"--we are not for sale.
Here's the big deal--see, schools have a hard time being anything other than factories that manufacture goods to be treated by hospitals and prisons--they produce sick people who often break even the most sensible rules. Certain schools gear learning away from disease and incarceration, but the schedules, the rewards and punishments, the common duels between teachers, admin, and students prepare most people for lives of despair rather than sharing tools to repair what is not working.
Certainly, there are places in both the public and private sector where stakeholders in education communicate and create collaborative and culturally relevant experiences so that children may grow into the fullest expression of themselves...but I'd be able to sell a hoodie for half the money if there were more than a few. Here's the clue--when 59,000 people a year are dying of overdose while almost 1/2 the population is headed for jail, the psych ward, or the system, our schools and our habits of mind and of heart have failed us, failed themselves, failed you.
It's not the system that is to blame. At work in public and independent schools for what will have been 18 years this last June--(that's crazy)--2,227 children's lives have passed through mine in ways that transformed me; 196 teachers have been reviewed, hired, and wired for sound, and 229 men, women, and children have sought my services independently as a means towards growth or inspiration to heal from a world of the completely deranged. And in 18 years, everything really has changed--but this one thing has stayed the same: we treat children as though we don't want them. And the truth is, we don't. Children have become the things we make when we can't make decisions; children have become kids--grazing in fields we don't bother to fertilize with anything but pesticides, grown up with parental gossip and gear-heads heating up the sidelines. Sport used to be for playing--now 27 games a season are for staying out of the house, staying out of trouble--and because of too many injuries on untrained bodies, or too much pressure on winning, sports are for getting into trouble. Steroid use, self-starvation, opioid abuse. An estimated 10,000 kids become addicted to pain killers because of sports injuries they are coached to "play through."
There is no system that can't be broken by basic love and attention--and while I am the least a fan of parent shaming, Be as You Wear strives to quit the habit of blaming everyone else for why our young people are failing in ways that end them rather than contribute to building in them a fitter, faster, wiser, fight. Parents of the world, unite! Children do not learn how to lie and cheat and bully and medicate themselves in school. They learn these habits from watching you. And yours are the mirrors I am looking through every time I meet a person age 12-22 who ruins her/his life with drugs and alcohol--it's not because of school; it because of a system of domestic rules, perhaps unconscious, that have made children cruel and unusually damaged, by everything, including school. And only a fool will dive into a shallow pool after a day of being taught how not to--which explains why children who are taught by adults who do a lot of drugs, learn how to take medicine before they turn year two.
If you are a family who does not medicate yourselves in any way, not with booze, not with drugs, not with tech, not with food, call me for a hoodie, I'll give you a few!
If you are a family that doesn't worry about money, or safety, or being cool, call me, and tell me what in the hell to do with a world in so much denial--we are becoming the tools of a system we aren't changing, but blaming for why we continue to lose.
In the same way we have come to retire our elderly population in the US as non-consumers, and therefore, non-entities, we ignore the needs of our young people who watch everything we do. The only clue they are getting is how to be addicted to deadly and less deadly toxins and thought toxins that make it possible for fewer and fewer moments of connection to cure whatever ailments we actually suffer by numbers and circumstance we can't control.
We cannot know 99% of what happens inside the mind of another human being, but the 1% we share is the fact that we are made of the exact same stuff--dead stars, water, and so much wind, that without some grounding in our shared skin, we are about to blow ourselves away. This US Independence day marks a chance to become freedom fried once and for all from the things we aren't made of--fear, greed, and false pride. If buying a hoodie won't change your mind about who is to blame for your fate, or who you hate, or if you aren't done denying the truth of what it is you wish to make (music, art, a well loved home, or a healthy relationship where it's safe to mate), it will hold your heart as we try to part with idea that we are anything other than a 1 in 400 million sprint miracle of pure light and skin, and life--any other story of creation is a lie. It's personal. We are people--and it is time to love each other beyond the conditions, or because of them--I don't care why--I care for XY and 23 sets of chromosomes we have to multiply ideologically, if not biologically.
Never let the passion, love, and delight inside us die.
Buy a hoodie. Add a heart. Know you are loved beyond the measure of what human ideas make, and let's eschew the fear of losing insurance, and rather, take our healing into our own hands, and let the power of our voices shake a few million people out of our slumber-- and right back into wonder.