Funk, Indigo: One Student’s Response to Gun Violence

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Click here to begin listening (http://www.radio4all.net/files/[email protected]/1197-1-FUNK_INDIGO_6-15-18_CA.mp3) Our guest in this edition of Radio Curious is Indigo Funk, a 2018 graduate of Ukiah High School, here in Ukiah, California. Funk, who will begin his college career at Brown University in Providence Rhode Island, in the fall of 2018, caught my attention when I heard him speak, rather eloquently, at the March 24, 2018, Ukiah version of the national student March For Our Lives, organized here by Ukiah High Students. When Indigo Funk arrived the Radio Curious studios on June 15, 2018, to record this interview, I asked him if he’d like to read Frank Bruni’s Op-Ed column entitled “How to Lose the Mid-Terms and Re-elect Trump,” that had been published two days prior in the New York Times. Bruni’s article challenges the effectiveness of Robert De Niro’s “profanity-laced comment about President Trump, for which he received a standing ovation at the June 10, 2018, Tony Awards ceremony in New York City. Bruni shares De Niro’s anger but challenged his expression. In his Op-Ed piece, Bruni wrote: “When you answer name-calling with name-calling and tantrums with tantrums, you’re not resisting him. You’re mirroring him. You’re not diminishing him. You’re demeaning yourselves. Many voters don’t hear your arguments or the facts, which are on your side. They just wince at the din. You permit them to see you as you see Trump: deranged.” Bruni then posed the question: “Why would they (the voters) choose a different path if it goes to another ugly destination?” When Indigo Funk finished the Bruni Op-Ed piece, he said he had just been thinking about that issue. So we began our conversation when I asked him to share his thoughts. The book Indigo Funk recommends is “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace: A Brilliant Young Man Who Left Newark for the Ivy League,” by Jeff Hobbs.

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