I prefer purple, on democracy and disagreement

I love you. I mean it. And I’m not trying to be weird. You’re interesting and amazing and I appreciate you and your ideas. I believe that human beings are essentially good. That most of us are plugging along on our paths doing the best we can, stumbling now and again, suffering, loving, and getting confused and happy and annoyed and surprised and excited and bored and a bunch of other stuff. Not sure about that? Look around at the people you know. Count them, the ones that are doing ok, being essentially good, and the ones that are not so much. I think you’re doing great, going along your path, working at what you work at and hoping for the best.

We don’t have to agree on everything. And I’m not just paying lip-service when I say that I believe we have more similarities than differences. What I think and what I feel may be different from what you think or feel sometimes, and that’s great. We can be blue or red or purple or orange or grey or teal or chartreuse, and that’s fine. What I hope, though, is that we can believe what we believe and respect each other enough to ask each other questions and share ideas and not resort to calling each other names. Because contrary to what I’ve seen in my Social Media feeds recently, I am not pro-murder, I am not pro-fraud, I am not pro-whore. I am not anti-god, or anti-Christian, anti-gun, or a man-hating feminazi. I promise. I am a lot of things, some that I’ll even admit, but I’m not those things or a lot of other, nastier bits that rise up out of the amazing organic froth and foment of the twenty-first century internet. So let’s make a deal. I’ll not call you names, directly or by implication, and you’ll not call me names, directly or by implication. And we’ll swish along in this bubbling democracy, and perhaps we’ll smile at the similarities or fume a bit at the differences, and maybe, every once in a while, we’ll influence each other a little bit and call it compromise. And every little thing will be just fine.

Further discussion

• Name-calling by word or implication includes but is not limited to anything that begins “Liberals believe q” or “Conservatives believe x” or “Monkey-necked freckle mongers want z” or “Anti-monkey-necked freckle mongers want w.” Me and most of my friends are included in one or another of those groups. Except maybe the freckle mongers. I’m not sure about those.

• Having experienced a murder in my immediate family, I can say for 100% certain that I am anti-murder. But I am also pro-choice. Not pro-abortion, mind you. I’d happily prevent the need for most abortions with comprehensive, evidence-based sex education, equitable and affordable access to contraceptive services for both women and men, and equitable and affordable access to high-quality, comprehensive pre-pregnancy and pre-natal care. Until most people have access to those things, I’m pro-choice because I believe life is way more complicated sometimes than you or I can easily imagine, and sometimes people find themselves in tough situations without as much support or resources as some of us are lucky enough to have. Your choices may have worked for you, and that makes me very happy, but your choices would not work for everyone for lots of different reasons. My pro-life, Democratic, State Senator Judith Zaffirini summed up something like my perspective very beautifully in her closing remarks of the debate on #HB2 in the Texas Legislature’s second 2013 special session. {I’m looking for a link.}

• I believe in a comprehensive social safety net and in the expansion of equitable, affordable healthcare access. I know for sure that there is fraud in those systems. There is fraud in all human systems. But just because someone steals a loaf of bread now and again doesn’t mean we stop sharing our bread. I also don’t believe that vilifying the poor is the most useful occupation. To blame the most desperate people, in their most desperate circumstances, when they do desperate things, while at the same time ignoring the actions of people in less-desperate circumstances who create more problems for the poor and enact more expensive and economically damaging consequences for society is at best misplaced and at worst enables the continuation of that damage. I also believe that structures can manifest inequity more steadfastly and more invisibly than any hurled rock, and so the structures must be named and changed and blamed when blame is appropriate.

• I believe that women are people. People assert themselves. People have sex. People are nice and mean and quiet and loud and make choices and defer choices and make mistakes and live in this messy, gritty, delicious world all together. A woman who asserts her rights to her body, her mind, or her actions is not a whore. She’s a human being. And I support her. A man who asserts his rights to his body, his mind, or his actions isn’t a whore either. He’s a human being. And I support him. That is my definition of feminism, and under that definition I am an unapologetic feminist.

• Religion and spirituality are personal, individual, and complex. You and I probably do not believe in the same way. But one of the truly awesome (and I use that in the AWE way, as in, the thoughtfulness of this particular thing inspires AWE in me) about the United States is this: Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. You get to dig what you dig and I get to dig what I dig (or not) and the government won’t shake a stick at either of us, in fact, the government has an obligation to keep its stick completely out of the conversation. The “Government” includes courts, law enforcement, tax offices, street sweepers, and public schools, among many other things. Once upon a time a persecuted group of Vermont Baptists were so happy about this particular provision, frequently named The Separation of Church and State, that they gave Thomas Jefferson a 1200 pound cheese. Ok, I know, that sounds a little absurd, but this particular group of (mainly) farmers were so happy to have their government stay out of their spiritual affairs that they took an epic manifestation of one of their most valuable commodities and gave it to the person they credited with being the main architect of that Butting Out. That is my favorite story about The Constitution, and I have a minor intellectual crush on Thomas Jefferson, who served the cheese at the White House for a very long time. (I edited the size of the cheese after rereading the story. If you’re curious, google “Cheshire Mammoth Cheese.” It’s an even more epic story than I remembered.)

• I don’t think the second amendment is as cut and dried and as simple as most people want to make it. And for me it’s very personal. See above reference to “having experienced a murder in my immediate family.” A responsibly-owned gun, in a gun-aware, responsible gun-owning family, was used by one said responsible gun-owner to murder one of the other responsible gun-owners. My feelings about gun ownership are therefore complicated, fraught, and I continually wrestle with them. But I do believe that people allow themselves to be ruled by irrational fears, and I do believe there is a strange tendency to fetishize gun-ownership sometimes. And I believe that a gun, the primary purpose of which is destruction, should be reasonably regulated, at least as much if not moreso than reproductive organs, the primary purpose of which are hormonal regulation of bodies and species reproduction (i.e. maintenance and creation).

• In case I didn’t state it clearly enough in my earlier paragraph (see again, “Having experienced a murder in my family”), I love you all. All of you. I object to the suffix -nazi as applied to anyone or anything of any time period other than actual Nazis and their sympathizers. Look how loosely that suffix is bandied today. The Nazis murdered six MILLION people. Systematically, with a calculation and a brutality that is gut-punching and astounding and not equivalent in it’s modus and scope to any other thing in human record. Hanging that -nazi suffix on the end of words and phrases (feminazi, soup-nazi, grammar nazi), even as metaphor, is insensitive and bafflingly wrong-headed. Unless it’s referring to actual Nazis who did actual genocide and their genocidal support structures, or the baffling people who continue to believe in word and action that the Nazis had a good thing going. Please, freely use the term or the suffix there, because that’s where it actually belongs.

• Want some cheese?

10 Things: Loving, living, and letting go

By popular demand, I bring you 10 Things inspired by this quote/meme, shared on Facebook this morning:

“In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.” —Buddha

Apologies ahead of time for the rambling philosophization that gushed out. If you want to play along in the comments, skip over my bit and write your own 10 Things first, then come back and read mine. So, the first 10 Things that come to mind after reading that quote…

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1. I’m slicing up the three pieces of the quote and considering the value of love in all its forms as the foundation for all of our choices and actions. Quantity is implied here, but not the quantity of people or things we love but the amount we love, the amount we give love or put love into the world.

2. One aphorism leads to another. The more you give, the more you get.

3. I was thinking of the different ways we can love, and the marbles that started rolling around in my head were the Greek forms. I thought of eros and communitas, but then I couldn’t help myself and looked them up (I like to get things right; I have a hard time letting go of accuracy). Agape, eros, philia, storge. We are capable of loving in many ways. The deep, true love we hold rare and precious; desire and aesthetic and physical love; the love of friends and family and community that requires virtue, equality and familiarity; and, of course, tolerance (also with many forms). 

4. None of the three statements is explicit about their antitheses. Anger, hate, abhorrence, intolerance, contempt, etc. Is the first phrase — how much you loved — or the judgment implied in the opening, like a bucket that gets filled up by love and emptied by the detrimental emotions? Is it that simple/complex?

5. Gentle living reminds me of parenting babies and toddlers and preschoolers. Gently when you pet the cat. Gently when you hug your brother. Gently when you touch Gramma’s face so you don’t poke her eyes out. Gently. I don’t say that word out loud to the Sonars very much anymore. They have pretty decent self control, which is what we monitored with the word ‘gentle’ in their wee years. But perhaps I should still use it. Gently with your words to your peers who are entering an age of sharp-tongued anxiety. Gently with your brothers who will likely be your longest friends and fiercest allies, even though they may always know how to push your buttons. Gently on the earth. Don’t waste the water or the paper or the electricity. Gently with your mama who is both proud to watch you grow and gain your independence and fearful of seeing you stumble along the way. 

6. How gently you live can then be kindness or conservation or through word or action it can mean minimizing the damage that we inevitably do to the people and the world around us. So that if loving much is maximizing what we give, then living gently is minimizing the harm we cause. 

7. How gracefully we let go of what is not meant for us. In my clumsy understanding of Buddhism, letting go gracefully seems like the ultimate goal. Not allowing material goods to weigh you down. Not allowing negative thoughts or experiences or people to weigh you down. To release the weight of everything. Though in pragmatic terms for the normal human who feels angry and jealous and slighted and loves things and people and feels sentimental and attached, then letting go gracefully is challenging and requires a strong hold on the first two concepts. Maximize what we give, minimize what we take or harm. 

8. My hand is tired and far more minutes have slipped by than a traditional 10 Things exercise usually occupies. I suppose that is the nature of philosophical contemplation. It takes time and might hurt. 

9. The sky just turned much more dim and the wind is gusting. An imaginary line on a weather map is manifesting as a line of force in the sky that blusters across the coastal plains like a dust squeegee pulling cold air behind it. 

10. That dust-squeegee metaphor is both hilarious and terrible. I love it and I give it to you with love, letting go of any embarrassment I feel about it as I release it into a gust of wind and into your eyeballs. Gently, I hope, for the sake of your eyeballs. 

Semi-Dreaming of Snow

I could hear him moving around in the kitchen, in the edges of my sleep. I was semi-dreaming. Half-awake, half-buried in sleep. I pulled the blanket up a little to cover a gap on my shoulder, guarding against the cooler air in the room. Not cold, of course, because this is Texas and this is May. But cooler than the warm coziness under the blanket.

I remembered days like this, years ago, when he would be awake so early, making coffee and reading in the semi-dark. I remembered those days when he’d lean over the bed and kiss me goodbye before wrapping the scarf around and around and around his neck against the frigid temperatures for his walk to work. But mostly I remembered those mornings when I could hear him, in the kitchen, making coffee, with mumbles of radio weaving in and out of his moving sounds. Remembering when the mumbles would stop and he would climb back in bed, careful not to let too much cold air under the blankets, and settle back next to me, whispering, “Snow day.”

He is young enough to be my son

The eight-year-old boy who died. The nineteen-year-old boy who likely killed him.

Or they could have been my students, a sibling. She may have smiled that beautiful smile over my lunch. He wanted to serve and protect. He wanted us to stop hurting people. She came here to learn. 

These people, living and dead, cause me pain. So yes, I want to know them. Not to exploit, or glorify, or justify, or apologize, or excuse. No. I want to know because I want to understand. I want to know why. I want to know if something could have been done to help angry young men with hate in their hearts to see a different path. Because I have the imagination of a mother. And the rage, and the heartbreak, and the ache. They are children. They have mothers. No mother looks at her baby’s face and imagines she will suffer in this particular way. No mother looks at her baby’s face and imagines he will unleash pain and death and torment. So how does that capacity for hatred grow? Where does it begin? I tell myself — the way we do — that my boys are different. But in this way or in that way, they are the same. And I have the imagination of a mother. And the guilt, and the worry.  

If we try to understand, if we seek to know, could we identify other children on a path that could be redirected, could be supported, be SEEN and treated as human and valuable, so they could see and treat others as human and valuable? So that our children will grow — whole, and alive — and without hate in their hearts. 

And still I’m talking about a bomb and a gunfight that killed four people and maimed so many others. For hate, yes. Which is terrible. No doubt. 

But what about the bomb that killed fourteen and destroyed so much in a tiny town? That bomb that people prefer to call a factory or business. That bomb that exploded not for malice but for what? Negligence or profit? That bomb that was not set by radicalization but is so much more eminently preventable if we give it the attention it deserves. So much more readily mitigated. But strangely not causing the same level of anger. I look out at the stacks of refineries and factories within my horizon, and I imagine possibilities. 

So many questions here and there and elsewhere. I can imagine something different. I can imagine something better. But first we have to be willing to value those lives, to look at them, ALL of them, to see them, to ask questions, and at every step to be humane and just.

155 Days

I will be thirty-nine years old for another 155 days. Then I will be forty. I’ve never worried too much about my age. At least not since lack of it in my youth felt like some sort of deterrent. And I’m not so much worried about forty either, but it sounds different than the other ages so far. Like a shift. Something deep in the ground. Something seismic but subtle on the surface. And 155 is a nice number. Not really round or aesthetically shaped, but far enough in front of the superstar 150 days to give me time to play. You know, on the off-chance that there’s anything I’d like to accomplish before I turn forty. So what could I do in that five months? A list of potentialities coalesces in my fore-brain. To be sure, this is not a midlife crisis yet. Ask me again at 100 days. 

Thao says, “Rest and Be Strong / Wash and Be Clean / Start a New Year / Whenever You Need,” and you know I’m a fan of Reset.